In other news...

I'm crazy. So, I took this quiz, and this is what it says:

Your Aspie score: 70 of 200. Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 105 of 200. You seem to have both Aspie and neurotypical traits.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it all. I just think it means I'm crazy. Take the quiz yourself.

WPCA - Explosions

It's ten PM. The sky's dark; pissing rain. My trenchcoat is soaked, my fedora along with it. The streets are turned slanted under the streetlights. It's twisted how the world changes in the dark.

I hear footsteps and turn. A guy walks up on me, says, "Gotta light?" I rustle my hand through my pocket before coming up with this tarnished silver thing. He flips the top and rubs his thumb along the igniter. A spark blooms into flame and he puts his coffin nail up close, inhaling to pull the small flame into it.

It puffs up good and orange in the dark. He hands it back, smiling and saying, "Thanks."

That was when the sky blossomed down in the bay area, turning from a molded over fuzzy black to a halo of yellow, orange and white. Lit up like a fucking Christmas tree. I can see the fires from here, hear the boom of the explosion, and watch the hazy smoke floating up only to hover as if the rain is pushing it back down to the ground.

"Holy shit!" the guy next to me exclaims. "What in God's name was that?"

I shrug, pulling out my cell and plying my fingers to the buttons. A moment later and its up against my ear and I'm hearing this voice like satin, smooth and delicious; could've sworn it was expensive sweets like chocolate how silky and rich that tone was. Except that even though this is like the voice of heaven, the words coming from that sweet sounding voice are all about something downright wrong.

I hang up. I got my orders. I smile to the guy next to me, tip my hat, and wander off toward the bay area. I don't look to see if he's following me. If he is, he'll find himself with a bullet straight through his eyes so fast he wouldn't even know he's dead for the next five minutes.

My black dress shoes slosh through the puddles as I cross over pools of collected rainwater. The bay area isn't too far off, and now I can hear fire engines wailing in tune to the roar of the now nearby fire.

WPCA / Dominion

For those wondering...

WPCA: When Purple Clouds Attack, a series of random shorts/crap I write that's too short to have a larger over-arching plot. Falls under this.

Dominion, is a larger series relating to a fictitious universe I've created with dozens of characters and locales. Has some kind of plot to it, but it's still rough. Some of the stuff is in the Dominion universe, even if it doesn't tie into the over-arcing plot line.

Chat - Vol 1

(2007-11-24 16:23:50) Demon: http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/genmessage.php?board=422&topic=39754350

(2007-11-24 16:23:51) Demon: Epic

(2007-11-24 16:24:54) Wolf: Yeah, I saw that. I grabbed some soap, some steel wool and then proceeded to scrub at my eyes for about five minutes while listening to "Bleeding Under My Eyelids" by Blindside.

(2007-11-24 16:25:06) Demon: BWAHAHAHA

Forum Dueling Basics - Flow

Flow in writing is the toughest, and probably one of the most asked, questions to be answered. Flow is a bitch. She comes at you with a knife in one hand, a silver tray on the other, and when you think you got both of those steadied out, she kicks you in the balls.

The best way is to relate flow to Lego. Your words are the bricks and you're attempting to build yourself a nice "wall" of text. Now, you can grab any word, or brick, you want. Builds up a wall fast, but it won't look right, you get mismatched colors, and it won't feel right. It becomes gaudy, messy, and puts people off. The other side of it, though, is that you choose the wrong parts for the job, or wrong words, and the whole thing crumbles under its own weight. You have to do a balancing act. And even then, supposing you get all the right pieces, the right words, and fashion a wall of a single indiscriminate color, you get something that stands good, but is bland. You need some color to liven things up, but you don't want to over-do it and make things seem gaudy or right out to lunch.

There isn't really a definite answer, and won't be, since you style your writing however you want, and some people will either love it or hate it. This brings back the balancing act where you try and use the right pieces for the right role. I can't say I'm perfect in this aspect, as even I fuck up and I know it. You can only do your best at it.

