Can you handle the truth? Read on.

Basically, it boils down to one thing: I’m no longer able to stick my finger in the nearest creative outlet and get a satisfying shock out of it. Actually, that sounds a bit more risque than it’s supposed to, so let me just try that again.

Earlier this year, the Avid nearly fried in its own fat. It’s spent long periods of time “in the shop”, a friend of mine donated a new power supply, and then… it turns out the hard drive was toast too, perhaps as a side-effect of the original problem.

Let’s not kid around: not every Avid project I launched into was a money-maker. Some of them are pretty utilitarian (i.e. PDF game videos for the site), and some of them are goofy stuff that’s intensely fun to work on, but I could never charge for. The ratio of stuff I do for fun vs. stuff I do that I can make a buck from is probably 5 to 1.

Problem is: it’s been driving me crazy to just flat out not be able to do it, period. Some people knit, some people paint, some people do other stuff… this is just what I do. I put stuff together in this way. It’s just something I know how to do, and have always known how to do. I didn’t go to school for it. It’s just something that was there the first time I hooked up two old VHS VCRs when I was a kid. The moment I figured that out, it was just something I knew how to do, almost instinctively. Most of my adult life has been spent doing this.

And – not to sound ungrateful to the friends who have inspected/fixed/etc. this machine in their spare time – it’s just taken most of this year to fix this thing, fix that thing, and now to arrive at the verdict “Your hard drive is fried.” I can’t complain too loudly when all of this work has been done for free (and I understand that if these same folks have a chance to do something to make a buck first, that gets priority)… it’s just taken a long time. The outboard drives are not fried – they contain the actual media. What’s been lost on the internal hard drive is the road map of how to put all that together. (Thank God I kept dumping these little work-in-progress Flash movies off… now all I need to do is recreate them frame by frame!) And let’s not talk about the tedium of reinstalling an entire OS (and an old one at that), reinstalling all the drivers and software… you name it. My Avid’s been down most of this year. Considering some of the other stuff that’s gone on this year, that also means that one of my favorite “escape hatches” from real life, work, and daddy duty has been missing.

So… yeah. I’ve been cranky. At any rate, it’s good to know what’s up. A replacement hard drive is on the way, I’ve got all the installer disks, and I’m ready to get that grunt work out of the way and get back to doing what I do best. What I haven’t been able to do for so much of this year. I mean, it’s not like I don’t write and do a bunch of other stuff, but this is kind of like my backbone – it’s always there in the background, I practically do it to relax. Not having that creative outlet has been like having one hand tied behind my back all year. With barbed wire.

For those who believe that might makes right: does might not make right not? Please discuss.

August

Scattered Light: A Fan Tribute To Electric Light Orchestra
This charity compilation, due in just a few days, pretty much does what it says on the outside of the tin. Many of the participants got together to produce this via the ELO Showdown mailing list, which means there are friends I’ve known for years taking part. You go, guys. There’s a very interesting mix of ELO songs both overexposed and obscure here. Can’t wait.

Lost: The Final Season
Surprisingly, it’s only a single CD. I would’ve expected another 2-CD package here (one CD for the bulk of the season, one CD for the complete score to the series finale, a la the season 3 soundtrack). According to Amazon, this is due August 24th to tie in with the DVD release, but take that with a pinch of salt (and maybe some of that special water from the heart of the island) because the label says nothing about this release on its site.

September

Royksopp – Senior
The lamentably-delayed follow-up to Junior, this was originally supposed to be released in the winter of the same year as the previous album, linking the two in a kind of seasonal, age-themed double concept album. Record companies being the enlightened beasts that they are (i.e. not really), this album has been pushed back over the protests of both the fans and the band. There’s a tracklisting posted in the forum. Due September 13th.

Doctor Who: Music From Series 4 – The Specials
Even John Williams doesn’t go around making unapologetically brassy John Williams-esque music anymore, so thank goodness for Murray Gold, the composer behind the revived Doctor Who series. This 2-CD set (expanded to 2 CDs at the composer’s insistence) features music from the specials that followed the end of season 4, up to and including David Tennant’s finale, The End Of Time Part 2. Due in September in the UK, US release date unknown.

