NaNoWriRe? (National Novel Writing Research)

Add a copy of the documentary series "Going Medieval" and I'll be ready to rock this November.  I've been working through the "Song of Ice and Fire" series, and George R.R. Martin's fanatical attention to detail has inspired me to be a little less carefree with the anachronisms and actually make a trip to the library to pick up these weird paper rectangles with words written in them.   Most likely won't be as detailed with the food though.  I don't intend to reach the 50k word count on meal description alone.

Since I've already done a ludicrous amount of world-building for my webcomic "An ArrowIn the Moon", this year's novel is going to be set in that same world.  Drawing a full color comic, it turns out, takes a bit of time and there's a whole (fictional) world out there, ripe for exploration but I won't ever get to share with anyone if I want to keep the comic story moving at a reasonable pace.

The books in the picture are: 

Daily Life in the Middle Ages

Life in a Medieval Castle

Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders

Medieval Underpants is probably the best for writers.  Life in a medieval castle feels a little dry, but it's got good info.  Daily life in the Middle Ages is a good quick reference.

Making Drawrings

I write this blog post as Samsung is on the cusp of releasing what the media (other bloggers) are calling "the most powerful tablet ever".  The Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition.  You'd think they'd have come up with some cool name, like the X-99 Velocirapter Diesel Face Punch, but I digress.  To do my part in maintaining the perpetual tech-hype machine, I've gone and bought... a good condition unit of last years model.  Dude, I'm not made of money, what do you expect?  I ain't one of those chumps what camps outside the Apple store because they're releasing a new thing that's the same as the old thing, but with color options.

But I didn't start this to talk about planned obsolescence and Apple and all that noise.  I just wanted to do a quick rundown of a pretty cool app called Layer Paint that in my opinion, was the best solution for drawing on the go with a fairly slow android tablet.  Layer Paint doesn't have quite the feature set that Sketchbook Pro does, but I was on a Le Pan II and the lag in combination with the crayon-sized stylus was just too much to overcome for most purposes.  Not so with Layer Paint, which at a mere three bucks from Google Play gives you layers, canvas sizes up to whatever your device can handle, and a decent selection of brushes, along with the basics like fill and gradient.  Here's two of the better drawings I squeezed out of the Le Pan II / Layer Paint combo:

 

Both of those are from requests at a sub-reddit I frequent: /r/redditgetsdrawn  It's great for drawing practice by the way.

After upgrading to the more powerful processor of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, I still used Layer Paint and to scrawl this image:

5 Layers, 1800 x 1800, the Galaxy Didn't stutter at all.

Truth be told, I intend to start using Sketchbook a little more now because the horrible lag is gone, but I'll still fire up Layer Paint for quick sketches.  It's just simplistic and doesn't get in its own way, like those weird word processors that have minimal features and just edit text, looking like an old DOS screen.  It remains to be seen if the current setup is good enough to maybe try a page of An Arrow in the Moon.

One Last Slice of Life (Dexter finale spoilers)

Dexter is over.  The series finale aired this past Sunday.  It was just okay. 

That's the most I can say for the final season of a show that at it's best, may have been the most original and well-written crime/procedural drama on television ever (and it turned that genre on it's head).  Unfortunately, as even great shows tend to do, Dexter became a sort of parody of itself in the last season.  So the end wasn't the epic finale the fan base desperately wanted it to be (oh, some people are pissed), but I also feel like it wasn't awful enough to detract from the overall warehouse of awesome that was the entire Dexter series.

MULTIPLE SEASON SPOILERS BELOW.  YE BE WARNED.

Anyway, in my opinion, the main problem with this season, and the previous one to some extent, is that most of the really interesting stuff already got thoroughly explored in earlier seasons.  All that remained, really, was the plot-centric question of what happens to Dexter, as in: does he get away or not?  The answer: Sort of.  He fakes his death and becomes a lumberjack.  Because that's what people do when they want to disappear.  Just ask Wolverine.

Then there's Hannah.  There wasn't really an aspect of her that wasn't already handled in a more likable package (Rita, Lumen), or a more annoying one (Lila, aka the titty vampire).  So you get Hannah and there's not a lot to her, because other than being an amalgamated version of the previous women, she disappears for a good portion of the two seasons she's featured.  In her first season, she has to share "Big Bad" status with Issak Sirko, who is actually sort of interesting until he gets blown away by his boring henchman, who then gets conveniently blown away by Quinn.  Then she reappears halfway through the last season and is suddenly the love of Dexter's life, even though we honestly never got to see why she's so special other than some on-the-nose dialogue where Dexter flat out says so.

At least we got some closure with Cody and Astor...  Nah, I'm just messin' with ya.  Cody and Astor just sort of bugger off because we need to concentrate on Harrison and ignore the fact that, like the youngest child of a sitcom family, a lot of his stuff is going to end up a rehash of the things that the older kids already went through.  Also, seeing too much of Rita's kids would lead more people to question why Dexter thought it best to send his child to live with a fugitive murderer he's known less than a year instead of his actual blood relatives.

The last season also features some subplots that sort of go nowhere.  Vince Masuka has a daughter, it turns out, which provides some comic relief, but not much else because it's like the writers realized they only had ten episodes and they also have to deal with the Quinn/Deb/Jamie love triangle and this season's Isaak Sirko played by Charlotte Rampling who previously starred in the greatest movie of all time: Zardoz.

All in all, I think the reason I'm not as angry about this as some other fans is that the show was clearly not what it once was and I'd already sort of lowered my expectations.  There's all kinds of "how it should have ended" posts on the net, and a few people going so far as to suggest a kickstarter to shoot a proper send off to America's favorite serial killer.  Yes, the lumberjack ending was all manner of lame, but I don't know about actually trying to do something about it.  I feel like quoting another great show with an ending that made a lot of people angry, but I felt was a far superior way to end a series:

"What's done is done."

That's right.  I managed to shoehorn LOST into a post about the end of Dexter.  And tell Vogel's son that "Make Your Own Kind of Music" is Desmond Hume's song, so step off.