Alright, with my retreat from NaNoWriMo 2009, I've come to the point where I really, really, REALLY need to have a storyboarding program. Something like Scrivener (but for Windows) or something like Liquid Story Binder (only less complicated) or something like yWriter (only more simple). I guess they're called storyboarding programs.

I need something that lets me easily maintain things like character pages and plot notes and timelines so I'm not breaking continuity and canon. I don't want to be like every other science fiction/fantasy story out there, 'kay?! I used to have a personal wiki for this stuff, but that's the definition of convoluted and impossible to maintain.

I need something that I can organize all novel-related ideas in! I know there's a market for this kind of stuff now, but it seems to be so vast and each program offers similar features incorporated hugely different from each other and I'm not sure which one to pick or even if I've seen all there is to choose from.

I don't know what I want, but I need SOMETHING. Something so I don't have to collect binders or scattered Word documents or maintain a wiki or anything crazy and impossible to keep track of like that. I'll keep searching, but if you happen to know of any that you enjoy, LET ME KNOW!

Calm down! Calm down! I know the news spells shock and horror for all of you! All none of you, that is, seeing as how I haven't been writing anything here regularly enough for people to check in. But still! In the interest of all interested parties, I will attempt to explain why I'm chalking up NaNoWriMo 2009 as a fail on my part.

What is NaNoWriMo for? It depends on who you ask, but generally speaking, it's to set aside time for writing 1,667 words every day for 30 days for a total of 50,000 words by the end of the month. Write fast, write hard, don't worry about errors and plot inconsistencies. JUST WRITE. That, to me, screams of brain dump. You have a story floating around in your mind and you're not sure what you want to do with it, and NaNoWriMo gives you a fun month of pep talks and forums and word counts to speed you along the path of just puking words all over your paper until something emerges that is close to a storyline. (Amateurs think this method is a joke, but brain dumping is a vital step to building a coherent story!)

Well, to be perfectly honest, I think the story I've been writing for the past 3 NaNoWriMos has finally emerged from the brain dump phase. This year, nothing changed. I like what I'd written previously and I was just rehashing it with different words that meant the same thing. There were no vast changes and no glaring plot holes and I was getting bored writing what I already knew. I know they say that if you get discouraged or stuck, you should intentionally skip ahead in the storyline and fill in the gaps later, but that wouldn't have worked this time.

I've got enough of a story arc now that I need to worry about collecting my ideas, not pouring out more of them. I've got to start worrying about making sure my characters have personality and consistency and that they're all interacting properly and in the correct order. Not only that, but I need to actually start reading some work by authors I'd like to influence what I write.

This year, I noticed that I focus an extreme amount of writing on strictly dialogue as a way of introducing information to the reader, and that's bad. There's no glimpse into the inner workings of a character and there's no sense of discovery for the reader, and I need to work on that very badly. I kind of accept that my dialogue method is my style, but it's not a style I want. Seriously, I had pages of size 10 Times New Romans of nothing but two people talking in order to build what the world looks like. I don't think that's good.

But there's my reason for my late quitting of NaNoWriMo 2009 at only 25,000ish words. In the mix are a few other reasons like school wanting me to write 3 papers by next Wednesday. I finally decided that me resting while I'm a bit under the weather this week is more important than cramming 10,000 word days AND 3 papers this weekend. Not only school, but I don't think I liked the whole "you get a special prize for winning NaNoWriMo" thing when they announced they'd be giving out 50% off codes for Scrivener. It's a nice thought for spurring people onward, but what's stopping people from faking 50,000 words, anyway? I think giving away prizes like that are kind of shifting the focus away from "writing for writing's sake" and I didn't like that. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to have Scrivener if I had a Mac, but the fact that I'm feeling sad for not finishing so I could get the prize makes me remember a little bit of why I stopped.

But my primary reason is: ENOUGH BRAINSTORMING THIS PUPPY! It's time for some serious work.

