voyage to mars
I returned to my last screenplay this weekend -- like a remorseful murderer to the scene of his crime -- and realised that I do need to sit down and rewrite it some day soon. It's been my intention to turn this script into a low-budget digital movie for a long time now, but other stuff (such as work) has been getting in the way. That's still no excuse for not making the changes to the script that I've long thought about. So now I will. Really.
The script used to be called "The Dark", but it's now called "The Dark Places", and I've even gone to the step of registering a website called (drumroll, please!) www.thedarkplaces.com. Nice, innit? Except there's nothing there. Yet. There will be something there soon, though, honest.
Both thedarkplaces.com and thehiddenplaces.com are part of my work on an entire universe of stories that will hopefully carry over into my games as well -- post-Midgard, of course, as that game is a universe unto itself...based on Norse mythology, yes, but still its own entity. So to speak.
'Ambitious' is putting it mildly. But there's a natural unity to the stories I'm working on now, the stories that I hope to tell in the years to come. They're all tied into the hidden places, and the dark places, in our world...where the walls between the known and the unknown are thin.
We all know places like that. Think about it. Maybe it's your grandma's attic, or a cul-de-sac in your town, where garbage bags remain piled up for years... Perhaps it's an overgrown path in the forest where you played when you were a kid, or an abandoned cinema... Wherever your hidden place is, whichever dark place you fear, we all have them, somewhere. Maybe they're inside you, maybe it's right behind you. But these places have stories to tell, and I'm the one who will tell them.
So. Fun things in store. Just be patient. I promise...I'll make it worth your while.
Sometimes it's awfully hard to know exactly what to put into this "journal" (and I use the dreaded quotation marks simply because I'm not entirely sure what /edgewise is). My days aren't action packed. I don't go to a heck of a lot of Playboy Mansion parties (yet). I make games. Sometimes, when I'm feeling creative, I write stuff. But in no way, shape, or form am I particularly exciting. And this, I venture, is part of the problem: Not enough happens in my life to justify a daily entry. Thus, weeks may pass before I have something even remotely interesting (and I do mean remotely) to Blog down for your "enjoyment" and/or "amusement". Hence the irregularity, and possibly the utter dullness, of my entries.
What if you Blogged, and no one stopped to read it; would it still be a Blog? And is it better to write something, boring or not, than nothing at all?
Philosophy aside; it's late, I'm falling asleep, and I should go to bed. And yes, before you ask (as if); I did go outside today, and no, I didn't get any work done. What a surprise.
Saturday. Slow day. Warm day. Should be outside, but I should also be doing some work. In a few weeks, I'll be presenting a lecture at the first
GDCE -- Game Developer's Conference Europe -- in London. And I still have a
lot of planning left to do for that one. We're also wrapping up work for the launch of the official Midgard website, and I'm currently going through a bunch of text that has to be done by Monday. So; sunny or not, I should really be staying inside. "Should" being the operative word. Can't...resist...sun...and...heat! After all, summer's almost over here in Norway, and the next we know it'll be dark and miserable and cold, and the long, long winter will be upon us.
I think actually I'm going to go outside now, after all.
Today, there was a hailstorm in Oslo. No big deal, right? Certainly nothing to warrant an entry in /edgewise.
You'd think.
This particular hailstorm was nothing like the hailstorms we usually get here in Norway. In my experience, Norwegian hailstorms are brief and embarrassingly trivial. Our hail is usually the size of salt grains, barely distinguishable from cold rain. Today, though...today we got a taste of divine wrath.
I was sitting in a café with a friend when suddenly, without warning, icy balls the size of marbles started hammering down from the sky. Thousands of them, bouncing like basketballs on the asphalt, assaulting t-shirted pedestrians, bombarding cars, shattering into fragments as they fell like mortar to the Earth. It was amazing. It was cool. Especially since we were sitting inside with a ringside view of what appeared to be the end of the world.
It only took five minutes for the show to wrap up, for the ice to turn into rain, and for life to return to normal.
Now, I know that in other parts of the world, this is no big deal; that in America, you get hail the size of buildings that can crush a man and the car he's in. To me, though, this was a show worth watching, and a reminder that nature can still surprise me...and scare me a bit.
