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Ladies Close Your Eyes Chapter 5 ‘Hole in the Silk’ (Raw)

Ok this in the overall book when it’s done will be the start of part 2. This is where we get introduced to the side plot with the fbi characters I pulled out of my hairy well-toned ass. Originally this story was intended as a small comic maybe around 3/4 issues long so I didn’t feel the need to go into depth and have characters investigating the murders from the other side for context but now I have free reign to do whatever the fuck I want. And goddamit I want slightly weird fbi agents looking at dead hookers!

So here’s the start of that, my main inspiration for them comes from movies like Surveillance and again tv shows like True Detective. So I wanted introverted slightly quirky people who could do the job of a toughed fed.

Updates on general shit, my day job has gotten a little crazy right now, hence the lack of content but I’m still going strong making that paper to fritter away on editors and marketing schemes. I was thinking of just giving away free money and see how that works, bribe motherfuckers to read my shit haha.

Also been reading a fellow zombie authors book and I’m actually really genuinely enjoying it. It’s like the walking dead novels but good haha. So I plan on doing a review for that sometime in the future if all goes well.

As always you can check out this whole chapter for the exclusive price of no monies on inkitt with the link provided.

Hole in the Silk

~

A black Lincoln town car pulled up along a dirt road on Riverview drive in Jurupa valley CA.

The car parked on the sidewalk in front of two green plastic garbage bins. The sidewalk consisted of a curb bracketing a patch of dirt and grass from the road. It was way out near the train tracks close to Riverside municipal on the other side of the valley.

It was a small back road, penned in by verdant hills on one side dotted with lonely single storey houses on the right. On the left looked like some kind of little ranch with a white picket fence made of metal out front. The fence of which had a wreath on it and a broken mailbox. Large trees surrounding it on one side, a small wire fence on the other. A single horse stood with its head dipped under what looked like an overturned sandwich box. Of the kind of sandwiches you get in gas stations, chewing silently. A small single storey house shrinking into the distance. Behind the overgrown shrubbery and white picket arch ways.

A shapely black woman got out of the driver’s seat. She leaned on the car door and looked around with an air of disenfranchisement. She wore a dark blue pant-suit with a grey camisole under her buttoned jacket. Her shoes were sensible black work shoes with raised rubber heels. Her hair was straight, tied back into a loose bun. She took a deep breath of fresh air, as if against her will and turned back to the car. She leaned on the open car door and craned her neck to look at the passenger seat. She was pretty trying to look dower with a practiced set of frown lines. Around her mid to early thirties, but it was catching up with her quick. She had a wide mouth, thin drawn on eye brows above small downturned almond eyes on a round warm face. Her nose was a thin strip down her face ending in a petite rounded nose. She wore no jewellery at all.

In the passenger seat was her partner. A man in his early forties, slim but well built. His suit looked more expensive than hers, just plain black with a white shirt and black skinny tie. He sat with his legs knotted playing Sudoku on his phone.

“Bored with Pokémon go already?” She said comically exasperated.

He looked up and smiled a cheeky ten-year-old smile “Too much walking”. He was handsome. Designer stubble left a little too long turned into a small shaggy salt and pepper beard. His hair was darker, slicked back tight on his head, his hairline dipped a little at the corners but it held out. He had a strong chin which dominated most of his face. The rest of it was pure jowls which sagged just a little more each day, hence the beard. He had a slightly flushed colour on his cheeks and forehead. Thin lips and small sincere eyes above a large ruddy nose with a few chips missing out of it.

She let out a breathy laugh shook her head, looked down the road and sucked her cheek before turning back to him. “Are you coming?”

He looked up, brow furrowed sincerely. “Hnh no, I’ll sit this one out”

“You sure?”

“I’ve seen it before”

“Ok” She sucked her gums and made a playful chupse sound as he smiled and shook his head. He was still looking down at his phone as she shut the door.

She straightened up and walked to the end of the drive towards a yellow sign with an arrow pointing right. The road itself looped back around the hills to a larger residential area.

She took her time walking down river view. She stopped out front a black set of gates in a walled off area of dirt. Probably for the horse to walk around in when it wasn’t pretending to be a truck stop sandwich.

