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.

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.

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

One of the points I was trying to make in that post is that I sometimes take that too far. Given the chance, I would go to the Chernobyl reactor just to see what it was like. I will (and, I guess in some cases, have) put myself in harm’s way so that I can “know” more.

In some ways, I think that this has allowed me to have a broader opinion on a lot of topics. I also hope that it has made what I scribble down here a little more interesting.

But there is one topic that almost brings me to a combination of tears, bile, and vomit. It’s human trafficking. However, when presented with information, I am compelled to read it all, to try to understand all parts of the story, and ultimately, to tell it to you all.

I’ve poked around Human Trafficking a little, reading small news reports, and generally being ashamed to be a man with typical male sex drive.

However, I recently bought Slavery, Inc, and have devoted a lot of my (very limited) spare time to reading it. I’m only 60% through it (thanks, Kindle!) but there are so many stories in there that you really wish weren’t real.

One in particular almost reads like bad horror. It is the story of a girl who had escaped the clutches of her captors after who knows how many years of being whored out. She recalls the story of a girl a few years older than her who tried to escape. The other girl was from a foreign country, and knew few words in the language beyond “Mister” and “Yum Yum”.
One day she escaped by hiding in the Madam’s car. As punishement, the remaining girls were locked in their rooms for two days without food.

On the third day they were released and fed a chicken curry. Obviously starving, they wolfed down the curry. When they had all finished, the Madam told them that they had just eaten the runaway, and that they would suffer the same fate should they try to escape.

Now, there’s no way for me to verify this story; even the journalist writing the book notes that this could simply be a mind-game. But it doesn’t change the fact that there is a concerted effort around the world to buy and sell children for sex. Even girls that are “old enough” to make the choice to become prostitutes were probably coerced into that position one way or the other.

However, as much as I wish I didn’t know that this happened, I’m also glad that I do know. I have no idea how I can put a stop to this trade, but at least I am not feigning ignorance anymore.

Anyway, in lighter news, I have basically shirked my work duties after 14 straight days on, and I’ve done a bit of an edit on the next chapter of Arctic Gale.

Please check it out, and let me know how I can improve my “Action” writing.

And now, back to reading.

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

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.

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.