That’s right for some reason Jim has a blog

Alright since this site is back up and I feel like typing a little bit while having very little people on the forum. Here Jim is.

First order of business is working on the forum as an administrator. It is kind of funny how I came across this position and it sort of stuck after all while. The forums seemed to go down for some odd reason and dunkel made both Jim and Brian admins to try and get into the administration tools and try to fix the problem. Fortunately enough Jim was able to see that a squirrel was acting up and he was able to get it repaired. So that’s how Jim and Brian become part of the administration team. After that we of course had to get a couple of mods together to pick up for the gaping hole that we had left (Considering DL and WM were stepped down back to regular members. Don’t worry WM Jim still <3’s you.) We debate for a little bit, though we all seemed to come into a general consense on a couple of members. Jux was always someone who seemed to be very active in the gaming section an untamed wilderness where only admins would tread occassionally. He was the most likely to be promoted and has since done a wonderful job. The next choice was Becky who helped me out a lot during my time as an RP mod by keeping everyone nice and orderly and coming up with some of the most creative posts I have ever seen.  The last mod Silent Echo was someone we considered for the chit-chat cafe and a possible Serious Discussion mod, I think back when I was in consideration he was as well. More to come later Jim needs a nap.

With the constant spam showing up in my G-mail account recently I found myself asking the usual question. Why haven’t I posted on my blog? I mean Brian went through all the trouble to set one up for me and I haven’t used it in quite some time. Heck, a lot of stuff has changed over the past few monthes, not really writing wise but change in general.

The main reason there really isn’t much to report with any of my writings is because I’ve been suffering from a prolonged case of writer’s block. There are occasions when it does leave and I can get a little bit of work done, but it always seems to come back. I know what everyone’s thinking, Jim, you pure being of awesomeness and win, how is it that you, perfection incarnated, can suffer from prolonged writer’s block? You also my wonder why I used so many comma’s in that sentence and the only answer I have is because that how things turn out sometimes. The universe and a strange thing that likes to implode, or explode… Whatever the scientists say it’s doing right now.

So I’m sure the question on everyone’s mind is this, Jim, just what is it you have been doing? It has been a long time since you told us. The short answer is working, playing Rock Band, other stuff, blah?… But since I really don’t like giving short answers get yourself a comfy chair and a nice refreshment because I’ll tell you all what I have been up to. Just remember that you have been warned.

I know, I know, I usually don’t go much into my personal life in this blog, but since I’m not writing I don’t really have much to do, anyway here goes. Turns out back in May good old Jim quit his job over at a pizza place that he worked at and pretty much lost contact with everyone that worked there until just a few weeks ago. What does Jim do now, you might ask? Well Jim now sells computers at Best Buy. Why? Because I’ve wanted to work there since I was 16. No seriously, I have literally applied at the exactly same store every single year until up from then until now, which now I actually have the job there. I know what you’re thinking awesome, right? Well of course we are talking about Jim after all.

Of course Jim doesn’t work all the time, so what is it he does during his spare time, did he finally decide to get himself in a relationship? No, and shut up. Finding a relationship in my hometown is like mining for coal, dark, oxygen depriving, and canaries dying left and right. Where do canaries come into play in this metaphor? Yea, I don’t know either, but I still stick by it! Actually I do have a really good idea for that, but I’ll just let everyone guess. What I’ve been doing in my spare time is what every other nerd with a love of music is doing, Rock Band. Alright so the only next-gen system I have is a PS2 (That’s right PS2 not 3), but who cares that game is still badass regardless of what system I have. I actually do drums and a little bit of singing, which are both really fun, plus the make you more cordinated. Other than that well the list of games is rather long, but here goes to the best of my memory: Persona 3 FES, Saga Frontier, Pokemon, Final Fantasy IV (DS), Brain Age 2, FFVII: Crisis Core, Patapon, Gods of War (PSP), Rune Factory, Final Fantasy III (DS), Final Fantasy VI (GBA), Maple Story (Don’t ask), and others I’m sure I’m forgetting. As of right now my friend who is currently in the mountains of our fine state going to college as introduced me to that MMO Perfect World International. It’s an open beta, free to play game that as my cousin so elegantly put it, looks just like Everquest. I’ll be the first to tell you, I’m not a fan of MMOs and what they do to people, but there are occasions when I want to play one. Of course I also like a challenge and nothing seems more challenging to me than to play a healer, so of course I chose a cleric. Now whoever decided that a cleric needed ZOMG high damaging magic from the get go needs to smack themselves in the face, because I haven’t found this challenging yet. I mean yea occasionally I do get a little overwhelmed, but still. Oh and my friend that told me about it… Yea I haven’t seen him in the game yet, go figure.

