When you write fiction you form models of your characters in your head. Even if these characters are based on real people, you create an abstraction, a model that describes how you understand that person to function. You then run simulations on it, ask it questions: how would Fred react if asked about his parents? If Jane slapped him, how would he react?

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I will get your handkerchief for you. Wait, it’s right here.

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There is this attitude in film and television, completely antithetical to the general position of the blogosphere, that you do not talk about your ideas. A great deal of this is the fear of others stealing them. It’s easy to say that the important thing – and the hard part – is execution, but unfortunately in film and other industries with more money than ideas this is not the case. Someone can take your idea, pay people to execute it, and even if the end result is shoddy, prevent you from executing YOUR vision of it. “Oh, the film about the leper fashion show?” the financier will say as he thumbs his blackberry, “we already did that. It bombed.”

This partially explains how projects that are important to me, and take some substantial portion of my time, find no representation on this blog.

I will attempt to remedy this shortly.

Distractro enters. He is covered in flashing lights. There is a video game console embedded in his back.
DISTRACTRO: What’s up, man? Have you checked out Gizmodo lately?
D: Nah man. Just trying to write here.
DISTRACTRO: Ew, with that font? Gnarly. You know there are some really great monospaced fonts these days, what was that post with like ten of them? Bet if you googled it…
D: Oh yeah, there was— no! Later, I’ll worry about that later. Okay.
(WRITES)
DISTRACTRO: Pretty dark in here. I mean, that’s cool, if you’re cool with that.
D: I can open some blinds. Here-
D opens blinds in the living room, then the kitchen.
Distractro quickly takes D’s place at the computer and begins to tap at the keyboard.
D: No! What are you writing!
DISTRACTRO: Nothing…
META-DISTRACTRO enters. Small FIREWORKS are constantly firing from his body, and his head is spinning around rapidly.
META-DISTRACTRO: YOOOOOOOO!!!!
D: Fuck it. YOOOOOOO!!!
D begins to dance, as “Boom Boom Pow” or some equally nightmarish single begins to bang from the speaks.

END.

I just finished importing most of the archives of d/blog. It was my blog before this one. My personal publishing history goes like this:

• April 2001, start Bloggus Caesari
• July 2001, start d/blog, begin d/blog glory months
• Sept 2001, combination of 9/11 and full-time employment ends d/blog glory months, alienates readership, wrecks shit (not really)
• July 2004, move from Movable Type to Textpattern
• for a while, nothing happens. (At least that I have archives of… working on that)
• Feb 2007, start Angry Robot, as new personal blog; sankey.ca now just a portfolio site, and archives taken offline for reasons now not entirely clear (Human error? Shyness? Epistemological quandary?)
• July 2007: caught up in the enthusiasm of others, Angry Robot becomes video games blog
• Sept 2008: Angry Robot returns to its roots, grand commitment to excellence &c.
• Present: in powerful act of healing, d/blog archives added to Angry Robot.
• Future: robot stomps on enemies, kicks them into sun; A.I. remake symbolically returns shitty Spielberg film to Kubrick; 3D camera perfected, sold at massive profits; plonkism established as viable philosophical school; moment of imminent nostalgia reached; Maggo’s Secret Blog: The Restaurant opens to great acclaim; gristle-sack bird finally found, tranqued, tagged, tamed. Dreams become reality.

Until then, I’m certainly happy to have the archives back. It’s really more for personal symbolic reasons than an expectation that people will find them useful. I know there are tons of dead links and so forth, and the lack of an archive page makes navigation challenging. But this is where it starts, or this – in the backwards logic of weblogs, on page 126.

Jesus Christ, I’ve written a book.

I’m torn between two commitments this month: National Novel Writing Month and Fallout 3. I thought it would be a bigger problem than it is. I love getting lost in immersive worlds, so I imagined Fallout would swallow me whole, sabotaging my attempt to force myself to write more through gimmicky contests. However, I’ve realized that whatever electro-chemical cocktail that makes me like exporing worlds is the same formula that makes me like writing. When I’m writing, I’m creating a world, with only myself to blame if it gets boring.

The challenges of writing come from the vagueness of it all. You lay out a huge goal, yet there are many smaller steps that are unclear. Also, there is no one to tell you what to do next, or to even to do anything at all. It makes you wish you just had to chop wood all day. That’s the great thing about NaNoWriMo: it makes writing more like chopping wood. You need to hit 1667 words per day, and if you don’t, you didn’t do your job. No matter if the words suck, just keep blasting away.

So if you even see me up in this robot, I’m totally procrastinating and you shouldn’t encourage me. Bad readers! Look away!

Say hello to Doombot, our new sister site. I can honestly say that if you like our cantankerous robot musings, you’ll like theirs as well.

This just can’t be ignored. Of course, Penny Arcade is all over it.

Wow, get a load of this AV Club review: “blunt, dumb, ridiculous, and almost never funny.” We totally didn’t play the same game. Sure, it could be a whole lot better; its shoddy camera nearly wrecked the thing for me. And I’ll admit that the first few levels are probably the weakest. That Lard Lad level is a little too early in the game, and a little too close to the intersection of hard and tedious. But later levels more than make up for it. The Overlord-style controls for Marge (who uses a megaphone to recruit angry mob members) were a great change-up, and who can argue with the boss fights towards the end: Matt Groening, Shakespeare, and God?

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviews the writer of Portal (who also worked on Psychonauts):

In defense of games, I want to point out that the writing in plays, including everything by August Strindberg and The Lion King, is 100% pure crap. So we’re doing better than they are even though they have the benefit of mostly not being about space marines.