This is What Goes On Inside My Head

INTERIOR, OFFICE. The author, ME, has just sat down at his desk.

ME: Okay, here we go! Second draft of the novel. I've gone over the whole manuscript, made notes for every chapter and scene, even got myself a nice slice of time to work in.

ONE HOUR LATER

ME: Well the prologue went well. Good rewrite of existing material, fits in with the new plot structure I've come up with. On to chapter one! Harald is climbing up a cliff...

INNER EDITOR: What the fuck are you doing?

ME: Wait, what are you doing here? I'm not done drafting yet!

INNER EDITOR: This is your second draft, asshole. Why is your main character climbing up a cliff? He was working in the woods with his brother last time.

ME: Yeah, but that was boring. This cliff is where the last battle of the book is going to take place, so it's like... bookends. And this way I can have him look out to sea and talk about how he wants to leave home, 'cause I'm going to give that to him in spades.

INNER EDITOR: Hrm... yeah, okay, go ahead.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER

ME: So Harald yells at his older brother to wait up, and goes running down the trail...

INNER EDITOR: Trail? What trail?

ME: The trail back down to the village.

INNER EDITOR: There's a trail from the top of the cliff to the village?

ME: Yeah.

INNER EDITOR: So why the hell did you open with Harald doing some death-defying climb up a sheer cliff?

ME: Well the thing about this cliff is that it's a widow's walk. If somebody gets lost at sea their wives or friends go up there to pray to Suibhne for their return...

INNER EDITOR: What's a Suibhne?

ME: He's god of the sea.

INNER EDITOR: Really?

ME: Shut up. The point is, if Suibhne doesn't answer the people who go up the cliff jump have to jump into the ocean to their deaths.

INNER EDITOR: Why don't they just walk back down?

ME: Because Suibhne will get pissed and kill them anyway.

INNER EDITOR: With what, fucking Air Sharks?

INNER EDITOR: So let me get this straight, anyone who goes up to the top of this cliff either gets a loved one back or dies, no exceptions, right?

ME: Right.

INNER EDITOR: And your boy Harald can just climb up there with impunity?

ME: It doesn't count if you climb up the cliff.

INNER EDITOR: It doesn't...

INNER EDITOR: And this Death Cliff is just there? The villagers don't have a guard up in case some dumbass kid goes up there on a dare?

ME: Well I don't know! There's like these... arches along the trail, and if you go up there to pray to Suibhne they try to scare you off so only serious people try it.

INNER EDITOR: But if you go up the cliff by climbing he's totally fine with it.

ME: Yeah. Suibhne respects strength.

INNER EDITOR: Brilliant. Hey, genius, do you understand how stupid that sounds?

ME: Ahh...

INNER EDITOR: I mean it's bad enough you named your main character Harald. Everyone's going to end up calling him Harald Fucking Potter, the Boy Who Ripped Off J.K. Rowling.

ME: Shut up! It's a meaningful name! For reasons!

INNER EDITOR: Sorry, sorry. Hey, different topic, remember you've been reading Mistborn lately?

ME: Yep. Great book.

INNER EDITOR: Love that magic system, right?

ME: Oh yeah.

INNER EDITOR: So how does yours work again?

ME: Uh... well, there are eight gods, and you pray for the power to cast spells...

INNER EDITOR: Any particular kind of spells?

ME: You know, spells... associated with each god's, uh, domain...

INNER EDITOR: And that sorcerer you introduced in the prologue, he uses what kind of god's magic, exactly?

ME: Ahh...

ME: Okay, I didn't think through the magic system as well as I thought.

INNER EDITOR: Or the cliff.

ME: Or the fucking cliff, yes. These are not crippling problems, I can still push forward on this draft.

INNER EDITOR: Suuure, you can do that. Hey, you want to talk about how Harald Potter's gonna hike across an island and back before his father dies of dehydration praying on the Death Cliff?

EXEUNT.

HabitRPG: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

In my ever-continuing quest to keep myself on track, I've been experimenting with HabitRPG, a website that promises to help you build good habits and track your tasks by treating your life like a roleplaying game. Earn gold and experience points (EXP)! Level up! Lose health because you hit snooze on your alarm clock for the fifteenth time! And so on.

Welcome to the world of task lists.

