and wonder why the hell it happened?

This happens to me periodically. I suck at posting updates and gallery additions here for several reasons, not the least of which being that my big projects of late have nothing to do with furry. (my latest book is a litrpg for instance)

Maybe people just like the stuff in my gallery in general, and they watch me to indicate that. Maybe they read the journal I happened to have up at the time and figured I'd be cool to listen to. MAYBE they read something they liked, but watched me rather than favorite the piece because watching will let them get hold of any sequels I might put out in the future, whereas favorites often get lost in the shuffle.

...

Maybe they're watching my wife, and figure they'll watch me too just in case, thinking it'll get em a jump on her queue. :P

That last is probably it. :)

In completely random news, my wife claims - and I can't disagree with her at this point - that I have Jimmy Neutron hair when I wake up in the morning. Maybe that'll be my next commission request. Ceb with JN hair.

I just spent the last four hours shooting the shit with former Wide Receiver Kevin Williams, two time superbowl champ with the Dallas Cowboys. One of the most laid back dudes I've met in quite a while, and MAN does he have some stories.

It just goes to prove something told to me a long time ago by a fellow in another cigar shop down in San Antone, once upon a time.

He said to me, "Son, You'll never meet a man smoking a cigar who wasn't worth knowing."

Too right.

An Alejandro Villanueva jersey.

I had a project called Dissonance.

This is WAY before Beyond the Veil, and it was the most ambitious project I'd done outside of the Artificer stories.

Now that I've got two novels written and another two planned, I figured I ought to start entertaining ideas for a second series if this first one doesn't pan out, and remembered Dissonance.

I reread all the old work I'd done on it and... yeah... >.< BUT. The world-building was good and I figured I could work off the premise, so I've started writing.

At some point in the not too distant future, I'll probably put up a sample to see if anyone would actually be interested in reading a novel.

Since I don't post journals very often I figured this state of affairs warranted one, so here it is.

Hope everyone's cruising. Take care.

The infiltration team sent to a world beyond our dimension to end the banishment of a vengeful god has failed. Owen, the lone survivor, is in desperate straits. He's wounded, deprived of all advantage, and the most sadistic warrior of the prison guard is closing in. His situation deteriorates even further as an elven army and an evil shaman take advantage of the chaos.
Used as an unwitting agent, Owen must find help and overcome all — even the will of the gods themselves — or his own world will pay the ultimate price...


Thoughts? If that were the blurb for a book on amazon would you read on?

who volunteered to beta read for me, I've updated the files to include a ToC if that's something you'd prefer having. Link's the same, just dl the fresh file.

Front and back matter will be added post edit.

So yeah, the general impression that I got from the first round of beta readers was essentially that the novel just didn't cut the mustard.

How's that for a temptation to read the second try? First one sucked, think I'll go two for two?

In all honesty though, the first round of beta readers were of tremendous help to me, and I've got absolutely no shame in asking again if anyone would like to give the second attempt a try.

Fantasy novel, ~100K words in length. If I were to pigeon-hole a genre, I'd have to say it was portal fantasy. I'm still working on the blurb, among other things. I will probably post a new journal when I DO get the blurb finished, to solicit opinions on THAT.

Please let me know either in comments or by note if you're interested. I'll be doing a loose edit this weekend and will have a draft ready on Monday.

Thanks to all who read this, regardless of interest. Hope y'all have a great weekend.

Was pretty decent.

The story was right up my alley in that it is largely a heroic tale.

I have not and do not intend to play any of the previous mass effect games, my view of them having already been tainted by all the sht I've seen on youtube already. I don't want to invest a hundred hours in a game series only to have the outcome be one of three flavors of explosion, as it were.

THIS mass effect game, judged absent baggage from the series, is all right. I spent the climactic scene all but yelling 'Hell Yeah!"

There are a few things I feel I should go ahead and get off my chest, not because anyone reading this cares but because this is pretty much the only place I have or am inclined to blog about anything, so here goes.

I played as Scott.

I shipped Vetra, and even after consideration I've no desire to ship anyone else in the game. She was far and away the most interesting and lovable of the options available. In fact I knew pretty much from the very first scene I saw her that she was, if eligible, going to be the love interest.

Cora was a self-absorbed, self-pitying half-pile of white hair for all I was concerned, and I kicked her out of the party as soon as humanly possible. None of the other options were interesting enough for me to even define what I did and didn't like about them.

Most of the moral decisions were on the light side, which is to say there were pretty clear right choices to all of them, and I say with fair certainty I got them all right given how my climax went. (read too much into that at your peril.)

