Endgame Viable

I don’t normally do month-in-review posts, but since I was largely absent this month, I figured I should do one for a change. I’ve spent most of November trying to recover from back pain. The first day of the month it got really bad, then it got better, then it got really bad again, and now it’s getting better again. I’ve been taking a muscle relaxant called baclofen every day this month, and last week I started going to physical therapy to try to loosen things up. X-rays have shown it’s entirely a muscle problem in my upper back, neck, and shoulders, most likely caused by years of slightly incorrect sitting posture (my own theory, since I have no other ideas-assuming it’s not some as-yet-undiscovered medical issue). Technically I have a slight curve in my spine between my shoulder blades but they tell me it’s not unusual and not the root cause here. (765 words.)

Exactly one hundred years ago today, World War I ended with the signing of the Armistice. I’m posting this at 11:00 my time, though of course the actual Armistice was signed in France, so I’m probably four or five hours late. My grandfather was a part of the American Expeditionary Force along with a million others, went through basic training, shipped over to France, and arrived just in time for the last offensive in the war, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918. He was 23 at the time. (1013 words.)

Lord of the Rings Online opened their Legendary Server the other day. It’s another of what has become known in the industry as a “progression” server, although I feel like they’re stretching that definition in this case. (Then again, nobody has ever defined what a “progression” server is, except Daybreak. Or maybe it started with SOE, I don’t remember.) In this case “progression” seems to mean a new server with a level cap of 50 and nothing else, which to me is the bare minimum of effort. (1099 words.)

It’s interesting to watch view statistics when you upload a series of videos to YouTube. You might think, as I do, that if you say, “I’m going to upload a series of videos to YouTube, one every day, and here’s the first one,” that people would know and understand how to find and watch the complete series if they’re interested, and you’ll get similar view statistics on each video. But you’d be wrong. The first video will get some views, if you have any followers at all, and then the remainder of the videos will get zero views because everyone will wander away and forget about you amid the rest of their busy daily lives. So from time to time you have to keep reminding people, on social media, or in blog posts like this one. :) (194 words.)

Random WoW image from the media library because I can’t be bothered to find one that makes sense for this post. This will be what I hope is a quick blog post about BlizzCon, largely inspired by peer pressure more than any real interest. In fact, the main reason this post didn’t get deleted was I needed a vehicle to say that I’m trying to reserve most of my writing energy this month for NaNoWriMo. I’m still having back trouble so typing at keyboards for long periods of time is challenging. You can safely skip the rest of this post because I won’t be saying anything about BlizzCon that you haven’t already read a thousand times before. (563 words.)

Very old GW2 shot from my media library because my back hurts too much to sit at my PC to find a new one, and this post has been sitting here for a week waiting to post and I’m tired of waiting. (304 words.)

Considerably more talking than writing on day 4. Morning update: Irish accents, daylight savings, second Mythica movie, nervous about iOS Scrivener, feeling mute when I’m not able to type on a keyboard, struggling to differentiate character voices in dialog. Evening update: the story so far, NaNoWriMo community and me. (49 words.)

Kind of a long one. A better day. Hilarious text-to-speech on the iPad, switching scenes, what I like about my writing so far, blanks between writing sessions, thinking about getting Scrivener for iOS, starting fresh every day, finally getting into the world of the story, bringing complex modern sociopolitical themes into the backdrop of the sword-and-sorcery city setting. (58 words.)

I’m trying an experiment this year for NaNoWriMo. Instead of writing blog posts about my progress, I’m recording “vlogs” about it. I created a YouTube channel where you can watch me ramble about my NaNoWriMo journey this year. My goal is to record a short video every day talking about my progress, the challenges I run into, how I deal with them, etc. Things that I think might be educational or inspiring or helpful or just funny to other writers. A lot about “the writing process” and how I’m feeling about the project as I go along. Thrills, chills, spills. Stuff that I would normally write about, but I’m just going to talk about them instead. I would rather reserve my writing energy for the NaNoWriMo draft as much as possible. (302 words.)

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, photo by Brandt Luke Zorn. I saw a tweet the other day that made me raise an eyebrow: Hey Twitter fans: please go track down people who could legally get us Star Wars Galaxy's server code, and City of Heroes server code. If they agree to hand over the server code, we can bring those games back online legally. (688 words.)