#janwum ii

[duhragonball]

Janwum Update: 11,545

I’m further behind than I wanted to be, but I’ve still got 12 days left to cover 18,455 words, so I’ve been in tighter spots, I think.   I still need to get my butt in gear, though.    As a warmup, I’m going to discuss Cryptoland, which is some sort of scam based on the flimsy premise of crypto-dorks buying an island.   It got a lot of attention recently because they made their own cartoon to promote the idea, and it’s really really lousy.   You can watch it here.

A lot of people have already mocked this thing into the ground, so I won’t waste your time repeating their observations.   There’s really just two things that I can’t get out of my head.

The first is this shot of the main characters, Christopher Adams and Connie, embracing when they meet up on the island.  They’re just blinking here, but this is the freeze-frame they use at the end of the cartoon, which shows this as the photo in Christopher’s “wish you were here” postcard to his friend.   It really implies this deep, tender friendship between the characters, except one of them is a cartoon coin, so it looks ridiculous.

The “plot” of the cartoon is that Christopher bought a property on the island, and he’s finally arriving to check out his investment, so he’s basically a proxy for the audience.   “See how much fun he’s having?  This could be YOU!” But it seems like his favorite thing on the island is his pal Connie.  That’s what he put on his postcard, right?

And I can’t stop thinking about it, because what the hell does it mean?  Christopher is just a stand-in for the viewer, but Connie isn’t even pretending to represent a real thing.   The people running this scam are selling NFT’s of him, but that’s it.  You’d never meet the “real” Connie on this island resort.  I don’t think the Cryptoland people are delusional enough to expect this, and yet they sort of imply that you would have whatever Christopher gets when you invest in the island, and that seems to include a long hug with an old friend.  

It reminds me of when I was a kid, and my family went to Disneyworld for the first time, and in the 80s they ran all these ads that made it look like Mickey Mouse would just hang out with you the whole time, or whatever.  I knew it was bullshit even then, but I was really into Pinocchio at the time, and I thought it would be pretty cool if he and I could just cruise around the park, exploring tunnels or something.   That still sounds pretty awesome, actually.   But it’s a theme park.  Disney tries to market the thing like it’s Toontown from Roger Rabbit, but it can’t be.   Cinderella’s Castle just had a gift shop or something, and you couldn’t go to the top and look out at the view or anything like that.  

Anyway, this Cryptoland cartoon reminds me of that childhood realization of marketing vs. reality.    Except who is this for?  They’re trying to buy a private island, and selling plots of land on it.  Christopher had to be a millionaire just to get a piece of this thing, but he’s presented like a child. 

Because there’s really nothing on Cryptoland that you can’t get someplace else.   Christopher eats pizza for lunch, he checks out a cybercafe, plays a pinball machine, and he gets an extra hour in the ballpit.  Everything is named after a bullshit cryptocurrency reference, which he finds brilliant and hilarious, but I feel like that would get old after about a week.    He could have just bought a house in Branson, Missouri.   But no, he had to come here, because that’s where his best friend Connie lives.  And that’s fine for him, because he lives in a world where he can hug a shitty cartoon mascot, but the people watching this video can’t.  

It hit me that what they’re really trying to sell with this crap is the community spirit, which isn’t exactly something you can put in a bottle.   This is like Dashcon or those other conventions organized by people who don’t know what they’re doing.  You’re supposed to go and support it because you can hang out with like-minded people and talk about Superwholock or whatever.   The hug is a metaphor for the experience you’re supposed to have as you swap Bitcoin memes with your fellow jackasses in real life.  They’re selling a fantasy, where you get to be rich and all your friends are rich too and you live in a paradise where you can have whatever you want.   Christopher meets a girl in the cartoon, and they’re probably selling that fantasy too, which is amusing because they can’t deliver it.   Even if they bought an island and set up a pinball machine, you’re not guaranteed to get laid, sorry.   But they want you to think you could, so they use it to hide the fact that this is just a hotel.  

The other thing that I can’t stop thinking about is that the cartoon is set in the future, a future where the Cryptoland resort is already bought, paid for, and developed.   The idea here is that they wanted to show off all their “cool” designs and plans for the resort, but they haven’t bought the island yet, so they made a CGI model and did a shitty cartoon with that as the set.    But it’s a real scummy move, because none of it exists, and yet the cartoon presents it as a finished product that you can go to right now.   So the whole thing is Connie and Christopher doing a victory lap on a racetrack that hasn’t been built.   At one point, Connie congratulates himself for how well his plan has come together, except it hasn’t happened yet.  It’s this weird mix of past, present, and future, manipulated to trick people into sinking money into a pipe dream.    It sickens me.

