Planeswalker Sundays

On Sundays from here on out will be "Planeswalker" days, where I go a bit off topic, to delve into the other worlds my imagination inhabits when not working on a book/paper/randomness (holy crap 5 more pages due for my Novella "Bricks and Mortar" this week). Most of these worlds are provided by my love of gaming, some of them by other books I have read, and sometimes I may just post a random blog about a new story idea. My mind is never in one world for long before it moves on to the next, so hang on it will be a bumpy ride.

Today, I will be discussing one of my favorite hobbies and favorite places to go, The Multiverse created by Wizards of the Coast for their trading card game Magic: the Gathering.


I have been playing this game off and on since I was 7, or for those of you who actually play the game, I have been playing since Revised was a new release. Jeez that dates me a bit.

My favorite part about this game has always been the story-lines the guys and gals working at Wizards R&D create for this game, and as a person with a huge imagination this game plays right into it. You build a deck of spells and creatures that you, taking on the mantle of "Planeswalker", can cast and summon to try and defeat your foes. (You have been playing too much magic if you know what is coming at you when I say "Catch!") While at the same time you take part in these immense, deep stories they create.

Stories so deep that in fact I become very much a part of them in my own mind. I fought along side Urza, and Teferi, and the entire crew of the Weatherlight, I helped fend back the hordes of oncoming Phyrexians, and helped to expel them from my home on Dominaria. And while Dominaria is healing, from its fourth brush with apocalypse, I discover that Mirrodin is suffering from its own Phyrexian problems, so I vow to help them in any way I can.

For those of you who play you know what that means...it mean I have picked a side in this war, I am a friend of the Mirran's and an enemy to the corruption of the Phyrexian Horde.

We Will Endure!

(Thank you for following along with this Tangent and I hope to see you here next Sunday for what could potentially be yet another random tangent.)

O Inverted World.

from http://www.vladstudio.com/

I love this picture. Always have, probably always will. This is a rather unique view of our planet that we lovingly inhabit. It shows our world, but its a new world isn't it, and it simply did one thing, land and sea have swapped places. It has been done to look like an old cartographers map, not one of those new fangled ones you can find anywhere on the internet. This is new, and yet, this is old. This is a perfect example of who I am and what my blog is.

I am steam-punk at heart, and my heart runs on steam, this aesthetic that I prefer drives me to live somewhere on the boundary of what is new, and what is old. Loving an old world, and embracing new broad horizons, that is my goal. But the most important part is that I never let go of the old, I guess I am a vintage pack rat of a sort, though I wouldn't be caught dead being an actual pack-rat/hoarder.

And at the same time this is why I love books, especially the old ones, not only do they take you to new worlds. Usually where only one simple thing is different from our own. But the age of the book itself leads us down the dark forgotten pathways of our past. In books we discover new worlds, and in old books we discover both those new worlds, and the world the previous owner left behind.

And that, is why I prefer my leather bound spines.

Why Leather Bound Spine?

No I am not a member of a shady BDSM club, so put that out of your mind right now.

Leather Bound Spine, refers to the spine of a good old book, as real leather is rarely used anymore. The title was chosen because as a reader, and a writer, I prefer real books, in this blog you will never hear me talking about the latest 'Kindle Edition' of a book I have read. I strongly dislike this move towards technology, now don't get me wrong, I LOVE technology, I build my own computers, I upgrade constantly, and my phone has the most recent version of Android (2.2 Froyo) which makes me very happy. But I really love books, especially the old ones. My best friend got me a 70-80 year old edition of Robinson Crusoe for my birthday, and a 100 year old edition of Hamlet for Christmas. And even though Crusoe and Hamlet aren't necessarily my most favorite books, the fact I own editions that old makes me giddy. I even love the smell of old books, my friend and I are actually taking the time to develop our sense of smell to determine the age of a book, my friend can guess withing about 10 to 20 years, but his nose is more developed than mine as I usually get as close as about 40 to 50. Yeah, we are dorks.

So, that is me, and this is my blog. Thank you for visiting, and if you stick around, welcome to my world, its both new and old, and I enjoy it here.

Oh, and by the way, if you think my friend and I are crazy with our nose training, I would like to point you to an article from Wired magazine that discusses the science behind it. You can find the article here.

Advanced Fiction Writing Pre-Class Discussion

Got into a discussion about fonts today, which considering some of the other topics that have come up before Advanced Fiction, it is a rather tame one. But it started when a classmate friend of mine, who shall remain nameless until he reads this and say yay or nay about name usage from here on out, became a little flustered when he realized he didn't switch from his preferred font to Times New Roman on his printouts for class, the name of the fonts which as my memory usually does, escapes me right now, this made me feel like I should have a preferred font to make myself seem more intelligent, and considering the fact I used to have one, Papyrus (yes, yes, I know terrible font...second only to comic sans), and my phobia of picking a critically panned font because of my last choice. (Most are now asking themselves "What kind of moron likes Papyrus?") I decided I would pick one that could neither be used in scholarly type works, and doesn't even come on a computer standard. I picked Exocet, which has been used in such places as, Planescape: Torment (Video Game), Planescape source books for D&D, and Diablo 1 and 2 (Video games made by Blizzard Entertainment). While my choice may seem odd because I do not like it because of its spacing, or neatness of lines, I am at least comfortable knowing that it has in fact been in print, the aforementioned D&D sourcebooks, it does not come standard, and not EVERYONE hates it.

For those of you interested in seeing, and/or using, this font, it can be found here.

An example can be found at this website if you don't want to download it, they use it on their leftmost sidebar headings.