Today's Words of Inspiration

Writing can be really difficult. Having just passed 200 pages in my very first attempted novel, I feel like I've been working for ages on something without any reward. At times it kills me not to be able to wave it in someone's face and get that immediate feedback that I so desperately crave.

Sometimes I need to find something inspirational to keep me going. It might be an idea that energises me, or reading a great book or sometimes even just a wonderful quote to keep things in perspective.

Here are the words that got me through today:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt, "The Man in the Arena" speech, 1910.

Transformers: War for Cybertron

Now, I love video games and I love Transformers but the recent video game adaptations of the (very enjoyable) first and (utterly horrible) second film were very standard, so I was trying not to get too excited about the new upcoming Transformers game... until I saw this trailer.

And now... OH SWEET JESUS, OPTIMUS CATCHES A FUCKING MISSILE AND HAS AN AXE AND THERE ARE GIANT FUCKING TRANSFORMERS WITH HEAD LASERS!!! I MUST HAVE THIS NOW!!!!

Tucker & Dale vs Evil

I am completely in love with this preview. I'm a massive fan of both Alan Tudyk (of Firefly and more recently Dollhouse fame) and Tyler Labine (Reaper), I love horror movies generally and the idea of inverting the horror genre in this way is totally awesome.

Normally I'm almost as afraid of inbred hicks as I am of zombies (Ohmygod -- inbred hick zombies!! ARGH!) but this is one time I'll be cheering on Team Backwater Inbred Hick as they duke it out against Team Douchebag from the City.

The Biggest Fails of 2009

The number one thing I ask myself when watching these videos is, "What the fuck did you THINK was going to happen?" Still, I'm glad they went through with it anyway because now my stomach hurts from all of the laughing. I just hope that most of these people lived to tell the tale... except perhaps the ones who totally deserved it.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Top 10 Reasons it Would Suck to Be An Ewok

Ewoks have such a raw deal. George Lucas initially planned to make them Wookies. Wookies, for god's sake! How much ass would that have kicked? Heaps!

Here are 10 other reasons why it would suck to be an Ewok:

10. Height restrictions suck! Only allowed on the children's rides at Disneyland. Also not allowed to operate most heavy machinery.

9. Very little designer clothing made for the Ewok market.

8. People occasionally confuse you for a koala, when you clearly descend from the drop bear family.

7. Difficult to get the girls - they don't like dating guys/ewoks who are shorter than them.

6. Even if you do get the girl, she will probably an ewok and, let's be honest, they're not great lookers.

5. C-3PO would be just about the shittiest god I could possibly imagine.

4. All that fur makes Summer a real bitch. Don't even get me started on waxing that bikini line.

3. The language barrier makes it difficult for humans to distinguish between Ewok for "You look nice today" and "Holy fucking shit, watch out for that AT-ST!"

2. Tendency to be cast as comedy sidekicks in action sequences, even when you absolutely decimate the technically and numerically superior invading force using a couple of logs and some stones.

1. People find it difficult to take you seriously when your name is Wicket and you don't wear pants.

Simile of the Day

Successful dating is like a really good magic trick. You have to get your audience to believe they're seeing something wonderful, when in fact you're just using sleight of hand and misdirection to keep the horrible truth hidden behind all the smoke and mirrors.

The True Meaning of Christmas

Christmas is fast approaching. Every year it seems to approach that little bit faster, with the speed and stealth of a rocket-propelled ninja panther traveling through the vacuum of space on ice skates. But what is it, really? Do people really think about what they're celebrating in this helterskelter day and age?

Here are a few suggestions for what the true meaning of Christmas is:

1) According to my supermarket, Christmas is a special time of eating too much shortbread and buying hilariously overpriced chocolate packages left over from Easter that have been re-branded to have vaguely Christmas-themed packaging. Supermarket Christmas runs from November - January. I think it's a season now.

2) According to my TV, Christmas is a special time where dreams really can come true, so long as they involve finally getting the parent I've always wanted after approximately 1.5 hours of hijinx involving someone temporarily and comically becoming Santa Claus. It appears that Tim Allen is contractually obliged to be involved.

3) Christmas is a special time when people remember the birth of Jesus Christ. Or his death. Or whatever, just give me my presents.

4) Christmas is a special time when people come together to celebrate the "true" gifts they have been given - friends and family. *snigger* I know, right?! These people are traditionally called "hippies" and are under no circumstances to be allowed access to your Christmas gathering. They will smell bad and feed your children communist propaganda and hash brownies.

5) Christmas is a special time when families gather together at a predetermined battleground to wage no-holds-barred psychological warfare on an epic scale. All parties are required by International Treaty to first participate in a pre-conflict ritual known as "The Stuffing of Faces With Food" in order to even the playing field. Combatants then use "presents" to punish, disappoint, mystify or even (on some rare cases) build a false sense of security in their opponents, to be exploited on a later occasion.

"But what is the true meaning of Christmas?" I imagine I hear you clamor. I'm afraid that's not for me to say. You must look into your heart and blah blah spiritually uplifting message and so forth.

All I can tell you is that for me, Christmas is a special time when people come together to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ by decorating a tree as brightly and colourfully as possible in order to lure a magical fat man in a red suit to your house and then trap him there, with the expectation that he will leave "gifts" (i.e. "ransom payments") under the tree in exchange for his personal freedom.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

If There is A God

If there is a God
He spun the stars from darkness
and made the Earth from scratch

If there is a God
He built a universe so vast
Our far distant children will never see its end

If there is a God
He is All Seeing
All Knowing
All Powerful

That means
Before He made You,
He knew what You would do

If there is a God
He doesn't care what you wear
He doesn't care who you hug on a cold winter's night
He doesn't even care what you call him

If there is a God
He doesn't want you to fight over him
Because He knows the truth reveals itself in time

If there is a God

I Have Seen the Creature That Will Eat My Soul

Seriously.

