Why are toilet roll holders always placed a couple of feet off the ground, so that anybody over three feet tall needs to bend over to pull some off, while it's quite simple for a cat to unroll it as much as it wants to?

Expect something before 8:00 AM on Friday.

...

That's all.

...

No, really, it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8C.....Chisaki_Taiyou
http://www.destructoid.com/okamiden.....r-147254.phtml

It's been like four months since my last submission. This is getting stupid. I'm going to finish something, anything, up tonight, and post it tomorrow morning. 9:00 AM or earlier. That's a promise. A PROMISE TO THE ENTIRE INTERNET! I WILL BREAK DOWN MY WRITER'S BLOCK WITH A PICKAXE TO MY OWN HEAD IF NEED BE!
...
Okay, maybe not a pickaxe to my head. But it's getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder...

Seriously, what do you guys do when you've got writer's block? I figured I could just ride it out, but it's only gotten worse with time.

EDIT: Okay, so I didn't make 9:00 in my time zone. But I did make something.

So my day was kinda lame. It wasn't all that hard, but it was very slow, and in addition to getting in to work a little late, the head cashier had to take me aside and mention I'd had a few previous lates as well, and that they'd really really prefer if I didn't show up late any more. Add in that I had a light breakfast and missed lunch, and was very cloudy-headed all day (even though I'd gotten plenty of sleep). I finally get home around 9:40 or so, and find out my family's already had dinner (considering how late we normally eat, it was entirely valid for me to ask). They went to Boston Market, but didn't get anything for me, which means I get to have leftovers. Which wouldn't be as much of an issue if I hadn't had leftovers for about half a week in a row, to the point where we don't actually have anything decent in the way of leftovers remaining.

Anyway, I'm thinking, "day, you suck." So I go up to my room, notice the lights are out and the blinds are closed. I just shut the door, lay on my bed in the dark, and think, "yeah, these are prime moping conditions." Then, the next thoughts through my head were, "woe is me, and woe are my rich white boy problems."

I swear to God I'm not kidding. Literally, I lay down and close my eyes, and for whatever reason, my head puts together a sentence containing the word 'woe' (twice!) and the phrase 'rich white boy problems.'

So now I feel like a dick. I'm just gonna go out and get something decent to eat, come back, sleep off whatever lameness is making me dizzy, and try to make tomorrow suck less for people- self included, but not exclusively.

P.S. I'm still writing. Just very, very slowly.

So I finally start trying to catch up on my unviewed journals, and I notice several people talking about E3. I think, okay, Nintendo probably did the same as last year, and showed a bunch of lame stuff that would only further push me away from the company I grew up with.
Then I see someone mention "Metroid."

New Super Mario Bros. Wii: Online multiplayer would have been nice, but it might still be fun.

Super Mario Galaxy 2: SMG1 was fun, but struck me as a little 'off' in some way. If it was only part of the game Nintendo had planned to make, that'd certainly explain it.

Metroid Prime Trilogy: Technically not an E3 namedrop, but my investigations after E3 lead me to its discovery. So that's why they didn't release the new motion control MP remakes in America.

Kingdom Hearts DS: My brother's been pressuring me to play the KH series, and this game looks like a multiplayer 3-D brawler-ish RPG- one that he'd be willing to join me in playing. Definitely got to give something like that a shot.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade: Because it just looks fun.

And, of course, Metroid: Other M... By Team Ninja? The Ninja Gaiden guys? Wha? I'm not completely sure what I saw in that trailer, but I think I liked it.

(Insert Portal reference here)

Yeah, still alive in spite of lack of postings. I felt like I'd hit some kind of wall, working exclusively on the story for Neopuc, and I ended up just cleaning my room and sorting my paperwork and cleaning up my computers instead of writing today. I felt a bit better, so I decided to try doing a little side writing, and much to my delight I ended up giving up on the side writing and returning to Neopuc's story. So things are kinda working out.

I've started keeping track of how many words RoughDraft thinks I've written in the story, and the effects have been pretty therapeutic. I don't feel like I'm making absolutely no progress whatsoever any more, although it's still nowhere near as fast as I used to write. Maybe I'm slowing down in my old age. Early twenties is old, right?

05/08/09: 7917
05/09/09: 8146
05/11/09: 8586
05/18/09: 10,109
05/20/09: 10,208
05/21/09: 10,574
05/24/09: 10,661
05/27/09: 11,552
06/12/09: 13,317

Yeeeeah. I don't think I'm making the deadline, and I've got a bizarre work schedule for the rest of the week. Sorry, Neopuc. It's coming along, though (currently at ~6k words), and I'm going to see if I can't finish it before the weekend- for real, this time.