Since everyone else seems to be weighing in with their stereotypical anti-Microsoft drivel, I'm going to weigh in with a slightly more balance interpretation of events:

1. Microsoft installs browser add-ons when you install .NET framework.
2. People get angry because you can't disable it. (Actually, you can. I wonder where this rumor started?)
3. Apparently there was a security hole in the add-on. (That Microsoft has since patched.)
4. Mozilla decides to block the add-on, even after Microsoft patched it.
5. The kicker is, Firefox doesn't let you turn it back on if you want to. (I tried.)

Isn't not being able to turn it off why people were upset? But not being able to turn it on, that's not a problem? People get upset that Microsoft holds your hand and installs add-ons, but when Mozilla holds your hand and permanently disables add-ons that are deemed "dangerous to society", that's okay? Two groups doing the exact same thing... One is getting burned, and one is getting praised. Thus are the actions of the anti-Microsoft open-source movement. Rather like a liberal, wouldn't you say? They claim to want a standard of behavior, and yet they don't care to adhere to that standard of behavior themselves. (Oh snap! A political comment? From me? Shame, shame!)

The add-on has been patched. This much has been repeatedly announced. It's even on Windows Update now. What's your excuse for not installing the fix? Mozilla's argument is that people don't bother to upgrade, so they're going to block the add-on for everyone! Thank you, Mozilla, for treating everyone like idiots because a handful of people are too lazy or ignorant to actually check into the facts and/or use Windows Update on a regular basis.

I'm tired of Mozilla. I stopped using Thunderbird and now I'm not using Firefox anymore. In fact, Firefox is so stupidly slow and bloated that I've installed Opera on my Dell Mini for school use. So much faster and so much more proprietary! (And now I've even found a StumbleUpon toolbar for Opera!) Now I won't have to live with Mozilla's standard holier-than-thou attitude that open-source projects radiate all over the planet. Disgusting.

Microsoft alternatives that work? As if!

So now that I'm actually in computer classes that aren't freshman level, I've noticed a sharp increase in the anti-Microsoft atmosphere. Even the professors take time to make irrelevant jabs and jokes at Microsoft's expense. It's really, really distracting and annoying. One of these days I'm going to start making jokes and Linux and Apple's expense. I've already had a few opportunities that have presented themselves... Ironically because they were trying to make fun of the Windows market. One particular opportunity arose when they were talking about how Dell would use generic hardware, lock it down, and slap their brand name on it to sell at a profit, to which I immediately remarked: "Oh, you mean like Apple?" Nobody said anything, but such things from my mouth will be more common if they keep up the tirade.

Anyway... At one point in the class, the conversation turned to how horrible Microsoft Office was and how awesome OpenOffice is and how the ODF standard is awesome and how DOCX is just an evil money-making scheme. I mean, there was some interesting things mixed in between the rabid open source arguments, such as how governments were concerned that old documents might not be able to be opened in 50 or 100 years and how they needed a document format standard. So I decided, hey! If you would have just given the facts instead of taken the opportunity to make fun of a capitalist business that is supposed to make money, I would have considered using OpenOffice because of ODF. But, ya'know what? I tried it anyway.

Unfortunately, once I actually started using options in OpenOffice that I take for granted in Word 2007, I started running into some pretty interesting problems. Most notably the automatic bibliography features. A professor told me OpenOffice makes writing papers easy because you don't have to remember APA formatting. Great, I said! Let's try that! I have a paper due this week that needs APA formatting, so let's give it a shot. Load up a new document... Tools... Bibliography Database... Instant crash. In Linux. How awesome is that? Okay, maybe it's because I'm not using Ubuntu Stamp of Approval OpenOffice. Let's try Bibliography Database on Windows. Load up a new document... Tools... Bibliography Database... Instant crash. In Windows. How awesome is that?

Seriously? A modern feature with the prominence to be on a first-level menu crashes the entire application without any warning? I wonder what would happen in Microsoft Word did that. Which, I might add, it doesn't. I tried it just now. Guess which word processor I'm going to stick with? I'll give you three guesses and a hint: It's not OpenOffice. So much for the arguments that open source bugs get fixed before proprietary stuff. I try to look up solutions and I get bugs reported from 2007 and 2008 for version 2.0. Hello? This is 2009 and version 3.1 and the bug is still there? Excuse me while I laugh at your precious open source ideals.

