Les Mis – A.K.A Life Changing Moments

One Day More.

Another Day, another destiny.

This never ending road to Calvary.

These men who seem to know my crime will surely come a second time…

I am forever indebted to Victor Hugo and the entire body of work that followed from Les Miserables. Any of you who have read Katawa Shoujo should probably also thank the musical version of the novels as well.

Once upon a time there was an Air Force officer studying nuclear physics. In an attempt to avoid the more… physical… clubs like Rugby and AFL, he joined the AV production team of the Defence Force Musical.

Already enthralled by the technical arts, he watched, spellbound, as the performance of Les Miserables drew him into a world that would break some friendships, yet cement others forever.

Musical theatre has coursed through my veins since I was a babe. My Mother used to sing constantly, always able to find a song that somehow fit with any situation (a trait that irritated my late brother no end). So I think my brain was wired to listen to “Do You Hear The People Sing?” well before I ever stepped into that fateful theatre.

A few years ago we KS devs were asked to do an “influence map” for Katawa Shoujo; an image depicting our various influences whilst writing/drawing/programming/composing for KS. At the time, I chose Murakami, McCaffery and Higurashi. Had I thought slightly deeper, Les Mis would have found a part on that page.

I separated from the Defence Force under undesirable circumstances. Having been identified as an accomplice to an attempt at insubordination, my fate was sealed. Thankfully my years of good grades and good service saw me off with a light sentence. To this day I have not regretted any of my actions leading up to this separation.

But after I left I took a good hard look at myself (usually through the bottom of a beer glass) and discovered that what I really liked doing was bringing out emotion in people. As a person of relatively few outward emotions, I thought that this was important.

My short run of Les Mis (a total of four shows) impacted upon me, and when given the chance, I started working in Musical theatre once more. I’ve worked on a number of musicals since.

But it was not until I watched the movie adaption of Les Mis the other day that I realised why I liked the musical so much. To be sure, the songs are memorable (10 years later and I’m singing them to my daughter) and the original acting was epic. But the new movie version, with its terrible singing, still stirred that original emotion in me. And I apologise to anyone on SQ25 the other day if I unintentionally started breaking out into song.

The fact is that Les Mis is possibly one of the first things that made me feel. Or, more colloquially, get the feels. Since then I’ve been chasing that impossible high… not only of feeling those amazing feels, but also in making other people feel those same feels.

The year after seeing Les Mis performed by my troupe I signed up to act, and have since devoted my life (albeit unintentionally) to letting people experience similar feels. All of my writing, all of my technical achievements (and there have been a few), and even my way of managing my current company… all of this really comes from that drive of giving the guy or gal in the seat the best damned night of their life.

So for those of you that have been along for the ride, thank you. The feedback from KS was great, although I know that I must tip my hat to Suriko for most of the Hanako-related love that comes my way. I know that my updates are few and far between, but I most certainly mean to keep plugging away at them. I want to keep working on Arctic Gale, and who knows, maybe I’ll be able to expand upon Run as well.

To those of you who have buoyed me up over the past 6 years, thank you. special thanks to Meowshi (who first introduced me to 4LS), to the guys from4LS and WinD, and to my wife and baby.

Come July I will have finished my various (current) studies and can use my time away from home for good (instead of study).

I hope that you will all continue with me on this journey, and that, one day, at least two of you will somehow look back upon something that I have worked on as the beginning of your own journey.

Welcome to Berne

One of the great things about doing postgrad studies is the lack of sleep, the inability to spend time with your family, and the huge student loan the ability to learn things that you never really thought about.

In the past I used to think I knew a lot about Copyright; what it was, what it meant, and what you could do. In fact, I felt so confident that I worte a “licence” for the good contributors of 4LS to make sure that we were all covered in “any circumstances.”