Holy fucking shit. I love animals as a general rule but this is one creature so horrifying that we need to get everyone on earth to band together, get a shit ton of bazookas and then hunt down every single last one of these hellcreatures and destroy it with extreme prejudice.

Then burn the ground and salt the earth to make sure it doesn't rise from the dead, which I presume it can do and already has done based on how this godforsaken demonbeast looks.

Meet the Creature That Will Eat My Soul (aka. The Madagascan Aye Aye Lemur):


What. The Fuck. Is. That. You know what, I don't care. Fuck you, nature.

Me Vs Dan Brown

Dan Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol, has just been released and I, like so many others, went out to the book store to grab my own copy. I think it's because I enjoy the overall journey despite the prose being riddled with annoying quirks that sometimes make me laugh unintentionally or jar me from the novel's reality.

These quirks include: Cliched / cookie cutter opening sentence; massive overabundance of unnecessary details; lame dialogue; recycled characters / events / situations; horrible metaphors and similes; incorrect word usage; extremely obvious "twists" and, really, really bad descriptions of characters.

Yet here I am, with the new book in my hands. And even more annoyingly, I know I'll probably enjoy it. Unless it turns out that this is another book about a worldwide conspiracy involving an ancient mystical order of thousands of members that actually consists of only two people. If that happens I will set this book on fire and never, ever buy another Dan Brown novel.

To celebrate the release of The Lost Symbol and in honour of Mr. Brown's success in the face of adversity, I give you my imagined version of Dan Brown's first draft of his next novel, "The Lost Artefact of Ambiguousness".

Archaeologist Peter Oldman listened in horror as the horrible beeping sound clawed at his ears like a rake claws at a pile of dry autumn leaves. He knew with the certainty that Howard Carter must have felt when he descended the steps of tomb KV62 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings that he was going to die. I am, thought Peter Oldman intrinsically, going to die.
In front of him, strapped to several bricks of C4 explosive, plastic binder, plasticizer and taggant chemicals 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane was a mobile phone. He knew with an absolute yet completely unnecessary to the plot or current action certainty that the phone was a Nokia N95 with a 332 MHz processor and 64MB of SDRAM.
The ringing stopped as suddenly as a stop sign appearing out of the fog on a foggy day and a voice crackled through the speaker.
'Hello, Mr. Oldman,' the voice sublimated. Oldman had never heard the voice before yet somehow knew he had heard it every day before now.
Peter gasped, 'What do you want with me? I've told you everything I know about the Lost Artefact of Ambiguousness.'
The stranger, who called himself Zekal'Mor rather than his real name, even in his own inner monologue, because it would keep the audience guessing about his identity for another three chapters, laughed strategically.
'Isn't it obvious?' Zekal'Mor asked in an unintentionally rhetorical way. He paused while he thought of some incredibly cliched dialogue, then added, 'I want you to die.'
Before Peter Oldman could deposit another thought, the hot heat of the explosion's explosive inner sanctum disintegrated him completely, leaving behind nothing but ash.

Symbologist Robert Langdon frowned at the ancient manuscript in front of him. Showing a careless disregard for the irreplaceable and incredibly fragile document that one would expect from a highly celebrated University Professor, he held the parchment up to the light.
He gasped. 'This is the Symbol for the AAA - the Alliance of the Artefact of Ambiguousness.'
Although this was a good time to explain what his comment meant, it was an even better time to awkwardly describe Robert Langdon's physical appearance because it is important to give a detailed description of any male characters as soon as they appear in your story.
Langdon was not traditionally good looking though he did look oddly like Dan Brown and almost every woman he met in the course of his stories found him attractive. He wore a charcoal turtleneck sweater under a tweed jacket, which was completely coincidentally the author's favourite ensemble. Strapped around his wrist was a Mickey Mouse watch to tell rather than show the reader that the protagonist had some endearingly strange yet harmlessly inoffensive character quirks.
'What is it?' Spanish astrobiologist Elizabeth Enriques enthused quizzically.
She had dark hair and her gunmetal grey eyes sparkled with a deep intelligence that was never really utilised or evidenced in the context of the story except to solve one or two minor puzzles that access to a google search engine could have solved in 20 seconds because her role in the narrative was actually just to listen to Robert Langdon's verbal diarrhea about symbols and junk.
Rest assured that Elizabeth was ambiguously but extremely hot and was an expert in bikram yoga, which was not at all relevant to the plot of the novel but would lead to at least one uncomfortably sleazy exchange of dialogue between Elizabeth and Robert at the end of the novel in which it would be "implied" that she could finally use those skills for something worthwhile - in the bedroom.
Behind them stood acclaimed philanthropist Anders Grange, a powerfully built 45 year old man with silver hair, who stalked the room like a timberwolf, back straight and proud and on two legs but totally like a wolf at the same time. Grange had been Langdon's best friend since their childhood, despite not having been mentioned or referenced at all in any of the previous three Robert Langdon books.
When Anders spoke, his voice was far away yet disturbingly close. 'I have heard of the AAA. They are very old and powerful,' he reminded. 'The legends say they possessed an ambiguous artefact that granted them power over life and death itself.'
His voice was suddenly as wistful as a blade of grass waving in the sunlight and implied very subtly that he would ultimately turn out to be the sole bad guy responsible for the supposedly global conspiracy.....