Tumblr has stolen all my websites updates for the last month without me even noticing. I am insanely oblivious to essentially everything.

My apologies, internet. Guess I’ll catch you up with some things;

Exterminators and Sad Robot will both be seeing updates within the week, so mark your calendars. But mark them in pencil because we all know how I am at this point. I will also be doing another experiment in donation based writing when I post my most recent novella. This is the one I was writing while in chat a few weeks ago and was forcibly made to read an excerpt from by the 20 weirdos who actually care enough about this stuff to be in a chat with me. Did I say weirdos? I mean loyal fans and comrades. In any event, the novella is finished and turned out even better than I had hoped.

I have also begun to set mechanization in motion for something sort of big. It is still in the early stages though so I can’t really talk about it, except to let you know that if you are thinking I might be starting an electronic publishing house for writers and artists of the -punk, avant garde, and extreme left nature you might be psychic.

Yesterdays post was supposed to be about Tumblr but ended up being about me, I’m very self important and think the couple hundred people a day who read this actually give a crap about what I think about anything that isn’t video games or dick jokes, so this one is now about Tumblr.

As anybody reading this knows, I’m a social networking addict. Well, maybe not an addict, but I realize the value of having huge amounts of friends and followers on various social networking sites and how it relates to developing a following in entertainment/writing/art/etc. Plus I genuinely enjoy interacting with people and learning new things or getting to know new personalities that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to get to know. This leads to me having every single one in existence. Hell, I still log into my makeoutclub account occasionally. Mainly I stick to Facebook and Twitter though. Although, I did start a Tumblr, which any self respecting hipster doofus probably should have already, but I was late to the ball. When I started it, I had no idea what I was going to use it for. I mean, I post videos and music and all that stuff here already, so Tumblr really didn’t seem like it was going to serve a purpose.

Until I figured I would resurrect my “play a rom a day” project over there. One of the reasons I stopped doing the MaelstROM-a-day was that I simply didn’t have time to dedicate a review at the level that I would like to games that were 20 years old. Plus my style changed so drastically since the last time I did that and now, there is just no way I could balance the two. It takes me a real long time to do reviews, I mean this Mount and Blade review is taking a while because I’m teaching myself olde English for it, and my Final Fantasy XIII review still isn’t done yet because I’m waiting on some multimedia effects from a friend of mine. I don’t do normal reviews, which you may have noticed, so it takes me longer than most to get them out. This goes back to my post yesterday about being spread thin, if I just focused on reviews like a real professional it would probably only take me a day or two, but whatever.

Anyway, if you want to keep track of the new Rom-A-Day, go over to my Tumblr account and follow me! Or else.

So I should point out I’m kind of a weird guy. I wouldn’t say I’m crazy, not normally at least. I have pretty stable and pragmatic views on everything except for possibly my strong liberal leanings and my desire to see reliance on religion removed from our realm of reason. Everything else I do and say is generally just geeky, but not crazy. That is, except for things that revolve around my writing. You, dear reader, have probably gleaned by now from my reviews and fiction, plus my posts on the process by which I write, that I’m a little bit nuts when it comes to my “art” if you will.

One of these things are my recent reliance on sleep deprivation to get through particularly tough bits of writing.

Yeah, I know, I know. Unhealthy and the exact opposite of what you are “supposed” to do before you start writing. Usually around the 48 hour mark, which I’m staring down right now, I start to write and see what happens. Generally nothing too interesting, and then I pass out. This time, however, I’m attempting to make it three days without sleep before I even start to write. It is a bit of an experiment to see what my brain does with fiction, more out of curiosity than any real function. Actually, more often than not, the stuff I do write during a battle with anti-sleep usually ends up being incoherent, but the last entry in the Sad Robot saga was finished after breaking through the 36 hour mark and it turned out incredibly well even for me.

