Dimensional Warriors Fan Fiction: The Return Chapter 24

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My one condolence is that out of everything I do this is the least popular. Therefore even when I post late or make horrible mistakes I don't have to worry. Though it does get sad when I do awesome things and no one gets to see them.

Anyway this week:
Saturday: Professor Astonishing Comic
Monday: Weekly Review
Wednesday: Dimensional Warriors Comic
Friday: DW Fan Fic

Javier Aladren: Rough Cuts: Inconsolable

We are now moving into his more recent work. Everything from here on out is not in an absolute complete state. This one in particular has a couple of audio glitches, but the beat is nice and the lyrics are interesting. This is a good place to be for those who like to critique music (so not really me) because constructive criticism is still usable in this stage. For my part all I can offer is tune the vocal part down, don't mumble one part and maybe boost the instrumental.

Lyrics will come when they come.

To Determine who Wants Death

Political Blog Update

I promise I'll have Javier's song up soon. I just need to ask him a few questions.

Dimensional Warriors Comic 44

Weekly Report: 11/19-11/25

I'll be honest, a little thing called Thanksgiving occurred this week. And while my typical reaction to this time of year is to hole up even further into my anti-social cave of wonders and ignore that the rest of the world exists, my brother arrived from Ohio. What's more he brought with him Dragon Age: Origins. And it wasn't until he was hooking up the virtual IV to my arm that I realized I was going to get absolutely no work done over the next three days. Sure enough three days and half of a game later I woke from my stupor to a dirty house and an inflated gut. The moral of the story is binge anything always has horrible consequences later. I also got a first hand lesson on EA's customer service philosophy of "go fuck yourself".

Do I regret it? No. Had an excellent turkey day even if the meal was substandard. My pie was amazing though.

But that isn't to say I have nothing for you guys. See, I have backlogged tons of writing (the official word count of the entire story so far is 55,000 words as of tonight.) So I'll go ahead and post up an excerpt from the final part of Book 1: Into the Maw!

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Have a fun week everyone!

Dimensional Warriors Fan Fiction: The Return chapter 23

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Fan Fic chapter is up. Here's the week's schedule:

Monday: Weekly Review
Wednesday: Dimensional Warriors Comic
Thursday: Javier Aladren
Friday: Dimensional Warriors Fan Fiction

Be careful out there with all those sales!

Dimensional Warriors Comics 43

New page in time for Turkey Day. I hope everyone in America has a great vacation, and that everyone eats a lot of turkey. While I do not fully agree with the reasons for this holiday, any day that gets me out of school is a good thing in my book.

Weekly Report 11/12-11/18

Not a whole hell of a lot to report this week, school has entered that mad dash phase where the teachers are piling on work in an attempt to shorten their student's lifespans. And this is both me and Ted so comic work has gone down to a crawl. On the plus side since I use the train ride as my primary time to write I still have been moving forward. On the downside since last week I decided exactly how I wanted the last part to look other than just writing it down there isn't much else to say. So I'm going to instead offer you guys the middle part of BBT. The beginning is cut down a bit (It'll start from the first excerpt that I posted about two weeks ago) and the climax is also removed. Enjoy!

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Professor Astonishing Comic Page 6

Free injections of pure humor for all! Have a nice weekend folks.

Dimensional Warriors Fan Fiction: The Return Chapter 22

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Hurricanes, blackouts and school have been collaborating to destroy this, but it survives. It survives because I want it to.

Onward to the schedule!
Saturday: P. Astonishing Comic
Monday: Weekly Report
Wednesday: Dimensional Warriors Comic
Friday: Fan Fiction chapter.

Perspective

Also Women, Gays and Religion

New one up on Political Blog, also working on Fan Fic. Need to petition for more hours in day.

Javier Aladren: Surgery

This song follows Javier's usual style of having upbeat music fused with depressing lyrics. It also marks the approaching 'end' of these segments. As of now there's only two songs left, once we cover those this will no longer be a Thursday thing, it will be a when he releases more I will post them thing. So enjoy it folks, 'cause Javier's in college and that means it takes him a while to get music written and recorded. If you wish to keep track of what he's been up to his blog is over here.

