Added a review of KamiChu!, which I finished yesterday. Nice little slice-of-life show.

Awesome! A big thunderstorm is sweeping through tonight. We haven't had a good storm in months. This one comes complete with huge flashes of lightning and foundation-shaking thunder. The rain's steady as a pair of Mormons canvasing a neighborhood.

I rolled down my window on the way back from a church group and just inhaled deeply of weather.

Finished Texhnolyze. What a mind trip. It's a perfect ending for this particular show, but it's tragic. Sad, in the sense of watching an insect get trapped in tar. You know it's not getting out of there.

It's odd. I never want to create a show like this. I don't like depressing stories, and I certainly don't like Texhnolyze. It is well-made, and thought-provoking. I appreciate it. I value it. It's a strong work of art.

There aren't that many of those in the world.

Been watching Texhnolyze. It's pure science fiction. It's dystopian storytelling. It's...true. Real.

I disagree with some of its philosophy, strongly, on a lot of levels. But that's surely part of the point, to watch and think and form opinions (reactionary or otherwise).

Nice to have something I can sink my teeth into.

Life is practice.

(Not that it is practice for something later. It's a matter of practicing things, over and over. You may never get it "right." Getting it "right" is a question for the historians, not us living and practicing.)

Just back from the first night of AWANA. Great fun. I feel centered now, like I have a much better feel for how I should act with these kids. I should focus on them, give them plenty of grace.

We all need grace.

Relationships are the wellspring of happiness.

Another long day at the office. But...

...because I'm so busy, I'm focused. I don't let time slide by. I refuse to waste a minute of my one, precious life.

I wonder if I could get used to this.

It's amazing to watch people create something out of nothing.

Case in point: the first five episodes of Space Battleship Yamato, which I watched recently. Made in 1974, when anime was still a bunch of crude cartoons for kids, this is a show with weight and melancholy. It's slow and deliberate. We spend whole episodes in almost real time. We see huge futuristic cities, empty due to the prolonged war with Gamilon.

This was in 1974. A tremendous accomplishment. All because they decided to do it.

Noticed someone on a personal productivity forum, who asks a lot of questions. This is normally good. However, this person appears to ask questions instead of doing things.

There's a difference between inquisitiveness and Analysis Paralysis. In the former, curiosity is combined with action. See: children. They open their mouths as they reach out their hands.

A good philosophy.

Just finished watching Brad Bird's short film, Family Dog (it's on YouTube). It was an episode of the old anthology TV series Amazing Stories, if you remember that.

Fascinating. It's a solid story, very funny in parts, and drawn in a very modern, minimalist style. What's most remarkable is that it isn't amazingly brilliant.

And that's comforting. Brad Bird didn't start brilliant then flame out. He's gotten better as he's aged.

A variety of thoughts:

• The most common subject in self-improvement is fear. It seems that most people don't improve themselves because they fear, oh, all sorts of things.
• I've been reading the Shortpacked! retrospective on Roomies/It's Walky/Shortpacked. I was struck by the juxtaposition of drama and humor. The artist has pointed out that he has a tendency to be too dramatic. To take a comedic situation/world/whatever and wring it for all the drama it's worth. And that that's not fair to the fans, who come for humor.
• Neat animation trick from anime: Show the beginning and middle of the action, but not the end. The viewer can mentally fill in the end.
• Which came first: the church or the New Testament?

Is this an effective way to blog, or do your eyes glaze over? Let me know.

I'm beginning to really appreciate daily rhythm. One's energy spikes and dips throughout the day. For those of us with daily responsibilities, we can observe that rhythm and plan for it.

For example, I get tired when I get home. My creative juices are low. So I watch some anime. Not much; just two or three episodes. And that's recharges me enough to let me complete more creative resonsibilities later in the evening.

Otherwise, I putter around all evening, unable to muster the energy to do much useful.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Work has been stressing me out.

