The Fractal Hall Journal

A quick note on something I read about after posting yesterday’s entry, via a comment at io9 and confirmed by (I know, I know) Wikipedia. Michael Biehn was so pissed off at how Corporal Hicks got canned off-screen in the third Alien film that he asked for (and got) the same amount of money he was paid for Aliens to allow his likeness to be used in one scene. Ah, Alien³. Occasionally good, mostly disappointing film. Brilliant Sega Master System game. How frustrating is it that the studio refused to put the clips of David Fincher moaning about studio interference on set onto the Quadrilogy DVD? Unsurprising, maybe, but frustrating.

And now for something completely different.

I don’t know how other scribblers out there feel about it, but there’s a certain difference between blogging and, er, fictioning. I wouldn’t say working on one necessarily steals attention or focus from the other, not for me, anyway. But the former is a little easier than the other in certain ways.

When holding forth on a particular subject at the Journal, I find usually what happens is something will lodge in the brainpan, spin around for a bit, and then make itself known as a topic worth (for, as always, a given value of “worth”) expounding on. Usually Marvel or DC doing something annoying. Sometimes, toys. On one occasion, a packet of crisps.

After that, it’s just a matter of turning the tap on until the word count gets to something respectable. I don’t find I stop and start, and (it may be apparent) I don’t tend to analyse the process much. Just pure, untainted brain splurge. That said, somedays the tap dries up and there’s no restarting it, hence the occasional cat photo.

Fictioning, on the other hand, is all stop and start. Five hundred bloggy words take maybe a quarter of the time. I’m not hugely clear on why that is, but I suspect it’s the difference between the processing power taken up by commenting on a pre-imagined world (i.e. our own Earth Prime) utilising only my own perspective, and the processing power taken up by making shit up and sending in a handful of characters with separate perspectives to comment on it. I don’t think even first-person helps with that, because in that case you’re making shit up, sending in the characters, then recording the perspective of one character reacting to the actions of other characters based on their own perspectives of the shit being made up.

Video games, I believe, were created specifically as a fiction-prosthetic that allow us to get the fun experience end of things without taking up our important time with the boring nuts and bolts of having to create something first. This is why Playstation and Xbox are slowly killing the comics “industry” ’s ability to get anything out on time.

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Forgot to link to the PvP strip I referred to the other day. Here it is. I’m pretty sure Scott Kurtz isn’t desperate for the link boost.

Nothing outward strikes my fancy today, so let’s turn our bloggy gaze inwards.

As of writing, there are 244 posts published on the Journal, tantalising close to the quarter-millennium. Is millennium the correct usage? Quarter-century would be correct, but I suppose that’s a cricket thing, and batsmen don’t rack up a thousand runs in one match all that often. What’s interesting (for a given value of interesting) is that the sequential numbers automatically assigned to each post currently stand at 306, meaning at various points during the Journal’s existence I’ve started over 60 posts only to delete them unpublished.

I say it’s interesting because I didn’t think I did that very often- certainly not one in every six posts, which is almost one a week. Some are probably saving errors, but even so I thought there were very few posts that I type up before deciding against using them. I guess it happens more often than I realise.

Next stats are the category sections. “Comics” are unsurprisingly ahead of anything else, with 103 entries to date. “SF” is next, and again not a revelation, nor is “Film” at 77 posts. “TV” is a bit of a surprise in the fourth slot because I don’t watch that much on the Idiot Box (unless you count DVD sets), but I suppose that’s the X-Files effect. “Horror” has 35 posts, and I would have thought I’d have written more about that, followed by “Fractal Business”, which is a bit of a nothing category, really, a place to dump things that don’t go elsewhere, much like “Media” (with 20 posts) and “Misc.” (with 3).

The lower tier is filled with things I’m damn surprised I haven’t written more on. I thought I’d have had more to say about “Books”, “Music” and “Animation”, while a low number of posts on “Games” and “Manga” sounds about right. “Politics” is too dodgy a subject for me to want to get into on the Journal, because I can’t really see it being any fun.

The biggest surprise is “Crime” and “Fantasy” having the same number of posts, which doesn’t reflect my interests at all. Apart from a handful of authors, I’m really not that into the dragon stabbin’ side of things, while I read a lot of crime fiction. I guess grim, everyday criminal misery just isn’t that interesting to write about, in comparison to, I don’t know. Toys. Films about toys. That kind of thing. That said the awful grimness, horror and abuse in yoru average police procedural gets a damned good run for its money from Battlestar.
Is there a useful point to be made here? Probably not. Anyway, let’s nudge the “Music” category up by one.

I haven’t bought a music CD in almost two years. That seems absolutely crazy to me. I was in HMV the other day, and I actually couldn’t find a single thing I wanted to buy. It seems like there’s been a few singles here and there that I’ve kind fo liked, but nothing that’s captured my attention at all. Considering it used to be a matter of there being too much to choose from, this situation is mind-boggling. I hate to be an old fart about it, but everything just seems so mediocre. Indie music, British indie in particular, is just fucking wet.

I swear, if I hear one more pissing track that takes off Morrisey or Joy Division, or sticks a fucking disco spin on either of them, I am going to lose it. It’s funny, because I was watching the music channels again recently, and I saw a chunk of an Oasis video marathon. And you know, the more I think about it, the more obvious it is that I was a way bigger fan of them than Blur, and that a lot of the stuff from their first two albums was awesome. Except for Shakermaker, which is an awful track.

That is all.

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