She hung her hands on her hips and cast a glance down Avenue Juan Diaz. It was a reasonably nice area, quiet but for the trains. It was out of the way, in the dark you could come and go without crawling over too much bubble wrap.

The closest house was one on the corner. A single storey with a big driveway. A white Pontiac on the sidewalk out front and little red number on the driveway. Another white car in the open garage. It has a little stone path leading up a raised embankment shaded by large shaggy trees. There were two cop cars parked ‘cop-like’ at intersecting angles across the curved curb.

On the other side of the street on top of the hill was what looked like a sprawling villa or a large sand castle with large arched windows in the front. There was a large white unmarked van parked out front.

Her head on a swivel she turned back to the dirt road with the yellow sign. She was met by a steel gate almost at right angles to the black one for the horse. The gate was open at a slap-dash angle and dug into the loose dry earth. She lifted it and eased it across, it swung loose and scrapped to a stop, lifting up a layer of clay dust.

The path was too narrow for a car, lined on one side by a drainage ditch of some kind. The path itself looked well kept.

She walked without great haste down the path about a quarter of mile in the direction of the river. It lead her down a steep embankment overlooking the viaduct. One of the largest in California she’d been told.

The viaduct was a great concrete deco construction made of several arches. A train track ran across it and little else. It was slim bridge almost like one you’d expect ending in a large fort or a castle. There was only room either side for a walkway. Probably reserved for maintenance on trains that got stuck or upkeep on the bridge itself.

The embankment was overgrown with a crude path cut out leading down towards the river. She praised her sensible shoes as she gracefully descended the haphazard path towards the edge.

As she got further down the greenery thinned out and she could see them now.

~

Hole in the Silk

 

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Green Sunday Chapter 6 ‘Smooth Sailing’ (Edited)

Another day another edited chapter, it’s almost over people, almost over and almost I mean never and by ‘over’ I mean bitches. That doesn’t make sense.

Ok well day job grinding and shitty and deadend as it is has given me the desired resources of my condensed wasted time to allow me to have more of this silly ass zombie novel I’m not entirely sure why I wrote edited haha. Of which will be coming soon.
I’ve only got one chapter left to proofread and then it’s all downhill from there.

In other news I’m reading some cool noir shit, some grade Richard Stark shit and it’s starting to show in some of the recent stuff I’ve done. I’ve actually made a start on one of those novellas I was toying with to keep me busy until nanowrimo when I unleash the beast of my next hurried giant word salad hah.
It’s turning out really nicely, I mean I actually gave enough of a fuck to open up google maps and plot routes for the story, research locations and plants and other such real life shit. I virtually walked the route of this story I’m doing and I think it’s turning out really nice, my style is evolving and it’s a lot of fun. It still has that evocative bullshit I like but it’s framed by this anal attention to detail which really nails the tension down.
Anyway the first chapter of that should be ready soon enough so you can ignore it at your leisure haha.

As per usual you can check out the full chapter on inkitt.

Chapter 6 ‘Smooth Sailing’

Peace out.

~

Roy held the camera low, trying to be discreet. It created a shaky low shot of TJ’s front door. A doorbell ringing sound; a cool morning mist starting to creep up on them.

“Who’s there?” TJ’s mom said from an upstairs window. The camera panned to the window as she leaned out in her yoga gear.

“Oh hey, Mrs Kincaid, a lovely morning, am I right?” Zed said with a tinny laugh, like he was selling Jehovah.

“Oh you’re those nice neighbour boys. TJ’s not home right now; he’s out getting milk; he can’t come out to play.”

“Err, yeah, you see… TJ kinda said we could come and borrow some of his stuff for our show, for the Internet”. Roy stumbled over his words, his frantic nerves stripping all charm from his voice.

“Oh well, he didn’t say anything to me about it. But I suppose, since you only live next door, and it’s for the Internet, you said?” TJ’s mom ditsily mused on what that might mean as she leant out the window.

“Err, yeah,” Roy said, a tired indifference climbing into his voice as he realised he’d been up all night. Was he holding up the camera or was it holding him up?