Probably the best advice I can give is to read more, unless you happen to be TEW. It'll give you more ideas to use, and to see how different authors and writers approach writing. Some things, you'll find, either reach up and grip you by the throat in a choke-hold of death and won't let you go until its done and you feel like you were raped in a most unpleasant way, while others will put you in a headlock and barrel you through the most awesome things you've seen and never let go until the end where it leaves you satisfied and wanting more.

It comes down to a trial and error thing. Find what works and what doesn't. Plain and simple.

Dominion - Origins (cont)

-> Message in a Bottle

0912 Hours (Galactic Standard) 2.52.4E1453 / LDE InOps Division,
Lyzrantii system, Lyzrant

The overcast was the usual above Lyzran. A calm, collected conglomerate of white-grey fuzz spread from horizon to horizon and past. The mishmash of grey on grey was like a thick blanket that threatened rain and made a hub-bub about it constantly, but it didn't rain. Just thundered. The shaking of windows was the outcry against the rain, but the rumbling didn't stop. It was a sky tossed above a grim city, with archaic architecture that had once been pearly white but had a thin coating of charcoal grime on every surface, marring everything. Some said it gave character. The whole of Lyzran was like that -- tall, gothic structures with plazas and statues set in all sorts of poses cast from iron and copper and built from various kinds of stone.

The Imperial Navy held one such monolithic structure, with tall towers and gilded domes. Gargoyles scrambled for perches amid the security wares nestled high on the buttresses that overlooked the surrounding 'al Torro Velthseda Plaza and the giant fountain in its center with a defaced statue of what had once been Nel Ent 'al Torro.

Admiral Gabriel James Ravensdale sat in that officer. He sat and glared with glum dis-compassion at the number of reports on his desk. A line officer, reduced to being nothing more than a clerk. The military ran off this outdated, outmoded form of bureaucracy; the politics were beginning to wear on him. The asinine, inane and redundant meetings over the same things, addressing the same policies as if they're new every time. It wasn't new now, it hadn't been new five, ten or even fifty years ago. It was the same relentless bullshit -- a kind found only in paper format. Those papers lived, hibernated even, in Admiral Ravensdale's in box, determined not to leave. By comparison, his out box looked like a desolate wasteland, having never seen a report in probably the last two years he'd been in the office. In fact, every time he had put a report in that out box in the past four hours, it had disappeared faster than he could blink as his aide came in.

And even for the small opulence afforded him to this office and his position, it never liked it. Never liked the view offered by the window of the more luxurious portions of Lyzran. It could never distract him from his boredom or annoyance or his own feelings of inadequacy. Every day it was like this. The repetition had already begun to erode his sanity, shaking its foundations like earthquakes, attempting to shatter what little resolve and will he had to carry on.

"I'm more a bureaucrat than an officer," he would mumble from time to time, realizing he spent more time with councilors and advisor's and other rank and file officers in the same conundrum as he than his own family. And it was all to pull deals, ask favors, call in favors, put words here or there, possibly even the Emperor's ears. Vain attempts for funding where it was needed. It sickened him.

He probably would have continued thinking along the same lines he had always thought after assuming this position, only the door to his office burst wide breaking the monotony and a winded junior officer stood there heaving like he'd run the worlds fastest sprint.

"Sir!"

"Catch your break, son. And when you do, try that entry again, and properly."

The junior nodded, gasping loudly, sucking down air while he close the door, rapped a couple times, heard the Admiral say enter, then entered and saluted sharply. Admiral Ravensdale returned the salute just as crisply, then: "And what the hell was that previous entrance for?"

"Sir, if I may?"

Admiral Ravensdale just motioned his hand in a circular fashion, gesturing the junior aide to get on with it. Instead, the junior didn't say anything, and walked over to the blank wall holo-projector and activated it. The junior cycled through a few menus before arriving on a news channel feed. Immediately it began showing fuzzed and grimy audio/video footage of what looked like a standard LDE scoutship being destroyed by a blast from an unknown and strangely designed and configured ship. The visual cycled several more times, moving in and out of depth, showing scans of the energy blast that had ripped apart the small ship and various other bits of data.

