Gord McLeodPosted on Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 1:18AM
This has to be another fairly short night of writing. I have an interview coming up tomorrow for one of those day job things I remember from some time back in the past. The dream is to do this writing gig full time, but it’s going to be a while before it can pay the bills, I suspect. Anyway, it’s a fantastic gaming company with a lot of great projects under them, so wish me luck! I’m really hoping I get this.
Gord McLeodPosted on Monday, April 2, 2012 at 3:43PM
Well talk about timing. 45 minutes ago I posted my big writeup of Geek & Sundry, Felicia Day’s new YouTube celebration of all things good and geeky in the world. Moments ago, Veronica Belmont of Geek & Sundry’s The Sword & Laser posted a brand new longer trailer for the video version of the S&L show, with a better look at the set and more explanation of what to expect.
The Sword & Laser started about four years ago as a book club, which quickly became an audio podcast. It’s going to remain an audio podcast, with this new show complementing it rather than replacing it.
The video version of The Sword and Laser will be every two weeks, alternating on Friday with Wil Wheaton’s Table Top. It launches on April 13th, kicking off the next book for the S&L community, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.
Gord McLeodPosted on Monday, April 2, 2012 at 2:14PM
I love living in the future. I really do. One of my favorite things about this future we’re in is how huge geek culture has become and how it continues to explode with great content, like Felicia Day’s brand new Geek and Sundry channel over on YouTube.
The Sword and Laser
Geek and Sundry first came to my attention by way of The Sword and Laser, a fantastic fantasy & sci-fi book club/audio podcast/GoodReads forum hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt. Some weeks ago, they announced that they were bringing S&L to video as part of Geek and Sundry, so of course I had to check it out.
Sadly, The Sword and Laser won’t be airing on the G&S channel for another couple of weeks, but G&S itself launched today and they’ve got a bunch of other shows that are well worth checking out.
I’m the One That’s Cool
Firstly, Geek and Sundry is Felicia Day’s channel, so you’d better bet The Guild is represented. They’ve gotten together and made another music video, this one about the injustices many geeks had to endure in their formative years at the hands of “cooler” peers, and the cultural reversal that has left geeks increasingly popular lately. It’s a fun song and video, though by far the most serious of the releases they’ve done to date, dealing as it does with issues of bullying and abuse.
The Flog
Felicia has another show, this one a weekly solo effort. The Flog debuted today, where she talks about stuff she’s into, highlights cool things she’s found around the internet lately, and goes out and tries things she’s always been interested in, sometimes for the first time. In her debut episode she goes out to learn the basics of blacksmithing. Now I’m no stranger to blacksmithing and crafting in general—I wield a mean pick in Minecraft—but she was doing this in the real world for once, not in a video game. She forged a real iron fire poker, and has it up for auction to benefit the FDNY Foundation. Pretty awesome stuff.
Table Top
Felicia got Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Eureka & The Big Bang Theory) to host a show all about table top gaming. Yes, they still make games you don’t play on computers or consoles! This one is the longest of the shows I sampled at half an hour plus individual one to two minute interviews with each guest player afterward. It’s well worth the investment.
For the first episode, Wheaton has guests Grant Imahara (Mythbusters), Jenna Busch (Girl Meets Lightsaber) and Sean Plott (Day[9]TV) on set to play Small World, a German-style fantasy board game that’s something like Civilization meets Settlers of Catan with some Dungeons & Dragons thrown into the mix. You watch them play, get a feel for the game and how much fun it can be, get some instruction on the rules and some tricks for good play. It looks like it’s going to shape up to be a really fun show. It’s supposed to air every two weeks, alternating on Fridays with The Sword and Laser.
Dark Horse Motion Comics
The last show I checked out today was Dark Horse Motion Comics, where they take actual comics and give them just enough animation to kick them off the page and into the video realm, with voice acting, sound effects and ambient background music to present the stories in a whole new light. Whether this one is for you will depend a great deal on whether you’re into the comic being adapted; this first one, The Secret, is maybe not my cup of tea, but I could easily appreciate how the format would (and will) appeal on a series that I’d be more inclined to follow.
Geek and Sundry isn’t the only such channel to pop up. Chris Hardwick, aka the Nerdist, has something similar in the works. I’ll undoubtedly be checking that out shortly too.
Gord McLeodPosted on Friday, March 30, 2012 at 4:59AM
Earlier today (okay, sort of yesterday) I posted a revised version of The Price of Demand draft 3, this time with everything except dialogue stripped from it. There’s no context, no description, not even any proper dialogue tags. I simply identify each character before each line.
This is part of an experiment to see if I can make editing a bit easier. I’m hoping that:
It’ll make consistency of voice easier.
It’ll make weaknesses in the story easier to spot. (I already know the ending is dreadful and I’ll be rewriting that whole section.)
It’ll improve dialogue flow.
It’ll reduce redundancy in the text.
It’ll help me cut down on exposition.
It’ll help me show rather than tell.
There’ll be some challenges in doing the editing this way, starting with the fact that I’m forcing myself to work from two documents instead of one. Possibly three documents; I’ve been toying with the idea of a similar exposition-only version as well, though I think that’ll break a lot more than dialogue-only did.
Once I’ve gone over the story as spoken only by the characters, I’ll have an easy way to block out the structure of the story, identify areas where exposition is really critical and where it’s difficult or impossible to convey it through dialogue. At that point I can go back and begin working the exposition back into the story again. I expect this’ll be the most difficult, or at least the most time-consuming part of the process.
Gaming, 
