RafeWorld

I had planned a while ago to put a couple of my short stories in here. At first I was hesitant. After all, putting them on the Internet puts them out there into the ether, where they can be copied, stolen, or worse, ignored. An interesting discussion by some published authors changed my mind though, so in the interests of having something I’ve written actually read instead of rotting on a hard drive somewhere, and in the hopes this will somehow motivate me to write more, I’m putting up one of my stories here.

A peek behind the curtain: The idea for this story came about when I was in college (which is when this story was written). I left one of my classes and had a voicemail from my wife, letting me know that she was dealing with some charges on our credit card that didn’t belong there. She was confirming they weren’t actually charges I had made. They weren’t. Someone had stolen our credit card information and tried to make several large purchases with the card. There was an odd feeling knowing someone had temporarily taken our identity, which gave me the idea for this story. The original idea started in my mind with one of the later scenes and I worked backwards to get the final story, which is a selection I’m actually pretty happy with.

Enjoy

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From Penny Arcade:

We constructed a guild specifically to play World of Warcraft in a reasonable way, with a focus on five-man instances and a schedule that was compatible with human lives. The trouble is that the rewards for doing the more elaborate raids are almost nonsensical by comparison, ridiculous. I’m not talking about bosses, or middle management, or whoever is being gutted tonight. Even their undead pool man, a Goddamned civilian, drops a ancient, spiked crown that peers deep the future.

So, you build your organization out to grasp that fruit. For a time, you aren’t jiggered for five mans, because now you have eight. And once the tens have arrive, you have thirteen. It’s some magical Goddamned ratio, written into existence, that ensures human suffering.

Fuck the rest of this shit. I want our next President to have managed a guild.

Having been part of several guilds in online games I’ve played, and even working as an officer in one, I couldn’t agree more. Manage the loot whores, power gamers, casual players, selfish jerks, and selfless players on a twelve hour raid and then we’ll talk about your ability to run our country. Baraden, why aren’t you running? (Beat Strong the Mithril Hearts!)

I’m a fan of How I Met Your Mother and last week’s episode got me thinking. In the episode, Ted finds out his new girlfriend has never seen Star Wars, one of the most influential movies of his life. He realizes he can’t be with her if she doesn’t like the movie, because it’s that important to him.

So, I started thinking about what movies fit that role for me. What movies are so influential upon my life, upon who I am, that people who haven’t seen them don’t truly get me. A friend challenged me to come up with twenty, which was a difficult task. After spending an hour or so coming up with my list, I have since added a couple more.

Here’s my list – in no particular order, other than how I thought of them. This certainly isn’t an order of preference by any means…

1. The Shawshank Redemption
2. Star Wars – the original trilogy
3. The Goonies
4. Army of Darkness
5. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
6. Ghostbusters
7. Back to the Future
8. The Matrix Trilogy
9. Disney’s The Sword in the Stone
10. The Karate Kid
11. Finding Nemo
12. Rounders
13. Dead Poet’s Society
14. Spider-Man 2
15. The Muppet Movie
16. The Princess Bride
17. Tron
18. The Dark Crystal
19. Crash
20. The Dark Knight
21. Pulp Fiction
22. Office Space

Biloxi Blues has come to an end, and with it several different chapters of my life come to a close. In one fell swoop, this weekend has taken several things I am passionate about and removed them from my life. To say I feel heartbroken right now is an understatement of epic proportions (to be cliche).

With this show wrapped, I am officially on a hiatus from theatre. I have no idea how long it will last. At the very least, I am taking off this winter from directing the winter play. It was an incredibly tough decision to step down this year, but one I felt I had to make in light of the changes coming in my life. One of my friends, who is a father, tells me I’ll want to take more time away from theatre once the baby arrives. I’m sure everything changes once the baby is here, but right now the idea of several years away from the stage, especially now that I’ve reached a point in life that I really appreciate the roles I’ve gotten (and have gotten some really great roles). So… theatre is on hold for right now, and I’m utterly torn up about it.

Along with this show, my relationship changes with someone I’ve become very close to over the past few months. I have no doubt that they will continue to be a part of my life, but shifting a close friendship from face-to-face to something a bit more long distance isn’t something I’m looking forward to. I will miss the daily interactions more than words can say. How someone becomes such an important element of life in such a short period of time is something only fate and the heart can know.

