Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n.

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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Baxil" journal:

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November 18th, 2009
02:11 am [Link]	NaNo update Week 1: Muse frolics about in the playground, running from shiny thing to shiny thing, shouting "Wheee!" and exhausting herself on the slides and swings. Week 2: Muse sulks at the edge of the playground because, when she built a huge sand castle directly underneath the slide, her friend Authorial Standards promptly came down without looking and squished it. Week 3: Muse's sulking is interrupted by a Novella in a nearby van. "Want some candy, little girl?" he whispers in a husky yet strangely alluring tone. She gets too close to the vehicle, arms reach out, the door slams shut, and before she can scream they are 13,000 words down the road. So, yeah, there go my pretensions of frittering NaNo away via the completion of dozens of scattered half-finished projects. I can't abandon my protagonist now! He's running from the authorities after spoiler spoi ler spoilersp oi le rspo iler! Plus, y'know, backstory! And the worldbuilding is all falling together! And and and ... I'll have to figure out how I can "with one bound, Jack was free" my way out of the mess, so I can get back to the various requests and writing trades and finishing up of old projects and then planning out the Fireborn game that starts in December and catching up at work and and and augh. I'm glad November is just a part-time thing. Anyway, NaNo user page has been updated with an excerpt from "The Time In Her Eyes." If you're interested in beta-reading and offering constructive feedback, drop me a line in some fashion; it's a neat enough story to be worth second-drafting once all the words come out. How's your novel going, if you're writing? How's your month going, if not? Current Location: ~/brainstorm Current Mood: wordful Current Music: Bax's NaNo game music mix Tags: misc life updates, writing (22 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 11th, 2009
06:20 am [Link]	Daily Random Thoughts (via LoudTwitter) 21:49 I'm conflicted about discovering the RPG 'Fireborn' after it went out of print. Now I can afford it easily, but can't support the designers. # Tags: 140 characters (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 9th, 2009
05:43 pm [Link]	Why NaNoWriMo? So, thanks to the discussion in my previous post, I went and made it official: I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year and have been busily writing behind the scenes. This year's goal: 50,000 words, total, period; working on whatever the hell I want to work on, just so long as I'm working. (And so far it is working: I'm still on track for quota.) NaNo has a term for this sort of flagrant non-noveling: being a "NaNo Rebel." So far I've finished a half-done story; written a story from scratch; typed up a ridiculous number of words in D&D campaign journaling (like the old CSI: Luvine stories, but I haven't found the magic spark to make the stories truly cool yet); and am most of the way through writing up a really vivid dream I had in October. Plus I counted about 500 words that I'm about to edit and reprint below -- it was originally written as an LJ comment in a friend's journal, but it was important. (I'm not counting the few paragraphs of blather here, though. I have my limits.) Why NaNoWriMo? > [I] can't really just write regularly like that. ... NaNoWriMo makes [writing] very regular and machinish. ... [I'm] hardly that sort of machine. If this sounds like something you would say in criticism of NaNoWriMo ... then, first of all, let me make this clear. None of what I say should be taken as criticism of what works for you. That having been said: I am the worst sort of burst writer. My inspiration is erratic, I block easily on long-term projects and get distracted easily when I'm blocked, and sometimes I find myself going months without getting anything of value written at all. I'm also a three-time NaNo finisher. While the material I produce during NaNo is generally decent enough for me to appreciate having written it, that's not its real benefit. What I truly appreciate about NaNo is its ability to knock me out of the expectations of my own head. I start with nothing but a word-count goal and some minimum quality standards, commit myself to set aside the majority of my social life during the month, and treat the whole thing as an experiment in boundary-pushing. My first real NaNo was done solely to discover that I can finish, actually get to the end, of a novel-length work. (It also checked off a ticky-box on my ten-year goals list. There's a separate ticky-box for "finish a novel NOT written during NaNoWriMo". I haven't done that yet.) My second real NaNo (four years