The Gaming Outpost

As Blackadder and Baldrick travel to the future, our Examiner temporal anomalies series follows them with Blackadder Back & Forth part 5:  space, only to discover that they have nowhen to go.  There being no past, there can be no future, and our story crashes.  Don’t worry; apparently neither Blackadder nor his writers were aware of this, and so they continue their journeys in our next article.

My day didn’t exactly crash, but a substantial chunk was given to a family adventure, viewing a rising full moon in a heavily overcast night sky over a dark ebbed ocean, and as we returned westward from the shore snow found us at our dinner stop.  It was not a major delay, but I do seem to be running late.  Too, my youngest has come home with the request that I ensure he gets to work in the morning, so I can’t stay up too late.

I have started work on Watchmen.  There’s not that much to it in temporal terms, but what there is can be entirely confusing.  Just the one conversation between Jon and Laurie about her affair with Daniel which he does not yet know about but already knows he will learn about later in the conversation is enough to confuse any temporal analyst.  It will be a short series, but a rough one to write, I think.  After that, my sons have tracked down our copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III:  Turtles in Time, so I’ll probably turn my attention to that bit of humor next.

On the home front, if Gaming Outpost is home, we have more from Eric Ashley.  In Practise Bits:  Knife he explores the other side of whether and when women might be soldiers.  (This should not be confused with his earlier piece of the same title.)  Practise Bits:  Hunt puts a high-tech warrior on the track of giant spiders.  Practise Bits:  Ride reads like an interlude connecting parts of a longer story; but then, he gives this to us as writing practice, and it helps to practice all the parts.

–M. J. Young

Today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article concludes the examination of Source Code with Source Code part 11:  future, a consideration of what happens to Colter Stevens now that he has to become Sean Fentriss in this final universe.  I anticipate posting a filler article on Thursday addressing why I do movies but not television shows, or incidentally books, comic books, graphic novels, or video games.  Then on Monday we’ll begin running a short series on Warlock, and I’ve already begun work on Blackadder Back and Forth hopefully to follow that.

Meanwhile, I keep forgetting to post links to the available videos from the recent Collision concert at Silver Lake Community Church.  At first it was because they were delayed–I have no video equipment, and someone else had done the recording.  Then when finally they were posted I myself was too busy to view them.  I managed to do so last week sometime, but forgot to mention them here.  So for anyone who is curious what I look like and sound like when I’m singing, I recommend the video Fall Festival 01, if I recall aright three songs from our performance there which are reasonably well done overall.  I hesitate to recommend the other two videos, creatively entitled Fall Festival 02 and Fall Festival 03, because I made a could of mistakes in the singing–you probably wouldn’t notice it in the first clip, but I displaced a line and had to fake a fix during the song; the second is, if I recall correctly, a much more obvious flub.  altogether that’s just over half an hour from the concert.  I’m waiting for the rest of the video, but it might come to me privately on DVD rather than posted publicly, and I don’t think I have any editing software so I’m not likely to be able to post the massive amount of material I anticipate receiving.  I also haven’t figured out how to download those, but I did manage to dub the audio off to my recorder so I can listen to them.  Anyway, I expect the response will be “don’t quit your day job”, but since I’m not making appreciably more money on my day job than I am singing for churches, it’s a moot issue.

While I’m posting links, let me include the new material from Eric Ashley, who has given us three more over the weekend.  Practise Bits:  Leo gives us a Florentine setting with a man summoned to see the king.  A man who takes a job overseeing the policing of the royal highways is the core character of Practise Bits:  Roadway.  Finally, Practise Bits:  Dance begins at a dance, but moves to a different kind of dance in which a villain again confronts his Nemesis in an ongoing duel.

I have been asked to help with a float for a Christmas parade Sunday, primarily in providing sound system equipment and a bit of musical performance, so I’m hoping to get a few minutes to do some equipment repair just to cover the bases before it gets too late.  That means getting through things quickly here.  And I am already tired.

–M. J. Young

The Collision concert at the Silver Lake Community Church Fall Festival is over, and I think went well, although I am awaiting media on that–I realized during one of the first songs that I had neglected to set up my recorder, but that it was being videoed by someone else in the band, so I should be able to access that eventually.  We were also interviewed by Lift-FM, and played in the background while their roving reporter interviewed others at the fair.

Among other things, this means that the pressure for rehearsal is significantly relieved:  we have no scheduled events ahead.  Of course, there is still reason to practice if we intend to perform again–we managed twelve of the fifteen songs I had listed for our repertoire, and the remaining three will take some effort to bring to performance level, not to mention that the dozen we have done are still a bit weak, some more and some less.  However, I am pondering how often we need to rehearse at this point, and it might free a bit of my time.

I certainly could use some of that time.  I just today posted Source Code part 3:  divergence to the Examiner’s temporal anomalies series, and the Source Code series will be short, so there’s pressure to prepare the next film.  However, I probably shouldn’t take the time right now to discuss future articles there; they’ll come.

Speaking of articles brings us again to the works of Eric Ashley, who has posted twice since my last visit.  His Practise Bits:  Pammy is another bit of science fiction space adventure.  As to Practise Bits:  Adventure, it’s barely the beginning of one, but perhaps it is another anticipated serial of shorts.

Even with the changes, it’s still a challenge to get through everything on Monday and finish the forums, so I’d better be moving that direction.

–M. J. Young