Space Junk
I’m in the mood to make fun of myself
So while I was moving into my new place, I came across several notebooks from elementary school all the way up through high school. Looking at them now, I have to laugh at my inability to spell and some of the random drawings I came across. I decided I’d show off some of the ones I found since they seem… quite strange.
Apparently as a kid, I couldn’t spell “Hitler” correctly. Why I selected that as a word for that hangman picture, I have no clue. So supposedly Nazi Germany used to say “Hail Hithler” instead of “Hail Hitler” . Also, “donut” planet? I didn’t know there was a planet of doughnuts.
Speaking of Hitler, I watched the cartoon Dilbert on Netflix and got these as suggestions:
Old Space Junk character list. Only three of those characters remain from the original list I created over 10 years ago, and they’ve changed compared to that. Also reminds me to get off my butt and complete my book. It’s now three years past its due date. I didn’t realize I came up with the idea that early though, apparently two years earlier than my first word document.
The old Intro from Space Junk in 2003-04. Only thing that still remains is the first sentence, minus the character name. I enjoy seeing all those spelling errors. I think I wrote that while being bored in my high school English class.
Old species list from 2003-04. None of those are used. Hell, even the later part of my plot was tossed not too long after this picture.
Going even older (the 90’s)…
This was in a book that was dated from 2nd grade if my years are correct. 999mph is kinda slow for a spacecraft or airplane. Also the amount of fire coming out of the engines is concerning. I had a habit of labeling who was the pilot/copilot, me and a childhood friend flying Swat Kats style (big cartoon when I was a kid). Also, why is it bombing an empty platform? Waste of ammo (or energy).
I actually drew a comic book series around the same time as the picture above that when I saw years later cleaning out trash in high school. That comic book series is actually what Space Junk came out of, although the original story and meaning has long been trashed and replaced with stuff that makes more sense. Who knew that random drawings from my childhood would give me an idea for a book 7 years later (well now 17 years later)? Maybe I’ll scan that eventually, I still have it with the other stuff.
Curse my inability to draw
So, being done with college now and having a somewhat more predictable free time schedule, I decided it’s time I attempt to dedicate more time for my very neglected projects.
I’ve never been quite too fond of the current theme I have setup, I wanted something a bit more… neonish, dark but somewhat scifi for a theme. Older versions of this site that I never got off my butt to finish always had a black background with either blue or green text, attempting to mimic the old monochrome monitors of the early 80s. I still want a variation of that, but themeing WordPress seems to take up a bit of my time. I have a prototype theme I think needs a bit more work, so I’ll clean it up soon and launch that as the primary theme.
Next is the logo. I’m a horrible drawer, personally I haven’t done much besides cad drawings and schematics in probably 5 years. Stuff for fun even longer than that. As a kid, a few friends and I used to draw these really embarrassing (in my eyes now) comics depicting humans fighting various alien species and some times humans of the opposite sex or different countries. It was something that led to me being made fun of by people, which I honestly didn’t really care about at the time since I thought they were wonderful. That stuff dropped off in middle school, when I started to gain interest in doing fanfiction and began to teach myself about computers. I rediscovered the comics I drew as a kid a few years later in high school when I was trying to find leftover school supplies. On the back of one of the comics was a plot guideline for the entire series we had planned. That guideline became the rough edges for my incomplete story Space Junk.
As for the logo, the idea is a variation of some of the old Strangeness Networks logos I made on paper back in high school when this site was set up to be an “alternative media” website. It never took off because we all lost interest a week in. Basically, the site was supposed to display a different logo every 24 hours, usually something unusual. One logo was the sites name drawn with a smoke trail of a Saturn V rocket (yes impossible). Another was with frogs. Some were kinda plain, for example one was a schematic drawing for a building but instead drew the site name, whereas some were super unusual as they involved measuring equipment or kitchen utensils. My idea for a logo was a combination of all of the above, each random object representing a letter for Strangeness Blog. I was thinking of a rocket drawing an S, the T being a fork and spoon, the R as a ladle, and so forth. I know I did want the L to be a ruler and the G a extension cord. Think of it like the Google logo when it changes for special occasions. Also, if I could figure out how to integrate the lochness monster for the “ness”, that might be awesome, who knows?
I purchased strangenessblog.net the other day, and I intend to move the site over to that. What happens to strangenessnetworks.com, I’m not sure yet. I intend to set a 301 “Moved Permanently” message for any webcrawler that hits this blog to be sent to the new domain. I don’t intend to do away with the old domain as all my emails go to it, but I’m debating having a go with possibly doing a media hosting site a year or two down the road again. For now it’ll meet the same fate as bigbiteindustries.net, mainly a redirect to this blog. I don’t feel right letting that domain go even though I have no idea what to do with it. I do offer subdomains for strangenessnetworks.com if people are interested, for now.