Anyone else get really annoyed by the freecreditreport commercials or is it just me? Nevermind, off the subject, that’s what I get for watching television while trying to blog. Anyway that is all that I have been up to as of lately, I still lurk the forums and try to do a little work every now and again. I’m on aim a lot so if you want to talk feel free, I just normally take a while to reply depending on what I’m doing. Expect to see a few more of these before the years over, maybe 2 or three I don’t know. Depends on how productive I’ll feel, after all Brian’s leaving for boot camp soon and dunkel and myself get online at sparatic hours, so… :/

Alright since my internal sleep clock is all screwed to heck and back I decided that I would a least take a few moments to inform all of my readers (Brian and dunkel <_< ) that I have actually been doing a little bit of work with the characters that I’ve used for RPing over the months. Of course the only two that I’ve worked on are Melayna and Isaac, but that’s only because I have no intention of changing James, ie myself, anytime soon and working on Wallace Wainwright just isn’t tickling my fancy at the moment. I mean once you figured out that the old guy is probably going to be done in by some fatal disease working on his last bleating moments of life seems to be rather laborious. Of course that could be because I haven’t had to deal with any major loss of loved ones since the death of my grandparents when I was in middle school, but there’s also that fact that I am one of the few statistical anomalies that would rather stand in front of a large crowd in nothing but my birthday suit and tell mediocre jokes than be put in a hole in the ground. Call me crazy though. (Actually chances are when I go I’ll follow in my families footsteps and get myself cremated, all about the legacy thing…)

Now of course all of you are thinking to yourselves, James, you dashing and clever fiend you; haven’t you already planned to kill off Isaac in the first Aurora Chronicles? Well the answer to that is a bit more confusing than what I’d like to let on. Technically yes he does die, being turned into stone would justify being kill in my humble opinion, but he will be revived later on through other actions. The main reason for this though is because of the way I had Melayna end up developing. She basically turns all emo and goes into the whole crusade about finding a cure to bring him back to live, because somehow she feels that she is the reason for him sacrificing himself. I’ve taken the whole standpoint of this story and actually visualized it as an RPG for some console, and the results so far seems to make a rather interesting game. Sure it reeks of J-RPGs but who wouldn’t want to see a short girl wield a giant boomerang and have enough magical abilities to make Hiroshima look like nothing more than a firecracker? That’s all I plan to say for now, mainly because I’m tired and I feel like changing subjects again.

Let’s see the other project is along the lines of a new Zelda RPG that would basically be a new sort of spark to the series that I think it so desperately needs. I got the idea after watching the Zero Punctuation review on The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. This time the game doesn’t revolve around Link. The main character is a young man who is dragged away from his small village to fight in some war for the sake of Hyrule. This of course sets up for basic training and all that jazz, and you probably know where I’m going with that. Anyway near the end of the whole controls training you do actually get to meet Link who has become the prince of Hyrule, finally. He is once again the silent protagonist as always and doesn’t say anything besides his normal grunts and groans, no fanboy would ever want Link to say anything, but they’ll be pissed off at my idea soon enough. Once all this has occurred you end up getting throw headlong into a massive battle against the invading force and end up losing, that’s right even though you have control of the character you still loss. It than cuts to a scene showing Link getting throw off of his horse just as the blade in his hand, the master sword, shatters. The new character is able to make his way over to the prince and is given the broken master sword before blacking out. With the intro done I’ll probably make a full out post on the rest sometime in the near future. Look forward to it.