The same goes for Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I put it on my Dell Mini because I was tired of Dell's version being old. All was well... That is, until I wanted to switch from the new-fangled UNR desktop interface that turns your entire desktop background into a task bar. I want to see my background image, thank you very much. So I switch! Simple, right? Something as basic as switching between Netbook interface and normal interface shouldn't have any problems, right? Hah! How could I be so naive? Not only was there a bug that prevented the window manager from running on start up, but the bug persisted even when I switched back to the stupid "new" desktop interface. Applications would load, but the window manager wouldn't technically be there, so I couldn't move, resize or even close the windows. They'd keep opening on top of each other and run in the background.

Yeah, I'm totally convinced open source is superior to Microsoft products, guys. Gee, I wonder what would happen if editing the Start Menu properties on Windows suddenly caused windows to freeze open, even on reboot, until you managed to limp along to find a patch you had to download from deep within a bug repository. It wasn't even in the automatic update, yet. For some reason, this massive bug managed to sneak through a severe lack of Ubuntu testing and I'm still not even sure it's up for automatic update. To be honest, I spent a day browsing bug reports so I could fix something as basic as changing desktops. I would never recommend Ubuntu to anyone who wants to use their computer easily.

And then there's Apple, of course. The iPhone, pride of the cell phone market, of which I own, relying solely on iTunes, the single most laughable chunk of programming I've ever had the honor of using. Right now, it's idling at a lovely 50MB of RAM. Doing absolutely nothing. When it wants an update, it vomits dialog boxes all over my desktop until I either update or hide the warnings. I finally just hid the stupid things. I would rather be entirely clueless as to updates than have boxes popping up in the middle of my work and games. Of course, I can't even use the Apple Update thing that have going... I have to install new versions of iTunes from full-install scratch. And I mean I have to uninstall the iTunes I have, too. Why? I don't know. It makes no sense, but whenever I use the update feature, my iPhone invariably ceases to sync. It'll toss up a cryptic "can't connect" error that not even Apple's knowledge base can pinpoint. Only after I uninstall and reinstall from a full 100MB installer file will it ever actually work.

So folks, there's a reason I use Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2007: They just work.

Yep. Ugh. Crawlers...

Apparently, beemp3.com managed to find a folder I'd hidden away on my site for personal MP3 uploads, ignore my robots.txt rules, and put up links to all the music I have uploaded all across Rivenwolf.net. Can you say "UNHAPPY?" I sure can. How it found the folder in question, I'll never know. Maybe it just guessed... It seems shady enough to do something like that. Shame on my for having the folder indexed for easy access, because that allowed it to link to all the files I had uploaded. Bah!

So, in response to that, I'm not even going to bother flagging them all. What I did, though, was change all my links (so at least beemp3 is linking to dead things now), remove all my indexes (a major inconvenience, but I can't afford to leave them), and rewrite my hotlink prevention rules. Because of that, there may be some nasty side-effects with RSS feeds when I post links to stuff I have hosted. I provided a rule for Google Reader, since it seems to break things by being a referrer. I think most readers, though, treat things as a direct connection (at least the offline readers do), so there shouldn't be too much of  a problem.

If there is, though, let me know?

Well, apparently, what was intended to stay in the committee for an extended period has already been leaked to the community at large, so I have to hack together a quick explanation before the rumors start flying and things are attributed to people that simply aren't true. (Come on, I live in a small town. I know exactly how news turns into gossip!)

I don't know how many people actually read this blog, though. Especially since I haven't said anything for ages. Hopefully that'll change now that I've repaired my RSS feeds and moved to a faster server and have actually started saying things again. That said, feel free to circulate this post far and wide so people who are interested actually get an explanation. An explanation for what, you ask? Well, my resignation from the Mysterium Committee, of course, as the title so clearly insinuates!