I find the brain to be fascinating, and I like experimenting with my own. Lacking sleep can cause incredible cognitive disability, not to mention hallucinations, aches, pains, an inability to accurately heal, and various other things that really aren’t too pleasant. But I find that near delirium focusing. You have to stay engaged and active or else your brain is just going to go “ok man, fuck this, bed time” and shut you down either for half a day of sleep or something they call ‘microsleep’ which is kind of a cross between a blackout and a minute long power nap.

Another reason I like using sleep deprivation as a writing tool is because of the effect sleep has on your prefontal cortex. For those who aren’t brain dorks, the prefontal cortex is the part of your brain that controls things like morality, societal control, expectations, knowledge of consequences, and decision making. Long story short- it fucks up your personality and goals. This does interesting things to writing. With the ability to judge what your consequences your actions will have, it makes it harder to think of things like rewriting or even the story making any sense. That might not sound great, but for somebody like me who has Constant Rewrite Disorder it helps to see what my brain wants to do with a story without the rest of me trying to restart and rewrite things- it is a removal of a filter. It also makes it so you kind of step out of yourself for a bit. My stuff is usually weird and dark, but Sad Robot is kind of light and silly, so it was necessary for me to get out of my own brain to finish the last entry and focus myself on being able to “think” that way for future entries. I’m more curious to see what a more extreme time of sleep deprivation (3+ days) will do to my writing. I doubt I’ll start drifting into psychosis or writing House of Leaves 2 or anything, but the idea of lacking the ability to second guess what I write even at a basic level interests me deeply.

Essentially I am telling you all this as a warning. If anything gets posted from this point forward, it is probably going to be interesting.

And I don’t mean that I have a young gymnast, I mean I am a dirty whore for every social networking site that exists so I started a Tumblr.

The plan is that I will be using it for crap I can’t get on my Twitter because it doesn’t fit into a haiku (I kind of backed myself into a corner on the haiku thing) and will also be, and I’ll await your rejoicing through e-mails about this, the place I will be posting my return to the “Rom a Day” feature I used to do here when here was an actual blog and not just me posting crap about myself because of how self important I am.

For those who weren’t aware of my existence before the last month or so, the Rom-A-Day/MalestROM was a feature from a website I used to work for that I brought over here sometimes- it was a brave attempt to play every ROM possible. Somebody once did the math and said if I played one a day it would take something like 60 years. The problem was that between doing current video game stuff and working on fiction there was no way I could do full reviews for games, so I stopped doing it. Tumblr kind of gives me an opportunity to just play something and slap it up there with a quick and dirty description. So, you know, there is that. I’m currently trying to beat the entire Metroid series when I’m not working on the next Sad Robot, Exterminators, short stories, Ripten (Bad Company 2, Final Fantasy XIII, and Resonance of Fate reviews forthcoming), or anything else I’m spreading myself thinner than Picard’s hairline with. I would complain, but that would be a big disingenuous since life pretty much kicks all kinds of dicks right now.

I have just been awful to you, blog.

Three weeks without so much as a hint of Sad Robot or Exterminators, and no new short stories to boot! My production of topical hilarity in video game news form has also been halved. I wish I had some interesting excuse for you, but I don’t. The last part of Sad Robot I began working on, and the short story I promised, have both become a bit longer and more detailed than I anticipated. This has caused me to slightly drop off the face of the planet, mostly thanks to the fact I am so pretentious I yell things like “I CANNOT BE BOTHERED WITH A FIVE MINUTE BLOG WHILE I CREATE!” Then I slam my fists down and my quill pen and ink go everywhere.

I promise I’ll be better, blog. Starting right now. Expect a deluge of delightful drivel.

Also I’m going to see Evelyn Evelyn in Boston, and feel that you all should also. They are such delightful girls.

I was sent this link with the message “Hey man, i’m pretty sure that if you wrote dog books in dog language for dogs, this would be your fan base.”

I think it was supposed to be a compliment. But you guys are so much more adorable than these puppies!