Oh, how niave I was…

Actually, nothing that I did in that licence was wrong, but certainly a lot of the thinking was. In fact, now that I’ve had the most basic of introductions to copyright law, I can see that there is a lot of ignorance in the whole topic, from wirting for VNs, Creative Common licences, and Facebook.

I’m not going to go on an bore you; let’s face it – law is a pretty dry subject. But Facebook doesn’t own your photos. I don’t own all of the Copyright to Katawa Shoujo, in fact no-one does. But I still own a part of it; a little less that 5% of it to be precise.

If you are doing something creative, and I imagine that this includes a few people that read this blog, then you should probably know more about Copyright. A good place to start is the Berne Convention, which has now been (mostly) ratified in most of the important countries.

Instead of trying to explain the salient points here (as I have a crying baby to deal with) I’m going to leave this one hanging here. If you’ve got questions about the Berne convention or Copyright, please throw them out here. I will admit that I am not a lawyer, however I did find it interesting that a lot of the hysteria over Facebook seems to be unfounded. So, if you are intersted, please either read up on Copyright, or ask me a question in the comments.

PS Artic Gale Chapter 3 is up.

100,000 views

Man, I knew that I should check this out more often, as you guys apparently do check out my blog often enough.

Sometime this week we’ve surpassed 100,000 views. Thanks heaps, it means quite a lot to me.

Hopefully my never-ending rants and barely proof-read stories will keep you all entertained for another 100,000 hits.

Crud

Figures for Sale

Hi All.

 

I’m not sure if any of you are into figures, but if you are, I have a couple for sale. We’re going to move out of this apartment at the end of the year, so we are starting to shed a lot of stuff now (to make the move easier).

 

So if you’re keen, please check out my eBay page:

http://www.ebay.com.au/sch/cpl_crud/m.html

The power of a Secret

My life is driven my secrets. Hell, I’m driven by secrets.

To me there is nothing more exciting than knowing something more than the majority of people. When I first walked through the darkened control room at a RAAF fighter base, I knew that I wanted to have unfetted access to that space. This lead to my first job as a Fighter Controller.

After leaving the Air Force and striking it out on my own, it was the allure of the stage that tugged my heartstrings. Not that I gave a toss about what was going on on-stage, but I sure as hell wanted to know what happened in the dark recesses of the back stage areas.

Donning naught but black for many years, I learned a lot about the world, and I managed to experience things that I would imagine many people dream of. I’ve drunk absinth with a magician in a red light district. I’ve traveled the world so that I can give my opinion on technology and design. I’ve been personally thanked by the late, great James Brown. And probably more than half a million people have read and enjoyed a story that I worked on, mostly in the seclusion of a private IRC channel (possibly the most secretive of Internet chat protocols).

But yet, now that I have had a few years behind the curtain, I want more, and I feel that my obsession is going to lead me further afield. the problem with a secret is that once you know it, it’s not longer a secret. The adrenaline that accompanies the crossing of the public/private threshold only lasts for so long.

I want to leave this life having explored as much of this world as I can. I don’t mean in the “discover the lost tribes of the Amazon” sense, I mean the “Get access to the most exclusive parts of the world” type of exploration.

For example: I would love to go and visit the reactor at Chernobyl. To cruise around Pirpyat would be a dream holiday for me. Similarly I think I would enjoy a day in Centralia in the US, where an accidental mine fire has caused the city to be abandoned, including a diversion of the local highway to avoid the town.

 

And it is for this reason I bought a book about the Bechtel Corporation, called “Friends in High Places.” The first chapter describes the Bohemian Grove; a secret camp in California where the rich and powerful go to act like drunken schoolboys. That immediately set off my interest, and now I’m keen to read more. When I’m done I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

 

Anyway, I haven’t written anything more at this point. I have recently been on one of my aforementioned international trips, and hence haven’t really been in the mindset to sit down and write.

 

I hope you enjoyed this little peek into what gets me up in the morning.

