This past weekend, my brother and his wife were looking for a home renovation project. They had already finished work on their own home, and were looking for something new to tackle. Yes, they’re insane.

So, I gave them a project to work on. We wanted to remove our cracked and ugly front sidewalk and put something new in place. We had decided instead of replacing the sidewalk with more boring, grey concrete, we would put in some nice colorful paving stones. This decision dovetailed nicely with my brother’s extensive experience in installing decks and patios with paving stones.

The result of the project is nothing short of wonderful. See for yourself below! The old photo on the left, and the new on the right.

Old vs. New

There’s an Flickr photoset available that includes step-by-step pictures of the entire project, from before to after, and everything in between. I even added descriptions to all the photos that outline in very basic terms what we did on this project. It was a big, long, exhausting day, but thankfully it was beautifully sunny, and we were working the entire time under a very shady front yard. Many thanks are necessary to my brother and his wife for their efforts in making this project a reality.

Father’s Day was spent simply. I put the finishing touches on the sidewalk, adding a few grains of sand to one side. And then spent a couple of hours with my oldest son assembling my Father’s Day gift: a brand new hammock. My old one, purchased when I was a brand new father back in 2002, had deteriorated after years of use and neglect (NOTE: being left out in the cold and rain does not help rope hammocks stay fresh!) and it had been tossed out recently on a community large-item trash pick-up day. I had told myself that I no longer wanted a new hammock, that it wasn’t that useful, nor relaxing, and I never afforded myself the time to waste within its comfortable embrace; but secretly, I yearned for a replacement, as well as a quiet, lazy afternoon in which to enjoy it. After a couple of hours of effort (where my son Caleb probably learned a few new words!), the new hammock was assembled, and lazy loafing was engaged.

All in all, despite the sheer amount of manual labor I performed (a rarity, I can assure you – I am a creature of comfort), it was an overall productive and enjoyable weekend. I need another couple more of those before the new baby arrives.

I was able to successfully acquire my desired name in the great Facebook vanity URL landgrab of 2009. No longer am I Facebook Random User ID# 501415487. I can now be found at facebook.com/nathanielpayne. It’s a minor thing, truly, but one that I’m happy to have secured. And yes, I was up late at night acquiring the username. It was fun to watch the posts from my Facebook and Twitter friends, seeing who was able to get the usernames they wanted, and who ended up having to settle for their third or fourth or even fifth choices. I was also pleasantly surprised at how well the Facebook servers held up. There had to have been about a million users simultaneously hitting the same /username page trying to select the name they wanted. It didn’t even slow down or falter for me when I was making my attempt.

So, kudos to Facebook for enabling a great feature and making it run so smoothly. Hopefully enough people got the name they were looking for. If not, tought toodles. There’s always Orkut.

I mentioned a while back (holy crap, and it’s still on the front page) that Kevin Lawver was going to re-incarnate the long-lost property that AOL killed, Ficlets, into a new creation. And now that day has come.

Introducing Ficly! I haven’t had a chance to really play with it yet, but here’s some things I’ve noticed right away.

1) You can sign in by linking your account to either Google, Facebook, or even OpenID (which, in the end, stopped working on Ficlets). I linked to my Facebook account since I’ve been using that particular social network more and more these days. Will this mean that any story I create can be automatically published to my Facebook profile? That remains to be seen but would be an awesome feature.

2) There’s a special section devoted to challenges. I love that they decided to do this. Challenges were something that appeared on Ficlets where authors would post a challenge of some sort–such as “write a story that takes place following a future apolocalypse”, for example–and fellow authors could create sequels to that challenge with their themed creations. The fact that Kevin and the Ficly team included this as a standard feature shows that they really understood the Ficlets community. Challenges appeared organically as a result of the authors attempting to install their own form of ownership and comaraderie within the community. An inclusion of this feature in Ficly is a direct nod to that established community, and it’s well-deserved.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to digging into Ficly and writing some more short, short stories. I’ll probably post again with a follow-up once I’ve had a chance to see more of Ficly first-hand and check out all that it has to offer. For the moment, I’m just really excited to witness the return of Ficlets; even if it doesn’t have the same name, I already know it has the same heart.

