Part 1 in a series about the development of SO YOU CREATED A WORMHOLE, from idea to proposal to book contract to shelves.
When tracing back the genesis of the project that would eventually become SO YOU CREATED A WORMHOLE: THE TIME TRAVELER’S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL, I suppose the very beginning would be my obsession with zombie fiction.
Way back in 2008, co-writer and hetero-lifemate Nick Hurwitch gave me Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide. After reading it, it was striking how true to concept Brooks stayed with the whole thing. I’ve heard the book described as being tongue-in-cheek hilarious, and you can read it that way if you want. You can also read it as being a serious take on the idea of being in the center of a zombie holocaust, given how methodical and logical the book is. It plays both ways.
Soon after I found myself watching the Denzel Washington film Deja Vu*, also at Nick’s suggestion. Being a big fan of time travel, I was excited to get into it, but I found it lacking in some ways. Continue reading Time Travel Guide Genesis: Doing It Wrong →
Six a.m. on a Sunday. That’s what it takes this week – and this is the first week.
I feel like I’m going to puke.
Make a coffee run. Return home. Send the girlfriend off for her 10k this morning, which I’m unable to attend because apparently runners are not expected to have people who would like to be there to see them run. Come home; avoid waking up sleeping guests in the living room. Headphones. iTunes. Facebook. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Facebook game I ashamedly play.
Aaand finally: Chapter 2, about 4,000 words in. This being the first new chapter of The Book. The Book for which, you last read, we were shopping around the Great Book Proposal. The Book which Nick Hurwitch and I are now being paid to write. By a publisher, which is real.
Continue reading Boomstick, this is my: working as a real-live author →
The more time I spend with Twitter, the more I realize it has the potential to be single greatest achievement of the Internet to date. No, dude – I’m totally serious.
Beyond the more amazing achievements of Twitter – broadcasting the struggles of people in oppressed parts of the world, for example – it every single day brings people closer together. And not in that Facebook “we were friends in high school and now we can occasionally check out pictures of one another’s dogs” way, in which there’s as much relationship expansion as there is total could-care-less ignoring of other people going on. Twitter is a conversation, and only a conversation, between groups of people. Twitter is a chance to have a conversation with virtually anyone, and in many ways, your ability to take part in that conversation is moderated only by your ability to have something interesting to say.
I’m speaking, of course, about following famous people on Twitter.
Continue reading Meet your heroes (if they tweet) →
Allow me to pimp my latest Top 10 list for FileFront: the 10 Greatest Game Power-Ups to Have in Real Life.
I’m extremely proud of the list – I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve yet written as a freelancer for the video game website. So you should go read it, especially because it took me almost two weeks to make it happen. And it almost didn’t.
Continue reading In need of a power-up for my brain →
I’ve become something of an expert on Dead Rising 2, the upcoming massive zombie sequel from Capcom. I’ll be walking through the game next week (it really is huge, so it’ll take a while), and I did the walkthrough and the review for the piece of prequel downloadable content that launched a few weeks ago, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero.
Most interestingly, I attended the Greene’s Hardware Store promo event in Silverlake, down the street from my apartment, a couple of weeks ago. Yes, I am 8-Bit put on the event. Yes, I am friends with everyone in that company. Yes, it was purely coincidental, and totally professional, that I attended in the capacity that I did.
I actually got to cover Greene’s Hardware as a working journalist for FileFront. During the course of the event, I played the game (check out the hands-on preview I did for FileFront here) and spoke with Josh Bridge, an executive producer at developer Blue Castle.
Continue reading Dead Rising 2 and plagiarism’s specter →
I had a really great time making the 15 God-Awful Video Game Commercials list for FileFront last week. It basically amounted to scouring YouTube for several hilarious hours, watching some of the most ridiculous TV spots ever put to film with the hopes of selling a video game to, seemingly, whoever the hell might be interested in buying one.
