The Writer is a Liar.

Hello. I'm Beth. I'm new here.

I guess I should tell you about myself.

Hm. I've re-written this part a few times, now. I can't get it right. It's just that, there's not too much to say. I'm not that interesting. I'm one of those girls with dark hair and glasses. I look like I majored in English (I did). I look like I may want to be a librarian (I do). I like books, cats and muffins. I'm 21. I have a tattoo; it's from my favorite book. I like snakes, and they've been known to like me in return. I'm a pretty bad speller. I only speak English. I've never been outside the country. You see? I'm just not too interesting.

But my house is.

The first thing you should know is that my house is a Fort, located on the south edge of the city. My house was a place of ill-repute, drunken brawls and drug trade before we claimed it, sailing through the sky in a teacup like Baba Yaga. We: myself and another you're acquainted with, the dispossessed rent boy, the Earl. Our local shaman, peacock and fish-monger. We claimed it with a kiss, and wine, and music. We throw parties for the seasons and ourselves and nothing at all with Bacchanalia's that have become epic legends in our own minds. We've even gone so far as to imagine (in our silliest moments) ourselves a live-in Butler, wildly disapproving of our antics and always ready with a tray of tea if required after a particularly ribald moment.

We decorate our house in feather and bone and velvet. There is no place like us, a Fort defending beauty and spontaneity, good taste and a true enthusiasm for the art of living. We are a Fort on the south edge of everything, defending ourselves against the mundane, the boring, the hopeless.

I promise, I'll tell you all about it.

In Which the First Theme Week is Introduced

Hello!

Welcome to the blog. I'm Thomas. Hi, how are you doing? I love what you've done with your hair. No, no, not ironically - I really mean it. I accents your face. Before we get going in earnest, I think it's important to mention that Zach has made his way into the eye of the internet itself.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=4543

So, how's that for legitimacy?

As mentioned earlier, we're just saying hello. It's something I don't do every day, because I'm basically a recluse. The people that I say hello to are captives, people working in the service industry who I buy my food from. I don't mean to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat, but I do enjoy trying to lighten the day of the working class. Actually, I totally meant to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat. Someone needs to fetch me wine, and to tell that one slave to dance - his antics amuse me.

Personal predilections aside, saying hello is an interesting sensation. We are presenting ourselves with our worst foot forward; we are not who we introduce ourselves as. Our real friends know what lazy, indulgent, inept, and deliriously self-important sophists we are. Meeting someone new, we have, what, thirty seconds to convince the new person that we are witty, charming, urbane, athletic, and good looking.

Further, people carry filthy diseases that they then transmit onto you.

Meeting new people brings with it untold existential stress. Since we often seek to define ourselves through how others see us, to hold very complimentary mirrors up to reality, then, what we say and do literally becomes who we are. How many people out there have met a really cute guy/girl/other at a bar, stumbled out an awkward introduction, and then felt like leaping off a cliff, because the sad charade of their existence isn't worth the resources they're consuming? Similarly, how often do you meet some drunken, unshaved lout, and then the two of you continue to talk the rest of the night, discussing the threat of Uggo Vampires?* Meeting new people, then, becomes an inadvertant form of narcisissm. We value strangers for their appearances, because they present themselves in the ways that we wish we were. Their rejection is a confirmation of our own faults. Likewise, talking to crazy people about made-up undead menaces serves only to compliment our own social grace and tact, that we can so impolitely convince someone less than ourselves of the rightness of our ideas.

*I mention this only to let the rest of the world know - in our struggle against these unnattractive princes of the night, you are not alone.

The internet is the worst thing ever, if only because audiences are then held captive. The written word is historically unable to convey proper conversational dynamism that's needed to create proper communicatin'. Which is why, perhaps, that the upsurge in blogs (like this one!) is a good thing for society and for language. More options mean more divergence from tradition. While small-minded hill-people may smear Youtube with their hateful screed, overexposure to this lowest-common-denominator numbs our senses. All that is foul about spelling and grammar set into the ignorable norms, while people who are inventive with language fall to the much-noticed margins of popular viewing.

I can only hope that Eleven Names is able to follow through on it's original mission statement* and provide some kind of entertainment or whatever to you, the viewer. Incidentally, I did just re-read the above, and after reading "inventive with language", I kind of want to jump off a bridge. SEE? SEE?

*Zach: The internet can pay for our beer, Thomas!
Thomas: Where do I sign up?

Interstitial

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to what is, with any luck, not at all a terrible idea. My name is Zach, and I hope to be one of your hosts for the foreseeable future. There are many things to be done and said, but I vanish off the face of the internet for the weekend in a few scant hours, so let me be brief, now, so that I can be longwinded later.

There are three of us here.

We are here to write, and support each other in our writing efforts.

We are here to write with as much talent and skill as we can muster.

We will write about whatever strikes our fancy, and we will do so in whatever fashion we wish. There may, and probably will, be theme weeks.