"This footage was obtained just recently. It depicts the LDE scoutship, Starflung, which had been on a standard mapping mission of the unknown regions of space for the past seven years. As you can see, the ship was destroyed after encountering new, and hostile, alien life. Now we go to our panel of experts on what this could all mean; they are..."

The junior muted the news feed.

"And what in the hell is this supposed to be?" Admiral Ravensdale said.

"It's a recording from a slipspace probe of the last moments of the LDE scoutship before it was destroyed."

"So...this is real?"

"It is the official recording."

"Why in the hell am I finding this out from a news channel? Better yet, how the fuck did the news channel get this? Isn't it supposed to be classified?"

Ravensdale was fuming. How did a news corporation know more about a possible situation developing than he did? Weren't there supposed to be normal procedure for this kind of thing? Under normal circumstances, yes. But something had gone terribly wrong, both with the handling of the information, and with the LDE scoutship if this report were in fact real. Things would have to be done, no doubt. A taskforce would have to be mobilized to investigate, as well as a first contact group. Fuck, the Lyzrantii Dominion Empire hadn't encountered any new species since the Je'Kenkari, and that had been a shit show all by itself. The ensuing war had been terrible. The peace, however shaky, had thus far held. Ravensdale didn't want a repeat of that fiasco.

Before the junior could answer any of his voiced questions, though, Admiral Ravensdale cut him off with a chop of his hand.

"Nevermind, just get me Colonel Blythe over in InOps. Tell him I want a full report about this bullshit on my desk thirty minutes ago. And find out who the fuck gave that news corporation that recording! I want them fucking hanged!"

The junior nodded, snapped off a salute and left the room, huffing away.

It would take thirty minutes for Colonel Blythe to get there, in which time Admiral Ravensdale was left to stew in his own mired thoughts and aggravate himself further. The tabloids were going to have a field day with this. The only consolation by Colonel Blythe's arrival was that he looked just as perturbed as Admiral Ravensdale was, if not more-so. A short stocky creature, Colonel Blythe was heavily muscled, with a strong jawline, the darkest eyes around and hair thinning from too much stress. He also lacked any kind of pigmentation in his skin and looked like a ghost, ideal considering his job. He looked flustered, very unlike him, and more frustrated and angered than anything.

Saluting sharply, he dropped himself into the seat in front of Admiral Ravensdale without waiting to be ordered to.

"The problem is two fold, sir," he said.

Admiral Ravensdale arched an eyebrow, then said, "oh, so you already know what I was going to ask then?"

"Yes, sir. First is that the leak came from within InOps. I've already got some people snooping around for the retard who let the recording fall into the public domain. I'll deal with whomever did it personally. Second is that we have no spin control on this one. Completely out our hands. Already the public relations offices are being plagued with calls. What's worse is that two of my junior officers in InOps have already testified that the footage, however grainy, is from the Starflung."

"Who gave them permission to testify as to the alleged validity of the imagery?"

"No one," Colonel Blythe said. "They decided to take their own initiative. Don't worry, we're already grilling them downstairs, reinforcing the rules in the most...corporal sense of it."

"So this threat is real, not some punks idea of a practical joke?"

"No joke, sir. As far as I can tell from what we've dissected from all the records present in the probe is that the Starflung emerged into the system and began routine scans. They then discovered possible alien ships, at which point the captain, a lieutenant Kim Wong Tei, made a judgment call and loaded all data onto the slipspace probe. Probably the smartest thing he did, otherwise we wouldn't even know about this threat."

Admiral Ravensdale was silent several long moments, starring off into space. Finally he looked at Colonel Blythe.

"I want a threat analysis done yesterday on this, and mobilization of the sixteenth fleet based on that analysis. If this threat is real, which I believe it is, then I want to nip it in the bud. Also, put together a xenoc mitigation and first contact group. If possible, I want a peaceful resolution to whatever we may have started, if anything -- I don't want to see a repeat of the Je'Kenkari foul-up of fifteen years back. Hopefully this is all a misunderstanding."

