A Crayon Haiku #65!

The new season of Doctor Who hasn’t been all that great, but this latest development is especially ridiculous and utterly unacceptable. In A Crayon Haiku #65, we look upon the abomination that is… well, abominable.  (4/21/07)

I don’t even know what to say about the latest episode of Doctor Who’s Series 3. Wait, yes I do. FUCKING TERRIBLE. In addition to the incredibly superfluous pig people, we have the introduction of the incredible evolved Dalek… the Human Dalek. No, really. Almost everything that made the Dalek awesome had to do with that adorable casing — from the odd decorative spheres to the croaking robotic voice to the freaking plunger arm — and yet one of the writers had the brilliant idea of having the Daleks merge with humans and “evolve” into a humanoid form with none of these iconic features. Seriously. It’s just ridiculous.

Now, I’m hoping that this Human Dalek is killed off in the second episode of the two-parter and that the Daleks decide not to pursue this new evolutionary route — and realistically speaking, something like that has to happen, since I doubt that the writers would utterly fuck up the best villains that the series has to offer — but even flirting with this kind of ruin borders on blasphemy. It doesn’t even make sense. Why would a thing built like a tank suddenly want to take on a more humanoid form? (And it’s not as if these are the fragile Daleks of old that were unable to climb stairs and could easily be beaten into submission by mobs — these things have force fields and can fly!) Dalek Sec points out that whereas Daleks are nearly extinct, human beings have survived throughout the ages. It’s not because of the humanoid shape that the humans have endured, though — it’s because the Daleks keep fucking up and getting nearly destroyed by the Doctor! Yet every time they face him, they let him live. Daleks keep losing because of their own negligence and stupidity. Which they have only compounded by taking on humanoid form. Argh. 🙁

So I had to write an emergency haiku to express my disappointment.

OH NOEZ THE SINISTER PELICAN

Like the VA Tech shooter, Wes was also condemned for authoring “disturbing” works in college. In fact, this very excerpt was deemed so horrifying that the writing tutor avoided him at all costs after reading it! Srsly.  (4/20/07)

With all of the hubbub about Virginia Tech shooter Seung-hui Cho‘s violent writings, I figured I’d post a short piece of my own that garnered a similar reaction from someone who read it when I was a student. Now, this wasn’t for an assignment, but rather a short piece I wrote in my spare time and submitted to the Morse College writing tutor. Students were encouraged to submit up to three short pieces — whether for classes or our own outside writing — to her for further discussion during a scheduled meeting. Session times were chosen by signing our names in empty timeslots on the schedule on her door; students would leave the work to be critiqued in an adjacent folder. Afterwards, usually that evening or the next day, the writing tutor would e-mail us to confirm the meeting times.

But I never got an e-mail. When I e-mailed her to see if she’d gotten my writing and seen my amendment to the schedule, there was no response. Furthermore, from that point on, anytime I saw her on campus, she would literally hide behind objects, bend over to tie her shoe, immediately begin talking to anyone nearby — anything to avoid speaking to or even making eye contact with me. I suspect that she contributed to the multiple accusations and suspicions that were leveled against me as well.

And now, many years later, I bring you one of the short pieces from that writing packet! Granted, it’s not the most frightening of the two pieces I submitted to the writing tutor — the other excerpt, which was much more horrific and about two pages longer, involved vampires slashing open the leg of a mental patient and bleeding him dry, such that the corpse was left shriveled and greenish in color — but it’s the only one I’ve been able to locate. So here, for your reading pleasure, is The Sinister Pelican (Flight of the Dread Fowl). Around the time that I wrote this, I was having recurring nightmares (which I didn’t mind, as my nightmares tend to be far more interesting than my standard dreams) involving three or four rather spooky characters, so I’d planned to write up brief descriptions of the characters and their exploits in a numbered format. This was going to be the start of the section concerning the Sinister Pelican, but after the writing tutor never contacted me again I hesitated to finish it for fear that it would become among the “evidence” used against me if I were ever arrested or caught up in a formal investigation of the ridiculous claims. With the residential college dean condemning me for playing violent video games and actually telephoning the parents of students whom I’d known before arriving on the campus to inquire about my violent tendencies, I wouldn’t have put it past them.

I don’t even see what’s so horrifying about it, personally.

Anyway, I could go off on a rant about how this latest shooting will likely result in the persecution and/or censorship of a lot of creative folks who may not exactly be Joe Normal or produce material that Standards and Practices would approve, but I’ll stop for now. I’ve been sifting through some of my backlogged content, so I hope to have lengthier fare for you next time! Until then, try not to be too dickish to your fellow humans.

A Crayon Haiku #64!

Today is Friday the 13th, so here is A Crayon Haiku #64 with a potentially spooky product from the dollar store to commemorate the occasion! Perhaps it will go well with Whitehall sandwich slices… and bread.  (4/13/07)

I was hoping to post a new poem for you today, but I decided to postpone it for the time being because I couldn’t seem to come up with more than two verses. I still wanted to have something up to commemorate FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, though, so here is A Crayon Haiku #64!

Speaking of poems, I found some older ones that I wrote that will also be making appearances on the site in the near future. STAY TUNED.

I am going to use the mayo to make some egg salad tonight.

TMNT: MANHATTAN MISSIONS

They’ve released a ton of Ninja Turtles video games over the years, but none has been quite like TMNT: Manhattan Missions (except for itself, of course). Read on to find out why it’s our favorite interactive Turtles adventure!  (4/8/07)

Hey all — hope that your Easter or respective spring holiday is going (or went!) well. If you don’t celebrate anything (right there with ya!), I hope that everything is going well with you. Enjoying the weather? It freaking snowed here this weekend. Not much, but still.