later, I should add -- I can't do these things without a cooldown period) was done to prove it wasn't a fluke -- but also as an experiment in serial fiction, because I'd never done a long-form continuing story before. It's not continuing now, but again, I discovered I can, and that was vastly illuminating, and will help me the next time I develop a serializable idea. I am still an erratic writer. I do not generally push inspiration when it's not there, and I still write best in sprints rather than marathons. However, now I know what it feels like to do both; I know how to recognize the traps I fall into when the sprint doesn't push me to the end; and I've written some pieces during multiple sit-downs that I never could have done at a sprint. One of the pieces I'm most proud of writing is a product of that. It's a product, in fact, of my "failed" 2006 NaNoWriMo, in that I set aside to write 50K in interweaving short stories and then finished November at a fraction of that. Do I feel disappointed about failing? That assumes it was a failure! I blew a word count goal and produced one of my life's best pieces of writing. Should I have been disappointed? That depends on what my goal was. And there's nobody measuring that but me. The lesson I took from 2006 is that NaNo is, at heart, a learning experience -- a Rorschach test, if you will, of looking into words and seeing yourself. And what of the years when I did reach 50K? They've been a slog. Sometimes, yes, writing means trudging on without the muse. But that's part of the learning experience, and when you're done, you've had the experience of doing it, and then you stop. NaNo's goal is not to train you to write without your muse -- just to convince you that you can. And to teach you that sometimes doing so can get you more of what you want -- more words, more satisfaction -- than waiting for inspiration. ... I think I again need to emphasize that the NaNo I'm most proud of is the one where I failed, because I got an idea dumped into my head that really was worth writing about, and I stopped and did it right instead of forcing myself to live up to those external expectations. That's the crux of it, right there. While my writing style is spectacularly unsuited to a one-month novel, the reason NaNo has repeatedly worked for me is that I have made it into something that I want to do, and once that happened, by definition it was a success no matter how far I got or whether I met the initial arbitrary goal. (I mostly have, but, well, whatev.) I didn't even try NaNo'ing a novel until four NNWMs in; my first two were an "I'm going to write a journal entry a day!" variant and my third was "One short story per day" (which actually ended up being even more of a muse death-march despite clocking in at ~40,000 words. After that, focusing all my effort on a single novel seemed like a welcome change of pace). And if you have a muse, and some writing talent, and a deep-seated hatred of NaNo, and a little envy of the people who can write 50,000 words in a month? I need to mention how awesome it is that you can work without that NaNo crutch. The vast majority of my writing progress has been with it, in one form or another. And every time you start feeling like you need to be jealous of me for being able to finish a NaNo, take a look at my journal and the five-week dead silence leading up to 11/1, because I guarantee you that the envy flowed the other way while I was stuck. :) Current Location: ~spiral Current Mood: busy Current Music: Billy Idol, "Adam In Chains" Tags: writing (12 comments \| Leave a comment)
06:20 am [Link]	Daily Random Thoughts (via LoudTwitter) 16:14 "What was I doing attacking a city guardsman? I can explain. ... I'm in jail, and if you break me out I'll quit killing people." # 16:17 - Best line of the D&D session (from my char to the guard cap'n, misinterpreting a telepathic grumble from another PC as an excuse to offer) # Tags: 140 characters (Leave a comment)
November 7th, 2009
06:20 am [Link]	Daily Random Thoughts (via LoudTwitter) 11:42 Seen atop latest mass-forward in my inbox: "Snopes said this is false, but can't hurt to try it." (Cue facepalm-heard-'round-the-world) # 11:42 What I've accomplished this morning: Filked "The Impossible Dream" into "The Unreachable Bug" for pet cat. Rhymed "ninja" with "didn't'cha." # Tags: 140 characters (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
October 30th, 2009