Speaking of Space Junk, yes, I will actually upload chapters soon. I actually finished rewriting Chapter 1 the other day. A weakness I seemed to notice with my writing from 2007-2008 was it was all damn dialogue, so you had little to no idea what the characters were seeing or experiencing, just what they were saying. I actually have a complete chapter guide, plotline and everything done for one story, and a transition into a second story, but that’s another blog post. I really wanted each chapter polished enough to the point that I don’t have to go back and revise anything as much so I could possibly make a pdf of the entire at the end with little modification and make it look much like a real ebook that can be read on a tablet.
I was in a debate of finishing a old fanfiction series I started writing before Space Junk. I did revise several sections and started uploading them to fanfiction.net a few years ago, but stopped right before the good part. I might possibly work on that a bit for the heck of it. I read back on it last week and noticed some continuity errors that kinda are nagging me now, which is why I’m now considering it.
Strangeness Blog turns One!
Strangeness Blog is now 1 year old. As a way of telling myself to get off my ass and actually post something, I have posted the prologue to my story “Space Junk”.
I wrote this chapter last July, and then forgot about it until the other day. Hopefully from here on out, I’ll at least try to roll out a new chapter a month or so.
I made some changes to my plot line a bit from the previous revision. This was necessary since I’ve kept the sane time and location when I started writing it back in 2007. It was set to take place in the year 2014, but seeing it was a year away, that doesn’t seem plausible, so I set a generic time somewhere within the next twenty years or so. In addition, I’ve pulled a bit more current events in relation, since I want to make the time period seem a bit like the beginning of a very doom and gloom situation.
I’m also in the middle of developing a nice looking theme for WordPress at the moment. For someone who hasn’t touched HTML in the past decade almost with the exception of using very basic tags to do posts on sites elsewhere, getting anything that looks nice seems to be an uphill battle. My goal is to try and get a retro looking theme (think the old monochrome green monitors with a melting text logo). Since my spring break is in a few weeks, I think I’ll try to spend some time working on it.
Curse laziness
So… after throwing out most of my website and switching this site over to a blog where I can do long, drawn out educational rants (usually), I’ve never really bothered fixing hyperlinks across several old pages I had posted. One of which is my book I’ve been writing since 2007, Space Junk. Basically, I copied the old html pages to wordpress pages and never bothered fixing the hyperlinks that listed chapter names. Since I’ve decided to rewrite various parts I’ve already rewritten (this would be revision 14 if I recall), I just decided to disable the links for the time being and hide them from being accessible here on wordpress until I am certain I have most of my errors in the newer draft removed. Seeing that I’m currently working a full time job and doing full time credit hours at school, this basically will take a while like usual. I’m still aiming for a 2014 completion date for getting the whole story written, but for now, I don’t think I’ll get any of it done for the next few months.
Writer’s Block
I’ve tried to work on revising my story a bit… although its harder than I thought it would be.
The plot of the entire story was designed all the way back in 2003, with a few large changes made back in 2007, along with the first introduction which got stalled at chapter 4.
As I stated before, I’ve had to make a few changes to a good part of the story due to the fact that back when I came up with the idea, 2014 was a long ways off. Changing aspects of it to make it a more generic time somewhere in the next 25 years seems harder than it looked. Instead of using names of politicians, I’ve had to craft up a few… in addition, try to make it as reasonable as possible.
I guess my problem is more the details than the story itself. If I actually decide to do a dead tree version, it’d be nice to be a bit beyond 100 pages, wouldn’t it?
Actually, ideas of this story are even older than 2003. Some bits are based off of a comic book series me and some childhood friends drew way back in elementary school. The idea of writing it down came later when I was going through old junk to throw out. Coming across the 6 books, I decided to scan through them… although many didn’t have any captions at all, I got up off the floor and decided that I’d try and do something other than Ed, Edd, ‘n Eddy fanfiction.
I kinda wish I had the guts to put some of those online long ago before I lost the disk with most of them on it. Some of those were pretty good and I spent a lot of time working on them. Two chunks I still have, one titled “Eds in Space” that’s on fanfiction.net and updated whenever I decide to fill in gaps from the missing word files, and another that was an Eds’ 4th of July special that involved lots of arson. That one I could probably put up whenever, its only missing the ending.