Simultaneously with all of these things, one of my favorite places in the world, The Adventurer’s Club at Walt Disney World, has closed. This was the final weekend for the Downtown Disney locale, as The Powers That Be have decided to shut down the nightclub part of Downtown and make the whole thing more family friendly. Nevermind that locales like The Adventurer’s Club had a strong following and never in all my time going to Disney had the place been empty, even during the off season. Obviously with the end of Biloxi this weekend, I couldn’t go down to be a part of closing the place down (something I will mourn for some time), but Peter David has a nice account of the last night at his blog. Kungaloosh Adventurer’s Club. You will be missed.

It’ll take me a few days to feel better, I’m sure. If I seem a bit more somber and withdrawn during that time, just chalk it up to a broken heart. Like all things, broken hearts heal with time… but they do take time.

I haven’t gotten to write much about the play I’m currently working on. I will post more when it’s done and talk a little bit about a difference in approach I took this time in playing a part on stage. For now, here’s a local news story about the show, which shows just how different I look in the play.

September 11th… seven years later, and I still remember where I was when tragedy struck… still remember looking up at the television just in time to see the second tower struck… the horrific images of the towers collapsing… the news of the other planes and the concern that nowhere could be safe… and the days that followed, walking around in a daze, because things like this never happen in America… right?

Wrong.

At the same time, it’s good that we don’t forget. I’m not saying it justifies everything that has happened since, especially in the current administration, but we need to remember we are fragile, we are vulnerable, and we are far, far from perfect.

For those who fell, we pay tribute with our memory. I will remain forever thankful that they are but names on pages to me, none of them familiar.

I really haven’t been able to come up with any snazzy way to state the obvious: we’re pregnant. This is the third attempt for us (the first two ended in miscarriages) and we’re tremendously excited. Well, I’m tremendously excited. Kristi waves back and fourth between excitement and nervousness. After all, she’s the one who has to carry the thing for the next seven months.

We’re currently at 10 weeks and the tentative due date is March 14th.

I was already excited about us having a kid, but I was in no way prepared for what we would see on our first official doctor’s visit (neither of the previous pregnancies got that far). I expected to see a peanut or some sort of amorphous blob on the screen when the doctor did the first ultrasound. Instead, there was what you see above, with a steady, tiny, rapid heart beating. That was the thing I wasn’t expecting. The baby already has a heart, and it’s moving along. I’d be lying if I said the experience of seeing that didn’t bring me to tears.

So life changes now. We’re pregnant, with all of the trials and tribulations that will accompany that for the next few months. For the most part, we’re fine. Kristi has had some ill feelings but no real nausea (EDIT: Kristi informed me that this was not accurate – she has been having real nausea, she just hasn’t been tossing her cookies), and she’s having to take time to rest a little more often than she’s used to, but otherwise everything seems to be healty.

Yes, I know saying anything good and Paris Hilton in the same sentence is shocking, but this is hilarious, and darn if it doesn’t make sense at times.

For those seriously annoyed by John McCain’s stupid remark, comparing Obama with Hilton, the heiress responds:

I’m feeling a certain nostalgia lately. Maybe it’s because Psych did a high school reunion episode last week and I’ve been thinking about my own pending high school reunion – fifteen years. Where does the time go?

I, of course, am not going to the reunion. My fondest memory of high school was the day I graduated. The ceremony was delayed by rain – what started as an outside ceremony moved inside – but I barely even remember that. I can remember standing in the lobby of my high school following the ceremony, looking around at classmates crying because high school was over with and not understanding why they were reacting that way. This was the end of high school! Bigger and better things lay in the future. I remember my dad giving me a graduation present – stock in the Walt Disney Company, a present that became more appropriate years later. And then I remember taking one last look around and walking out the doors forever. High school was behind me.

I can’t say I hated high school, but I can’t say I loved it either. I was neutral to it. I just didn’t fit in, and that made it hard to embrace anything about it. I got along fine with most people, but I didn’t fit in with any of the cliques or crowds. Even among the group of misfits I hung out with I tended to be an outcast. I didn’t have the grades to be the nerd some of them were, and I had a girlfriend throughout most of high school, something many of them couldn’t claim. Of course, those girls were always in different grades. Only once or twice did I find any interest in girls in my own grade. I think there’s something about being from such a small school… over the years there became a familiarity with a lot of the people around me that kept there from being any romantic interest with girls I had spent so much time around.

I didn’t go to parties. I don’t even remember being invited to one. Then again, I never heard much talk about parties going on, so I’m not certain I missed the experience. I just was there, and I think that made me even more insecure about things, to the point that I let that insecurity become a kind of security blanket protecting me from the rest of the school. But why would I want to go to a reunion to relive that?

