Matthew Supert

Video games, video games, video games. 

Fall and early winter is that time of year when all of the blockbuster games come out. There have been some decent games that have come out this fall, but I feel that 2014 overall has been a bit of a lackluster year for gaming. I definitely have played less games this past year, and I am not entirely sure if it is due to the selection of games out or if it has to do with my available time. 

I put a lot of time in at the end of the summer and through the early part of this fall playing Pikmin 3. That game is quite good, but it had one of the most frustrating ending levels I have ever played in any game. I seriously almost did not make it through that game simply due to the ending. 

Just prior to Thanksgiving I also took advantage of a sale over at target and picked up three games; Sunset Overdrive, Shadow of Morodr and Bayonetta 2. 

I had a lot of fun playing Sunset Overdrive. It was a great looking game that had that goofy, over the top mayhem that is reminiscent of the first Crackdown. I beat the single player mode, but I hope to put in a little bit more time playing the multiplayer and getting all of the collectibles. There is a good, mindless sort of fun about the game that really hits well. 

I also started playing Bayonetta 2 over the past couple of weeks. I enjoyed the first game, but this second one really nails the over the top Japanese aesthetic and action along with overt sexuality, subtle and not so subtle puns and crazy fight sequences. The game is fast, smooth and really does look quite gorgeous. For anyone who thinks the Wii U doesn't have games, they really need to look at the releases for 2014 that Nintendo has put out. It really is a stellar system right now. 

Finally I started playing Shadow of Mordor just a couple of weeks ago. That game is straight up an Assassin's Creed clone, right down to the map. I have only put in a few hours so far, but I can't say I am hooked. People online seem to really love this game and many have it as their game of the year. The nemesis system, with the orcs is cool, but the game has not captured me. The opening couple of hours are difficult since the tutorials are almost non-existent. What little information it does put across the screen for you disappears too quickly. The text in the game is also incredibly small and if you are sitting any more than four feet from your TV you simply cannot read it. 

I hear it gets better and I am planning on still playing it. I sort of found myself this weekend though falling back into a game that has to be my game of the year if simply for the hours I have put into it. Titanfall. 

I have played over eighty hours of that game since its release last March. A took a break for a few months as if burned itself out, but Microsoft had it on sale for $12 over the Thanksgiving holiday. I booted it up again this weekend and it is as fun as ever. I am probably going to see myself playing that for another few weeks over the holiday break as well. 

As you know, over the past couple of months I have been slowly increasing my record collection. The purchase and setup of a record player in my house has been a sort of cathartic and enjoyable experience. It seems that there is a definite upswing for record sales purchases as of late. 

While records themselves represent a paltry 6 million in total sales, their increase over this past year has showed a definitely trend upwards. I have noticed just this past weekend while shopping, that the local Urban Outfitters, very prominently features records in the front of its store now. 

While a lot of this may be a bit "hipster" for these sales, there is certainly a level of satisfaction that you get when buying a record. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer mp3's for most use cases. For me they sound good and their convenience far outweighs anything else, but having a physical product in your hand or at your doorstop is something that I haven't felt in a long time. I remember back in high school going to Best Buy or the big Virgin Music on Michigan Avenue to buy a CD. Walking out of that store with a physical thing that I would tear the cellophane off of was exciting. Liner notes and those inner booklets were always something I looked forward to with CD's. 

That whole physicality has been lost with digital music. When was the last time someone cared about the design of the booklet in a digital album beyond the cover? Yes, this is a bit of nostalgia funk, but at the same time there is something special about having to deliberately hold the album, look at the track listing and then sit down and listen to it. It all just makes me want to get more albums. 

Woot. I am proud to say that I once again completed Nanowrimo again this year. I actually finished on Friday, the 29th with a total of 50,053 words. I had a big day typing on Friday, a bit over 7,000 words since I got no writing in on the 27th or 28th. 

Most of that day was productive with some really good text put down, but I have to admit that the last 2,000 words or so was just a garbled mess as I tried to hit my word count. Now of course comes to the all important part of going back and editing and in some cases, completely rewriting the stories. I never finished my editing on last year's project, so it is time I get back into doing that. 

I am planning to have a much more productive time with my writing over this winter and planning out my editing in a much more controlled fashion. At this point, I think I am going to take a break from Apath and Spice and head back over to last year's novel to keep working on that. 