All that said I have lyrics for this one:

Let's take the moments 
One by one until our bodies reconnect 
And everything just seems undone 
And I'll sink right past your flesh 
So long 

I just need time to correct my eyes 
To tell you just how much I hurt inside 
I'll tell you anything tonight 
Just lend an ear, at least pretend to 

And every day piles up like rain 
Where our house starts decomposing 
And every paper pushes us 
And begs me to stop singing 

I hold my breath around an infant 
Hoping that comes back from this 
I'll do anything for it 
Just make her well, at least intend to 

Make my pain remain 
Just make my pain remain 
How else can I stay the same 
If it won't go away? So please 
Make my pain remain 
I'll take any pill to make them stay 
Just make my remain

Dimensional Warriors Comic 42

Sorry it's a little late. But here's page 42, with plenty of action too. According to Ted we only need about a page and a half to cover the remainder of the semester. Which is good because school is starting to get really tough, partially because we lost a lot of time due to Sandy. Hopefully the schedule will remain unbroken. Talks are still occurring about possibly upgrading P. Astonishing to a weekly schedule next semester. Nothing solid yet.

Weekly Report: 11/5-11/11

Yes this is extraordinarily late. Yes there was no Fan Fic chapter. Yes I'm slacking a bit. And Yes Dimensional Warriors Comic, Javier's next song, and Professor Astonishing will all be updating on time. So with the important stuff done, let's move on.

Fan Fiction
Was no chapter because there was no power until Friday. We got power back Friday night, and I have been spending all of that time drooling over my electronic stuff that was just expensive dust collectors beforehand. This week we will see a new chapter.

Dimensional Warriors Comic
Little tizzy with the next page, nothing too big, but it may delay posting for a few hours. Three max.

S.T.U.F.F. Reviews:
I know no one is asking, but just feel like stating the obvious. No power = no work.

Dimensional Warriors:
I'll skimp on the excerpt this week, and that isn't for lack of work. Actually it's the other direction. I'm becoming TOO immersed in writing. I've written in the climax for Battle Beneath the Tower and after a short bit of confusion, Friday morning I plotted out everything for Into the Maw and it is So Much Awesome I can't stop writing.

I can hand over a couple of tidbits. I've decided to change the entire layout of the place. It's still nine floors to mirror Dante's Inferno, but it's a little more streamlined now.

I removed a lot of the animal beasts, I'm thinking of leaving the Minotaur in some form, Cerberus and the Yamato no Orochi since these are some of my favorite fantastic creatures.

More importantly I've changed how the opposition will work, aside from Seth there's going to be another shadow to deal with, and I'm planning that fight to end in the course of the story.

With Pah's parts added this will start to make a lot more sense.

Aside from the extra shadow I've added three 'human' characters to serve as the villains for this segment, each one using a certain kind of deceit to trick their prey.

Seth's part is going to be expanded upon immensely.

Decided to keep things relatively relationship neutral for now. Too much external stress for the characters to even start thinking about that kind of stuff. That will definitely be in full swing at the start of the next book though.

Only thing still undecided is exactly what the end will look like, but that will come when it comes.

I still would love feedback on the parts of Battle Beneath the Tower and The Gathering that I've posted. Comments, Criticism and Ideas are all welcome.

I'm also still willing to promote anyone's work. (I'm not incredibly judgmental.)

The Unhealing Rift

A plea.

I pray to the great Gods of Power that my house will see electricity again this century. In the meantime the Republican backlash from an Obama win is getting... Pretty bad.

Democratic Victory, It's over right?

Wrong!

Go check it out, now the real games begin over at the Desk.

Dimensional Warriors Comic Page 41

Obama's President!
Page 41!
We Still Don't have Power!
Wait that last one wasn't a good thing. Oh right it's supposed to be screamed with a howl made up of pain and envy. And ended with a whimper of fear as we realize the new snow storm is here. And it is hungry... for Power...

