I Was Always Being Boring

Recently an old and dear friend told me, or wrote me, specifically, and mentioned that she was experiencing boredom and thus, must probably be a boring person, since it is her belief that only boring people get bored.

At first I was inclined to agree with her until I realized that I myself have an extremely low threshold of boredom and rarely experience the state of boredom, usually being content to read something, write something, watch something, play something, talk about something or think about something. In short, I am easily amused. However, I am–as reading this blog quickly reveals–one of the most mindnumbingly boring people on the planet. I don’t have wild sexual escapades, don’t tear other people to little bits and pieces based on their physical looks, tend not to criticize too heavily on much of anything and have an annoying habit of talking about stuff I like in really glowing, positive terms.

It would be safe to say that compared to the people I know, and I’m sure they’d agree if you were to ask them, I am the least interesting and most intensely dull person they know, since I lack drama, conflict, angst or malaise about life and it is precisely those things that make people incredibly fun and exciting to be around, if somewhat emotionally exhausting.

So after giving it some thought, I’ve decided that perhaps the reverse is true, and it might in fact be people that get bored that are exciting since they have to do so much more to pass their boredom threshold and find anything even remotely interesting. For example, I might think that doing the Bull Run in Pamplona, Spain might be so exciting as to cause cardiac arrest, but to those extreme guys that drink Sprite, this is so ho-hum, so run of the mill, that only tying yourself to the space shuttle with a piece of kite string and trying to surf off the exhaust of its thrusters with a polystyrene surfboard would kindle even a mildly raised eyebrow of interest.

Boredom, then, is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Being an incredibly boring person myself, I tend find most other people incredibly interesting, so in my case, having that low threshold of boredom makes the world an exciting place for me, it just makes me terribly unexciting for anyone else.

How sad. Oh well, back to more video games…

Bad News From America

Got an e-mail from my agent saying that Ace has decided to pass on The Pale Summer. The word from my agent is “they found the exotic setting problematic for their market.” I take that to mean the fact that it starts in Singapore, goes to Rome, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and other ports of call made it too unpatriotic or something for American readers. Oh well…

On the other hand, I spent part of the day standing on a desk putting up posters of videogames and playing more Star Wars: Empire At War, and somewhere in there, a couple of articles got written too.

In the meantime, the book will now head for its second destination, Tor. They’re the biggest publishers in Fantasy and SF, but unfortunately, the last time my agent sent a book to them it took them over two years to say “No.” He’s telling me this time around that’s not gonna’ happen, and I’ll take his word on it.

Guess for now I’ll just start putting more thought into that next book. Time to get serious about my first children’s novel, Lost In Loveless.

Yet Another Quiet Sunday

In which the cats sleep on the bed, even though they know they shouldn’t, but they look so damn cute together sleeping there that it’s hard to kick them out, movies were returned, dinner was had a German restaurant, and it was decided that while Digital Devil Saga 2 is shaping up to be more story-oriented than its predecessor, this is because the game is badly paced and uses cheap tactics like horrendously diffcult bosses that require hours and hours of grinding for levels in order to artificially increase the lifespan of the game.

Oh well, I guess Atlus put most of its effort into the first game and kind of rushed the second one. It’s pretty short on actual game content, the majority of the gameplay being comprised of, “Wow, that boss is tough! But wait, one particular magic spell will make it possible to win… oh, it’ll take 8 hours of power-levelling to get the spell. Sigh… here we go…”

Good story, though. Too bad the actual mechanics of the game are so out of whack.

Symphony At The Bug-Eyes

Take a look at this:

It’s called the Esplanade, the official Singapore answer to the Sydney Opera House in that it’s supposed to be the national center for the performance of the arts. Every time I look at it, I think that these are the compound eyes of some huge mecha-dragonfly sleeping just below the surface of the water, and so I’ve always thought of the place as simply the Bug-Eyes. One nice thing about the place that morons will strongly resent is that the concert halls are actually shielded to cellular phone signals so even if you were one of those jerks that insists on talking on the phone during a performance, no one can call you and you can’t call out. Call it a denial of civil liberties, I simply call it finally clamping down on stupidity.

Tonight was concert night. We checked out a French pianist who, it seemed, came out for a single performance of Ravel, and then promptly left after one encore performance. In my estimation, that’s not too bad; get paid thousands of dollars for 30 minutes work. Not too shabby at all.

Overall, while I enjoyed the performance, I actually preferred the music without the pianist, which was Wagner and Schumann. Maybe it’s just an inherent prejudice, but I kind of like German symphonics more than French. Even when it’s trying its damndest to be upbeat and happy, as in Wagner’s Sigfried’s Idyll, there’s still a dark, militant undercurrent that makes you feel happy but still want to subjugate something. Only the Germans, man.

I also developed a new sympathy of the brass section. It was probably just the night’s selection, but I noticed the guys who played the trumpet in one piece blew his horn exactly once. But then you can say the same for the harp, trombone or any of the other instruments that aren’t violins or cellos. There’s always been a heavy prejudice towards the strings, but then they sound so damn evocative it’s kind of hard not to abuse them.