I bring this up because I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for Time Patrol stories, and I had once considered making up an original villain, but I couldn’t think of a good angle for a time-themed bad guy.   Towa wants to harvest energy from historical figures, Demigra wants to rule time itself, and Cell just wants to go back in time to fufill a program that was obsolete before he was born.   I’m not saying I would repurpose Connie into a time-villain, although that’s not the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.   No, I just mean there’s something intriguing to me about depicting a possible future to deceive people in the past.  And people would fall for it, not because they want a fancy resort, or a beachside mansion.   In the end, all they really want is that hug with a friend who may not exist...

[duhragonball]

Janwum II Final: 30,004

Done.  

That sucked.

Either I need to stop doing writing months in January, or I need to plan it out better.   This whole month felt like pulling teeth.   I suppose it was worth it, since I feel like I got some good material out of the effort, but it all seemed so much easier in November.  I guess I just assumed that ease would carry over into January, but it didn’t.  I think I finally got into the groove towards the end, but I sort of had to, since I had an 8k deficit with only four days to go.

But it’s over.  Starting tomorrow, I do Other Stuff That Isn’t Writing this Damn Wienerfic.   Gonna read some Fantastic Four comics.   Go to the grocery.  Might fuck around and take the garbage out.   Who knows?   The world is my oyster.  

But I definitely need to put some time into planning for April, when I attempt to do this all over again.  

[duhragonball]

Janwum II Update: 21,923

I can tell that I’m going to have to drag myself across the finish line this time.   I should have finished by now, but instead I’ve got 8077 words to go and four days left to pull it off.   And I can do that, but I sure don’t feel up to it.  I’m not too worried, because I’ve been in this sort of bind before, but I always tell myself that I can learn to avoid this in the future, and yet here we are.  

Right now, I’m trying to work on the Beerus mission from Xenoverse’s story mode.   It’s weird, because I remember being really excited about Movie 14 when it came out in 2013.   Tonight, I was reading my liveblog of the thing from 2019, in which I pointed out how a lot of that hype had cooled off.  At the time, it was a big deal, and now it’s just another installment in a big franchise.   Now it’s 2022, and I have to look up scenes from Movie 14 because it’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten how some of it went.  It’s still a gorgeous film, but it’s old news.  

And I feel a little bummed out about that, because I’ve been looking forward to writing my little take on it for several years now.  But now that I’m finally here, it just feels kind of ‘blah’.   But I’m reminded of the advice I picked up somewhere, about how stories always look better in your imagination than they do on paper, because nothing in your imagination is fully formed.  The vagueness of the idea is mutable and indistinct, which lets it seem way cooler than it is.   Writing it down makes it solid, makes it real.   That seems disappointing to the creator, but it’s actually a good thing, because it gives the work shape and focus and meaning, and it finally exists in a form that others can consume and enjoy.  

That said, I should find the time to rewatch Battle of Gods this weekend, just to try to get myself back in the mood.   If nothing else, the colors in that movie are really, really purty.

[duhragonball]

Janwum II Update: 16,001

Finally cleared the halfway mark, and today I’m aiming for 19k, so as long as I don’t fall behind, I should be safe from here.

Currently working on the Kid Buu mission, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense in the game.  In XV1, Super Buu just transforms into Kid Buu while Gohan fights him, which is a clever change to the timeline, except the game just skips ahead to the final battle with Kid Buu on the Sacred Kai Planet.  But how did Vegeta and Mr. Satan get there?

I fixed this by just breaking up the missions.  In the first one, Luffa just has to prevent Super Buu from transforming early, then there’s a subsequent mission where Kid Buu beat up Fat Buu too quickly, and they need another warm body to hold off the Kid until Goku and Geets can rustle up a Spirit Bomb.   It’s basic, but I can’t think of a better angle for this, and I sort of just want to be done with this part of the story. 

That’s not to say anything bad about the Buu Saga, or Kid Buu in particular.   I’ve been listening to “Buu is Fighting”, which is basically the Kid Buu theme for the Faulconer score, and it’s really gotten me in the mood.  And I know people like to write the Kid off as a bad character because he almost never speaks, but I take that as a challenge.  Everyone in this franchise says they love to fight, but that’s literally the only thing Kid Buu does, and that makes a nice reversal to play off of.   

