practicality | Blahhhh

So getting drunk on Bailey's last night and then staying up 'til three am reading FF7 fanfic was apparently not a great idea, because I feel crappy today. Not even really hungover-crappy, just...out of it and in a funk. Thus why I am sitting here morosely sipping at my tea and playing Flash minigames on MSN Gaming Zone.

I dunno, I just have this looming sense that I've horribly overcommitted myself again. Four classes this term, which are all interesting but fairly intense (one of them is actually a graduate-level class hahaha), Tuesday night gaming - I'm starting a campaign of my own up again, a comission for Mara-cookie I'm kind of tearing my hair out over, waiting to hear back from another job...I'd like to take a martial arts class but am terrified of looking like a total tool (and weeabo, out here - they don't joke about 'UBC' standing for 'University of a Billion Chinese' for nothing), and it would cut 'nights I can raid' down from like...two or three to none. I enjoy WoW, but...I think even with getting home before 7:30pm every night I still totally don't have the time for it.

QQ, fml, etc. I did get a little more writing down before the ennui and angst kicked in, so fic just needs some bits and pieces to connect the middle to the ending properly and some heavy editing. It is the longest piece of fiction I think I've written ever.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I love some parts of mine, and happily geek out about new breakthroughs and do stupid things like attempt to apply real science to video games (I have spent more time than is probably sane trying to piece together mechanism and effects of Geostigma), but I hate writing lab reports, and I think too linearly to make a good PhD candidate. So I'm probably going to do a biotech cert program after I graduate instead. I kind of feel like a loser for it because all of my science geek buddies are going on to PhDs (or working on them already), but...I would be unhappy :|

I don't think linearly. Which makes creative writing difficult. I've taken tons of logic/philosophy/math, so I can apply a linear mind, but it's not natural. (I'm a former math major. I got halfway through and just couldn't take it.)

Hey, whatever. You don't have to follow their path if you don't want to. My friends are all doing ultra different stuff. Happiness is the most important thing. That, and being able to afford food and Internet XD

I'm so linear I miss the little details and the creative solutions necessary to actually be innovative. Which also makes creative writing difficult because it's the little twists and details which make stories.

Yeah, I know XD My parents both have advanced degrees (from Harvard, no less), so there's a certain amount of loving if unwanted pressure to do something big with my life which...does not help, haha.

I'm better at the tiny symbolic details that people skip over... thus rendering them useless XD

Neither of my parents have degrees at all. My dad is lucky he graduated high school XD So, not much pressure, other than just to fill my personal potential.

Heh, I'll have to read more closely, then. Reading is one of the few places I actually /am/ good at picking up all the little details, and I love novels and short stories that are chock full of them.

My parents are totally nerdy, which is awesome, but at the same time, the high standards - not so awesome. Particularly as I'm the oldest - my little bro gets of crazy easy compared to me.

I love digging deep for stuff too. I love poetry. My mom is super nerdy. She's gone to Star Trek conventions XD

Have you read any of William Gibson's stuff? You kind of have to like cyberpunk, but he does almost all of his world-building as tiny throw away lines and details, and it's /brilliant/. And yeah, third generation Trekkie here XD My grandfather sends me his ST and SW books when he starts running out of space in his house again.

I have not. Haha I used to read Star Wars books as a kid! I liked the ones with Thrawn in them.

I will shamelessly pimp out his short story collection, Burning Chrome, because I love it and it's less headache-inducing than trying to start off with one of the novels (his writing can be a bit...dense, in that there's so much information and detail crammed in it's hard to process everything on the first read). The Turks and Midgar are very much in the vein of his classic cyberpunk works. I was actually thinking earlier about how much my Tseng would like one of the locations described in Burning Chrome, the Killing Floor. It's described as being like someone threaded wire through a junkyard and suspended it - huge chunks of metal, sheets of plywood, all on massive coil springs, randomly wired with pick-ups and amps. When it's in use, huge subwoofers pump out a steady bass beat - the rest of the sound is made by the motion of the combatants as they move across the floor.

Sounds pretty interesting. What do you mean by cyberpunk? I've heard of it, but having an actual definition would be good. XD

It's...tricky to define. I tend to think of cyberpunk as the intersection of dystopia and transhumanism. It tends to feature captalist dystopias, full of megacorps and consumerism - if there's a government, it's a figurehead only, as ultimately, the bottom line is all that matters. Large class divides, an emphasis on using technology to augment human ability, and a focus on computers/the Net. It's also a lot about style - black leather, chrome skyscrapers, mirrored sunglasses. Popular movie examples are Blade Runner, Hackers, and the Matrix. Anime would be Ghost in the Shell (all the versions), Serial Experiments Lain, Bubblegum Crisis.

This is pretty much my favorite genre /ever/, if you couldn't tell >.>

Awesome! Sounds like a blast.

Pretty much XD I love the aesthetic, and I love amoral characters and antiheroes, and I'm a rampant technophile, so...pretty much made for me, heh.

I love creepy dystopias that are a little too close to home sometimes. Other times it just creeps me out XD Like, Fahrenheit 451 is a good example. That one was awesome. Not cyberpunk, probably, but as far as the dystopia aspect goes... pretty cool.

The best dystopias are like that - an extension of the worst parts of our society today. That's why cyberpunk was wildly popular in the 80s - computer revolution plus Cold War fears. Farenheit 451 lacks the transhumanist element that defines cyberpunk as a subset of dystopia, but an excellent novel anyway.

And now I want to like...write fic exploring the dystopic and cyberpunk elements of Midgar and the Turks.

Awesome.

Do it!! <3 XD I enjoy giving people plot bunnies.

Once I get through the timeline bugs in the current project, maybe XD

Blahhhh

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