Here follows a very much modified (for the public) version of my resignation letter:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my part in the Mysterium Committee. I first considered joining when I was asked by a friend of mine to help them, and my final reason for joining was because I thought it would be fun and that it would be a nice way to do something good for the community. Unfortunately, due to recent events, I no longer find my participation to be fun.

The committee felt tense when I first joined, but I attributed that to some key teams being in disarray with Mysterium 2009 being so close at hand. People were spread too thin and I hoped that with my joining, things would lighten up and make things more fun for everyone, but now that Mysterium 2009 is over, I sense the mood hasn’t lightened even without hard deadlines.

So the reason I joined the committee? I thought it would be fun and I thought my help would be wanted. At first, it was, but now it seems like it isn’t. All of my reasons for joining the committee are gone, for a variety of reasons, and I have no other reason to stay. In light of that, I formally resign all of my positions (Web Development, Communications and Location) on the Mysterium Committee, effective immediately.

To those of you who I’ve discussed this with off and on, I’m sorry for finally doing this to you, but I’ve thought about this for weeks, and with college starting so soon, I really can’t afford to spend all this energy on Mysterium. If things were different, I would find a commitment like this to be a relaxing diversion from the academic grind, but as things are, it would only distract me and adversely affect my grades.

If you want more information, well... You're out of luck. I'll leave it entirely in the hands of the committee as to whether or not they want to leak the details of my departure. If they do say anything, feel free to ask me what the heck happened and I'll give you my side of the story. But until then, nada! To say it's not important? Eh... I won't say that. I think it is important, but the rest of the committee doesn't, and since I'm not part of the committee anymore, I don't think it's in anyone's best interest for me to go running around spouting internal information.

Let's just say that for a variety of reasons, my participation on the committee has become more stressful than I would like from a position that is entirely volunteer. I would prefer to spend that type of energy on something like a job or a political blog or something with a little more at stake for me personally than where the next location for Mysterium is or when the next communication is going to be distributed to the forum. I'm spending too much energy doing some very simple things.

So there you are... Now all you need to remember is that my @mysterium.net contact information is no longer valid and I have no idea who will handle incoming messages addressed to Communications, so just be aware that if you contact me from this point on, you will be talking to someone else if they don't deactivate all my accounts. I must add, though, that all forum accounts are my own personal accounts, so private messages and such will still work as intended. (I will remove my Mysterium signature in the future, but there are still some posts out there that people are actively reading, so I'll leave that up for a bit.)

(Otherwise known as Edrick-speak for "Hi, guys!")

After much, much, much, much, much pressure on TW to get his new servers working properly, and a few days of the two of us fooling around with reconfiguring his network, I finally have a site that's actually responsive! Woo! Guess what that means? More posts! There's been a lot that's happened since my last post, so I suppose I'll write up a little something every day until I get caught up.

Some quick points on what I've been seeing and doing, though, that I will hopefully follow up with complete posts:

• Feedburner was purchased by Google, who took the opportunity to wreck the service.
• I did, in fact, purchase an iPhone 3GS and have been loving it in spite of its Apple-ness.
• I've become far more active on Facebook and Twitter, if there are people who care about that.
• I've joined the Mysterium Committee in the areas of Web Development, Communications and Location.
• Someone got angry and went around blocking all YouTube videos of Kumikyoku.
• I've been on a Star Trek marathon, nearing completion of TNG and readying TOS.
• My WoW guild has been falling apart for reasons nobody wants to explain.
• I'm ramping up for another semester of university that starts on September 8th.
• I saw District 9 today and hereby order you to watch it at all costs.

And I'm sure there's more to discuss once I get my creative juices flowing once more. But until then, I would encourage everyone to see if you can break the site. I've updated lots of things, reconfigured lots of other things, and had to change the feed back to my standard Wordpress RSS address because the Feedburner service has been completely destroyed by a Google that doesn't seem to care that there are tons of people who are unable to get access to their Feedburner dashboards after the merger. (Seriously, how long has it been? I still can't get access to mine. I don't care anymore. I'll find a feed manager later, but it'll never be Google.)