Well, we are getting down to the wire here. Just about a week left for Nano. The past week was a fairly difficult one and was more of me just sort of spilling words onto he page opposed to an actual story coming out. I literally had three or four story progressions occurring on a single idea before I was finally able to sort of solidify it into some comprehensible. That mash of ideas though is still just sitting in the document file as a complete mess. 

I started another segment over the weekend, which I like the idea of, but haven't figured out a way to fully flesh out. I was going to have my main character just walk through the city and just describe and characterize the city itself, exploring some of the different neighborhoods and locations. I want to keep it simple, nothing dangerous or violent happening to him. I got a good way in, but eventually hit a brick wall. It is an idea I like, but need to figure out a way to make more interesting. 

I started last night my revenge tale, which should be good for pumping out some words. I am sitting at 38,844 words as of yesterday, so I think I am in pretty good shape. It is going to probably be a good push though through this weekend. 

So today is the end of day 16. That means we are just past halfway and this past Saturday as the "write in" Saturday where writers are supposed to lock themselves in a room and dedicate the day to writing. I was proud to say that I once again had a productive write in by getting nearly 6,000 words completed. I needed it as I was behind a couple of days at the end of this week due to scheduling conflicts. 

I have three short stories completed now, two of which are solid ideas, but I can already see that they are in fairly rough shape. I already have taken some notes on how I would like to adjust those and tweak the tone and settings for future revisions. The current story that I am working on focusing on Apath, our main character being lost in the wilderness, due to a trade deal gone bad. He was left to die by a syndicate gang that refused to uphold their end of the delivery. Apath is then found by a hidden group of outlaws who are now living in a small city they have built outside of normal civilization. The question that remains now is are they going to let him leave for fear of them exposing them and potentially putting all of their lives in danger?

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So we have one full week of Nanowrimo under our belts and so starts week two. This is the tough week where most people feel the doldrums and I can tell that I am already feeling them myself. I knocked out the first short story last week fairly easily, but this second story is turning out to be a bit longer and more complicated than I anticipated. I was hoping to keep it under 10,000 words, but we are rapidly approaching that limit and I am hoping I can wrap it up here soon. 

This particular second story features Apath and Spice who get caught up in an animal burglary when an eco-terrorism entity steals animals from a research lab. These animals are more than these seem. APath gets caught in the middle of a trade deal gone bad and they end up transporting the thief and the stolen animal while being chased by another syndicate. Their only chance of coming out unscathed is to strike a deal with the same organization that the animal was stolen from and may be they can find out in the process what is just so special about this stolen animal. 

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It has taken me forever to get this stuff uploaded. The recent updates to OS X have made getting GoPro video into iMovie and extra conversion step. All the way back on October 19th (remember that?) I did my second annual fall color ride down the Illinois River Road to Havana, Illinois. This is a nice scenic ride that I have done a few times and turned into an annual thing. The fall colors this year were spectacular, especially in Starved Rock. 

The ride had a nice group this year with a total of nine riders I think. The weather was super cold in the morning but warmed up nicely towards the latter portion of the day. 

Overall the ride turned out fantastic and the fall color was very vibrant. Special thanks to Matt C. who took some excellent photos, especially at starved rock. Below is my GoPro video, which isn't my best, but hopefully is still fun. 

So Nanowrimo 2014 has officially kicked off as of yesterday. As I posted a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't originally planning on doing Nanowrimo this year, but after having one of those "shower thoughts" moments, I decided to work on a collection of short stories. So far I have been doing really well. Last year my target word count for each day was 1,500 words. That is slightly below Nano's stated word count, but I felt it was a manageable goal for a new comer. This year I do still have that as my stated target daily word count, but after two days I am sitting comfortably at 3,396 words. 

To give you a quick synopsis of my story idea, my short stories are a collection of adventures for my characters Apath and Spice. They are a husband and wife rapid delivery team set in a sort of despotic sic-fi future. It is all very sci-fi tropish, but I am hoping that I can get some fun stories out of the two characters and their interactions. I am taking a lot of influence from "Cowboy Bebop" for this design. I always loved how that series balanced comedy, action and some remarkably heavy topics. 

Here is a quick list of my character profiles for both Apath and Spice. These were brainstormed with my wife and I one evening and truthfully the character profiles are loosely based upon the two of us. Of course, I have attached a little snippet and you can hit the "read more" button below to check that out. 

