Productivity

Thanks to a nasty habit of leaving the TV on the Sci-Fi channel all weekend long, from time to time I see a movie that I actively avoided watching for years because, well, it just plain looked nasty. Usually, it turns out my avoidance was the right call.

Case in point: Altered States. I've heard of it before, and I think I saw clips from it once, and I figured it was some sort of freaky druggy hallucination type movie with no plot. Turns out it's not though. What it's actually about is a scientist who sits around doing hallucinagenic mushrooms in an sensory deprivation tank until he turns into a monkey. And if that didn't force me to say "No seriously" enough, I mean he does this several times over the course of the movie, on purpose. It's pretty messed up.

Another movie like this I recently saw was Lifeforce. Way back when, I had 2 bits of knowledge on this movie. 1- The song from it on this here CD of classical music from sci-fi movies is pretty spiffy. 2- It's a cheesy movie about vampires invading from space. So, naturally, several years ago I rented it, and shut it off about a minute in on the grounds that while cheesy space vampires are right up my alley, nude cheesy space vampires are not. About a week ago though, this movie came on the good ol' skiffy, and, since I knew they were even more prudish than I am, and whatever I was doing was too distracting for me to hunt down the remote, I ended up sitting through it. As it turns out, once you get past the first five minutes, it does indeed turn into the sort of movie I'll willingly sit through. A British B-Movie. Aside from the footage of British scientists and millitary types talking to eachother in bad film quality land, which could be replaced with the cast of 50 or so MST3k movies and I wouldn't notice, what filled most of the screen time was cheesy exploding mummy-zombies. See, when a vampire sucks out all your life force energy, you turn into a dried up muppet-looking corpse with big eyes, then 3 hours later, you get back up, and have 10 seconds to suck out someone else's life force energy, or you explode in an amusing fashion.

Enough about bad movies though, especially after that last rant.

Remember a little while ago when I posted that big huge link to the diceless RPG I whipped up? If not, let me do it again.

I need to make some sort of more subtle link for that. Anyway though, when I first mentioned it, I also said that it was shareware, and that if at least 5 people actually paid the fee, I would be invigorated enough to take the time to write sourcebooks for it and toss those up too.

Now, here's my problem. One person actually paid the fee in question. Someone I know threw a hefty enough wad of cash Thor's way to count as a free registration from me, and someone I know said he'll throw the cash at me within a couple weeks. That's 3 out 5 there.

However, between the burst of happiness this caused, an unexpected wad of free time, and a long and nasty case of insomnia, I kinda sorta finished the first sourcebook yesterday. I still need to HTMLize it though, and that's the only thing keeping me from a serious ethical crisis. I made it a new year's resolution to actually make some freaking money this year, and I'm darned determined to stick to it. However, if I have a finished product of an entertaining nature sitting here, but I don't let anyone have it in order to make a greater profit off of some other product I have, I would be committing a Great Evil of the nature Disney and Microsoft make on a regular basis! And dagnabit, if I'm going to become evil incarnate, I want to fly, shoot lasers out of my eyes, and have a cape!

So what I'm getting at here is that it would be very very nice if 2 of you out there would actually pay that shareware fee. Especially if you do it before I give into the temptation to drop everything else I'm doing to HTMLize these here files. Otherwise I'll have to take some sort of drastic action like only making this other stuff only available to people who flung the $10 at me.

Oh, and on another note, a couple weeks ago it hit me that I had a big wad of unsubtitled anime, some video editting software, and access to a digital camera. So, I just finished an anime music video today. I think it's darn good for a first effort, and I might be able to win a contest or two with it if I can afford to take it to a convention or two. Hey, that's another reason it'd be nice for people to throw shareware fees at me! 30 would do it if you have a mob of generous rich friends.

Hmm... this rant sucked didn't it? "I need money! Gimme gimme gimme!" The only saving grace here is that if you actually do, the next update will be full of all sorts of happy treasures! Hopefully the bandwidth suckage off this video won't tick my host off...

Oh, and if this has you annoyed, think of it this way. Everyone else just stopped hitting the web up for cash. Admit it, you were starting to miss it.