I've been using HabitRPG for nearly a month now, and here's what I know:

The Good

The system works. The basic premise of HabitRPG does a great job of modifying your behavior. Good habits give you EXP, so if you add "Take the stairs" as a habit, you'll damn well take the stairs, because if you don't take the stairs you're going to lose hit points and your little sprite man might die. Daily tasks act the same way, except on a timer. You can also tweak your version of a "day" to start and stop at, say, 3 a.m. to cover staying up past midnight on a spontaneous writing jag. To-dos, tasks with no time limit, will gradually become worth more EXP as they age, which counter-intuitively manages to train you to complete overdue tasks when you get a chance. And once you've done enough tasks, you can treat yourself to a simple reward for a small (or large) amount of gold.

You know why World of Warcraft is so addictive? HabitRPG knows, and it's using that power for good.

It looks good. The user interface is clean, simplistic, and does the job in a pixelated style. Your character is roughly customizable to fit a variety of appearances, and you can upgrade him to wear cooler gear and hang out with pets as you progress. There are ads on the page, but they're as unobtrusive as possible and can be dismissed if you donate to the development team.

It's free. As noted, you can donate to the developer, but it's not required. Enjoy the full features of the site for absolutely no money.

It's social. If you feel up to that sort of thing, you can form a Habit Adventuring Party (patent pending) or spend some time chatting with other HabitRPG folk in the tavern. Another plus: while you can log in with Facebook, HabitRPG won't spam your wall for no reason.

The Bad

The system is easy to cheat. If you play by the rules, you'll find yourself making new habits, but it's very easy to avoid any consequences. Check off your dailies! Ignore your bad habits! Basically if you can't stick to the honor system, this website is useless.

Tasks are tricky to organize. You've got habits, dailies and to-dos, which is fine, but the to-dos can be hard to organize, especially if you build up too many to fit on one screen. It's not great to find out you were supposed to bathe the dog two weeks ago, but the task ended up five screens down on the list. Some sort of folder system (perhaps based on the recently-introduced tags) would help make it easier to keep tasks organized.

The Ugly

The user interface ranges from unstable to broken. I'm not sure what code base HabitRPG uses, but the GUI is tricky at best. Simply marking a task complete might require refreshing the page three times, and moving a task entry can send it flying across the screen for no reason. These aren't things that should be happening in a modern user interface, even one that's still technically in development. I'm hoping the planned mobile apps for HabitRPG will be an improvement, but they need to get these things fixed regardless.

Overall, HabitRPG has some kinks that need to be worked out, especially in the user interface, but it's still a worthy tool to help you increase your productivity. Especially if you like EXP.

Ten Ways To Look At Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is a great game. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with that assessment. Ken Levine's tale of Booker DeWitt, the down on his luck Pinkerton detective and Elizabeth, the girl who can give him his life back had been winning awards left and right even before it came out, and now looks likely to take home Game of the Year more than a few times.

But if you had to sum up Bioshock Infinite in a sentence, what would you say, exactly? That's not an easy question for a game with a story this complex.

Here are ten possibilities. Note that from here on the SPOILER WARNING is very much in effect, because I'll be flat out summarizing the game's ending.

It's A Major Award!

So a few weeks ago I entered the Caramel and Magnolias contest held by author Tess Thompson. I entered the contest because, well, I was on this wacky kick where I thought I'd win a tablet if I entered something like eleventy billion blog contests offering to give tablets away. Because they are out there and I am strangely lucky at contests authors run on their blogs.

I did not win the tablet. But I did receive an email after the contest closed:

"Congratulations!  We are excited to inform you that you are the winner of an autographed box of Kleenex in the Caramel and Magnolias contest giveaway hosted by author Tess Thompson.  Thank you so much for participating in the contest and helping to spread the word about Tess's exciting new romance release."

Oh. Okay!

I double checked the website and found that yes, this was an official booby prize that was being offered, if not advertised. So I said yes, by all means send me the autographed box of Kleenex. Why not? This is a major award! I'd get the box labeled Fra-gee-lay and everything!

And only a few weeks later, I got the box. Or, well, wrapped parcel.

It was not labeled Fra-gee-lay.

Not at all labeled Fra-gee-lay. But it was autographed, I'll give them that.