I played on hardcore, which is to say the hardest mode that didn't say nightmare somewhere in it, and it was suitably challenging for the first twenty levels or so, but by the time I got to the end of the game I had sixty some odd unspent skillpoints because I didn't need them and couldn't think of anything to spend them on to make things any better. The only reason I'd have spent them is if I wanted to change play styles... speaking of which:

I went recon sniper with a secondary emphasis on close-combat cloak shotgun/melee. Popping heads in video games never gets old, and as soon as I could do it with the Black Widow, that became my preferred method for the rest of the game.

The difficulty fell off rather steeply towards the mid-game and never picked up again: I went through the final, climactic encounter on the first try with no deaths. Not bragging, rather disappointed in fact, considering as my wife will tell you, I spent about four hours assaulting the Kett base on Eos and swearing a blue streak at how ridiculously unfair it was.
(As it turns out, I was 'doing it wrong' as they say. I was trying to blitz the base, not realizing the waves I was blowing through would continue to spawn BEHIND ME and commence the raep no matter how quickly I disarmed the alarms.)

The solution was simple, and once I learned that lesson the challenge, pretty much for the rest of the game, ceased. The solution was this: when a wave spawns, stop, take a deep breath, and kill every, fcking, thing. You cannot blitz the set-pieces, which is annoying in a way.

As for the thing everyone is complaining about, the googly-eyed unfinished look and wooden faces in the cut scenes and elsewhere... well, to be honest, I gave few fcks. I can see what people are talking about, but if you choose to invest in the story they could almost be stills and it wouldn't matter. Given how little polish went into some of the scenes, stills would have been better.

The voice acting was good across the board, but standouts included the krogan (who's name I forget), Jaal, and Vetra (I may be biased on that last but I don't think so.)

The multi-player was engaging for all of about an hour, after which it became boring. REALLY boring. The rewards are meaningless and it has no impact on game play. Why it was included I genuinely have no idea as it's clearly not something they put any thought into or focused any time on.

Space travel was utterly meaningless, as is planet exploration beyond those planets you can land on. Unless you get a hard on when someone tells you the mineral composition and temperature of ye random planet, don't bother.

I'm sure some of my concerns and potentially even the unfinished look of the game will get 'fixed' as time goes on but there was little here I'd consider worth replaying the game for.

I got the deluxe edition so I could have the soundtracks.

.... that's pretty much it I think. Back to writing.

fckin' allergies. And it should NOT be hitting 80F in fcking January. FML.

Need a name for one. Any ideas?

If you are willing and interested, I am looking for a group of beta readers to inflict my fiction on.

Here's what I need from you: A willingness to read and comment on what you've read within a month of receiving a beta copy.

Here's what you get: I will provide you with a complete rough draft of my first novel for your perusal. It is NOT YET COPY EDITED. It will probably be a few weeks before I finalize the rough draft itself, so I will probably send these beta copies out in two weeks or so. Because it isn't copy edited, there will almost certainly be some grammar edits required. I'm good, but I'm not perfect.

My plans for release involve having the first two novels finished and the third at least half done before I set up my Amazon details, do the advertising, etc.

The reason I'm asking for beta readers of the first novel now is to see if the series is interesting enough to keep writing, or if I need to ditch it and go with another idea. I need honest opinions. If it sucks, tell me it sucks. I'm not looking for critiques per se, but if you can point out WHY you think it sucks, that'll help.

If it doesn't suck, knowing that will help too. (Also what you liked in particular)

This is NOT A FURRY NOVEL! It is fantasy, (high fantasy for those who care about genre details) If you don't like fantasy, please don't ask to be a beta reader.

As long as this journal is up, I will continue to accept and grow a list of people willing to give this a shot.

My printer is whirring away next to me struggling to produce the first draft of what will, God Willing, be my first published novel. I will be going the Amazon route and have not yet picked a pen name, but I have an admittedly rough yet COMPLETE manuscript spewing forth from my annoyingly loud printer.

Ye.

Haw.

Tournament this weekend up in Colorado Springs. I'll be participating, should be fun. Be aware though, some of these guys play for fcking blood, and all of them practically speaking are amazing on the table if you've never been taught how to play.

I expect to do rather poorly over all, but what the hell, I love the game... Pebble in the moonlight huh?

http://theahpa.com/product/2016-ahp.....-championship/

I was reminded again why I don't post stories very often to FA.

FA is not a place for writers. I use Scrivener to do my writing, and even Scrivener doesn't have a formatting option for whatever kind of bullshit parser FA has.