Ben Folds – Lonely Avenue
A new Ben Folds album isn’t a bad thing, though this one isn’t necessarily just Folds: the lyrics, such as they are, are from the literary works of Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”). It’ll be intersting to see how this one works out.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Ron Jones Scores
From Film Score Monthly (which has already released a remastered and expanded edition of the Star Trek III soundtrack this year) comes a whopping huge 14 CD box set (with a whopping huge $150 price tag), containing the music from nearly every episode scored by Ron Jones (who makes his mark – and gets nominated for awards – these days on Family Guy). Jones was infamous for disregarding the insanely tight stylistic parameters set by executive producer Rick Berman, who later fired him in season 4. Jones was also infamous for creating some of the show’s most memorable music: Best Of Both Worlds, anyone? Tasha Yar’s funeral from Skin Of Evil? I could go on and on, but I’m sure you get the idea. Due to licensing issues with the label that issued Trek soundtracks in the 1990s, Best Of Both Worlds is actually not represented in this set, save for about 5 minutes of previously unreleased cues. There will also be numerous unused pieces of music that were deemed too dramatic, cinematic and just basically excellent for the tastes of Mr. Berman, as well as Jones’ final Trek contributions, the extra-rare music from the PC games Starfleet Academy and Starfleet Command. Due in early September, limited to 5,000 copies. Due to the price tag, this one’s gonna hurt, but I’m such a Jones fan – my friend Robert and I used to obsess over every note the guy composed back in the days when ST:TNG was airing new episodes – that it’s a must.

November

Doctor Who: Music From Series 5
Murray Gold reports for duty once more with a single CD covering the first Matt Smith season. As always, I have some minor quibbles with the “library of music cues endlessly reused throughout the season” approach, and as always, I’ll buy the CD anyway. Due in November in the UK; US release date unknown.

Tron Legacy
I’m sometimes not a big fan of change, unless it’s change that comes in the form of bills in large denominations. Seriously, though, I was very uneasy at the prospect of electronica group Daft Punk taking over Wendy Carlos’ rightful place as the musical force behind the new Tron sequel. Having heard some preview tracks, though, I’m warming to the idea. Quickly. Quickly enough that this album’s on my want list already. Due in November.

???

Jeff Lynne?
The rumors are swirling that Lynne will have something out by the end of this year. This, I must see to believe. Though rumors ran rampant, thanks to an off-hand comment from Neil Hannon, that Lynne’s new project would go out under the ELO banner (a la Zoom), the word from the folks who know is: no. This will be the first Jeff Lynne solo album since 1990′s Armchair Theatre. If it does drop this year, it’ll mean that Lynne, Neil Finn (by way of Crowded House) and Alan Parsons have all released new music in 2010, and the world will therefore explode in one great big awesome pop-music-gasm.

I can perish happily in the ensuing carnage with a list like this.

A quick list of pleasant surprises from the first half of the year: Broken Bells, remasters of Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn, the expanded 2-CD edition of the 2009 Star Trek movie’s soundtrack, remastered soundtracks from Batman and Krull, ComputeHer’s Modemoiselle, Royksopp’s free track-of-the-month downloads, Devo’s surprisingly awesome comeback album Something For Everybody.

Stuff I wish I hadn’t listened to this year: 95% of Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back and Sting’s Symphonicities. Guys, doing an album with a full orchestra is an awesome idea. But pick the right songs and don’t make the arrangements suck. Gah. There’s two awesome songs on each album, and that’s it.

By the way, if anyone thinks that somewhere in the above list is the blueprint for the 2010 end-of-the-year best-music-I-heard-during-this-orbit-of-the-sun podcast… you can go right on thinking that.

Why build up excess heat in the house and run up the electric bill? It’ll take a bit more time than the oven would, but it’ll get the job done by the time I need to go get the little guy from daycare.

Or maybe you’d like a hot dog instead?

(Don’t worry, Xena’s doing just fine. Also note nice new window on the front of the house, replacing the one I accidentally blasted a hole through with a projectile thrown by the lawn mower…)

Well, yeah. Something like that. Sorry I’ve been absent from the blawg. I’m on a new work schedule that, while it has the advantage of making my home life a little bit easier (i.e. I actually get to see more of little E than just 45 fussy minutes in the morning before he gets hauled off to day care), also completely sucks the life out of me. I’m working hours that wouldn’t have fazed me in my 20s, but I’m around the corner from 40 here. I’m tired beyond comprehension by the time I get home.