Colonel Blythe blinked a few times.

"You have your orders, Colonel."

"Sir," Blythe said standing, saluted and left.

"What a royal fuck up," Admiral Ravensdale said, looking out the window at the heart of Lyzran for the first time in five years.

Previous: Dominion - Origins: Birth of MAN / Encounters

Remembrance Day ... All Screwed Up

Okay, so I go to some small town yesterday (Moosomin), where we're going to conduct Remembrance Day ceremonies. First we head to a Victoria Cross (highest Canadian honor) winner's grave site and hold a quick ceremony there. Our drill was atrocious, because we haven't done any in a while.

Get on the bus, go to the Legion (which is a building in every bloody town across Canada for army vets to congregate). We conduct a ceremony there. During the ceremony, the flag bearers come in (color party), deposit the flags as per, then one of the bearers, a senile old man, starts an argument up right in the middle of the whole thing because an old woman "stole" his seat when there were more than a dozen available to him to sit in.

Finish up the ceremony, then head to the cenotaph where we conduct more atrocious drill and look like fools. The Air Cadets looked even more ridiculous than us, though, so it wasn't so bad. Afterwards, back to the Legion for drinks.

Back at the Legion, an old man comes up and talks to me. Begins talking about Stalin. I think 'cool, I'm gonna get a story about WW2.' The guy was old enough, in his 90's or something and still walking. Well, he launches into his story about Stalin, then switches half way to talking about gutting camels to get the cold water out from inside them.

I can only stare blankly for a moment as my mind attempts to put together just exactly how he can go from talking about Stalin to talking about gutting camels for cold water. Before I can even ask him about this illogical leap, he asks me how fridges work.

I tell him, since I do know how a fridge works. Thing is, after I tell this old man, he tells me I don't know what I'm talking about. Then he says, "do you know that old French guy who took over most of the world?" I stop, wondering for a moment, the hazard a guess and say "Napoleon?", to which he goes, "Yeah! I knew him real well." It was at about that point I started ignoring the old man.

Well, long time...

I haven't done anything here for a long time. Can't help it, though, I haven't been doing too much in the way of writing right now. Well, that's a lie. I'm currently in two duels on RPFF and I re-started my Create-a-Weapon on Veteran's, so saying I'm not up to anything is just an out-right lie on my part. But, even for all that, I still haven't put anything up here or on the site. You'd think it were dead for all intents and purposes. Maybe it is. I dunno.

Maybe I'll get some more of Origins up. I am working on the third segment, on and off that is. Well, as per, I'm a lazy bastard.

Forum Dueling Basics - Forces

During my two months in the field, there are times when you get moments to sit around on your ass and wait for the next phase, the next thing that's going to happen. This can sometimes be mere minutes or several hours. It's called the "hurry up and wait" syndrome, and happens all the time. Well, while during one of these lovely sessions I was graced with, I had a thought about RPing, as it struck me purely out of the blue.

Prior to going into the field, I had had an argument with a number of people about characters in general and the amount of powers they were "allowed" and what overpowering was and all that jazz.

No character is made the same; in this no character have the same abilities or powers or even thoughts. To assume they are is asinine. We're told constantly to get away from the cookie-cutter mould that a lot of characters are created from, to seek originality of concept. Well, in doing so, in making these different characters, they all come in different shapes, sizes and varying degrees of ability. And it is because of this inherent difference that it is difficult to properly match skill levels of the characters without it appearing that one is overpowering the other.

The answer? Simple. Regulation of the force necessary to the bare minimum to accomplish a specific task, such as beating so-and-so into a bloody pulp. It could be reasonable to suggest that a person who is considered an excellent role player would limit his power and ability, not take it away altogether, to the minimum levels necessary to fight. But the average person can't believe this, and whenever they see someone who is highly capable, instantly think that said person will overpower because they can't.

Sure, it's an assumption on both sides, but the whole "well you can't use that because you're going to overpower" rather inhibits more than a "well, sure, fight the guy, but keep it reasonable."

Just a thought. I might be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time, but leave some comments on what you think.