Here’s a post from Kevin on the launch of the new Ficly.

My regular blog readers have probably noticed the silence these past couple of months. I’ve been extremely busy, both at work and at home. At some point within the past few months, I slightly altered the sidebar description of this blog to denote that it is reserved for “larger more encompassing thoughts, essays, concepts, and arguments” in an attempt to at least partially dissuade the fictional constructs in my mind that incessantly harp on the fact that I don’t update the blog very often. However, I don’t feel comfortable leaving the site empty for weeks at a time. I also don’t just want to throw together one of those boring “Wow, it’s been a long time, hey blog?! Hurr, hurr” kind of posts. So I thought that I would rather assemble a bulleted listing of things that have been occupying my time lately.

Online

• Working on my Nintendo-centric blog, It’s Dangerous to Go Alone. It’s a bit exhausting having two blogs, but I like the dichotomy. This is still my one true home online, but my long-form essays on how pathetic Nintendo has been lately need to go somewhere. IDTGA has been a good outlet for those rants.
• Being fairly active on both Facebook and Twitter. Facebook more than Twitter, to be perfectly honest. I see the value in Twitter, but I can’t spend hours there sifting through hundreds of tweets and engaging in every imaginable conversation. I tend to pick up on trending topics amongst my various peer groups, add a morsel of insight here and there, and scamper back into the shadows when someone points out the errors of my logic. I think it’s exactly how Kant would handle Twitter, had he not died in the 1800’s.
• Writing some reviews for Colony of Gamers. It pays the bills. Actually, it doesn’t, because I don’t get paid for that. Drat.

Offline

• Spending lots of time with family. I need to make sure I give everyone as much time as possible while we’re still just a family of four. In another couple of months, our new addition will make our lives more complicated (but far more rewarding).
• Working on completing a major project for work that will go live this weekend. After that, breathing should come much more naturally.
• Working on a novel late last year completely burned me out on writing, but I’ve now been getting the itch to write again. I spent some this weekend putting together notes on a couple of short story ideas and fleshing out a new young adult novel concept I came up with a few weeks ago.
• The only gaming I’ve been doing lately is some intermittent bouts with PopCap’s new drug, Plants vs. Zombies. I think I’m finally over the addiction, but it was really touch and go there for a while.

And that’s pretty much it. I ate and slept in there a bit, every now and again. I also caught up on the first season of Dollhouse through the magic of Hulu and I’m marginally pleased that it was renewed for a follow-up season. But those are moments pest saved for tweets, don’t you think?

I’m not promising that this post means that “I’m back!” or any such nonsense. I’m standing by the idea that I will only post if I have something nascently substantial upon which to soliloquize (sorry, my thesaurus was handy). And even then, I can’t promise that it will be something worth reading. Only that it’s something I felt necessary to talk about.

Let’s just all agree to disagree on that particular aspect, shall we? Yes. Let’s shall.

It’s been a bit too quiet around here lately. So, how about a timely trip down memory lane?

In 2001….

• George Bush officially became the 43rd president.
• Dale Earnhardt crashed and died on the last lap of the 43rd Daytona 500 (Coincidence? I think not).
• The Baltimore Ravens won their very first Super Bowl.
• I started a new career, leaving behind my beloved Half Price Books store.
• The World Trade Center was attacked by terrorists.
• Microsoft released Windows XP to the world.
• We bought a house! (That we would now desperately like to move out of.)

Yikes. 2001 wasn’t a very good year, was it?

Well, at least one thing happened that was a bright shining light in 2001. I married my best friend, Amanda. And we have spent the past eight years taunting each other mercilessly for being so short-sighted.

Happy anniversary, my dear! I love you.

There’s been a big to-do on those darn argumentative internets regarding George R. R. Martin’s treatise on how he should be allowed to have his own life and not be forced to simply churn out book after book like some sort of novel-writing automat. Several notable authors have hopped onto the bandwagon to defend Martin’s quest for peace, including John Scalzi, who delivers (what I think is) the most damning essay of them all.

Now, it should be noted that I agree with them. Authors are human beings, with their own sets of wants, needs, and desires, and they should be allowed — or, more appropriately, expected — to chase after them.