OKAY! No Easter-themed pieces today (if that upsets you, you can always reread our scary Easter cards article and view the old Easter card Hot Flash), but we do have another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game review for you! Whereas last time we took a look at the most recent TMNT title (which, by the way, is on sale at Circuit City this week for $18) , this time we return to 1991 to check out the little known PC gem that was TMNT: Manhattan Missions. Like, cowabunga, dudes! 😆

Anyway, this is a review that, at least in some respects, has literally been in the making for over nine years — ever since I’ve been able to play it in an appropriate environment, I’ve been taking screencaps of the game, some of which appear here — so I hope that you enjoy it. But more than that, I hope that you decide to give the game a try! As a game that I’ve played since my elementary school days, I really do think it’s worth at least one runthrough. It’s so keen that I even made a couple of anigifs using sprites from it way back when. 🙂

Hum, this one’s kinda gory. Also, speaking of Turtles games and moving pictures, I’ve posted a few videos of the new movie TMNT game in action on YouTube. For your viewing pleasure, I have embedded them below!

This one is a full runthrough of the first Nightwatcher level in the game. It’s sorta become my new Solitaire. And yep, Raph is fighting with spatulas.

A brief video featuring Leonardo jumping through an area and taking on some Purple Dragons. For the most part, the fighting really is this simple.

The “boss” fight against the Shredder. That sure was quick…!

And speaking of YouTube videos, TMNT fans and those of y’all who recall how bloody frustrating the first NES title was might want to check out this video. It’s flipping amazing… I watched in awe.

All for now, then. Until next time, minna-san!

THE NATIVE AND THE FOREIGNER

Yes, it’s time for another short story! Well, sort of, as “The Native and the Foreigner” is more of a brief vignette that describes an uneasy foreigner’s initial interactions with his native host. Strange customs indeed…  (4/4/07)

So last week I picked up a $10 512MB flash drive for moving files from the old desktop to the laptop from time to time. The first trial of the new toy involved me moving a bunch of my old writing over to here, and upon perusing those old folders I figured I’d post another of my old short stories to Scary-Crayon. This one, “The Native and the Foreigner”, seems like it might have been part of a longer work if I hadn’t apparently gotten distracted, but it still makes for sort of interesting reading (I think). Enjoy!

In other news, you might have noticed that I’ve modified the little WordPress blurb at the bottom of the blog’s sidebar. I’ll likely end up removing it altogether in subsequent updates, since I’m planning to move all of the information about WordPress to the footer (where the copyright tag is located) and the “What is Scary-Crayon” page, but yeah. Kudos to Theron Parlin and the WordPress 1.5 Classic template for starting me off way back when, but since then the site has been altered so heavily — mostly as a result of my having read the necessary portions of the WordPress Codex and modifying the code to more accurately mimic the standing SC layout — that the standing credit doesn’t really seem appropriate. In fact, if I remember correctly (and it’s quite likely that I don’t), the code that I borrowed from Parlin’s Minima Plus theme is located on this page, which makes it a little less than original. Not to discredit Parlin or anything, as he’s responsible for some awesome themes. 🙂

At any rate, I intend to add a section to the about/site info page pretty soon that lists the WP plugins in use on Scary-Crayon, as the info might be helpful to people who wish to replicate some of the features on the site. The rollover effects and random images are my own doing via css hover declarations and the insertion of php’s random number function in specific places in the html code (it’s quite simple, really), but I needed a bit of help to keep the blog category from showing on the main page and to generate the page navigation links at the bottom of the article archive listings. Those features are achieved via the use of Rich Hamilton‘s Category Visibility plugin and Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan‘s WP-PageNavi 2.10 plugin, though in the latter case I did a good amount of tweaking to get it to behave in the slightly different way that I wanted. As such, I have dubbed the version active on this site 2.10w. 😉 I’m also using Matt Read’s Custom Query String plugin to make it so that different numbers of posts appear on different pages of the site (more on the category archive pages; fewer in the blog). We’ve also got a new addition today in Scott Reilly’s Hide or Cut Post Text plugin, which works kind of like the LJ-cut feature and which I’ve used to relegate this text to the post page itself (which you will have seen if you’re coming in from the blog index). And I was recently using the Search Hilite plugin to give the search terms that nifty purple highlight, but for the time being I’ve disabled it because I’m not sure that I like it all that much.

We’re also now using WordPress 2.1.3. And — from this point forward, I think, unless there are any significant objections — I think I’m going to start writing in 15px text instead of 14px text. It’s not terribly noticeable at all, but the change partly has to do with my decision to start using a more streamlined stylesheet for the articles from now on. See before, the entire site used the same stylesheet, which meant that the stylesheet called for the articles still contained all of the junk I needed to define the sidebar and article blurb rules on the main page. With all of that being controlled by my WordPress-specific stylesheet now, though, I figured I might as well excise a bunch of that stuff from the articles stylesheet… but seeing as how I can’t remember precisely what I did and didn’t use in the old ones, I figured I’d just make a new stylesheet and add/replace excisions as I need them.

And finally, a question: what other kinds of things would you be interested in knowing about Scary-Crayon for the updated site info page? I’m thinking that in addition to some info on the more technical aspects of the WP side, I’ll also have a bit more info about me, a section reiterating the story of how SC got its name, submission guidelines (!), and possibly some other stuff. As always, I am open to suggestions.

All for now, then. Ja ne, minna-san.