Stay safe guys, we'll get through this mess and come out stronger for it. Or we'll move to Ohio. I hear their vote counts more anyway.

Weekly Report: 10/29 - 11/4

With the power out all this week, there was hardly any work done on projects like both comics and the Review show. This is due to the fact that both require use of programs that are only accessible through our desktops. Desktops that are currently employed as extremely expensive paperweights.

Instead I bring to you, a ton of work on Dimensional Warriors. I've added at least 20,000 words most of which inside BBT. So let's get started.

Dimensional Warriors:
I'm bringing out the next round of excerpts and might post everything up to the climax soon. So for now, here you guys go:

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All that said I've completed the bulk of the arc, and gotten several spectacular moments written down. I'm about halfway through the climax, and it is looking great. If I can keep this pace going, I'll probably have something ready to send to an editor before the school semester is out.

Like I said, other than that there has been very little progress. Ted sketched up a few comic pages, but without access to the computer he can't scan it in and add some effects as well as the text. So everything has kind of come to a grinding halt.

That said my thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who was hit far worse than we were, as much as I hate having no power I'm still relatively well off. Though spending all this time camping at a coffee shop may just lead to me becoming fatter.

Stay safe everyone and I hope things get back to normal soon. Also make sure to go vote tomorrow, really important!

Professor Astonishing Page 5

I have to apologise about this size of the page, if you expand it, it will be enormous. Unfortunately we're still without power so there isn't much we can do about it until Monday when power should be restored. Stay safe everyone!

Hurricane Blackout

Fan Fiction probably won't go up today, and that is because I need the internet so I can look up little facts and things to make sure my writing is accurate. So no internet this week means I couldn't do any of the research I needed to do to get it done. Instead you get an insanity induced rant.

I'm writing this during the blackout caused by Hurricane Sandy, and it's going to contain a lot of whining, and bitching and moaning. And I advise people to not read this. It isn't going to be pretty, it isn't going to be well written. And the only reason I'm linking it to my Facebook and Google+ accounts is that I know people will read it anyway. But before I let you all go reading my helpless, insanity induced tripe I want to apologize ahead of time. I want to apologize to all the people who were hit harder by this hurricane than I was; to all those people who have to contend with broken homes and bodies my prayers go out to you, and I'm sorry that I'm about to bitch about my own sanity here. Like I said, I advise people to not read this. I wouldn't be posting it if I didn't have some strange compulsion to do so.

With that out of the way, the hardest part about this blackout for me is the alone time. I try really hard to drown myself in media, rather than have to face the demons that still plague my life. And fact is it works most of the time. Most of the time I don't have to think about my problems until I'm curled up in bed crying myself to sleep; at which point the whole thing is mostly moot. Now I'm forced to sit here, without anything but my left hand to distract me and the nightmare that I put myself into just keeps becoming clearer and clearer. I put on a strong face day in and day out, because I figure this is my problem, so I'll deal with it. The hypocrisy is that the problem is one that can only be solved by letting it be someone else's problem.

For those not in the know, let me explain. About a year and a half ago I was in heaven. I had a beautiful fiancee and a large group of friends, and I fucked it all up. It took me a long time to figure out how I did it, but that never changed the fact that I did it; and now I'm writing this not to place blame, or throw insults. I'm literally writing this because my own sanity is teetering on the edge of a knife, and I have no other way of even starting to stabilize it.

So I'm betting people are wondering how, well, I figure it starts with my fiancee's parents. In order to get out of what I considered a toxic environment at home I moved in with her parents. Unfortunately I took all of my emotional baggage with me; and a large part of that baggage was a distinct inability to place myself within my own environment. This led to a large amount of magical thinking, the most important one being as follows. Her parents had a weight problem, one solution was to get them to start moving around the house, which led me to conclude the best course was to try and get them to clean up the house. This of course circumvented the entire issue of me being a guest at the house, this line of thinking never even occurred to me. Though admittedly this was one of the very first things I would figure out during my solitude.