And once I am home… well, let’s just say we’ve run into some behavior problems with the little guy. The tail end of the terrible twos is going to be the death of me. I try to reason with him, but in the end it just seems like I have to become the Acme automatic spanking machine rather than being dad. He winds up wanting me to get the hell away from him. I wind up wanting to get the hell away from me too, for that matter. And after I’m doing being worn down by that whole experience, which seems to be turning into a nightly visit to hell… well, then I’ve got to go back to work, and I’m already pretty much fried.

One of the behaviors we’ve had to try to correct is the little guy’s tendency to get out and wander during the night when he’s supposed to be in bed sound asleep. Coming home from work and finding the following picture on my digital camera pretty much sealed the deal:

…so now there’s one of those little things on the doorknob inside his bedroom that keeps him from opening it from the inside. At least until he figures out that there is, in fact, a way to do it. I give it about three weeks tops before we have to just give up and attach a live electrical wire to the other side of the doorknob as a deterrent.

Still, both of little E’s grandmothers’ fathers were professional photographers, so someone, somewhere, is probably fiendishly pleased with the above development. This also explains why the previously monthly ritual of getting a new daddy-and-Evan picture has dried up for right now – it’s hard to get us both in the same shot, in a decent mood, at the moment.

Outisde of that, I’m devoting whatever time I can to getting Vworp! ready in time for OVGE this October. Given the schedule I’ve described above, it’s going to be a very tight squeeze. Whenever I get “Vworped out”, I try to put a little time into laying the groundwork for the next book, which will be – prepare to gasp in surprise here – Phosphor Dot Fossils. PDF is going to be a very “designed” book; I thought Vworp met that description enough as it is, since I put a heap of prep time in on the layout at the same time as I was writing text, but PDF will be even more “designed.” The design will owe a little something to the screen layout on the DVDs, but will be more print-friendly. The first PDF book will be a combination of the encyclopedic review format that everyone might expect from the DVDs… and something else entirely. Vague enough for you? I might have some preview material at OVGE… emphasis on might. There’s this whole other book that I need to have ready first. :shocked:

As for where I’ve been, Ive been putting in a lot of time talking to myself in theLogBook.com Forums …or at least it seems that way sometimes. First sign of madness, they say. I haven’t really consciously given up blogging in favor of the forums, but some of my geekier observations are better suited for the forums. At my 20th class reunion a month ago, a lot of people commented on how they missed me blogging more often, Facebooking more often, etc. etc.; I appreciated that. Being dad always comes first, but I will try to make more of an effort to post a few things here. The geekier side of the stuff I used to blog about – upcoming soundtracks, action figure collecting, that sort of thing – will likely be a creature of the forums in the future, while the blog will revert to being more about what’s going on in my life outside of all that stuff that I can’t really afford.

That’s what’s going on for right now. Stay tuned.

This is the frog before Obi saw it.

This is the frog after Obi saw it.

For some reason he didn’t stick around.

Wait, OVGE? What? Here’s my thought process. The only science fiction convention I’d have a shot at hitting from this particular location is Tulsa Trek Expo, which is this weekend. (The book will not be ready this weekend.) There’s also OKC’s SoonerCon, which has already happened this year – and which I had never heard of until after it had happened this year.

OVGE isn’t exactly a science fiction con, but it is an event that I have been a long-standing exhibitor at (it started in 2003 and I’ve only missed one year of it), and let’s face it: with a retro-skewing video game convention, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re going to have some spill-over into other areas of geek magnificence, such as science fiction. OVGE’s probably a pretty safe bet, actually.

And here’s the other neat thing: debuting VWORP! at OVGE also decides what my booth’s going to be about this year! I’ll still be carrying the usual DVDs (Phosphor Dot Fossils, Classic Gaming Expo), but the focus of the display this year will fit in with the book. I’ll be bringing some classic Doctor Who video games, as well as the latest ones, to show off and display. I’ve already begun testing the older games on the older laptops that otherwise sit around the house and collect dust, and I think we’re in pretty good shape.