“The door’s open; his room is at the top of the stairs. How’s your mother doing, Teddy? You boys want some green tea and rice cakes?”

“Err, no, we’re good, thanks; she’s fine,” Zed said, surprised at how easy that was.

A brief cut and it was a shot of TJ’s stairs as they climbed up towards his room. All TJ could see was a POV shot of the back of Zed’s legs as he went up, followed by Roy.

Zed stopped on the stairs and turned to Roy with an odd smile on his face, the camera uncomfortably close.

“Dude, why’d you stop?” Roy said, behind the camera.

“How much you wanna bet the fat fuck’s a brony?” Zed sniggered childishly, forgetting the blood under his fingernails.

Another brief cut and whoever held the camera was elbow deep in TJ’s drawers. “Where the fuck is it?”.

“Dude, I found it.” The camera panned impatiently to Zed who stood in front of the closet, smirking.

“Friendship is fucking magic.” Zed chortled as he spoke. Parting the clothes in the closet, Zed revealed a secret ‘My Little Pony’ poster on the back of the wardrobe. “I fucking knew it.”

“Yeah, that’s great; the dude’s a fucking faggot who wants to fuck a horse. Can we get back to finding the weapons now, so, you know, we can fucking live through the night?” Roy snapped, gripping the camera harder, until it was audibly creaking.  He span the camera around and it fell on the red toy box at the bottom of TJ’s bed. “Here we go.”

“Yeah, I’m betting porn and an inflatable pony.” Zed chuckled in the background as Roy lay the camera down on TJ’s bed. He knelt in front of the box. Zed went through TJ’s action figures and miscellaneous cosplays, giggling fecklessly in the background.

Roy opened the box. “Look at this shit – fucking mall crap! Gotta bag this shit up.”

“Then what?” Zed said, some ice closing in on his voice.

“We gotta deal with Gil. If he’s bit, we gotta cut his head off; that bitch too, just to make sure.”

“I don’t know-”

“It’s fucked. It’s so different from how I thought it would be.” Roy sighed as he started to pack the weapons into a ‘Naruto’ duffel bag. “Fucking otaku pussy.”

He put his hand on his knee and eased himself off the ground.

Zed sighed; the character he had created had crumbled and he felt like a kid. His skin sticky and dry from where he had washed off Christie’s blood. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

Roy fumbled as he picked up the camera and turned it off.

Another cut. The camera seemed to be resting on the edge of a sink, turned on by mistake as if placed there in a hurry.

Scuffling sounds, sounds of muffled whimpering. The camera was out of focus. A blurred figure came into frame and snatched it up. Fumbling sounds of plastic creaking. It was still being held low, around waist height; there was nothing to see just yet.

“You’ve got to do it.”

“Why do I have to do it?”

“Because I’m holding the camera,” Roy said, a cold smile in his voice.

Roy raised the camera, like a shield, to put the spotlight on Zed’s pale and drawn face. Zed sat on the bed in his room; he knew it had to be him. He swallowed hard, took TJ’s crappy mall sword in both his hands and unsheathed it a little to check it didn’t stick. He hesitated. “Oh, fuck it,” he said as he unsheathed the sword all the way. He threw the cheap scabbard across the room and held the handle as if it was a machete. The sword wasn’t quite a katana; it was one of those cheap ninja swords with a straight blade and no guard. He grabbed at his knee a little, rose with a jerky jolt of energy and began to march out of his room. Roy struggled to follow him out into the hall.

“Wait up, dude.”

They got to the inner door of the garage and Zed stood sullen with his hand on the doorknob.

“I thought he locked himself in?”

“He did, but I’ll try the door and then we can go around the front and open the garage door. He might be OK. Garage door makes a lot of noise,” Zed said.

“Yeah, best episode of ‘Zombie Stump Fuckers’ yet.”

Zed sneered and a sickly smirk passed over his face. He swallowed hard again and twisted the knob. The door opened with an uneasy jerk. Zed froze. He stopped breathing and then breathed out. Then in again with a low, shallow, silent breath.