On a related note, working at The Home Depot is surprisingly awesome. It's a retail job, but (unlike pretty much every other retail job on the planet) the customers don't automatically hate you or anything. I've worked something like 80, 90 hours there so far, and I haven't had a full half dozen customers who I'd have considered 'unpleasant.'


EDIT: Ffffff... Still working on it. I used to be able to get stuff down nearly instantly. Now it's taking forever.

05/08/09: 7917 words
05/09/09: 8146 words
05/10/09: 8146 still, I was busy.
05/11/09: 8586
05/18/09: 10,109
05/20/09: 10,208
05/21/09: 10,574
05/24/09: 10,661

The 1k-th pageview story goes to a great friend,  neopuc . We've known each other for quite a while, having met on writing.com and then moved onto FA when that site's options failed to meet our needs. The premise of the story will come from the massive list of story ideas he came up with during a laptop outage, posted recently:

A micro human sees a macro wolfess bathing in a lake. This story takes place in medieval times. Humans are in retreat, afraid they will be enslaved or wiped out by the macro wolves. This man finds the wolfess beautiful and often observes her bathing. One day she invites him out of hiding and shows him that wolves really are not that bad after all.

In hopes of finally finishing something in a reasonable time frame for a change, I'm going to do my best to get this story uploaded within two weeks of this posting.

Oh, cool. I'm almost up to 1k pageviews. That's ten sets of ten tens. And that isn't half bad. Well, for someone as bizarre as me, anyway. Uh... Well, I guess I can do a kiriban-thing to celebrate. Whoever sends me visual confirmation (i.e. screenshot) of my 1k pageview, or whoever manages to get the closest, gets a story. We can work out details when it happens, but I promise to make a best-effort attempt to write what you want.

Thanks again to everyone who's helped make this possible.

EDIT: Well, I'm past 1k, so it's basically first-come, first-serve at this point.

So.
April first.
Yeah.

I was planning on participating in the hijinks for a while. My idea was to commit account suicide, except I'd do it a week or so in advance and not come back until a week or so later. Scrapped the plan for a number of reasons. First of all, it'd be inconvenient for me and my viewers, since any comments and favorites and views and all would be lost. Second, I'd have to resubmit everything, which would flood my watcher's inboxes with stuff they'd already seen. Third, it wasn't really all that funny. Fourth, I'd miss out on the Thursday Prompts for about two weeks (although from the looks of things, I'm missing out on this week's prompt anyway). Fifth, I'd actually had some 'real' 'drama' at about the time I'd planned to leave.

So the plan fell through. All I'm doing for April this year is changing my icon. That's it. Sorry.

On a more helpful note, be aware that the hideously lame Conficker virus is set to kick into full gear on April 1st. It'd be a good idea to backup your important files before then, if possible. Better safe than sorry, right?

I'd also like to apologize for not submitting much lately. I've still been doing a decent amount of writing. I just haven't been doing much finishing. So I've got a bunch of semi-started stories sitting around waiting for missing parts. Hopefully I'll get a few done soon.

Some of you, like me, have probably downloaded a few images over the years. Some of you, like me, have probably downloaded quite a few. Some of you, like me, may actually have so many of 'em that you frequently forget if you've already gotten an image, or if your current version of the image is in the same level of quality, or in that 500MB torrent you downloaded last year and never touched again.
For us, there's the duplicate-image-finder, Visipics. Unlike most duplicate file finders that only check size and date, Visipics actually compares the images themselves. Supports most major formats, too.

It can take an hour or more to handle really huge collections, but considering what it's actually doing, that's pretty darn fast. It can generally get through about 20k an hour on my laptop when it's just running in the background- yes, 20k.
You can set it to automatically dispose of the lowest-quality duplicates found. Personally, I go through manually and rename, or mark and then delete/move large groups of files en masse. Takes longer, but my collection is horrifyingly unsorted.

Best of all, it's free!

I've been using it for a while, now, but I noticed it got a mention on Lifehacker, so I figured I'd try and help spread the word. Excellent program, comes with my recommendations.

AAAAAAAAAARGH I've finally finished something besides a Thursday Prompt it's been waaaay way too long. One day short of two months, in fact.

Hopefully, this is the first in another wave of completed projects like my initial month of rapid-fire postings. Realistically, I'm still a pretty lazy fellow.