Which is odd. I don't like the word "stress," as it has little meaning. It's like saying that work is "painful." Well, painful how? Stress is just pressure. What kind of pressure?

I've involved myself in a data migration project. It's complicated. It's outside my areas of expertise. But it's important, and it's getting me good contacts.

This Monday is their final, no-kidding deadline for much of their data migration. So I've received a lot of last-minute IMs, adding data, fixing problems, running scripts, etc. over the past few days.

The resulting stress/pressure/pain/whatever has exhausted me by the time I get home. So every evening, I've watched some anime, cleaned up a bit, and worked a little on a short story before going to bed. Then lay in bed for several hours.

Why? Why can't I let the work go? Why can't I drop it?

Perhaps I should meditate more.

After listening to Wil Wheaton's PAX keynote about computer games, I thought about art. In the past decade or so, two mediums have shifted in the public consciousness from cheap pulp entertainment into potentailly legitimate art form: comics and video games.

So, I wonder, what's the next medium to transition into Art? Some possibilities:

• Fanfiction
• Commercial packaging
• Advertising
• Selling
• Selling things on the street
• Sports
• Programming (the source code itself)
• Hardware/electronic design
• Exercise

Note that all of these media have afficianados. I'm wondering how many will become generally perceived as artistic media.

It's really incredibly important to my creative juices that I have all my projects in list form. I accomplish a lot when I can refer to them at any time.

Accomplished less than I'd hoped, but plenty today.

Lack of progress is due primarily to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I "took a break" to read, then paused when my stomach told me I was very late for dinner, four hundred pages later.

In reading it, I've identified four primary dimensions of fiction writing:

1. World building
2. Character building
3. Density of prose — ability to describe scenery or events evocatively
4. Storytelling — how well the story pulls you along, compelling you to read more

Frank Herbert was a master at dimension 1, Terry Prachett's amazing at dimension 2, Ray Bradbury's a perfect example of dimension 3, while J.K. Rowling's real strength is in dimension 4. Some of the descriptions are bland, her world can feel generic, and I'm occasionally confused by characters' behaviors. But I just can't put down her books.

Why? A few thoughts come to mind:

• Her stories are sufficiently complex that every chapter brings at least one new twist to the danger that confronts the characters.
• Her characters are sufficiently sympathetic. I care for them.
• Her prose style is clean and clear, so that my mind doesn't get bogged down parsing an intricate description.
• The plots are action-oriented. Plenty of stuff happens.
• Each book has a few central mysteries, which I want to see the protagonists solve.

There are undoubtedly others.

A bit of a wash this morning, but I refuse to let it keep me down. I awoke late and lazed around in bed all morning, then drove straight to my parents' house to go to lunch and traverse a nearby garden with them. Had a grand time.

Then, home for an hour so I could review my projects and generally clean up, after which I drove to Mandy for a game night with her and a few friends. Had a wonderful time there, as expected. Spent much of the night just chatting on her back porch, beneath the stars.

She lives a bit of a distance from the city lights, and I was delighted to look up and see the Milky Way. Just...right there.

And I remembered that the first line of Giant Armors (my young adult novel) begins with a reference to the Milky Way. Perhaps that's a sign that I should work to get it published.

(Which, at this point, requires half an hour reviewing my cover letter, and emailing an agent. I just always manage to find other things to do.)

I realized several years ago that, despite living near Washington, D.C. all my life, I hadn't been to the museums in over a decade. It's a common malady: you don't experience the things that are close, because they're close. They're mundane. You keep telling yourself, "Oh, I can do that any time."

So, every year I go in to D.C. and wander the museums, and today was my day for it. And it was glorious. Perfect temperatures, non-painful crowds, and the confidence that comes from several repeated attempts at something. I'm used to D.C. now.

Nothing really new, though. New pictures will be appearing on the site's sidebar, of course, but other than that, I just wandered the museums.

Which is good. I'm painlessly (joyfully!) maintaining my familiarity with my environment.