Right now, the theme is saying hello.

Hello.

And now, so that you don't feel like this was a complete and total waste of your time, let me talk to you a bit about William Gibson's Virtual Light, which I finished today as part of my ongoing effort to read his books in the least chronological order possible, providing you started with Neuromancer. (And didn't we all?)

As briefly as I can, because I can certainly use whatever sleep I can get:

The central image of Gibson's Virtual Light is not the augmented-reality eyewear that the title references--sunglasses which manipulate your optic nerves electromagnetically, allowing you to see things that aren't there at the native resolution of your brain, without any light striking your eyeballs: literal virtual light--but the abandoned and then repurposed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which gives its name not to the book, but to the entire trilogy.

A trilogy I read in reverse order, and with other books of Gibson's mixed in between.

This is an approach that worked surprisingly well.

All Tomorrow's Parties hooked me with the richness and the weirdness of its language, the strange structure of its narrative, the way it seemed to twist and turn and cavort, and how little of the character's pasts were explained, and how little that mattered. I always knew enough to keep reading, feeling like I was assembling a puzzle.

When I got to the end, I found myself wondering about the beginning.

Idoru was next, and in it I found characters I thought I knew and characters I thought I didn't, and another winding tale where the protagonists came at a situation from all sides, met once, and spun off again in different directions, sometimes together, sometimes not. And the details of the vision and the immense skill of the writing drew me in deeper, but I was never sure which books belonged together.

So I read more Gibson, over the course of most of a year, picking up books and devouring them as I found them. But it wasn't until today that I finished Virtual Light, and traced the threads back as far as the author intended them to go, and caught a glimpse of the shape of the whole.

The bridge at the heart of the books is not so much an edifice as a space, a gap, an opportunity.
An interstice, to borrow the man's own terms. The world of the bridge is an interstitial community, as the book is a story that exists in the spaces between worldshattering events, and the characters are people between, always coming or going but never seeming to arrive.

A space outside of normal society, where a new society has been created. Characters that have been displaced from the normal context of their lives, moving in the spaces between other people's worlds, and changing.

In the spaces between monoliths, life flourishes.

Welcome aboard.

I'm out here standing on a rooftop screaming "Hey world are you listening to me?"

Hello.

Much like most other blogs out there, our inception consists of a lot of enthusiasm, but few concrete details. (I said yes before the question was finished, by the way) To put our mission as precisely as I’m aware of it, we’re three nerds, unrepentant and full of opinions. It would not surprise me if from time to time we post opinions on politics. By and large, they’ll be pretty liberal. More than likely, there will be a lot of discussion of comic books, video games and various role-playing systems (D&D, GURPS, etc) because that seems to be the overlap in our copious free time.

For an introduction: Hi, I’m James. I’m the youngest around these parts. I listen to an obscene amount of punk rock music. In fact, I write for pastepunk.com in a news and interview capacity. I also keep up ipso.vox.com, which is based towards more video games and music politics. I have a feeling that ipso will be merged with this blog, but that’s neither here nor there. Or perhaps it won’t. I get the feeling this is pushed towards more of a length format, whereas ipso.vox.com is just getting ideas and thoughts off my chest at the time they come to me. Here, I’ll be thinking about things for a while, and then writing about them, not the other way around. Quite often, in fact.

Let’s get started, then. BioWare (you might know their games: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire and other PC RPG staples…) announced they’re working on an RPG for the Nintendo DS. Righto. Could be awesome. The IP? Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog.

Yes, I’m serious, a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG, made for the Nintendo DS by BioWare.

Putting aside the feeling of being absolutely perplexed, there’s reason to be hopeful. BioWare has a pretty excellent track record with their craft, so at least in theory, the game shouldn’t have a tremendous amount of technical problems. The Nintendo DS and it’s retired counterpart, the GBA SP, seem to be smaller Super Nintendos, so at the very least, there will probably be an “old school” feeling to the just announced game. This is a nice aesthetic choice, since recently, as you may have heard, Sonic hasn’t really starred in games, so much as been whored out for snuff films, so putting an icon in the hands of a developer who appear to know what they’re doing is good news, no matter which way you look at it.

Also, as Nintendo and Square showed, you can have a genre-defining icon star in a game type that is completely anti-thetical to the original, and it can work wonders. In another form of art completely, Slayer took that kind of a leap with South of Heaven, and guess what, it’s a grower, and now full live performance of the CD is included on the reissue to their 2006 CD Christ Illusion.

It’s also an interesting bit of convergence. 10 years ago, I doubt you’d see anything like this, since Sega and Nintendo were bitter rivals. True, there have been Sonic handheld games on the Nintendo DS, but a full blown RPG made by a third party with no relation to either developer is especially interesting. I’m not excited, but at least interested and perhaps, perhaps hopeful.

Just saying that makes me happy. Hopeful for a new Sonic game.

To that end, I don’t think there’s a better way to inaugurate a new blog then with hope. To greater and greater things.