Now I just get to hope I don't have a heart attack while waiting for grades to arrive.

I'm gonna be out for a while due to varying things. Nothing horrible, just real life getting in the way of fun again.

Obviously, that means no stories for a while, but it also means I'm not gonna be checking any of the prompts or responding to messages or such. Sorry about that, but the rules of physics are the rules of physics and I can't be in two places at once.

Just as an update before I go: My thoughts have been on a bit of a werewolf kick lately thanks to the presence of a certain lycanthrope in a just-released title*. It (and a certain awesome story  poetigress posted recently which I still need to comment on) have inspired me to go back and work on Alice and Ryan's saga a bit, so expect to see hear more of them and their kinky dominatrix werewolf luffins soon after my return.

Anyway, see you all later- hopefully not too much later.


* Nothing says "We don't have a decent fur-rendering engine" like having a werewolf character in full-body metal armor. Smooth, Eighting, smooth.


LATER HAS ARRIVED!
I've caught up on the ridiculous quantity of messages and new artwork, and now I just need to do the prompt and respond to others' prompts and finish some stories for submission and enter  chapdav 's macro story contest.
... Sheesh.

I've been telling myself for a while now that it's not a big deal that I don't comment on other people's works unless I have something groundbreaking to add to a discussion.
After all, I'm some kind of weirdo who writes furry pr0nz and stuff.
I'm shy.
I'd probably just sound like some kind of idiot.
I'm really not very good at giving compliments to people because I always feel like it's half-hearted or corny.

But, y'know?

Even when they're just saying "not bad," I really like seeing comments on my own work.
Even if I'm writing furry pr0nz, I'm trying to do it well. And presumably, so are most other writers and artists. The ones who aren't probably won't care anyway, so no loss.
Being shy is generally considered a bad thing. Something people try to overcome. And honestly, if I'm willing to upload a story about something as off-the-wall as Deiphilia, I should at least be able to bring myself to say "I liked your story."
Right on my profile, it says "V.D.O. does not take the internet very seriously..."
And if you don't think you're very good at something, the generally accepted way to improve is to practice.


So I'm gonna try to be less of a wallflower and start complimenting people on their works and stuff. I don't think I'll get everything done right away, but I'll at least get started.

I guess that's that. Obama won, and there's nothing we can do about it right now. Not even a Florida Recount can crush this.

Still, there's always '12. The Giant Robot party will stay strong! American Justice will be upheld without fail!

---

Still writing. I've almost got enough of my main project laid out to post its prologue.

Alice/Ryan actually has almost two complete chapters waiting for upload- I just want to make some final decisions about how over the top I want the pr0nz chapters to get at this point (gotta save something for the next round).

The Geneered screenplay is coming slower, but that's only because I've been using the time not spent on other things on catching up with real life.

And for some inscrutable reason, I've had like half a dozen ideas for one-shots of varying natures over the course of the last day or so. I'm branching out: several involve fetishes I wasn't even actually aware I had until I started typing them out and found myself aroused. Heck, one is a fetish I didn't even know existed, despite its apparent obviousness (you'll know it when I upload it, trust me).
I don't think any of them will evolve into the 10-25 page epics I've been making lately, but then again I wasn't expecting to make any of those in the first place, so who knows?

The thing that worries me most right now, though, is how there's been a lull lately in my coursework, and how Thanksgiving break is on the horizon. I'm sure all of you students know what that means. Calm before a storm, prelude to despair, etc.

But don't worry, faithful viewers, I'll soon upload more bizarre butcherings of the English language! Because, YES! The pen is STILL mightier than the sword!

Okay, okay. That was the last MWC reference from me for now, I swear.

Make the right decision. Vote for freedom. Vote for Michael Wilson.

BE CERTAIN OF YOUR CHOICE.
UPHOLD AMERICAN JUSTICE WITHOUT FAIL!
A HEART OF JUSTICE IS
A HEART THAT LOVES AMERICA!
LET'S PARTYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!

I have replaced the generic "STORY" placeholder images in my gallery with slightly more helpful custom plaques. They're ugly and too big, but I blame FA's auto-thumbnail-resizing. Not because it's at fault, but because it makes me feel like less of a total failure.

This has the added benefit of clearly separating my blatant smut erotic fiction from my total garbage serious works. No more unpleasant surprises for any visitors!

This has also made me realize just how little my gallery reflects my own perceived interests. A full half of my stories have werewolves in them, yet only two or so have macro, and not a single one has any buff hyena ladies! This calls for quick rectification, obviously.