The clock reads 2:00 am as I sit down and log onto my computer to find that my sanctuary has once again been attacked by my clever foe. This war has been going on for so long that my ability to track it’s origin fades away into nothingness along with the rest of my forgotten memories. Which side retaliated first? Another fact that has been lost to the ever present hourglass. As I sit here and ponder about the origins of this conflict I cannot help but wonder what started this conflict in the first place. Was it something I said? Have I done this person any wrong? The more I think about it the more I get the feeling that this erupted over something trivial and has been blown out of proportion. The only reason I do not concede to my opponent is the fact that my stubborn pride gets in the way every single time. This person who’s face I have never seen before in my life has tarnished my holiest of places and continues to do so even after I myself have retaliated. I grow tired of this constant game of cat and mouse, wondering why I do not just call a truce and get on with my life. After all the only casualty of this long drawn out war is the many seconds that I have lost because of being distracted by the attacks. I sigh and take a sip of the cup of tea I have sitting next to me, telling myself it has broken down into nothing more than a childish game. Than I hit the poke back button on my facebook page. Let the war rage on.

With Christmas right around the corner and finals week approaching (Thus my sanity leaving me.) I have once again started to think up weird and strange stories to write about. So far I have three that I actually think would be rather interesting though one of them would make a better movie than it would a book, so I won’t be talking about it.

The first story I want to talk about is of course one of my personal favorites, “The Epic Adventures of Wallace Wainwright.” If you haven’t already guessed this entire story is about everyone’s clever and ruthless friends Wallace Wainwright, The Grandpa Bandit. People’s childhood’s I find bland and boring so this story is going to take place back before the Grandpa Bandit even existed. I know what you’re thinking, “How is it that Wallace Wainwright the best thief to ever live not have been a professional thief for his entire life?” And sometimes I too ask myself that question until I realize one simple fact, he never gets caught. Now it’s a common fact that all thieves are about dumb as dirt, but Wallace Wainwright only seems to have harebrained skims, but they are well engineered at the same time. Turns out that the main reason Wallace never gets caught is the fact that he use to be a cop back when he was younger. That’s where things start out in the story. Wallace Wainwright, detective and husband. Now the first bit of the story focuses on Wallace and how much of a hero he is, until of course the unthinkable happens, his wife is killed, caught in the crossfire between a police officer and a bank robber. Now if fate was kind the bullet would have belonged to the robber and Wallace would have had a just cause for continuing to be a police officer, but fate tends to take the ironic route. The fact that an officer took the life of his wife (Heh rhyming words) was too much for him to bear. He quit the force and ended up going down the dark road of alcohol, cigarettes, and cheap women. It didn’t take long for his money to run out and that was when he started to steal things. Only what he needed to get by. Now here’s the interesting thing, as time goes on Wallace’s plans go from clever to downright strange, probably because he killed so many brain cells with alcohol, I don’t know. Of course Aurora, on HMF, will make an appearance as this was the place were some of my favorite crimes took place (I even laughed about the murder of the mime though I still think that was WM’s fault entirely, mainly because I put could instead of couldn’t. I mean come on that sentence wouldn’t even make since like that… But now I’m venting and that’s for Ventrilo ). I haven’t really thought of an ending as of right yet, but it should be rather interesting.