So I spent a long time sitting on a time bomb with her parents, before it finally erupted, leading to me being kicked out (inevitably) and leading to her breaking things off. Well that wasn't the only thing fueling this, I had slowly become more inattentive towards her, and this was due to two separate issues. One I can't talk about because it involves secrets held by her and a third party, but the other one took me a while to figure out. See for a while I couldn't figure out why I didn't feel like doing most of the things we had enjoyed together early on. It wasn't until later that I began lacking energy to do things that I enjoyed doing that I found the source of my woes. My stamina apparently was extraordinarily low. By the time I noticed I could barely handle ten minutes of slightly difficult labor before getting incredibly tired. Which meant that I was subconsciously avoiding anything that I knew would take effort. This included everything from fairs, to sex, to Rock Band. This is something I've spent a lot of time reversing, and how will become apparent later.

Now we had mutually agreed to remain friends after the break, and I in my ignorance had no clue what that was about. See putting aside her being my first girlfriend, this was the first time I had broken away from a friendship, and still had the ability to go back and see the person on a regular basis. I had spent most of my life moving across the country, loosing friends every time I moved. I had one semi-regular friend thanks to my occasional trips to my Grandmothers, but eventually I made several mistakes there as well, and the distance and increasing irregularity of my trips destroyed that friendship too. And I guess I might not have hurt these people as much as I feel that I have, and perhaps the next step for me is to reach out via Facebook (trust me Myspace wasn't even around when this shit happened) and see if I can rekindle some of my lost connections. However that is neither here nor there, especially considering there is no internet in a blackout, meaning I cannot use Facebook even if I wanted to.

Regardless, every time I had lost a friendship before, it was due to distance. I couldn't go back. So time would inevitably heal the wound, a fact that became faster the more it happened. Well by now you've got to be thinking “this boy is just bitching and moaning.” Well yes. Yes I am. And I fully apologize to everyone out there with actual problems. I fully accept that there are people with far more serious problems than my own. I've also come to realize that if I keep quiet about my own problems it will likely end with me in my underwear with a chainsaw running down main street and giving many more people worse problems than I have. That was a joke. I don't think I'm capable of violence, I had that beaten out of me a while ago. Doesn't change the fact that if I don't talk, my tenuous connection to my remaining sanity will snap.

And yes, the obvious solution is therapy. However, therapy is a dedication of time. See it's not so simple as go to a therapist and boom you're cured. I'd have to go to a therapist for likely five years running to fix my major problems. Now the problem with this, is I can't change therapists midway. I had a therapist for over a year at Kean. She retired. Now if I were to go to therapy again I wouldn't start with a year under my belt, I would start at square one. So I need to make sure the environment isn't going to change in the near future; and so long as I'm living under my parent's roof there is no assurance that I'll be remaining in one spot for long enough. I've already promised myself, when I move out on my own the first thing I'm doing is getting therapy.

All that aside, we go back to the issue at hand, not understanding how relationships and friendships work. This goes hand in hand with another little mental trait of mine, my own feeling of worthlessness and guilt. I was extended what I perceived as conflicting information. She wanted to not see me for three months, but she wanted me to come to the weekly group gatherings.

Me being easily confused and feeling guilty for the break-up decided to choose one, specifically the one I felt would punish me the most. And I picked a winner. Three months later and the only friend that was still speaking to me was Ted; who had never stopped coming by on a weekly basis to hang out and work on stuff for the blog. I soon got a call asking that I don't come to the weekly gatherings again because I had insulted everyone there. As well as something else, but that again revolves around secrets that are not mine to tell; plus the claim laid at my feet there I still don't know what they were talking about anyway so I can't refute it.

At the time I had no clue what they were talking about. It wasn't until a few weeks later that I learned about a conversation between me and my brother over Skype at three in the morning had been passed around. That sounds bad, and it was. I said things in such a way that they could easily be misconstrued as insults of a very deep and personal nature. In my own defense I have never sought to hurt or harm anyone, at the time I was babbling about the potential nature of a stereotype; something I like to do to distract myself. Of course my own inability to communicate, the fact this was all in text, and that three in the morning slurred all my words into an incomprehensible mess compiled to basically insult everyone of my old group of friends.