Apath

On friday I had delivered to me a record from an audio project called "Moment's Lost" from Indiegogo. It was a music project to create an homage album to the Blade Runner Soundtrack using the same tools that Vangelis used. I received the digital copy of the album a couple of months ago, but just this past Friday the vinyl record came in the mail. 

The record set is very pretty and super well done. There is some beautiful artwork in in this set and I cannot wait to listen to it. Thing is though I don't own a turntable. So this weekend I ended up ordering a turntable and I am setting up some of my older audio equipment in the living room to setup a sort of listening room. 

But, I don't have any furniture in the living room. So we went out and bought a couple of chairs to setup for listening. I now just need to get the console purchased and setup in the next week or so for this whole thing to come together. Megan spent a really good portion of this weekend designing a custom setup on Ikea's website and I have to say that I think it will really turn out nice when all said and done. My living room is much smaller than it looks and we realized quickly after getting tow chairs that not much else is going to fit in it. It is one of the reasons we have had such a frustrating time trying to find furniture for it in the past. Hopefully it will all come together here in the next couple of weeks. 

It is now October 7th and Nanowrimo starts on November 1st. Last year was the first year that I in earnest attempted (and successfully completed) Nanowrimo. It is an accomplishment that to this day I am extremely proud of. I wrote a book in a month. That book is still far from finished and is mostly scattered ideas, but there are about 65,000 words in that project file that I continue to slowly work on. 

I initially wasn't going to do Nanowrimo this year. My success of my book from last year was scuttled by little action in fine tuning and editing the story for the rest of the year. I went from cranking out the 50,000 words in a month to barely going back and editing the first few chapters the rest of the year. I suppose in some ways it was meant to just sit for a while. My original plan for Nano this year was to basically edit my book from last year. I spent approximately three months planning last year's story so when mid-September hit and I got those emails from Nano that it was approaching I figured I had no chance in planning something for this year. 

Nanowrimo though has this certain desire to it that I have felt creeping up in my mind the past couple of weeks. It is the same sort of creep that I have felt from other very tough events I have done in the past, like Tough Mudder. At the time of doing it, it is sometimes an incredibly painful process. There are moments of brilliance, but mostly extended periods of pain and frustration. If you successfully come out the end though there is this sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that is difficult to describe. 

I have been quietly talking about Nano on and off the past couple of weeks with Megan and she sort of encouraged me to just go ahead and try and do something. I think this is a habit of mine that I often do. I fester on topics or ideas for weeks at a time and then finally there is a tipping point where I do them. 

Up until about a week ago I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to write about. I have material from last year's book that certainly will most likely go into the second novel of that story so I could have started on phase 2 of that story arc. I didn't quite want to do that though. The fact that I don't have the first story completed has be a bit afraid of taking off in the second books arc. I did have an epiphany though. Last year when I was writing I accidentally misspelled a couple of words that resulted in two characters. I have a tendency with my typing and muscle memory to mistype common words. "The" for example almost always comes out at "teh" when I type. 

The words word "Apath and Spice" were the resulting words.  At the time I just threw them into my character notebook for last year's novel and figured I could incorporate them into the story at some point as a sort of Bauchelain and Broach type cameo seen in the Malazan novels. After looking at the names though heir style didn't fit with the other naming mechanisms I used for the rest of the book. That book borrowed heavily from a Persian influence so I didn't feel there was a way to fit those names in effectively. Instead I decided to take those characters for this year's novel and make them their own identities set in some sort of sci-fi universe. They are going to be a husband and wife team that are going to take a lot of influences from Cowboy Bebop. I don't think they will be bounty hunters, but they are going to have something that causes them to get into some over the top adventures. I like the idea of conflicting personalities that I can draw upon from my own relationship with my wife. We have these "events" in our daily routine that I sometimes find hilarious and I think could make for good material for a story. 

My structure this year is to actually write the novel as a collection of short stories. I think based upon the character structure and my influences from anime and other sci-fi that would make an ideal format for these two characters . I am taking some heavy influence from the Gotrek and Felix novels on this one since those are all essentially a collection of short stories placed into a novel. 

I am now rather excited to try and put this novel together over the next month. I have to spend the next few weeks fleshing out character profiles and also developing the 7-10 short story ideas that I have for the book. Hopefully I can once again complete a Nano.