DarkAge

Aw man. DarkAge ended today. Save for Chasing the Bard, this has been my favorite podcast for the past several months. It's not the absolute best writing but it's one of those that took me back. The premise is much like the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. A group of people from Default World get swapped into their characters in the Realm of Dark Age and stuff happens from there. If you want to load up on gaming nostalgia, definitely check it out at http://www.kirkcast.com

Speaking of podcasts, I might as well give a quick run down of other stuff I've been listening to.

Chasing the Bard ended a few weeks ago. It was definitely far and away my favorite podcast series. Shakespeare, the fey, and excellent writing. Good stuff. :)

Nocturnal is Scott Sigler's current story. While he's still not my favorite artist and I enjoyed some of his other worlds more, I have been meaning to mention for a while that he seems to be doing a bit better at portraying female characters lately. I can't lay my finger on exactly what's different but they're feeling less superficial than some of his earlier work. He's definitely maturing as a writer and becoming better for it. Heh. That reminds me. I never mentioned that he did a panel at Baycon and, just on a whim, I went out to the hall, bought a beer, wandered up to the front, said "Beer-o-gram", dropped it off with him and left. :)

Last one I'll mention for today is 12 Volt Theater's Down the Road It's a bit like Svankmajer's take on Alice in Wonderland crossed with a Choose Your Own Adventure book. It's a weird little ARG with a pretty solid surreal setting. I have sort of oddly mixed feelings about this one. The story itself ranges between interesting and grating for me, but the world-building and flavor text is consistently hitting interesting buttons for me. It's probably got pretty strong appeal for most PBM people.

Okay. That's it. I need to get back to work or I'll be here until midnight. :)

Split Personality Assessment

It's been a few weeks since I split my journal into DV_Girl, dervish_girl and dvnt_spirit and so far I'm feeling a bit mixed about the results.

DV_Girl has continued to be my primary focus, which makes me somewhat happy, but dvnt_spirit seems to be languishing a bit. I have many more projects in store for her but I've had so much minutia to take care of that they've been back burner. I definitely feel like I should be spending more time on my spiritual and fantasy life.

Meanwhile, most worrying is that by separating out dervish_girl, it seems that side of myself has become much more hateful and caustic. Sort of standing on a soapbox and screaming at everyone who passes by. It's like a subset of the greater internet fuckwad theory. Even though the account is openly connected to 'me' there's still a feeling of added insultation. I wonder if perhaps I should set her journal to friends only or make it more difficult for me to post there to balance out the aggression that journal seems to contain. I'm just not interested in being such a hateful creature and I'd like to purge or at least master that rage.

The best thing to do is probably to try converting that anger into positive things. Art, music, animation that will (hopefully) make others see my point of view better than just shouting and being angry. Of course, the problem is that there are so many things to be angry about in the world today that it's impossible to vent it all that way, and sometimes one needs to just say things RIGHT NOW so they can focus on more important issues. So maybe dervish_girl does have some positive aspects as a vent to keep me from exploding. Defaulting her journal to friends only probably wouldn't be a bad plan though.