Anyway, I took a little time away from Ripten just to refocus myself on my fiction nonsense. Except more video game posts and reviews coming up next week- that should enthrall many of you who are scratching your heads going “why is my ALL TIME FAVORITE video game journalist rambling on about depressed robots and sci-fi nonsense.” This week was kind of a wash thanks to loss of power/internet and having to dig out from underneath SNOWPOCALYPSE 2K10. I’ll still have a new Sad Robot up for you but I’m pushing it back to Valentine’s Day because, well, it makes sense.

What I mean by that is, add me on Twitter. It is the easiest possible way to get a hold of me and I begrudgingly use it despite the fact it is clearly vapid and… you know what, screw you. I like it.

Sometimes you all surprise me. The handful of people who actually check this website and, by some absolutely bizarre stretch of the imagination, call themselves fans of mine make it impossible for me to ever get down about anything. I just got an e-mail from someone asking if I was stopping updates for the Exterminators and another from someone else if I was done with video game journalism. I guess from my last couple posts it made it sound like I was done with both, but I’m not. Exterminators will start seeing updates again, and I dialed back my video game journalism commitments so I could focus more on my fiction stuff, I’m still writing full time for Ripten.com- so a no to both questions. Thanks “CupcakeCreator” and “Chad_Vader” for giving a shit about what I do. I’m going to assume the former isn’t the One True God of Cupcakes and that the latter isn’t the real Chad Vader (let me know your twitters and I’ll post them here), but either way I thank you for the sentiment. Knowing people give a shit makes it a lot easier to stay on the ball.

I may end up putting up the next bit of Sad Robot a little earlier than expected just because you people make the circuitry and wires where my heart used to be so fuzzy.

Well, I started writing a blog post that turned into a generic “here is a couple pages of Exterminators / I have big news for you soon about my writing” post and it kind of blew up. The last time I said I had big news, I started writing for Ripten. The awesome thing about that is how many hits it is starting to send over here. I guess people like my writing. Now that I’m getting a ridiculous amount of extra hits, I’m really going to start focusing on my fiction. I’m going to pry your eyes open and feed it to them like this is Clockwork Orange. Exterminators, I should warn people new to this, is not the best representation of my ability. It is a writing experiment.

You see, I have rewrite OCD. I don’t know if that is a legitimate thing, but let’s just pretend it is for now. I have so many finished pieces, from short stories to novellas and longer, that I have never let see the light of day. The reasons for this are two-fold; I have a crippling superstition about showing work that isn’t finished, and I don’t consider work finished until it is published. The fact I haven’t been published yet kind of lends itself to the fact I don’t have any work up here but snippets of stuff. Video game journalism became an outlet for me. I love to write, writing is the most important part of my life and always will be, but without the ability to show my fiction off due to my superstitions and anxieties I didn’t really have a true creative outlet. I started writing about video games in the style you guys recognize last year- and it was a caamora for me. It opened up the flood gates of my creativity. When I looked at the video game journalism world I saw kind of the same thing. Reviews were all roughly the same style, all the features and opinion pieces have been done, and news posts were pretty much one gigantic circle jerk from post to post. I won’t say I want to change that, because that is ridiculous and I can’t stand games journalists talking about games journalism, but I just want to offer up a different style. A different voice. And I think I’ve been successful with that so far, and I think now that I’m with Ripten I’ll just get more successful with that. Which is awesome considering everything I do is apparently a “don’t” when you ask other games journalists.

I kind of took my eye off of why I started writing about video games though. I’ve said that I’m a ’starving artist who uses gaming journalism as his medium’ and that is true. Entirely pretentious, but true. One of the things that helped me was having an editor, whether it be Chad Lakkis over at Ripten or the absolutely underrated Sinan Kubba over at The Game Reviews, who helped me hone things. My writing with an editor is always better than my writing without one. I don’t have an editor with my fiction stuff, so it kind of made me regress in a way. I feel like writing, and all art really, is such a personal thing to the writer or artist. That probably sounds corny, but if you’ve ever felt dejected because something you did wasn’t well received, you understand better than you think. Even if an artist doesn’t admit it, they put a piece of themselves into their work. You sell a little bit of yourself with every word, every paint stroke, every note. You do this because you want to connect your art with someone else, you want your vision to resonate with someone else. Even though I do some pretty out there experimental reviews, and even though my news posts are my own style, I still haven’t felt creatively fulfilled, and I realized the roadblock was my rewrite OCD and my superstition. I peeled back the layers and figured my superstition about showing my work before it was “finished” was really just an excuse to hide the fact I worried it wouldn’t be well received. It was a snake eating its own tail when you think about it. I wanted what I showed people to be perfect, so I rewrote it constantly, and it was never perfect so I could never show anyone.

