This jumped straight to the top of my “stuff I can justify buying for some good reason, while secretly preparing for the zombie outbreak” list.
2…
My new Asus eeePC 1000he netbook makes me pretty happy. It took me a little more than a year to talk myself into it, and waiting that long meant that I got a 10-inch screen, much-improved keyboard, and a purported 8+ hours of battery life (YMMV) for about 75% of what I would have ended up paying for a lesser machine in 2008.
Time: Not only on my side, but kinda groovy.
3…
While cleaning the bloatware from the netbook (which I’ve named “The FMA” until I think of something better), I dug about for the tools I wanted to turn the thing into an open source/freeware writing machine. OpenOffice was a no-brainer for word processing and MS-Office-friendly output, but I MUST bring your attention to Write Monkey.
Write Monkey is a full-screen … I was going to say “word processor”, but it’s both more (a writer’s tool) and less (a text editor). The creator promises a distraction-free writing experience, and that’s what you get: just you and the words on a black screen. Word count display is optional, as is a “Write or Die” timer. It has a few nice options hidden in the background that I’m not going to spoil, and an all-keyboard-commands style of interface that I absolutely love; I wrote my first stories on ProWrite 2.0 for DOS 3.1, and this this feels like coming home. (It also has a solid “export to doc format” function that works quite well.)
My current favorite part? The Repository screen, where you can hide all the bits you haven’t found a place for in the story, yet. Brilliant.
4…
What else did I put on there? A bunch of game-rules PDFs, VLC Portable, bookmarks to Slacker Radio and Graham Walmsley’s Very Fine Dice Roller, and I’m pretty much good to go for everything I’d want to do with the thing. (Full disclosure: I also put LotRO on it, just to see if it would run. It did, and the less said (or done) about that, the better.)
Anyone else have a software app they think the whole world should be using? Lemme know: I have tons of free space and a strong desire to tinker. (Note to self: figure out why you can’t boot to the eeebuntu thumbdrive. :P)
It’s been relatively quiet around Casa Testerman for the past week or so. There was a trip to Philadelphia, thick with unexciting wardrobe malfunctions, but otherwise I’m plugging along with writing, reading, and trying to get these damn habits locked in. Lemme sum up:
Reading: It’s been a very good month for me as far as new reading experiences go; first there was Terry Pratchett’s Nation, then Neil Gaiman’s wonderful Graveyard Book, and I had the pleasure of catching up with all the cool kids and read The Lies of Locke Lamora on the Philly trip. Great book. Just enough ‘new’ in the fantasy world, with great characterization and plotting. Capers are capered, swashes are buckled, and a great many skulls are duggeried. I came fairly close to sleeping on the couch a couple times, thanks to interrupting Kate’s own reading with chortling, out-of-context excerpts. Recommended (as are the others I mentioned – highly).
Writing:
The “Adrift” story continues, in which Finnras seems to be engaging in some kind of Cunning Plan. We’ll see if he’s as good at such things as Locke Lamora. Odds are not good.
Habit the First – Tracking what I Eat
This went very well in the first week – I even dropped a few pounds. (Actually, according to the website on which I track such things, I dropped too much in one week, and now they want to me to eat more this week — as in… a lot more… “I can’t afford a whole cow!” more — it’s confusing.
I have regained control of my eating patterns by keeping meticulous records.
Habit the Second — Getting up an Hour Earlier
This one isn’t going as well. Yes, I’m getting up earlier, but I never have to use an alarm clock normally, and I for damn sure have to right now. Also, I’m dragging through large portions of the day, short on energy and long on nap-tropism.
I think part of the problem is that I haven’t set up any kind of reward for when I succeed at this each day (the other part of the problem is that I have no personal desire or investment in this – it’s wholly external) — so I need some help with that: what kind of reward should I be giving myself for getting up at the crack of dawn every day?
Suggestions need to be something concrete: that early in the morning I don’t think highly enough of my fellow humans for “a sense of moral superiority” to mean anything. Gimme some ideas in the comments.
I’ve been a bit periscope-down for the last week or so, but I thought I’d pop in for just a moment before my students show up and muse on a game I’m starting up this evening. I don’t normally talk about my gaming on this blog (saving that for Random Average), but in this case, I thought it was relevant.
The game is Primetime Adventures – a story-game that’s designed to simulate the ebbs and flows of (mostly) genre television melodrama, best exemplified by shows like Buffy, Alias, Six Feet Under, Chuck, Heroes, Lost, and things of that nature.
Tonight we will have the Pitch Session, in which participants will propose various show ideas which we will then shoot down or hammer on until we have a concept for a television show we rather like – at which point in time we proceed to make up the protagonists for the show and figure out the basic flow the story arcs and the character issues and all that good stuff that we’ll explore for the next five or six game sessions.
The television metaphor is a powerful one, and leads to some good concepts, many of which are inspired by the basic idea “this is something I think would make awesome television, but which no one IN television would ever have the balls to make.” Maybe it’s faerie-invaded Edwardian England, or ghost hunting noir, or undead-fighting kung-fu holy warriors, or everyman robot-overlord survival horror. Could be anything, really.
I don’t have any ideas.
