everything else - nicolle c jones.com

my eyes are on strike

Posted by nicolle in everything else on 04 30th, 2008 | 1 Comment

Somewhere between getting my drafts in order for the competition deadlines, my daily bill-paying 8 hours in front of the computer, the compulsive Sam & Max playing, weekly overseas television downloads, beefing up my digital design portfolio and the 3-year old eyeglasses prescription I’ve royally fraked up my eyeballs. Since I’m incapable of moderation, I’m stuck trying to come up with some way to take it easy while still getting things done. But nearly all of my awesome and sustainable activities involve bombarding my retinas with photons.

The top of my list right now for awesome is Sam & Max. Can’t really explain why the little things I enjoy for years and years sometimes suddenly possess me until I’ve somehow learned everything there is to possibly know about them. They just cancerously grow in the back of my mind until WHAM! I burst into flames. Because cancer is prone to spontaneous combustion. Bet you didn’t know that. So now with the Sam & Max Season 2 episodes, which is full of great vaudevillian noir & mania, and chars my brain with witty writing and lateral thinking puzzles. I also really like Telltale’s episodic game format. If you’re looking for something to play, look no further.

Speaking of game activities, while in Greenville for JF+Sessoms celebrations I got to play a little of Mario Kart Saturday night and Sunday morning. Very fun. I’ve always liked the idea of online competitive racing and the Mario Kart miis-en-scene (see what I did there?) is a nice blend. I don’t know why I can’t bring myself to buy a Wii. I want one, I fully expect to own one at some point, but as I keep coming across it in stock it just becomes a Meh. Unlike guitars, which I now seem to purchase at the drop of a hat. Console gaming is very much a social activity for me I guess. I think it’ll take another title or two like Mario Kart, where I’ll be able to hook up and compete with friends online, before I dump the Gamecube.

And just because Bart asked for it:

Revising my definition of Busy

Posted by nicolle in everything else on 04 12th, 2008 | No Comments

I don’t do a lot of heavy thinking and I don’t know that I’m particularly suited to the task, but I recognize that there is this pattern that I fall into on the blog: I go on a spree and hack out a lot of posts about any sort of subject, baseball, hockey, television shows, whatever comic or cartoon I’m jonesing over at the time, scripts, my philosophy on writing, etc… Then I go for a month or two without posting and upon coming back I talk about how busy I was, blah blah blah.

This version of ‘busy’ so far has included traveling, hanging out with friends, watching and doing all that stuff I mentioned above, mundane day-to-day, work etc– but not what I’d ideally like to consider ‘busy’ to be. I want BUSY to be all those things, my hobbies and scripts in production, my own short films off the ground and at least three brand spanking new scripts a year. I want to function off of four hours of sleep a night. I want to freak people out with the amount of shit I’m doing. I don’t particularly know how I’m going to do this, but that’s what I’ve decided I want my BUSY to be, so if you have any thoughts on how I can best do this, let me know.

Now, I have a really screwy work ethic. I say it’s a short attention span, but the consumption and assimilation of new knowledge makes me a little compulsive. My hobbies consist of:

playing guitar;
drawing, design & artwork;
web design, simple programming & stuff like The DARK KNIGHT ARG;
computers, simple electronics & soldering;
video games (TF2, Sam & Max ep2, Oblivion, Gamecube stuff currently);
1000 years of literature, comic books, television & movies to catch up on;
randomly deciding I need to learn Japanese, or 3d modeling, or glasswork;
making t-shirts, buttons, stencils- Hell, anything I see that hits me just right I wanna do, see, or make.

But besides all that, I have to write scripts and I have to learn how to do that as best as humanly possible. I mean it sounds dumb when I say it, but I don’t care– that’s the definition that works for me. If you don’t get it, no hard feelings, I’ll buy you a beer and we can talk about baseball or hockey.

So I guess I need to get busy, dammit. Feel free to make a pun if it strikes you– bonus if you work in Hugh Laurie or George Clooney (who we all know reads the blog).