A few weeks ago I bit the bullet and decided I was going to let people “watch my method.” Essentially, I was going to write stream of consciousness for a few hours a week and post it up with nothing but the most basic grammatical editing. No matter if something pained me or I thought it could be done better, I was going to show the absolute skeleton of my writing talent. If it sucked, then all wasn’t lost because I knew I could still rewrite and improve- much like my work through an editor, if it was good then I knew my anxieties were misplaced. So tomorrow night I will be posting another bit of Exterminators, and now I will make damn sure I update it every week since I have an extra couple thousand of eyes on it now.

I digress, that isn’t even why I made this post. Like I said, an artist always shares a piece of himself and most of me is long winded. I can’t do it through music or painting, so I do it through writing. It is tough when your artistic expression generally looks as interesting as a bank statement. Anyway, I’ve been seeing other people write about their years on their blogs, so I figured I would let you all in on the best year I’ve ever had professionally and the worst year I’ve ever had personally. Read the rest of this entry »

Just realized the link for the December mix CD was broken, whoops! I should check my e-mail more often. Thanks to the six people who A) told me of this over the last week and B) blew my mind by showing that people actually come here. I guess I should start updating more.

Link is fixed now.

As penance, here is an album I probably should have had on my Top 50 of last year and just forgot about. Mount Eerie’s Lost Wisdom. I don’t really like Mount Eerie all that much, but anything with Julie Doiron on it is going to get a big ole thumbs up from this guy.

Website redesign tomorrow due to an unfortunate relationship fail which means that any comics that were in the pipeline are currently and indefinitely shelved, that means I have more time for non-comic fiction though so expect some coming up, finished a novella that is a tribute to my one true muse- Lady Gaga, going broke because of lack of freelance gigs, article this week pushed back a bit due to idiocy on my part this week, apology to TheGameReviews. I have just summed up an entire news post in less than a sentence, and people said brevity was my weakness.

Also, if you don’t find this funny, I don’t know if we can be friends.

I’ve been neglecting my little pet writing experiment lately due to the pitfalls of needing to scrounge up money for my bills, but no longer fair readers! My stream-of-consciousness-no-planning-ahead sci-fi serial continues now. I have moved it over to its own section of the site, but I will make sure to update the main page just to let you know that a new entry is over there. The general idea for those of you tuning in late is that I’ve developed pretty terrible OCD about writing fiction and end up outlining, planning, or just rewriting everything I do to death. I also have a terrible superstition about showing my work to people before it is finished. In order to beat all of those negatives out of me, I am doing a serial without even cursory planning- entirely stream of consciousness. I write until I’m bored and then post it as a part of the story. I only give it a cursory edit job and I won’t be allowing myself any rewrites unless I absolutely have to fix some glaring plot fuck up. The link to the right of this post (the one that says EXTERMINATORS in CAPS EAGLE) will aggregate all of these bits in once place from now on.

Anyway part 002 of the story is up. The talented Tara (Russian Housewives) no longer has to be hanging on her cliff about my last entry. You happy now!

Also expect a few design changes and some artistic expressions that don’t look as visually appealing as a bank statement over here as the gorgeous rainy island dweller Rebecca Holdcroft will be moving her art in soon. Or at least she better be or else a stern talking to will be in order.

I have had a touch of the zombie this last week and, thus, have not been able to reward you kind readers with updates. So, as a penance, I will provide you with some Ink & Dagger. I will have a few articles up in the next few days and, now that I am not a member of the walking swine dead, I will be posting not one page, not two pages, but FIVE pages to advance Exterminators forward.