Company Dinners

I have decided that this really isn’t my thing.

The crew over at GameAxis invited the freelancers/part-timers to attend a dinner for the staff. I showed up but really didn’t show much interest in socializing with anyone I didn’t already know, and the high-light of the evening was when it turned out someone had brought Mario Kart DS and four of us wirelessly networked our Nintendo DS units together and pretty much ignored everyone else while we endlessly raced.

Yup. I’m a big geek.

I Am Not An Artist

But then I suspect most artists are rather lousy artists as well when it comes to the less savoury element of being successful; dealing with opening night at the gallery.

Yesterday and acquaintance of the Wife and I had her gallery opening. We met her and her husband when they were newly arrived from Paris and they decided to adopt the first kitten we’d ever rescued, which I had dubbed Pathos and they ended up calling Momo. She’s more of an Artist-artist in that there’s a more conceptual bent to her work, rather than pure technical.

But yeah, it was a weird thing to go that gallery opening where everyone was a young, urban professional, dressed to the nines and sagely commenting on the social life in Singapore, the art work before them, and the daily struggle of being successful and wealthy. I found I had little stomach for it and we ended up leaving pretty early if only because I hadn’t had anything to eat all day and needed some food in me. Of course, the same could be said for the artist herself and her husband; neither of them particularly enjoys that sort of thing either, but then this, apparently is the price of success and that is meeting a lot of people you don’t particularly care for and pretending to, at least for a night.

On the other hand Gundam MS 08 squad is shaping to be an excellent series, which was loaned to me by the editor over at GameAxis. Unfortunately the final disc in the series is missing, so I guess I’ll never find out how it ends, which kind of puts a damper on things, but oh well…

Apparently Someone Likes It

Out of curiosity I went scrounging around on the ‘net to see whether there had been any comment at all on that television show I wrote a few months back. It turns out that there’s an archived review from Valentine’s Day here.

I’m of two minds on the whole thing because the review itself doesn’t seem particularly informed, but then I have to wonder at the quality of the program itself. I have no idea how it turned out since I never saw the final result and more or less walked away once the final episodes were handed in. On the other hand, I’m glad that at least people seem to like it, but if I were to live on Arcturus IV, on the other, other hand, they say that this program’s quality is the result of the improvisation sessions, thus resulting in more natural, spontaneous sounding dialogue. To prove their point, they give a piece of dialogue, something about the disgruntled Asian guy who grew up in a white country being told, “You’re no longer a skinny little Chinese guy surrounded by six foot tall pale gorillas” and I had to break into a bitter grin at that, since, of course, no such line ever arose out of the improvs like that, and that entire character was more or less created and scripted by me because I wanted some comic relief and so took over the character entirely during the writing process.

Oh well… It’s funny what you don’t see in the commentaries and extras sections of these “making of” things…

My Job Is A Scam

Granted, it’s part time work, but still… You know there’s something seriously wrong when you spend the most part of your work-day plugged into Star Wars: Empire At War and this… is your job.

Now I guess I’ll go write about it more and then finally plug myself into the Fantastic Four movie and find out how bad it really is.

Australia Just Says “No”

To videogames about graffiti.

I’m still amazed that this even happened. Usually it’s countries like Oz, America and Canada that lead the pack with an easy-going, tolerant, fairly liberal attitude, while Singapore acts like a prudish stick in the mud.

This time around, Singapore is allowing a game, called Mark Ecko’s Getting Up to pass its censorship standards and enter stores, while Oz has given the game an adult rating, effectively–if not technically–banning it from the country, since while adult rated games are legal, stores as a matter of policy don’t sell them. I’m still trying to figure out what made a country as progressive as Oz suddenly decide that this game was too corrupting an influence. Meanwhile, Singapore, which has been trying to promote creativity anyway it can–including holding graffiti contests and exhibits–can’t shy away from legitimizing the game, but ironically, the game itself is about toppling government, which falls under the very loose censorship laws here and could potentially make it proscribed material, in the same way that Naked Lunch was illegal here for many years.

Man, things are getting all topsy turvy. Singapore more liberal than Australia, I never in a million years would have imagined it…

It’s Away

Too much time spent today writing the BioWare submission and then hurriedly checking it over before mailing it off. I’m pretty sure I missed quite a few typos and errors but oh well, at least the thing got sent off on time. Barely.

On the other hand, I also watched Dragons: Fantasy Made Real which was, more or less, Walking With Dragons, and was uniformly excellent when they were doing their Walking With natural history part, and uniformly sucky when they did their C.S.I. Dragon bit with a fictional scientist performing an autopsy on a preserved Dragon carcass.

I’ve read comments from some people that the documentary style of this program (which plays it straight. Sort of.) could fool children and adults into thinking the program is legit and dragons really are real. Having read those comments, I can only say that either they have an extremely dim view of the intellect of television audiences today, or else I’ve seriously overestimated how smart people are capable of being these days…