Anyway I fixed the new bit piece text file to display as correctly as FA's red-headed step-child parser can manage.

daily bit of random

My wife just showed me the Overwatch trailer and while I'll probably pick it up, I'll do so because of a spooky resemblance to another game I used to play....

Go see it.

....

What? That's it.

Deadpool was a good popcorn flick, well worth the watch. Say what you like about Ryan Reynolds... the man worked hard to bring that project to fruition, and he did not let Deadpool fans down.

I'm also kinda looking forward to X-Men Apocalypse. I liked X-Men First Class despite the flaws it very manifestly had. It escaped the malaise that has gripped the series in general since X-Men III, the Oh God Here We Go Again.

I also might see Gods of Egypt before it leaves theaters. I can hear the gasps. "But Cebelius! It's set in Egypt and the cast is a whitewash!"

So? If Thor is suddenly a girl and Deadshot is now black (Wil Smith), then Egyptian Gods can be white. I don't care really, they could have been japanese, the movie looks like a good romp. I say without reservation that I am a sucker for 4 color movies. And having not really researched it, I can say with fair certainty that Gods of Egypt will be uncomplicated with a happy ending.

Deadpool didn't skimp on the gore, or the nudity, or the swearing... but really when it comes right down to it the reason I think I liked it most was because the plot wasn't complicated, it made me laugh consistently, and the "good" guy won (and got the girl) in the end.

I like simple heroism. I don't like movies, or the people who direct them, who think they should challenge their audience. You know what? When I want a challenge I'll go read something challenging. FA Hayek is challenging. Homer is challenging. Milton is challenging. The only thing challenging about shit like "Requiem for a Dream" or "Black Swan" is finding an audience who actually wants to subject themselves to what is, in essence, mental torment.

Am I alone in this? Maybe I'm just old fashioned. I missed my chance. I should have been born in the generation that fought World War II. I'd have fit right in. No one had any questions about what constituted good and evil or who fit in which category and the movies were fantastic and usually straightforward entertainment. If someone had floated the idea of "The Human Centipede" to a director in the fifties they'd have probably been told in no uncertain terms to jump off a very high bridge and if by some miracle they survived, to repeat the task until Death did his proper duty.

When did being edgy in and of itself become a plus? Do you know what happens to people who live life on the edge? That's right: They fall off. That's why we build railings on every fcking edge we can find in this country, then hang signs telling stupid tourists and their even dumber children to stay the fck away from the railings and the edge beyond. It is quite curious to me that a culture positively obsessed with physical safety and NOT falling off the edges should so carelessly skirt one mental abyss after another with wild abandon. To laud people who offer "challenging" tales of depression, perversion, and nihilistic evil as pioneers and visionaries is the height of intellectual idiocy.

I have a confession to make. I don't watch challenging films. Fck challenging films, and fck the people who make those films. Exposing people who might otherwise never know what the true face of evil looks like isn't doing them a service.

Ever hear something like this? "The good guy doesn't always win in the end."

We now have a generation that wouldn't understand the implications or the context of that statement. You'd have to explain it to them. My generation, and all those prior to mine, would have understood it to mean that the real world isn't like the stories. Now the stories look more real in some ways than the real world. Fck that. Give me back my heroes and villains and shove off the rest. I like it better when I feel like I can aspire to something more than what IS.

Not everyone can be a hero. But by the same token, we aren't all hot messes either. Deadpool wasn't a good man to begin with, and wasn't a good man at the end of it, but his quest for vengeance and ultimately rescue was something we as an audience could empathize with and the villain was after all far more evil than Wade Wilson (who incidentally began the movie as a man in search of at least some redemption). There was no question who the good guys were, no one doubted that the bad guys were evil, and the happy end was satisfying, if just a trifle undercut by all the holes in the 4th wall. :P

That's all really. It is after all, no longer Valentine's Day and I'd hate to be lying to all the folks who stop by this dusty corner of the intertubes.

Not singles awareness day.

No one wants a whiny bitch. If you complain about being alone so volubly you have to denigrate a day dedicated to couples to ease the pain in your destitute soul, you clearly don't understand your own problems well enough to even BEGIN to solve them.

Seek therapy.

I don't post here very often anymore do I?

Oh well. Never let it be said I let the truly important things go by without a word. Merry Christmas, may peace and prosperity be upon you all, and may the joy of the New Year bring hope and charity into your lives.

Take care, and take time to call the people you love, or at least the people who loved you, especially when you were young.

-Ceb

Hide all the kitchenware.