I can legitimately tell you that I am surprised how interested in it some of you readers are. I’ve gotten a few e-mails about it and I’ve noticed I get more hits on days when I update with an Exterminators entry than I do for anything else. Don’t worry, I’ve noticed, and if that is what you all want to see well, of course I will abide. So expect more fiction to fill the gaps here.

For now though, Ink & Dagger.

You may be noticing some changes here at my our humble blog over the next few days, as a new member will be joining the fray. My better half, the lovely and incredibly talented Rebecca Holdcroft will be joining things here and using this place much to the same capacity as I am. You will get to see some of her fantastic art and see some of our collaborations when she gets settled in. The design of the site will be changing in order to feature her art and the new direction of the blog. You can see that she already has her About Me section up, so check that out if you are interested. Hopefully within the weeks ahead we will begin to post some bits from the comic we are working on for you to digest with your eyeballs. There is talk about us doing a webcomic or two, but who knows. We both love drinking a bit much and tend to forget these ideas fairly quickly.

Being a starving artist couple is awesome like that.

So it has happened. I, the brave and wonderous Gavin, have experienced what you mortals refer to as “The Red Ring of Death.” I’m not particularly surprised or bothered by this, as I don’t have many 360 games I need to review currently and the ones I did need to do, I have already finished up. Plus this is a 360 from 2006 that hadn’t had any problems until now, so I consider myself in a rare group for that one. It is a bit frustrating though, I seem to have atrocious luck with electronics and failures- luckily I’m fairly adept at conquering foes such as this. Tomorrow, if I’m not entirely lazy, I will be traveling to Home Depot to purchase the tools I need to vanquish the evil that is the RRoD. It doesn’t seem to be the most difficult thing in the world, I will report back for debriefing when it is finished.

I actually got an e-mail asking me what was up with the site and why I haven’t been updating the serial novel. Well, a lot has changed in the last couple weeks. I’ve found an artist who is interested in the project and we are beginning to work together to find a way to make this as interesting as possible. I want to do the build up to the story right, and my photoshop/artistic skills just weren’t enough. On the plus side, the serial novel itself is as done as it needs to be while still allowing me wiggle room with plot elements when feedback starts coming in. The addition of an artist doesn’t mean this is going to become a graphic novel or comic, but moreso that we will be working together to provide you all an interesting experience aesthetically. The negative side of things is that I now can’t give you a date for when it will (re?)begin.

In the mean time, you can check out some of my video game coverage at FACEOFFgames.com, I am also pitching ideas to a few other websites in order to get more experience and hopefully start taking off a little in this field. I’ve also, apparently, left Hardcore Gamer magazine due to some issues that don’t need to be revealed here.

The incredible plus of working for FACEOFF is that it has afforded me some freedom to be able to, and I know this is going to blow your mind, ACTUALLY START UPDATING HERE! Look for a lot more music posts and geek nonsense, plus my own flawless opinions, in the coming days. I mean it this time.

Don’t worry, kind readers, there will be more music and such up today. I’ve had to get through a bunch of reviews that will be visible at Hardcore Gamer and haven’t had a boatload of time to dedicate here lately. I’ll be posting some ROM reviews (old school IAC lolz) and some music as it feels pertinent when I’m finished this review of NecroVision . I also wanted to let the eight people that read this site know that the serial novel is finally coming to fruition over at And The Sun Stayed Set. The format is going to be as follows; I’ll be adding two or three pages once or twice a week until the story is done. I have a beginning and an end, and most of the major plot elements already finished, but I want to give myself room to move around if I feel like a plotline isn’t really going anywhere so nothing is set in stone. The best way to look at it is that I’m writing a novel, and I’m letting you guys see the creative process in exchange for feedback. For the next month I’m going to be posting elements and images from the story in order to get you SUPER EXCITED about it. Nothing you see is really going to make that much sense out of context, but that is kind of the point.

So go check it out, and come check back here for some postings today.