I might bring an Odyssey2 to play Attack Of The Timelord! just for giggles too. Even though, yes, I know, it’s not that kind of Time Lord. But people would start checking my pulse and wondering if I’m a pod person if I didn’t bring an Odyssey2 to OVGE.

Kent’s already demanded OVGE weekend off from work, so of course he’ll be there with me. And he and I can both talk your frakkin’ ears off about Doctor Who.

So that’s the plan: to have the book finished, printed, and have copies of it for sale at the show. If you want it signed for some unknown reason, I can probably do that for you too. (Not going to be in Tulsa in October? Don’t worry – I’ll probably have things set up with Lulu.com or another similar entity to handle ordering.) Updates about this project can be found in “theLogBook.com Media / Other Projects” area of theLogBook.com’s forums. But I’ll probably blog about ‘em too.

So there you go: you’re wondering who the guy is who’s daft enough to debut a book about a science fiction show at a non-science-fiction video game convention? That’d be me.

It’s June 24th, I’ve got ’till October 23rd. I think I better quit blogging and get to work.

Some of these aren’t on a standard chicken hawk’s approved diet plan, but I have seen Myfanwy wolf down a small snake at the edge of the back yard (either a black snake or a small copperhead – no complaints from me either way).

Chicken hawks are smaller than most other varieties of hawks, but Myfanwy still has room to grow – quite a bit of room, despite being about as large as our two smaller cats. (This development puts quite a new spin on worrying about Oberon dashing out the door, especially since Oberon has joined the Myfanwy Fan Club, which gathers at the back door to admire the new arrival.) Fortunately for Obi, Myfanwy’s main diet is actually supposed to be smaller birds. We used to have a robust population of cardinals (any more cardinals, and I would’ve expected the Pope to show up soon); now, not so much. And noisy blue jays? Strangely absent after making their (godawful noisy crapping-on-everything) presence known early in the season. Again, no regrets here, though I’d appreciate it if Myfanwy would leave a few specimens alive to pick off the still-quite-healthy bug population.

I don’t know if Myfanwy is male or female, but the behavior patterns suggest male: stalking a specific area for food and then taking off with it (gotta keep the Mrs. and the little ones happy). Myfanwy is a Welsh name, and most of the time it’s a female, but don’t tell Myfanwy that, because I don’t want Myfanwy to claw my eyes out the next time he(?) sees me. Giving the name to a male is not unprecedented though. (In case you’re wondering, Myfanwy’s also the name of the pterodactyl who hangs around the hub in Torchwood. Very appropriate since this big bird will perch on our deck railing and look straight into the house with no trepidation. I suspect he’s thinking “Mmmmmmm… kitties!”)

So without further adieu, ladies and gentlemen, I now give you the bird.

(Wait, that sounded kinda bad.)

It started with one particular big (and I mean big) brown bunny, who I named Stu after I noticed he wasn’t going anywhere. That way, he was Rabbit Stu, or at least he would be when Xena got back to the business of chasing and, occasionally, catching and dismantling big-eared yard intruders.

Obviously, it didn’t happen. Soon Rabbit Stu was joined by his friend, Flufferella and Little Johnny (sort of a miniature version of Rabbit Stu – I’m sure you can work out what’s going on here). I wouldn’t be surprised if Flufferella is expecting little Buffy sometime soon. The point is: there are now as many bunnies, and I mean regular recurring cast members, as there are cats. And mom and dad are as big or bigger than any of the cats. There are many copies. And they have a plan.

Xena, what gives? Do we need to find you a trainee dog? Did these little cotton-tailed bastards chase off Todd the Possum and Mystery Cat? Do we need to make like Aussies and build a rabbit-proof fence? Please let us know. Soon. Before Buffy is followed by little Ignacio.

I’m not the kind of guy who needs a flashy sports car that can transform into a giant killer robot. I drive a station wagon that, on certain very rare occasions when the electrical wiring is up for it, transforms into an economy-sized, fuel-efficient robot. (If the wiring isn’t up for it, it just stalls.) Anything more than that would be showing off.

That’s it for today. Obviously I need more sleep. If you’d like to contribute to my caffiene replenishment fund, you know where to find me.