Lullabies to paralyze

I finished my first semester of real University two days ago. Yay for that. Unfortunately I only have two weeks off, and the Summer session starts on my birthday. Though I am pretty stoked for the next session, I'm taking a Noir fiction class and have been getting a head start on the reading list. First up is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I've actually never read the book or seen the film, but I've been privy to all of the tropes that it helped codify. So much so that when I read the first chapter, I was amazed how closely I ripped off the intro when I wrote my comedic noir play, A Night on the Rocks, during my senior year of high school. I'm still meaning to rewrite that and try to get it performed. One day. Still have the OG script gathering dust. Ripped off Simpson's jokes and accidental ripped off pulp fiction cliches as well.

So I finished my three shorts I wrote for my workshop. Now it's time to start shopping them out to the world at large. I submitted one for a contest, didn't win, but the road to hell is paved with good rejection letters. Aside from that, it's back to working on To Slice The Sky, halfway through chapter 7, but I'm kinda at a point where I need to redo the scene where Decker does his first big slice, since I apparently already wrote it in By Starlight. I practically copied all of the action when writing the novella, and I knew it, and now I have to pay the price for it. Let that be a lesson to any aspiring writers stumbling across this blog, don't steal from yourself. It only makes more work later.

I got back to playing Resident Evil again. Since time is scarcer for me these days (picked up a second day job because life is expensive and I hate my first day job) progress is slow, but I'm halfway through episode 2 of Revelations 2. I've been finally taking advantage of my Steam account and have been grabbing at games the PC games I grew up playing. Currently I've started up a new Fallout playthrough, but only meandered about for a bit. I need to get a Bluetooth mouse, playing with a trackpad blows and it sure as hell isn't optimized for a touch screen.

I also caught Iggy Pop's last North American show for the Post Pop Depression show. He was backed by most of Queens of the Stone Age and the drummer from Arctic Monkeys. It was by far one of the most satisfying shows I've ever seen. It amazes me how agile and well-muscled Iggy still is at his age, and he definitely has a flair for the theatrical. It makes you remember that he used to do Glam Punk. Also, seeing Sister Midnight played live was pure wish fulfillment. And I wish words could sum up how amazing Josh Homme's solos were but there were many times that I had my eyes closed, just trying to absorb what I was hearing. The man knows his way around five strings.

That about sums up what I've been up to. Amazing how a whole week can be summed up in four paragraphs. Here's my dog!