Seriously, it appears as though prior to the turn of the millennium, nobody in the industry had a clue as to how to sell their product. They were stabbing madly in the dark with jingles and goofy scripts and awful footage, hoping that someone might be dumb enough to buy what the companies were selling.
Even the ads for some of the best games ever – notably, The Legend of Zelda, which defined a great many childhoods – are uproariously terrible.
The list originally was supposed to include 10 spots, but I just couldn’t bring myself to trim down to so few. The number I finally settled on, 15, was a painful line in the sand. I had to quit or it was going to consume an entire day, and even though it was really fun, let’s be honest – I wasn’t getting paid that much to do it. Other projects needed my time, too.
Still, there were a few I had to pass on, and I’m including them here for no other reason than that they deserve to be seen and I’d like to watch them again. Consider the following items 16-20, or 15 God-Awful Video Game Commercials (Honorable Mentions).
Continue reading More terrible video game commercials →
It took me a while to get hold of this game, thanks to a hiccup in some unknown, probably wasteland-bound Best Buy warehouse with a single phone line to connect it to the Internet. It took me longer to get through it, as things like Comic Con, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, Kane & Lynch 2, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Case Zero again, PAX, and StarCraft II – you know, work – popped up. Not to mention real non-game-related life.
However, I finally hammered the last few levels of “Splinter Cell: Conviction” a day or so ago. Immediately following that, I pulled up the “Splinter Cell: Conviction” Wikipedia page to figure out what the hell was going on in the story.
Partially this was my fault. I’ve been on a protracted play arc that’s lasted about a month when “Conviction” is, at best, probably 10 hours long (and that really feels like a high estimate). As I mentioned before, spending a lot of time playing games as a freelance writer means a lot less time for games for pleasure.
Upon completing this new “Splinter Cell,” the fifth in the series and sixth if you count that tiny round turd Ubisoft dropped for the PSP a while back, I was struck by how underwhelming it was. I mean, I just stopped the end of America, after all, in quite an awesome feat of marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat and general badassery. Shouldn’t I feel more…I dunno, just more, about it?
Continue reading ‘Conviction’ is yet another so-so ‘Splinter Cell’ →
Let me qualify the following statements by saying that there are things I really liked about Inception, and if it had been made by virtually any other person, I would be more forgiving.
But this is something written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and therefore its flaws are all the more glaring. As a story, Inception is all setup and no payoff, all concept and no heart – all science, no humanity.
By now I’m sure you’ve heard all you need to about the film. Inception is about entering dreams in order to steal information from a person’s subconscious. Leonardo DiCaprio and his squad of dream-raiders do this for a living. They’re very good, but it’s highly illegal.
The dreams have a ton of rules (much more than the similar but comparably less complicated[!] world of The Matrix). Get killed in a dream and you wake up. Dream time is faster than real time. You’ll never remember the beginning of a dream, and you need an object to carry around with you so that you can hold it and feel if it is different than the object is in reality, and thusly know if you’re in the dream world or the real world. You can’t change too much in a dream or the dreamer’s subconscious will rise up and attack you. Pain in a dream is as real as anywhere else.
Imagine all this mess as the first half an hour of a film.
Continue reading Missing ingredient in ‘Inception’: humanity →
I don’t even know how to start this.
It’s rare that some major aspect of a film doesn’t leap out as I go to compose a review, begging to be dismantled or jeered or championed. I had no such luck here. Two days have gone by while I sat here, trying to come up with an introduction that does this film justice. I never did find one, so I’ll be as simple as possible.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is spectacular.
“Spectacular” in every sense of the word. Spectacular in that it is a loud, explosive, awe-inspiring epic (of epic epicness; not to sell out or anything, but it’s so totally true) that clips along beautifully, taking just enough time between each hilarious moment and developing characters so that we literally can’t wait for the next massive, graphic set piece. Spectacular in that it is one of the best movie-going experiences I’ve ever had, bar none. I mean that in the sense of best of all time. I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun watching a movie. It has been years.
Continue reading ‘Scott Pilgrim’ is supremely, stunningly fun →