So bridge burned. Make new ones right? Well not so easy for me. See, I have never once approached someone else unless I was already close friends with them. Which doesn't make friendship impossible, just a little harder to get. I just need places where people gather and where I might find that outstretched hand; except I don't go out of the house. I see no need for theaters, and malls, and stores. I only really go out to eat when I'm with friends or family. Which leaves work and school. I've only got a semester and half left at Kean and it is a two hour grueling commute to get there, so I really see no point in trying there. I'm currently unemployed, but that remains my one future hope. That I'll get a job, and someone there will start to build a friendship with me. Though the most likely scenario is that I'll get a work-at-home job, which will destroy that.

So what did I do wrong? Well that was the hardest thing to figure out; and I honestly felt I couldn't even start to try to make new friends until I figured out how I lost the last ones. Eventually I realized that by not showing up, rather than starting to rebuild a different kind of friendship I just made the break-up harder. It was a selfish action, perceived as: if I don't show up we things couldn't change. Which wasn't how I viewed it, but I can see how others would view it that way, or at least looking back I can. And it's not like anyone in that group was particularly vengeful, or amoral. In fact I have never seen so kind a group, often willing to go so far as fifth or sixth chances towards someone who's messed up. Which makes my exile that much more damning. If I can't been seen well in these people's eyes, I'm just beyond saving. I might as well find an internet job and become a hermit; 'cause there is no chance I'll ever find people willing to put up with me. Except Ted obviously, I have no clue why he hangs around me, but I'm grateful for every minute he's willing to spend with me. I'm just afraid that one day I'll do something to drive him away too.

Now the last thing before I'm done here is a surprising thing. As much as this last year and half has been a living hell only survivable through massive media dosages and being a damned stubborn ass; I wouldn't trade this time for anything. I grew the hell up. My mind is sharper now than it has ever been. I'm starting to actually associate with my body, as well as place myself within the greater context of the world. I learned to do things I was too lazy to even consider doing; cooking, cleaning, acting, weight-lifting, computer repair. I picked up new habits like stretching and running. I'm planning on picking up some other new hobbies like sewing, dance, martial arts. I repaired my relationship with my mother and step-father to some degree. I've taken care of my twin baby sisters, dealt with their temper tantrums and changed their diapers. I have learned so much that I wouldn't have otherwise, and can safely look back and say that I've grown. I've matured in ways I hadn't been capable of. So while I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, I also do not regret the choice I made to get here. Dwelling on the past without trying to learn from it is a waste of time, something I couldn't avoid doing, but I tried to minimize the time I spent agonizing.

And with this, I think I might finally be able to move forward. If those people I once called friend wish to forgive my past sins I will return without hesitation; if not I hold no grudge against any of them. I will move forward, with or without them, maybe I'll find something better, maybe not. That's the fun thing about life, there really is no way to know how the future will turn out; all we can do is keep looking forward, and keep hoping for a better future.

And I think that's about it. I feel better now, and I'll probably feel even better after I edit and post this. I'm one of those people who don't like to do anything unless it serves more than one purpose. So yeah, next time someone asks how I'm feeling, I'll still answer okay, but know this; the answer is not okay. I'm never okay, I'm so far from okay it's scary. I may be repairing parts of my life, but it's a slow, grueling process. And at least until I build a few new friendships I probably won't truly recover. Might even take until I can get that therapy, but no I'm not okay. I'm hanging in there. I'm clawing with bloody stumps so that life doesn't leave me in the ditch. I'm hopeful for what tomorrow brings; but as of right now, and probably for the foreseeable future, no I am not okay.

Javier Aladren: Dressed and Bound

Dressed and Bound is one of Javier's best song, I know I said that about his last one too, but we're hitting a clump of them, and it isn't my fault. Blame the artist for having excellent songs. This is a must listen.

Lyrics will be up eventually.