Now, I am not blaming Tess Thompson for this. Every piece of correspondence I got indicated that she'd outsourced the contest to persons (whom I will not name) that were doing all the heavy lifting of picking a winner and sending out the prizes.

And I'm going to be polite to those persons, too, because along with the bent/spindled/mutilated box of Kleenex I got a polite letter apologizing for the delay in sending out the Kleenex, offering me a free electronic copy of one of Miss Thompson's books. So as far as I'm concerned I'm getting the real prize, fair and square, and a great little gag gift to go along with it.

But I do have four words for anyone looking to run an author's giveaway contest of their own.

Corrugated cardboard shipping containers.

Tears and the Telephone... The Recovery of A Thousand Dollars From Bob the Banker... Everything Takes an Hour in Texas...

The first I knew of the problem was when my wife slammed her hand on the desk and demanded my phone.

I'd just helped her pick out a new Dell computer to replace her Inspiron, which I was going to upgrade and use to replace my computer - a win all around. Then Sarah opened her email and found a message from her bank letting her know that they'd declined the charge, for her protection. Because my wife is a 1337 haXX0r who'd bought an apron and a desk earlier that day to test out the credit card she'd stolen from herself.

I handed Sarah her phone, in case they were checking numbers, and went off to heat up a frozen pizza for dinner. I'd been fighting our home wireless network all day, and after that evil bastard I had no desire to witness the coming conflagration.

I could hear the conversation getting more and more heated, and then "Dave!" Sarah saw me come in to the office and told the guy on the phone "You're going to have to talk to my husband, because I'm about to start yelling at you." Then she handed me the phone and burst into tears. "It's the Gremlin," she explained, and went looking for tissues.

I put the phone to my ear and heard... something. Bob (not his real name) had a thick accent, and there was static on the line. I could have handled one or the other, but the mix blended into a symphony of gibberish and I could only make one word of his out of ten. In return, I had to yell all of my answers and tried to keep them to three words or less.

I eventually deciphered that the bank had canceled the charge to prevent possible fraud, and Bob had been trying to make Sarah call Dell to resolve the problem, because the bank certainly wouldn't do it again. Finally Bob agreed to conference me into a call with Dell to have them put the charge through again.

Let me be abundantly clear: Bob the Banker was going to call Dell's support system with me.

We waited on hold together for ten minutes, during which Sarah came into the office for a hug. Finally we got through to Al, who took my order number and offered to transfer us to the department that could actually rerun the credit card. Then he hung up. This is Dell's standard practice, apparently.

Bob called Dell back. Another ten minutes on hold. Chris picked up and took my order number again, also my address, name and phone number. He transferred us to the Very Important Department, which we got to fifteen minutes later. Donna picked up the phone and said "Hello?"

I opened my mouth, and then Bob began yelling into the phone at the top of his lungs right over me. So I shut my mouth and let him go on, then I noticed that Donna was saying "Hello? Can you hear me?" I said "Hello!", but Donna had already hung up. I heard Bob mutter "Are you serious?", and by God I felt for the man at that point.

Bob gibbered at me in a futile attempt to get off the phone, but I had him conference us in to Dell again. This time we got Jose, who in defiance of every law of telecommunications was the easiest man to understand I got the entire evening. He put us through to the hold system for the next twenty minutes.

At this point I was an hour into the call and was getting a little loopy. Sarah had brought me the pizza and a drink, so at least I wasn't hungry, but the entire call was so absurd that I couldn't stop giggling.

Finally Ellen picked up and offered to run the charge again. I confirmed with Bob that yes, it would work this time, the charge was run, and everyone confirmed that it had gone through successfully this time.

Ellen hung up and Bob asked if he could do anything else for me, a question so jaw-droppingly stupid that I assume it was part of his script. I blanked, trying to decide if I should demand he raise Sarah's credit limit or lower her interest rate, when Sarah saw my expression and snatched the phone out of my hands to lay into Bob for a good five minutes.

And that should have been that, but like any good monster movie Bob came back for one last scare. I found an email in my inbox saying that Sarah's contact information had been changed, something I should not have gotten. Apparently Bob, out of confusion or pique, had swapped my wife's email address with my email address, something I had never given him. When I worked up the nerve to tell Sarah she immediately called the bank, and the first thing she got was an automated message asking her if she wanted to activate her new credit card?

I took Lina outside to run around in the back yard. Every man has his limits.