But I’m not here to defend them, because then I would be just one more small, meek voice on top of an enormous pile of much louder and more prominent voices, and that would just be silly. No, I’m here to try and explain how we all got here in the first place.

It’s actually pretty simple: it’s the consumer mentality. We have built up here in our wonderful little capitalist society a consumer mentality that people who buy things (i.e., consumers) are always right, should have their every whim catered to explicitly, and must at all times be happy about every aspect of their consumerism, or else. Just read the Consumerist for a few minutes, and you’ll see just what I mean. If our happy meal doesn’t come with a toy, if our download speeds are not acceptable, if our paint is eggshell instead of off-white, we complain. Loudly. And make serious demands of the corporations that in turn (sometimes) treat those demands seriously. It’s what we do. We’re consumers, and we feel we have a right to make sure companies know when we aren’t happy with something they’re doing — or NOT doing.

I’m not even trying to say that that’s wrong. We should demand the world from companies that promise the world, especially if we’re paying for the privilege. It’s not necessarily wrong, it’s just where we are right now as a society.

Unfortunately, this consumer mentality has leaked into our artistic leisurely entertainment devices, as well. Let’s face it, authors (in most cases) can be just as faceless as the faceless corporations we scream at in disgust on a daily basis about our tall cafe grande double mocha whip that was made with — gasp! — 2% milk instead of skim?! Oh, the humanity! Call the authorities. They must be stopped.

And so authors become victim to the dreaded consumer mentality just like the McDonald’s, the Starbuck’s, and the Comcast’s of the world. People begin to make demands and have expectations about books being of a certain quality or delivered within a certain timeframe. They complain when the roles of favorite characters become diminished in a sequel, or when a highly-anticipated novel is late. Again. They are consumers. They know no different.

Now, once again I reiterate: I am not attempting to excuse the behavior of those angry and nonsensical fools that think folks like Martin should be writing them their books and doing nothing else. I hope to someday be one of those marvelous authors that is so wildly popular, people will actually beg me to write my next novel. I could only be so lucky.

But we have to face the fact. This behavior is not going to go away. Never. Let us not forget that books — despite how influential and altruistic we readers deem our hobby to be — are a consumable media. We are consumers who purchase a product that a creator has produced. We exchange money for a good, and therefore have expectations attached to that particular transaction. As such, authors will continue to be lumped together with the rest of the faceless corporations and be reviled when their products do not match expected quality standards.

However, unlike Starbucks with its thousands of baristas, or Subway with its thousands of sandwich assemblers, an author is one person. One single solitary human being that is producing one single solitary work of art at a time. We shouldn’t be berating them for not meeting our wild expectations. We should be thanking them for creating something beautiful and amazing and allowing us to share in the finished piece.

Even in our capitalist society with our consumer mentality, we have to remember that. For as tiny and seemingly insignificant a detail as it might be, it makes all the difference in the world.

So, I’ve had this short story bubbling around in my head for a while, and I finally got around to scratching down a few of the details before they become lost to the vanishing ether of this echoing chamber of a brain I’m cursed with. As I was putting together some of the character details, a thought occurred to me. What makes a character the “protagonist” of a story?

This question came to me just as I was attempting to mark one of my characters as the protagonist of my story. I have two characters in this story that are “central” actors. One is the narrator and, essentially, the “main character” in just about every respect. She is a strong female character who grows very noticeably through the story. From her perspective, you understand her thoughts, motives, and reasoning.

However, the other central character is a male who is, for all intents and purposes, the “hero”. In the climax and resolution, he is the character that rights and wrongs and saves the day. But for much of the story, he is an important, yet a purposefully “background” character. His actions are not at the forefront of the story, but they are obvious in the telling of it from the female lead’s narrative. His existence is really only suggested through much of the story. Even though he truly shines at the end, he is never really the focus.

So, which one is the “protagonist”? According to Wiktionary, a protagonist is described as “[t]he main character in a literary work or drama”, as well as “[a]n advocate or champion of a cause, or course of action”. Well, that’s all well and good, but my female lead may be the “main character”, but is in no way a champion of any cause or course of action. My male lead IS the champion, but isn’t really a main character in the strictest sense of the term.