I know it is out of character…

… to post two posts in one week, let alone in two hours, but honestly:

 

http://www.adagio.com/signature_blend/fandoms.html?letter=K

 

Someone made tea inspired by KS.

Little do they know that I probably ingested my body weight ten times over in tea during my involvement with the project.

 

As for the “non-compliance with the CC licence” thing… there is actually not much that the CC licence covers, especially in Australia.

I really wish I did my masters before committing so much time to defending my “rights” on teh intarwebs. Would have saved me a lot of time.

I’m not sure if I like Dubstep

I’ll be honest. I have never really associated with one type of music over another. I’ve bought who knows how many CDs and tracks, but I don’t think I’ve ever bought a band t-shirt. And a few years in the theatre industry meant that I’ve probably been to more concerts of a diverse nature than most other people.

 

But then… dubstep.

 

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hate it. There are some tracks that make me go “huh, interesting.” But I’ve not yet been inspired to spend money on it.

 

Now, I’m sure that I’m bound to invoke the ire of many by saying this, but I do like this track:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW0AuyCTBkU

That’s Chronicles of a Fallen Love by the Bloody Beetroots.

I’m not sure why, but I would really like it to be the ending theme to something that I’ve written. Obviously, this isn’t really your standard high school romance type of track. However, every time I hear it on the radio I just wish that something like this was written for something that I had written.

 

So anyway, track like this inspire me. When I was writing KS I was constantly listening to music (embarrassingly, it was mostly anime songs that I could barely understand at the time).

The emergence of dubstep as a popular form of music seems to have inspired me to re-visit the violence-fuelled writings of my past.

Whilst I haven’t really “taken the axe” to Arctic Gale in the sense that Suriko and SilentCook took the axe to the Hanako Path, I feel that I’ve started to edit AG with more vigour.

 

So please, let me know if it is working. If that is the case then I’ll go and buy the Bloody Beetroot’s CD and listen to it on repeat on my impending flight to Germany

http://cplcrud.wordpress.com/arctic-gale/chapter-1/

A Belated Happy 2013!

Okay. So I’ve fallen off the wagon. At least you’re not followers of my Technical blog; that thing hasn’t been updated in ages (kind of reflecting my divergence from the technical world).

Still, I have started going into withdrawal from the attention that I get from posting here, so here I am again.

A few days ago I thought about waxing lyrical about the whole concept of New Year’s Resolutions, and how I barely even make them, let alone stick to them. In fact, I can’t remember a single resolution that I’ve ever made. I suppose that it is entirely possible that I’ve actually stuck to a fair few of them. With a few glaring exceptions, life has pretty much been tending upwards for the last decade and a half, so I can’t really complain.

However, there is something to which I have been paying a little more attention over the past couple of weeks. A while ago I posted a poll asking about what you guys, the people who actually find my writing interesting, would like to see in a travel blog/book kind of thing. “Cultural Issues” won by a country mile. So, in-between changing nappies and getting stung by a Blue Bottle (a.k.a. a Portuguese Man o’ War), I’ve actually been writing my (hopefully one day to be finished) guidebook to surviving Japan.

Yes, I realise that this may well be the ravings of a Japanophile. One thing that is blatantly clear to me is that I am, in fact, not Japanese. Still, I’ve been researching the topic for a good 6 years now, and I have some pretty good references, so I figured it is worth a shot.

However, that’s not really what I was thinking about when I started writing this post. What I started thinking about was my Bucket List.

Whenever I think of my “Bucket List,” this sculpture comes to mind. It is near Shirakawa-go in Gifu, and it runs on a constantly-flowing Hot Spring.

I don’t have a Bucket List, at least not one that is written down. Having written this, I may actually make one and put it up here somewhere. That way I’ll have my pride to push me forward. In my head, I’ve always had “Write a Book/Screenplay” on there. It’s what led me to write The BBQ and Arctic Gale, and what lit the fire that became the burning obsession with Katawa Shoujo.