04:07 am [Link]	Upgrades and updates My life seems to have gotten a little out of balance lately. I say this because it's a modestly better reintroduction after five weeks of silence than the traditional "tap, tap* Hey, is this thing on?"* It's not that I've been too busy to write; I've got no less than three unfinished short stories (and some completed song lyrics) on the front burner. But that's the problem. For a while my creative urge just dried up (or sublimated into roleplaying, one of my ongoing offline activities that has happily picked up the pace). And now that fingers are hitting the keyboard again, there's such a backlog that I'm dancing around from project to project and falling back into my old bad habits of leaving everything 80% finished. And with so many stories crowding around seeking resolution, I've been putting off journaling in favor of fiction. The good news is that this creative burst is carrying me into winter in high spirits, rather than a few months of endless freaking out over the weather and general lack of daylight. And procrastination has its fringe benefits: for instance, I'm up at nearly 4 AM putting some final polish on a relaunch of the TTU Wiki. I just upgraded its back-end software (after three years and seven releases), which was a lot less painful than I expected, so I wrote some custom code for it to make its category listings prettier (i.e., sorted by columns instead of rows, which is slightly less trivial than it sounds). The wiki has been getting a lot of attention lately, actually. I'm really proud of the glossary of TTU slang, and there's now some excellent detail on events like the New Year's Flyby. And I finally fixed the permissions so that any registered user can make edits wiki-wide -- which should make it a lot friendlier as a collaboration tool. All of which is well and good, but ... it's almost November, and you know what that means. Yes: NaNoWriMo is upon us once again. And, 48 hours from the start of the race, I find myself dithering. On the one hand, a lot of close friends are committing to write, and I really want to join them in solidarity. It would also do me good; some of my best work has come out of the frenzy of the November word-count dance. My creativity is currently working overtime and crying out for outlets. On the other hand, I know, with great and terrible certainty, that if I make any sort of NaNo commitment, all of my half-done projects are going to die ignominious deaths, and that rankles. I've also got more social commitments than usual this year and don't feel like I could devote the time to NaNo that I really ought to. (I also wrote 50K words of Legend of Hero last year, and traditionally I've taken a year off after each NaNo success.) I'm juggling a few ideas for "alternate" NaNos -- I'm no stranger to the idea, having moved from BaMoJoEnt to BaMoTTuSto to novels and back. Perhaps I could create a new page on the TTU Wiki every day, or go back to the classics and post some nonfiction every day? Or maybe I ought to just keep on keepin' on, and spend November finishing my 5-story backlog ... Thoughts? I'm in a state of severe waffle here, so reader input (and especially fellow NaNo-er input) will go a long way toward helping me channel my pent-up writing bug. Current Location: ~/laptop Current Music: Jim's Big Ego, "She's Dead" Tags: misc life updates, requests, writing (20 comments \| Leave a comment)
September 23rd, 2009
09:47 am [Link]	Ask the lazywebs Are there any music players (pref. for Mac) that allow tagging of songs, the same way virtually every other type of media now does? It seems a natural extension of "playlists" and easy enough to store in ID3V2. Also, I've been immortalized on TVTropes! (Grep the page for 484.) Current Location: ~spiral Current Music: Medeski Martin & Wood, "Sugar Craft" Tags: multimedia, requests (3 comments \| Leave a comment)
September 21st, 2009
06:13 pm [Link]	If you had told me after 9/11 that Little Green Footballs was one day going to get shunned out of mainstream conservatism for not being right-wing enough, I would have looked at you like you had grown a third eye. For many years the LGF comments section was the go-to place if you wanted to find reprehensible opinions from the depths of the reactionary fever swamp. There is truly something unreal about today's GOP. Anyway, I ought to do more than stand on the sidelines and gape at right-wing political infighting, so here's your Moment of Zen: Current Location: ~spiral Tags: politics (8 comments \| Leave a comment)
September 20th, 2009
06:20 am [Link]	Daily Random Thoughts (via LoudTwitter) 19:08 Masquerade ball at ritual tonight! Which is awesome because I got to say in context: "Hang on, let me go put on my robe and wizard hat." :-D # Tags: 140 characters (Leave a comment)
September 15th, 2009