Recently I looked in on FA and saw that I had 1400+ watch items I had yet to peruse and that there were well over two hundred journals that needed clearing out. So I undertook that task, with suitable breaks, and now I'm down to no journals (I admit I don't read ALL of them... eheh..) and 450 some odd items left in my watch list.

Yay.

In other news, Beyond the Veil is pretty dead. I want to write the rest of it in novel format and I may get to that someday, but not today, and tomorrow's not looking great either. It was a good project, lot's of fun, but in the end it just didn't serve the purpose I wanted it to.

The new project I'm working on with my wife and sundry parties is also still on hold pending greater financial stability. Don't get me wrong, I'm not having problems but I would like to hear, "We'll bring you on full-time" before I devote the kind of coinage and time into another comic that I dropped on BtV. I have no regrets, but I would gain a few if I didn't learn from my mistakes.

In other other news, I'm back in the gym on account of I have gotten sick and fckin' tired of the marriage 'spread.' I no longer work 12 hour shifts five days a week in the dead of night with an Army gym and an Army chow hall to help me stay regular with diet and exercise. I now work days, with odd off days, and enough money from contracts that, "Let's go out tonight," doesn't cause me to pull up my bank account or wonder if my credit is maxed. This is a bad thing when it comes to controlling what I put in my face. More discipline is needed.

I've also taken up Air Hockey again. We'll see how it pans out, but there's a Nationals this October down in Houston and I and a few friends of mine will be going. Back in the day I was ranked as an Expert, which means I was in the mid to upper 30's worldwide. I have a few friends here locally to play with, and one of them (when he's practised) is easily a Pro-A player. Another friend of mine flying in for the tourney is a former two-time National Champion. So I was never really that great a player, but I enjoyed the hell out of the game. This time, I'm going to take a systematic approach and actually train for the tournament. We'll see what comes of it. I doubt I'll break the pro ranks but I won't embarrass myself. At the very least I won't have the same problem I had at the last three day tourney I attended, which is that by the end of it I could barely move my right arm to shoot. I will be fit(ter) so help me Gawd.

Y'all take care now.

(TLDR): We're fine, we're all fine here now, thank you.... how are you?

Small consumer warning regarding my personal experiences hiring a tax lawyer this year.

If you have cause to do so, and in your search you come across TaxSmith LLC, give them a miss.

You may get your taxes done correctly, but the owner has about as much customer service drive as your typical fast food restaurant teen at the end of a double shift. In a country where there are more practicing lawyers than there are McDonalds employees, you shouldn't have to put up with that sort of churlish bs to get your taxes done.

As for the rest of life, I'm tapped.

Still working on a new comic idea and such, but getting it off the ground is a slow matter due to a variety of factors. I'm waiting to announce until I have something ready to show.

I haven't been writing much because between my wife, my work life, and sleep... there isn't that much time. When I do have a free moment, I'm more inclined to spend it AWAY from the computer.

Take it easy y'all.

If you care about race.

AT ALL.

You are racist.

Fuck you.

If like me you do not care AT ALL about race... stop talking about it. Apathy alone can cure racism. Because caring is FUCKING RACIST.

That is all.

The bad news is I got canned from the contract I've had for most of the last year. It was a fairly cush contract that kept me off the air planes and allowed me to handle (with your help!) most of the expenses so far arising from the surgery we unexpectedly had to deal with.

The good news is I've been playing this game for a long, long time and when I saw the writing on the wall I put my status on blast and started doing interviews. As it turns out, one of those interviews was for another position within the same company that just fired me... so like George, I let go of one vine and grab onto another... which as it happens is dangling from the same tree.

A bit more money and a bit more stability in this contract; we shall see what the future brings. Suffice it to say, network engineering is really, really hot right now, and if you're looking for a job, study up, grab a CCNA, and go getchu some.

As for the subject of BtV, there's been something of a debate going on within the group that produces it. I'm not convinced that it will be commercially viable and the pace at which we've been able to produce it is not up to par. While I firmly believe that the story has merit, without the proper pacing it would probably be better served in a written format.

Have I officially killed it? No, not yet. Wyla, Dream-Taker and I are discussing alternatives. There are a few ideas being floated, but one thing is relatively certain: if we do decide to go in a different direction; it will not be a furry direction.

There just isn't enough omph in the fandom to really propel a comic forward. I know there are several comics who make their living within this niche, and that's why I'm keen to step outside it, there are ALREADY several comics who make their living here. While there are hundreds more in the broader world, there are also millions more to support them.

Either way, we'll see.

I hope everyone else is doing well or that you're at least having fun.