So, at the very least, I’m hoping to do a few things this year. One of them is to release my Survival Guide in ebook form. The other is to finally live up to my promise, edit “A Runner’s Afternoon” and “Final Finale” and put them together into another ebook.

And I’d like to ask all of you to actually hold me to it!

 

Happy New Year!

Even Good Drivers Die

I’ve heard a story similar to the following a number of times:

Don’t worry, I know how to handle cars. It’s only the guys  who can’t handle the power of their car that die.

I wonder what Ayrton Senna would have said to that. Or Peter Brock. Or Dale Earnhardt. Or any of the other hundreds of motorsport champions that have met their end behind the wheel.

I know the feeling that you get when you do something dangerous. I was a glider pilot for many years, have flown powered aircraft in loops, and I owned a sports car for a number of years. Yes, the rush is incredible.

But at some point you have to realise that this shit is dangerous. That means that you can very likely die.

I’ve been in Race Control for the V8 Supercars (Australia’s highest professional racing code). There are sixteen people there watching every single car, commanding teams of hundreds, all to keep the 26 drivers on the track safe. Before you fly an aerobatic maneuver, you perform a number of checks, including signalling to other aircraft that you’re about to do something risky. And you’ve usually got a parachute if there is any chance that something may go wrong.

But when you drive your car, you don’t have these support structures. You’re all alone on the roads. Even in the best case scenario, you are more than likely a few minutes away from medical attention.

I know that there is the temptation to do dumb things. You have a fast car, and you can easily overtake the 70-year-old that doesn’t seem to know the speed limit. You’ve only had a couple of drinks, and you feel fine, so what’s the harm?

This weekend, I had the honour of speaking at my Brother’s funeral. There were close to 300 people there to farewell this small country town boy.

However, part of me knows that the reason that he lay before us was that he somehow thought that he was a better driver than Senna. He made a dumb move, and within the blink of an eye, he was now killed.

Looking at this objectively, he had it coming. He overtook in a non-overtaking lane, in the wet, whilst speeding. But that still doesn’t lessen the pain that my family and I are now going through.

I know that the next time you all try something stupid that you probably won’t remember this, but in the off chance that you do, please reconsider your actions. Luckily, it was only my brother that was killed in his accident, but he may well have also destroyed another family’s life in the process.

So next time you think you can get around a slower car, or you think that it will be okay to mix drugs, or have unprotected sex, please at least make sure that you have made peace with your family and prepared a will. And please also put aside some cash to help pay for the funeral, because they are not cheap.

Just remember; you are probably not as good of a driver as Ayrton Senna.

Due to my early separation from 4LS, I don’t share the same kindred bond that some of the other do. I really wish that I did, but the amount of time I’ve have to spend on IRC in order to catch up is impossible. Besides, there are more dedicated fans that would easily outrank me in terms of “friendship”.

 

And thus, when I get the chance to meet a Dev (and they actually agree) I jump on it.

 

It looks like I’ll actually get to meet Raide next month.

 

In a complete fluke, Raide asked me to help him with his itinerary for his first Japan trip. I managed to give hi ma whole bunch of ideas before I realised that I would also be in Tokyo at the same time. So we both shuffled things a little, and now there is a very real possibility that we will get to share a romantic night in an Onsen…. It’s totally not gay.

 

I think I will try and connect more with the other devs in order to rekindle the love-hate relationship that we once shared.

 

 

Also, I’ve now scheduled the rest of The Barbecue. There are two reasons for this:

1) According to the stats, no-one is reading it at all, so it will do no harm to my reputation.

2) I have found some of my more interesting stories from before KS, including the project I was working on in late 2006 (which I shelved in order to start writing KS). I’m thinking I might clean that up and give it a shot. It’s only about 9000 words in, and I haven’t touched it for 6 years, but I still remember the plot as clear as a bell. I’ll polish up the prologue and post it for comment. 

I will admit that it is an action piece, not a high school drama.