But I’ve begun to get bored with the Time Patrol mission format.   Basically, someone changes history, and someone has to go to the affected moment and intervene to make sure the right side wins in the end.   There’s a lot more you can do with time travel, but the Xenoverse story mode doesn’t indulge in it most of the time.   I think it’s safe to say the most memorable parts of Back to the Future II were the scenes in 2015 and the “dark” version of 1985.  XV1 never indulges in any of that; it just has you do the part in 1955 where you stop young Biff from getting the sports almanac.   This may be why the game switched out Towa for Demigra about halfway in.  

Well, enough griping.   I’m not gonna blog my way through this.  See you next time.

[duhragonball]

Janwum Update: 06,075

I’m finally picking up some steam, so I think this is going to work out.  

A funny thing happened to me tonight that I wanted to record it for future reference.    I use Focus Writer, mainly because it has a wordcounter feature.  There’s a lot of other things in it for removing distractions, but I turned those off a long time ago, to the point where it’s just a Notepad clone that lets me count words and change the colors and font.   

But today, I noticed a lag with my keyboard, and it only seemed to happen while I was in Focus Writer, so I looked around in the settings to see if there was something that might be causing it.    The only thing I found was an option to “smooth” the fonts.   I always assumed this was cosmetic, so I turned it off, thinking it was using up RAM or something, and making the program sluggish?   

Eventually, I just switched the USB port on the keyboard, and that seemed to fix the problem, but one thing I noticed was that the file I was editing was missing some paragraphs.   I’d get down to a certain point and there was supposed to be a line of dialogue, but it was missing.   I would have written it in late November, so I remembered it being there.   At first I thought I must have cut it by accident, but I kept going down and finding more missing dialogue.

So I knew something had gone wrong, and since the “smooth font” thing was the only change I’d made all day, I went back and reset it, and the missing lines came back.   I guess it has something to do with the quotation marks?   But why would Focuswriter just hide the entire paragraph like that?  

Also, when I reset the thing, I found different lines of dialogue missing, so I’m not sure what to make of this.   I opened it up in Notepad just to make sure everything was still there, and it was.   Focuswriter isn’t deleting anything, just hiding it for some reason.    Hopefully, I won’t run into this again, as long as I pick a setting for “smooth fonts” and stick with it.    But I’d sure like to know what the hell happened.  

[duhragonball]

Janwum Update: 6087

My goal for 2021 is to write 150,000 more words onto my damn wienerfic.   I think I ended up somewhere around that number last year, but it was hard to tell since my main objective involved wrangling a bunch of words that I had already written pre-2020.   The point is, I’m pretty sure I can pull it off this year because it’s not too far off from past performance.  My breakdown for ‘21 goes like this:

January: 30,000 words

April: Camp Nano I: 30,000 words

July: Camp Nano II: 30,000 words

November: Nanwum V-The Mega Powers Explode:  60,000 words. 

I figured January would be a great time to start.    I get New Years Day off, I had all of December to rest up, and what else am I going to do while it’s cold as balls?   Well, I got tied up with something at work, that’s what.   I got that dealt with, but it cut into the first 11 days or so of my January, and then I bummed around a few more days before I finally got cracking on that 30,000 word goal.    So I’m at 6k now, but that’s like four days’ worth of progress, so it’s not as bad as it looks.  

Really, this is just like every 25k Camp Nano goal I’ve ever done.   I go in thinking it’ll be a breeze, then end up in a crunch at the last two weeks.   Maybe I should set higher word goals?    Like, just do 45k in April?  I don’t know, I’d hate to box myself in, but the irony here is that I seem to struggle more on the smaller goals than the larger ones.   

Anyway, I’m trying to do 1k-per-day through this week, and then I’ve got some time off to bust my hump and hopefully get a safe lead built up.   I look at it like this:

T 1/19: Oh shit, that’s tonight.   Reach 7000.

W 1/20: Reach 8000, AEW kind of sucks lately anyway, so maybe just skip wrestling this week.

R 1/21: Reach 9000

F 1/22: Reach 10000

S 1/23: 13000

S 1/24: 16000

M 1/25: 19000

T 1/26: 22000

W 1/27: 25000

R 1/28: 26000

F 1/29: 27000

S 1/30: 30000 finish.

And that leaves me the 31st in case anything goes wrong.

One of these days, I want to try to bust my one-day record, but I’m not sure this is a good time to try that.   Something to think about, anyway.   That’s pretty much all I’ve got, so I’ll leave you with a charming screencap of Guldo.