He began to open the door wider, inch by inch, praying for it not to creak. It did. He took a deep breath and launched himself into the garage. Roy followed. The camera fell on Zed as he swung the sword awkwardly, nerves and adrenaline making it shake in his hands, creating an annoying rattling sound.

“What the fuck?” Roy said as he panned the camera up to a tense close up of the garage, lined with black bin bags. He zoomed out to Zed in his uneven warrior stance, a small pool of congealed blood on the floor. “Where’d he go?”

Just at that moment, a clichéd woman’s scream rang out and they both knew where he was.

“Mom?” Zed’s voice broke as he spoke, the sword shaking in his loose grip.

~

 

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Perfect Porridge

Yo, just want to first tell the people who will reverse image search the header to go die in a fire ha-ha. (You’re doing it now aren’t you?)
Ok this is just a little update/buffer before I post a new chapter of GS, I dunno I just hate the look of two chapters together in my blog postings. It just looks lame.
So just gonna give a quick update on my writing. My brother recently came home for a visit, and brought with him an idea I thought I’d written down but seemingly did not.
He had mentioned this great documentary to me maybe a year ago but I never got around to watching but for some reason he felt the need to recant the story at the perfect timing of Green Sunday coming to a close.
Hearing it again just clicked perfectly with the timing. For at least a week I’ve been agonizing on what to do next, rifling through the cavernous files of all my ideas and loose story synopsises. Feeling a little like Goldie locks; ‘This is too short’ ‘Too long’ ‘Too weird’ ‘too stupid’ ‘makes no sense’ ‘oh that’s just an empty word file with a cool title’.
At that point I’d resigned myself to the idea of doing a few short stories or novelette just to pad out of my repertoire while I shill for GS and build on whatever I had planned for nanowrimo which was probably that Dexter fanfic I had rattling around in my tormented little head bowl. And I’m still probably going to do that just to pump up my views on inkitt page and what not, just to keep my head above water, maybe enter them in a few writing contests. I’m just dying to do something completely different and not have to be locked into this possibly yearlong commitment like with GS.
I really enjoyed writing that but towards the end I started to think if it really had an audience, and I sort of came up with all my best ideas for social commentary while writing it but it was too late to put them in so just pushed them off onto a sequel, that might never happen.

Anyway so I watched this documentary and instantly had before me at least 13 pages of raw notes and ideas of how to further the story and really make it my own. For anyone that hasn’t searched the image like the little Miss Marple’s you are, it’s a true story about a boy that goes missing but is then discovered in a foreign country years later.

The bones of the story are all lined up for a perfect faux murder mystery psychological thriller conspiracy story akin to the changeling. I just need to add the meat, my own characters, sub plot, the life and soul of the story. I’m going to breathe life into it and make it my own the only way I know how. Maybe add a little true detective/twin peaks “magic” ha-ha.
It’s something I’ve longed to write since I started, something dark and gritty and also melancholy and suspenseful with a truly captivating plot full of twists and turns and danger and intrigue of which I will add.
A gripping thrill ride that will have people’s head scratching weeks after and give them pause in their beds before they lay their heads down to sleep.

It’s still in the planning phases as yet, I only have 16 pages of rough synopsis, I’m going to go over it and see if I can double it, adding my own sub-plots and characters as the weeks progress. Alternating between writing the novellas I already have synopsisized (That’s a word) blogging and plotting this potentially award winning airport novel ha-ha.
Honestly I think GS taught me to not be so self-indulgent, I ned to focus on stories that will really make my mark, that will give me a voice and put my name on the map before I can re-visit ridiculousness of that calibre. It’s why I chose to side line the Dexter fanfic, it’s too self-indulgent, I can’t just finish a series I love and just think I can jump into writing the next wave of those books just yet. And even if I did, what am I going to do just ask Jeff Lindsay to endorse it, hope he’ll see that mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery and not sue me ha-ha. It’s something I’d love to do but I think I need to put it off til I get some leverage in the industry as opposed to the zero I have now ha-ha.