06:00 pm [Link]	Airport security* Italian airport security seems to be based on the premise that, if you are sent through enough security checkpoints - no matter how cursory the checks - that anyone doing bad things will eventually be caught, preferably by Someone Else. American airport security seems to be based on the premise that, if the bureaucracy is all exposed out front, and the rules are draconian enough, they can reduce wait times by making nobody want to return. Anyway, we're back on American soil, on the last leg of our trip, and I'm finally sitting down on my first non-moving seat in 48 hours. I've got unloted connectivity on the iPhone again, but can't find a free wifi network for the laptop, so wallyontheroad's continued updates (and the cream of the crop of my 1,400+ photos) will have to wait a little while longer. Kady and I are diving straight for the red meat now that we're back in the States - love it or hate it, you have to admit that the Italian diet is extremely carb-heavy, and I especially could use some iron to help replace all that blood lost to mosquitoes. -- * Please note that these are unfair generalizations based on a single flight between both countries. Intended for humor value only. Current Location: Detroit Int'l Airport Current Mood: Exanimate Tags: italy, via ljapp (5 comments \| Leave a comment)
September 11th, 2009
06:20 am [Link]	Daily Random Thoughts (via LoudTwitter) 12:25 Among the island of Sardegna's upsides: Great beaches and night sky. Among the downsides: Nearest Internet = 12 km away. (Posted via iPhone) # 12:28 Ironically, now that we're in a remote stretch of Italy we're having fewer language issues; my sister and her husband-to-be are translating. # Tags: 140 characters (Leave a comment)
September 9th, 2009
03:14 am [Link]	On Rome's big tourist trap I like, in general, to tour off the beaten path. My favorite part of Pompeii was after a rain shower cleared out most of our fellow visitors. The trip's best restaurant was down a back alley in a grimy southern Italian city. We have found more joy by bucking the crowds than we ever could by following them. The Sistine Chapel was not off the beaten path. It was exquisitely artistic, to be sure. Worth the money, glad we went, etc. I will even go again should we return; our afternoon visit totally underestimated the scope of the place, and so the trip felt as though we were sprinting past the main rooms of an art museum in an effort to say we had been there. Next time I hope to actually see everything that was on display. Unfortunately, the experience seemed specifically designed to wear us out. kadyg commented that we must have walked 12 miles today, and that's not counting the steps taken outside the walls of the Sistine. It's not far from the truth. The designers of Las Vegas clearly took their cues from the labyrinthine design of the Vatican Museum, which is laid out in a single line that coils and loops through three floors of two buildings. Every few rooms you see a sign helpfully pointing toward the Sistine Chapel, carefully neglecting to mention any sort of distance - and so you round a few more corners, climb a few more stairs, find the next sign and wonder just how much more Art you have to see before the main attraction. There is a lot of Art. There is a lot of Art. Picture the building itself as a decadent Renaissance pope, an aging and sedentary figure, crepusculent on a resplendent throne amid one of the infamous 500-plate banquets of the age, polishing off a gilded plate laden with deep-fried cheese and bacon. As he sits back in his chair, semi-comatose amid the Roman summer heat, he starts to get the meat sweats, moisture oozing from every pore and drenching his vestments. That is the art - so ubiquitous, so excessive, that it almost borders on the grotesque. So both physical fatigue and art fatigue are already setting in as you walk through the museum. By "walk," though, I actually mean the resigned plodding that is such a feature of modern life - the queue shuffle. Because as you're making the 12-mile pilgrimage to The Chapel, so are hundreds of other tourists, and all of them are being herded through the exact same rooms and corridors that you are, and every time you hit a narrow point, the laws of fluid dynamics kick in and the pressure increases. The labyrinth is a smart method of crowd control, because if you could go directly to The Chapel, everyone would and you'd get totally unmanageable people snarls. I won't fault them for it. But the net effect for off-the-path crowd-shy travelers like us is to add a layer of emotional fatigue on top of the other sources of exhaustion. Walking into The Chapel itself to discover packed standing-room-only gawkspace, after being surrounded by people for half an hour of walking, takes a lot of the impact away from the art. At least there are times when crowds are good. When walking back to the metro station after our visit ended, we saw several dozen locals sprawled out along a square, licking ice cream cones. We followed the influx of new customers over to a gelateria and got a snack. It was both cheap - less than half the price of the crappy gelato from the self-serve restaurant near St. Peter's - and highly tasty. Even when you're walking off the beaten path, it's good to hit civilization once in a while. Also, just as a note: if you haven't been reading wallyontheroad, that's where most of the trip jpurnaling has been going. Make with the clicky. Current Location: ~iphone Current Mood: Tired Tags: via ljapp (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