Anyway, life is normal for now. I'm working on three separate story threads (the Alice/Ryan werewolf series, the Geneered screenplays, and an as-yet unannounced work based on one of  neopuc 's tales), intermingled with the occasional one-shot pr0n or short story. Throw in the Thursday Prompts for good measure, and there you go: way too much for any reasonable person to take on their plate.


So what does this have to do with you, the reader?

Probably nothing.

Thanks for reading this anyway, though.

SNSFU...? Not quite the same, is it?

The voices are being a lot more quiet. The vignettes helped in a way I wasn't expecting- I had way more than three ideas, but every time I started to type one out I got a few words in and realized the idea sucked too much to waste any more time on.
Progress is progress. I'll take what I can get.

Anyway, I've got a pretty decent selection up now. I've got fetish porn, short stories, superheroes- I've even got a bedtime story (kind of). Something for the whole family! Except uncle Ted. But that's because uncle Ted is scary.


This journal is for two things.
1: I really appreciate the comments, watches, faves, and reads. I don't reply to anything unless I feel I need to say something more, but it's not because I'm trying to be a jerk. I'm just shy, is all. I really do want to thank everyone who wastes their time reading my stuff.

2: Alice and Ryan... okay, straight out: It ain't porn no more.
There's gonna be plenty of innuendo and references to stuff, but I can't write the plot chapters with the sole intent of getting people off any more. I like the characters too much for that, and there's really no way to fit the smut into the upcoming stories anyway.
That said, I enjoyed the first chapter way too much to completely give up on it. I'm just going to make separate mini-chapters for the hot sexy werewolf luffins, to compliment the story progression.
Everyone wins: People who want plot don't need to feel like the story's being cheapened for the sake of sex; people who want porn don't need to slog through character development; and people like me have a juicy 'cherry' on top of their storyline sundaes. In more ways than one.

Oh God, did I really just write that sentence? I really am back to SNSFU.

There's a story in Vertigo's The Sandman (which you really should read, by the way) where the main character, Dream, gets pissed at a guy. He has good reason: this man basically kidnapped the mother of Dream's only son and rapes her for story ideas. No, seriously, I'm not making this stuff up.
Obviously, pissing off the physical (is he physical?) manifestation of dreams is a bad idea. As an ironic punishment, Dream sentences the man to an overflow of ideas.
This guy doesn't last 24 hours before he's crawling on the ground, clawing his own head with his fingernails while mumbling incoherent story blurbs because they just keep coming and coming and he can't stop them.

Want to guess how I've been feeling the last few days?


I'd like to blame sleep deprivation. I've been staying up late (until 2:00 AM- for a relatively early riser like me, that's late) typing and backspacing and typing again, and the only reason I go to sleep at night is because I know if I stay up any later I'm going to lose the ability to type complete sentences. I think I've already lost the ability to not write run-on sentences.
The problem with that theory is that the sleep deprivation was caused by all these ideas.


In the interest of not going insane, I'm going to try something. I'm gonna just write a few quick vignettes, some quick bits of stories that have no relation to anything else. I may pick a couple and expand upon them later. I might not. If anyone has any interest in doing anything with them, they can feel free to go for it.

Don't worry. Once the voices go away, I'll get back to writing normal stuff.
Well, normal for werewolf love stories.

Now that I've been here a few days and subjected several of you to demonstrated my skills as a writer, I should probably say a bit more than the cryptic series of statements in my profile.

As the discrepancy between my join date and first submission shows, I've mostly just kind of lurked around here for a long time. Recently, I gave up on that and submitted the first chapter of a short story which had been dominating my thoughts for about a week or so. After that, I figured, "Hey, I should look at the forums and see if there are any resources for writers here." So I go to the forums, find the Writer's Bloc, and read a whole bunch of posts with extremely helpful tips like "Stop describing unimportant details, we don't care what color the walls are."
Why didn't I check there before submitting anything?

Oh, and I found some actual stories. Not porn stories, ones with actual plots and characters and stuff like that.
So now I not only feel like an idiot, I feel like a pervert or something too.

In summary: thanks a lot, FA. Way to make me feel like a jerk.



Also, I'd like to thank everyone who's watched or commented or shouted me. I'm not sure what's expected procedure (is it considered rude not to at least comment back when someone faves you, for instance?), so I'm going to apologize right now if I've upset anyone. It wasn't intentional, and I very much appreciate the compliments.