Ok so that’s what I’m doing, I don’t really have a title for this next project of which I will be doing for nanowrimo. The working titles I have right now are; “(The)Wanted Son/(The)Wanted boy/boy in the backyard/the boy that came back”.
I didn’t fuck around this time, I googled all those titles to make sure I would be the top search result if it was paired with the word ‘book’. My first title was ‘The stranger’, fucking retard I am. I’m not fucking around this time, I want this to be an original book title, that’s interesting and thought provoking and mysterious without being derivative.

All things aside my life pretty much fell apart a week or two ago, but to be fair I didn’t have much use for one any way, and it was definitely getting in the way of my writing. That’s all I can say on the matter really, I could sit and mope or I could ride the crest of this new wave of energy I feel from these new projects. Onward and upward and all that inspiring shit people say and don’t really believe ha-ha kill me :’).
No seriously, all good, I just need time and maybe prescription medication.
Oh shit, this would have been the perfect opportunity to write something about the Orlando shooting, fuck I’m self-centred, ah never mind, maybe next time.

Peace be upon you…. ALLAH AKBAR!!!!!!!!

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Dexter is Dead… again.

Ok been letting my blogging slip for a while because of this and that excuse, work, travel, romance, all that shit. But that’s all gone now, back to business as usual.
I recently finished the last of the Dexter series, if you don’t know already the blog is a play on the title of the first book ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter’. And although the series isn’t what inspired me to become a writer myself it has influenced a lot of thematic choices I later came to love.
So needless to say I’m a big fan of the show and then I just got done reading all eight of the books and it’s fair to say I really liked them since I read them back to back, which is pretty is pretty rare for me. I think the last time I did that was when I first discovered pulp and read all the Philip Marlowe books by Raymond Chandler one if not THE godfather of literary pulp/noir, whatever you wanna call it. I personally think he beats the pants off of Dashiell Hammet although I love me some Sam Spade and I really enjoyed the first Parker novel I read by Richard Stark I think it was. I was actually thinking of filling the hole left by Dexter with some Parker.

Parker is like a more amoral version of Philip Marlowe I guess, like half way between Dexter and Sam Spade maybe. He’s just a straight up, hard edge career criminal. I was almost shocked when I read the hunter. There’s a scene where he kills this innocent woman by mistake and that wasn’t really the problem it was the way he just brushes it off, like ‘oops’ and I thought even Dexter would have had a moment of contemplation over that. And that’s why that character is really memorable, someone so focused on what they want that they burn everyone and anything in their way and feel nothing for them. A really powerful character I thought. It’s like you’re reading this like “Am I the baddie?”

Ok so I really enjoyed the Dexter series, I felt it flagged towards the end a little, like Lindsay was just in no mood to continue it so just ended it. I was a little disappointed by the prison sequence (Oh yeah spoilers Dexter goes to prison ha-ha), because I expected him to shank a fool or whatever but it was pretty boring monotonous, nothing really happens.

I liked the change of pace, overall I thought the books were weird because they became less about serial killing and more about Dexter’s life getting in the way of his serial killing but I guess that’s realistic and a great parralel for real life getting in the way of the things you love.
I’m not sure if this actually is the last book because the ending was very and obviously intentionally open ended. And the show also played around with an open ending although mercifully they thought better of that because that show really started to drag. Looking back having read the books I can see it was dragging its heels as soon as it left the starting block of the first season. They really really really shouldn’t have killed off the ice truck killer. He’s a pivotal character in the books, well sort of, but I think that was a mistake. They could have dragged out that familial conflict into later seasons allowing them to not have to rely on really over used tropes and shameless filler.

I liked the show for what it was, it was almost an expanded universe, exploring things around his dad and his mom, they took the books and ran with them and it was very entertaining. it got me through a lot of stressful shit at uni when the new Dexter ep came out. I could sit and watch it and talk to my friends about it

Anyway, enough of that bullshit, what I really wanted to talk about was that I really do feel like there’s a Dexter size hole in my life. So I was thinking of doing a fanfic of sorts, a continuation surrounding Dexter’s grown up daughter Lily-Anne. Essentially I want to get deep in the shit and explore some of the stuff I think Lindsay shied away from and fill in the blanks myself.