So, maybe I have a unique situation where the two characters together form an amalgam protagonist? Neither one would carry the story independently. It definitely requires both of them. In a sense, I suppose, they are both the “hero”.

Am I picking nits by attempting to label one or the other — or both — as the protagonist? Should I forgo this discussion and simply move on to actually writing the story? Is this even important to focus on? Could my own perception of the definition of a protagonist be essential to my ability to tell a logical and compelling story? Curiouser and curiouser. I’d love to hear other thoughts on this.

It’s a bit late for Christmas, but I don’t mind one bit.

You may recall back in late December I highlighted some Christmas music for gamers (not surprisingly, this post is still on the front page. Yes, I update THAT infrequently). In that post, I had mentioned the excellent 8-Bit Jesus album by Doctor Octoroc. Unfortunately, I never bothered to mention the problems Doc Octoroc was facing. Just prior to Christmas, he had discovered that his beloved dog needed surgery. He pleaded with his new found audience that had come to his site in droves since he released the initial 9 tracks to his album. He asked for nothing more than some donations – anything anyone could give. A $15 donation would gain you a small present in the form of a physical copy of the 8-Bit Jesus album that would be sent after the holidays.

Well, I couldn’t ignore a story involving a needy animal. Plus, the album really is phenomenal. So, I went ahead and donated.

Christmas came and went. Doc’s pup got the surgery he needed. Life went on, and I completely forgot about the album. Until today.

Here it is. Click the image for a full set of “unboxing” photos of this gorgeous album. Doc had the album professionally done, and I think the result is absolutely spectacular. I honestly don’t feel that my meager donation was really worth this amount of effort, but I appreciate the gift nonetheless. The music on the disc is really just a bonus at this point.

Thanks, Doctor Octoroc!

I mentioned a couple of posts back that I started a new gaming blog. Well, sometime soon after I started the blog, I decided to give it a more permanent home. It’s not that I don’t like Posterous, it’s just that I felt it needed something more. So now, the blog is housed at WordPress (alongside this one) and is called It’s Dangerous to Go Alone. The name is based on this seminal moment from the very beginning of the Legend of Zelda:

See? It’s not only a Nintendo reference, it’s also a co-op gaming reference. Here’s a quick round-up of some of the posts I’ve already hastily pounded out over there:

• Square Enix: sequels and remakes
• Crystal Bearers makes an odd (but welcome) appearance
• It’s like Guitar Hero if it was made in 1981
• My kids are co-op gamers already

Obviously stuff you won’t care about unless you’re remotely interested in gaming. And even then, you have to care about gaming on Nintendo platforms, which I know is a stretch for a lot of people. But it’s fun to write, and it gives me an outlet for talking about games that doesn’t take up space here. There’s also a post there about my boys, along with a picture. Get your kid fix there, I suppose. It also talks a bit about what gaming what like for me when I was a wee little one, cautiously tapping at the tiny, clicking buttons of my NES controller so very many years ago.

I might pop in one of these “what’s going on at my OTHER blog” sort of posts every now and again, just to remind those of you that still read this tripe here that there’s another place where I yammer away nonsensically about things that interest me. You know. If you’re into that sort of thing.

You’ve probably heard about this new Coraline movie coming out, perhaps? It’s the one that looks provocative, yet somewhat nauseatingly creepy. Yeah, that’s the one. It’s the movie that’s based on a novella written by one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman. You probably didn’t know that, because the commercials for the movie never even mention Neil Gaiman. I think that’s a shame, honestly, despite whatever reasons there may be for not mentioning the person who wrote the story in the commercial for the movie. Maybe he opted out of that sort of thing. I’m sure his name will be in the credits, somewhere. I mean, he only won a Nebula AND a Hugo award in 2003 for the story, so it’s not like he’s already accomplished anything with it.

In any case, here’s more reason his name needs to be attached more often to the project. It appears as though Neil has just received the Newbery Medal for his recent children’s book, The Graveyard Book, and from what I hear, it is a well-deserved award, indeed.

So, there you have it. There’s a reason (among several more, actually) that Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors. One of the other reasons is Neverwhere, but that’s for another post at another time.