The next one actually has a strange story behind it, but if you know me and have Ventrilo I’ll tell you on there because I figure it’s funnier word of mouth than through text.(Probably will be able to do that this Sunday, if not later…) Anyway the story is called “How Andrew f***’d up Christmas.” and is based around on of my co-worker’s Andrew. This is of course the start of a trilogy of ironic comedy stories the second one is “How Andrew f***’d up Christmas again.” and finally “How Andrew and Kyle f***’d up Christmas.” Now I haven’t put much thought into these books as I just thought up the title yesterday and the general premise of it, but like I said it should end up being a comedy. Now each story is going to take place at one of my co-workers house’s and Andrew will basically be invited and completely ruin the holiday from them, but ultimately bring them together in some sort of sappy “Oh we should be happy” kind of way. The first victim will be my boss, Mrs. Janet (Who ironically shares the same first name as my mother, go figure.) I decided to have her go first because well, she’s overly nice and would probably let someone screw up her holiday season, be pissed off about it, but she’d get over it. The second one is other going to take place at my fellow manager Kyle’s house (Kyle’s only 19 and his little brother also works for us. Plus I know his family a little so it wouldn’t be too hard to visualize.) Or the old man of our little work family a preschool teacher named Paul (I screw with him all the time at work so I figured that would make him an eligible victim for this story.) Now the third one I’m sure my readers will enjoy the most because both Kyle and Andrew get their final revenge by screwing up Christmas for me. (If I end up choosing Paul for the second one, I’ll just introduce Kyle in the third one no problem.) I decided to do this only because I figured my co-workers wouldn’t be too happy about me writing about them so I figured I would have to poke fun at myself, not to say that I don’t already make fun of myself, I just feel kind of bad about them being the butt of my joke. I’m still not exactly sure how he’s going to screw up Christmas three times, but I’ll figure out a way to pull it off, somehow…

So, what do ya’ll (I swear it is not spelled y’all and I refuse to put it like that) think about these two ideas?

November, time for getting ready for winter, turkey day, and of course writing. National Novel Writing Month officially started a few hours ago and so far I’m already over my 1667 words per day limit. The great thing about it is that I already have a pretty good attack plan for this novel, so hopefully I’ll be able to get the whole 50,000 word limit done.

The story I chose was one that I’ve had with me from all my years of Role Playing on the various forums. It’s about the life of my character Isaac, the beginning of it is set just before the RP Aurora Chronicles and describes a different character than the familiar dark and demented Isaac we all know and love. It is basically a recap of his life, the prologue shows him at the grave of his comrade Laura and explains briefly how she died. Clearly this is actually both the beginning and the ending of the story, since if I go past that whole incident than I’m getting into my project for next year’s NaNoWriMo, which I don’t even want to begin thinking about yet. Actually I take that back I did want to at least get the titles done for my projects and basically I’m doing a trilogy:

• Aurora Chronicles: The Crusades
• Aurora Chronicles: The Celtrean Wars
• Aurora Chronicles: The Eternal Peace

Clever titles? I don’t think so either, but they get the point across. Anyway I’m rambling the point is it focuses completely on Isaac’s life and after the present it goes back to the past where he lives in an orphan in the kingdom of Silvercrest, he’s only five when that start I believe. So far it kind of starts slow though there is a little bit of action to start out with, but not much. The first couple of chapters focus on how he develops into a divine knight followed by him getting involved in the Crusades. That’s all I’m willing to give away now, but stay tuned same Jim time, same Jim channel.

Harvest Moon Farm forums going down was actually an unexpected thing for me. I was quite surprised when it happened, and began to look for survivors that were not members of the troupe. (Considering that the troupe is mainly HMF members themselves.) What ended up happening was I made my way to one of the HMF affiliate forums Ranch Story and set up an account there using my HMF account. They too had noticed the forum going down and have offered refuge for any of the members that were scattered around the seas of the internet. The only problem is though, that no of the newbies of our little community were even able to find their way to the affiliate site, so as of right now the only others that I know are okay are the people who have joined the temporary board.

It seems that even they seem to be getting a little impatient about having to wait on a temporary site, with limited members and limited topics. That is why I propose that they move to the ToF forum. Sure it suffers from the same problem when it comes to members, but it is by no means a temporary site. I am even prepared to set up a village on the forum if need be, though I am still not certain about the rules of the village or if it’s going to be based off of Rune Factory or not.

Possibly the best thing to come from this event was the newest RP I created about the destruction of Aurora. Now most members were not willing to simply kill off their characters so I have had to change my plans a little bit and allow a few of the to escape. I hope it ends up turning into something like the Higurashi anime that I had watched a few months ago, though I doubt it’ll end up being that weird :P.

Alright since Brian made this and Jim “borrowed” it, he guesses that he might as well use it. He plans to us it to discuss what he’s working on, be it school work or the various RP that he and some of his comrades make. Maybe a few random rants here or there too, but nothing to major.