September 7th, 2009
06:20 am [Link]	Daily Random Thoughts (via LoudTwitter) 04:46 At Rome's Colosseum: Seated >50k; 55 trap doors; hosted naval battles(!) when they flooded basements; built ~2k yrs ago. In just 8 years. # Tags: 140 characters (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
September 4th, 2009
06:20 am [Link]	Daily Random Thoughts (via LoudTwitter) 05:32 The song "Smoke On The Water" takes on a whole new meaning when you're listening to it amid the ruins of Pompeii in the shadow of Vesuvius. # Tags: 140 characters (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
03:29 am [Link]	Brief travel update In Napoli (Naples), where we will be spending the next several days. Tomorrow we will be travelling to Pompeii to take in the ruins. How has the trip been so far? Certainly could have gone better. (Note: Far more detailed write-up at the link; included here by reference.) On the other hand, now that we're settling in to the hostel and getting sleep and good food (both at reasonable rates), things seem to be looking up. Current Location: Napoli, Italy Current Mood: jet-lagged Tags: italy (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
September 1st, 2009
03:28 pm [Link]	On the way By the time you read this, kadyg and I will be on a flight to Europe. Visiting Italy for two weeks for my sister's wedding, with a stopover in Amsterdam along the way. We got everything packed and managed to leave on schedule with only a little sleep deprivation, so (modulo the usual airport ripoffs) it's been an uneventful start to the trip. ... I lie. A wildfire in our area forced a detour, we got pulled over by a cop, we left just late enough that the extra delays had me spazzing about the time all the way to the airport, and in general I am emotionally running on empty. Fortunately, we're boarding the aircraft now, so from here it's a chance to nap until Amsterdam. I've been procrastinating on announcing the trip, but we should be able to update from on the road thanks to the miracle of our digital age. I'll also look forward to chatting with people in English and fight off homesickness a bit. Ironically this means I am probably going to be more online from overseas than from my own computer. :-p Posted via LiveJournal.app. Current Location: ~iphone Current Mood: Exhausted Tags: via ljapp (6 comments \| Leave a comment)
August 28th, 2009
05:44 pm [Link]	Weekend caption contest! Bored? Trying to shake a little creativity loose as you head into your weekend? Make a LOLCat! Winner gets valuable ~~prizes~~ Baxil points! Participation is easy: Just make a LOLcat out of it (or, hell, do something else randomly creative with it; it's for fun, after all). You can do this at a number of places: - ROFLbot or Lolcat Generator let you save the result to your computer, and you can then re-upload it to an image hosting service like imgur and paste the image link here - Cheezburger's Lolbuilder appears to do the work of hosting it for you, but you have to enter an e-mail address to get the link sent to you Go wild! Current Location: ~spiral Current Mood: busy Current Music: "Flood," Jars of Clay (16 comments \| Leave a comment)
August 23rd, 2009
04:35 pm [Link]	Maybe we could get Greg Graffin to write the white paper Hypothesis: Should Me First And The Gimme Gimmes and Lounge Against The Machine ever play in the same room, the bands will annihilate each other in a burst of gamma rays and exotic heavy particles. This experiment must be attempted. For SCIENCE. Current Location: ~/laptop Current Mood: silly Current Music: Huey Lewis and the News, "The Heart of Rock And Roll" (4 comments \| Leave a comment)
August 22nd, 2009
10:56 am [Link]	District 9 addendum For those of you who managed to read through my previous post on the movie: In comments there is a strong argument that the privilege issue is in fact intentional, and thus that it's a lot smarter movie than I give it credit for. It's a good counterpoint, especially if you decided to not watch the movie on my say-so. I'll try to move on now back to my usual ... um ... silence punctuated by the odd bit of fiction. Or something. `:-P` (Comments disabled because any further D9 discussion should go on the original post.) Current Location: ~/brainstorm Current Music: "Port-au-Prince," Royal Crown Revue
August 20th, 2009
09:20 am [Link]	My brain needs some wake-up stretching I need better songs for 6 and 9 -- and 11+ if you've got 'em. Help me out here! Current Location: ~spiral Current Mood: tired Current Music: Guess. Tags: multimedia, requests (19 comments \| Leave a comment)

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