What’s really odd is that the few run-ins I’ve had with former classmates have all been positive, even with people who I’m pretty sure disliked me in school. For reasons unknown, people remember me (I don’t think I’ve actually changed much in appearance in 15 years), and they seem to remember having better relationships with me than I remember with them. But, while there is the old-fashioned desire to see who got bald and who got fat, I just can’t bring myself to surround myself with that environment for an evening.

The real shame of it is that there are probably half a dozen people from my graduating class that I’d love to find out what happened to. Searches online have yielded no results on some of them, but that also means there’s no guarantee that they’d even show up to the reunion. Why subject myself to an uncomfortable evening with people I was more than happy to leave behind fifteen years ago just for the hope of running into a select few who might not even remember me…

The interesting part of all this… the Rashomon change in perspective… is that now I’m a teacher. I’m a passive observer instead of an active participant in that microcosm of high school life. And what I see from my observation post is that all students have that insecurity that I allowed to isolate me from so many other people. The popular kids, the non-popular kids, and even the neutral ones like I was.. everyone is insecure in their teenage years. I wish I had known that fifteen years ago. It might have made my own high school microcosm a bit easier to survive.

So Cinema Blend went to San Diego Comic Con this year. It was my first trip to San Diego and the largest convention I’ve ever been to, blowing away DragonCon by about 500 miles. The atmosphere was a little different though. It’s much more corporate at SDCC, with a constant studio presence everywhere, from banners lining the halls to celebrities popping up in just about every panel. DragonCon is more fan run, with roundtable discussions and less fanfare.

Now, I didn’t have the typical SDCC experience, because I was there with the press. Instead of waiting in lines to get into panels, I spent almost half my time waiting on celebrities to show up so I could interview them. I recorded so much audio and video, I’m still making my way through it, and still finding interviews I didn’t even remember conducting, which I guess doesn’t speak very highly of the quality of the interviews. To be fair, by Saturday, when the opportunity arose to interview someone with Disney/Pixar, my response was, “It was just Pete Docter.” I had become so used to conducting these interviews that one of the men behind Pixar, behind Monsters, Inc and the upcoming Up didn’t dazzle me. That’s called conditioning.

Most of these things I’ve said you can find over at Cinema Blend, so what part of the trip can I make unique to my personal blog? Well, how about things that affected me personally – the moments of the trip that I will never forget as long as I live. Here goes:

1. I got to see J. Michael Straczynski (whose name I can oddly spell correctly on the first try). JMS was the creator of Babylon 5, one of the most compelling television shows I’ve ever seen – and one that has had a lasting philosophical effect on me. JMS has long been a hero of mine, and getting to see him address an audience was so cool I can’t even begin to touch on it. I meant to bring my copy of his book on scriptwriting to get addressed, but it was overlooked in the packing, so no autograph for me. I tried to rationalize that with something Neil Gaiman recently wrote on his blog – that you should never meet your heroes because once you know them they tend not to be heroes anymore, but I’m bummed I didn’t get the autograph. Hopefully next year.

2. I got to see the first live performance of a Fraggle in front of an audience. In celebration of the upcoming fourth season of Fraggle Rock on DVD, Karen Prell was brought in to perform Red Fraggle, who led the audience in several sing-a-longs before debuting an episode from the fourth season. Technical glitches ran rampant through the performance, but Prell-as-Red took it all in stride and did an awesome job. Considering my love of Auppets, this was an awesome experience.

3. Following the Fraggle Rock panel, I got to sit down and interview Prell and Dave Goelz. Goelz goes even farther back with the Muppets than Prell does – he’s the puppeteer and voice of Gonzo the Great, who was my favorite of the Muppets growing up, until Kermit finally took over as my favorite. Goelz sounds nothing like Gonzo, so it was hard to associate him with the character, but it was still an awesome half-hour talking with Prell and Goelz.

4. Actually, I have talked about this on Cinema Blend, but meeting Summer Glau was an earthshattering experience. The girl is so breathtakingly beautiful, my jaw literally dropped when she entered the room and I had to go back and listen to my tape to make sure I made any sense when talking with her (thankfully, I did, so it’s just my memory that’s been blurred).

So, those are my personal highlights from SDCC 08. I have more writing and editing to do before all my coverage is complete, at which time I’ll try and post something else about the trip that’s been on my mind.