Rather, I have about a hundred ideas, none of which are stepping forward and shouting “pick me, hone me, LOVE ME” the way I always expect they should do — the way that actual quality television or stories do.
In fact, what I’m feeling right now is pretty much what I feel every time I’m about to start a new writing project for which I only have a kinda-sorta idea. It’s a good place to be, and kind of a rotten place to be all at once. When all you have is a blank page and no constraints, you can get a little paralyzed.
I can hardly wait to get started. I’ll let you know what we come up with.
In the coming apocalypse, you will still be fined double for speeding in construction zones. We have to have order, dammit.
There are doubters among the readership, but I’ve long-since agreed with the theory that zombie movies, stories, and games flourish when the chips are down in the real world. Lots of wars going on that no one wants to fight? Zombies. Economic Uncertainty and Upheaval? Zombies.
Vampires are a monster that comes out when smooth and shiny predators are on the loose in the real world. Werewolves… well, when was the last burst of werewolf horror? It’s been far enough in the past that I think it’s engendered by something we don’t fear much anymore.
But when there’s upheaval and collapse? Zombies.
Now, I’ll admit that I play the genre of zombies a little loosely here and essentially mean Survival Horror (whose main concept can be summed up as “they just keep coming, and we’re running out of ammo.”), but the basic conceit holds, as does the trackable correlation to real world events.
Then again… what if it’s predictive? What if the zombie outbreak is imminent?
*long, uncomfortable pause*
Okay: no, not really, but… come on; we’re all geeks here. Who among us has NOT contemplated, at least briefly, a survival plan in case of a zombie outbreak? Show of hands.
Those of you who did not raise your hands are either fibbing, or you’re my wife. She’s apparently counting on me to get us out.
And, to be fair, I’ve given it some thought.
Variation A: I’m at work when we hear the news.
This is actually not a bad option, due the fact that I work with a lot of gun-toting libertarians that take their families to the shooting range for Quality Time Night. My first order of business would be to raid their F-150s for a spare rifle (no shotguns, please) and ammo.
Step Two, depending on panic level, is to stop at the Army Surplus store and grab a few things like jerry cans and a machete or two.
Step Three, get home.
Variation B: I’m at home when we hear the news.
Step One: curse myself for not stopping and replacing my long-lost machete and/or hatchet the dozen times I’ve thought of it.
Either Phase A or B: Hold up
The whole thing might not be that big of an outbreak. Wait and see. Stay quiet. Luckily, we can barricade the front of the house fairly easily, using spare lumber in the garage that can be moved to the house via the backyard. Our dried goods supply is solid for a week or so, and by then we should be able to tell the way things are going. We lock up and shut down everything upstairs and get into the basement, which has most everything we need for the time period, plus an escape route that leads right to the garage.
Last Phase: It’s bad: get the heck outta Dodge.
If the outbreak is going wide, or even looks like it is, we leave. We can stock up Sherwood (Kate’s Forester) without going to the front of the house. While the gas mileage is much better on my vehicle, the Subaru’s all-wheel drive, sturdy construction, ability to swing weapons at attacking undead while standing up through the moonroof, and increased storage space makes it a no-brainer. Don’t forget to pack:
The gas jerry cans I *do* already have.
A couple baseball bats and the semi-truck “Tire Tester” for melee weapons. Also, the two aeration forks, for simply shoving creatures away from the car as we flee.
Once again, bemoan the lack of appropriate edged weapons – and the fact that I don’t have a firearm in the house at this time.
The goal: get to my family’s house in South Dakota. The (lack of) population density is a benefit (unless the outbreak goes extremely wide, at which point hordes of the undead will sweep across the great plains like pre-colony herds of buffalo), and all the things I *don’t* have close to hand (ammo, weapons, defensible positions with self-sustainable food supplies) they do.
The trip needs to avoid major highways, so it’ll probably take about 15 hours and we’ll need at least a couple stops to refill gas – events which will be fraught with peril, unless I was able to snag those extra jerry cans – so figure it’ll take a full day, which I already know can be driven without rest if necessary.
This route is one of several that avoids interstate highways, which will become zombie buffet lines within the first few days. As an added bonus, we'll be able to visit the World's Largest Ball of Twine.
Now, if things are getting REALLY bad and those buffalo-herds of zombies are coming, we head north as a group, armed to the teeth and aiming for tundra. The frozen winter months will give us respite from daily attacks, and if we get REALLY remote (an environment I fully trust my family members know how to survive) we won’t have to worry about the other major threat – desperate strangers.
WOW, that’s grim.
PROS: Flexible, with enough detail to hang other plans on.
CONS: We lack sufficient supplies to make it to the boonies without stopping for gas and other necessities, thus increasing our danger by exponential numbers.
How about You?
Don’t tell me I’m the only one who’s ever given this more than a few seconds of passing thought. Reveal your plan for surviving the undead plague in the comments.
Things have been a skosh quiet on the blog over the weekend, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been tappity-tap-tapping else where within the intertubes.
I’ll have some more stuff soon, but right now I’m wrestling with some technical glitches within WordPress itself, and it’s hard for me to write something when I know the machine I’m writing on is broken.