Because I think I mentioned in the past that the Dexter lore has some supernatural elements, he essentially #spoiler alert# squares off with a demon or old god or whatever in the third book and then after that it was just dropped like an old guy’s jock strap in the men’s locker room at the gym. I think it must have got panned or received a lot of criticism for taking what was essentially a mystery/crime thriller book into the Dan Brown illuminati/Alex Jones territory. And honestly I have nothing against that sort of shit. I really liked that book, it was such a jarring change of pace I was a little disappointed it wasn’t gone into in more detail or at the very least touched upon at least one more time. It was just sort of side-lined. Just like how in the books he’s promised to train the fledgling killer kids he’s raising. He never gets around to it, so I want my story take on that to be the result of his inaction.

I was thinking of having the ancient society from book three come back and hunt down Dexter’s progeny to harvest their dark passengers. Structure it the same way as the other books, have her as like a crime blogger who investigates murders and gets tangled up in this web of intrigue because of her innate morbid curiosity. Then out of nowhere the murders seem to be spelling out a message to her. I essentially want to make almost a copy of the first book, almost an ‘homage’ force awakens that bitch. That’s about all the spoilers I want to give away. I may turn this into like a fun side project of short novellas or full blown novels maybe if I can get in contact with Jeff Lindsay, I’ve exchanged a total of three words with him on twitter so I’m in like flin motherfucker ;).
I dunno it just seems like there’s so much that could have come from the Dexter mythos, it just feels unfinished, unloved, like Lindsay was just tired of that headspace, which I can totally understand. I think Dexter was a character I related to in a scary way and I was very invested in his struggles and I just think it didn’t end quite right. I mean I never expected him to live happily ever after, but why not? Yeah it’s fiction and bad guys always have to pay but do they? Do they in real life? Not really, so why should fiction have to conform to that standard?

I just thought it would be interesting to keep the series going with a woman at the helm, especially in this current political climate. I could see myself having a lot of fun with that. I’m not sure if I should do it for nanowrimo because I already had some lovecraftian thrillery type stuff lined up for that or maybe something odd and lynchian, completely surreal and off the wall. But we’ll see if I can come up with a synopsis in time. I might just start those other things as soon as I’ve released every chapter of gs.
Anyway my facebook ban should be lifted soon and I’ll be posting more shit on there and on twitter, I have to get my thumb out of my ass and reignite my social media platform, reanimate that sucker.

Peace out my african brothers and have a killer day ;).

 

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Spyderco Delica review

This knife was a bit of a weird fascination for me since before it I wasn’t a huge fan of folding knives and I’d never even heard of Spyderco let lone would I ever be able to admire their unique beauty.
They’re odd looking knives but they’re so iconic and functional that you have to respect the craftmanship and utilitarian nature and the subtle curves of an effortlessly elegant knife such as a spyderco.
I became fixated on this knife in particular after I saw what was close enough to it in a punisher comic.

hdj3AyS.png

I really loved the idea of such a small nimble deadly little knife like that taking on someone with a machete. That sneaky way you can open it without looking using the spyder hole. Finding the edge alignment just right, waiting for the moment they’re close enough for you to launch one quick strike before they can even raise their knife. The serrated blade cutting evenly and quickly.
The knife is tiny, its probably the smallest folder I own since I collect just for show, so I like bigger flashier folders not so much utilitarian edcs. But something about it’s vicious utility and the idea of such a small knife being so deadly like a spider bite really intrigued me and I had to have one similiar.

The delica is the closest I could find, the blade may be a little rounder, the knife from the comic is more like a smaller version of the spyderco police which has that little top unsharpened swedge. But I never really liked the police and I wanted a three inch hide away type knife and there was something that irked me about having the word POLICE on the side of my knife, and I wasn’t really feeling the stainless steel handle scales.So the delica fit perfectly.

JQqP4eN.pngThe delica 4 is just under 3 inches of serrated cutting mini-samurai sword haha. Made with beautiful vg-10 all the way from seki city japan. The only knife I think I have from seki city so far.

Black frn handles, a tight back lock, and 4 way pocket clip. Its a really snug grip in the hand, weighs almost nothing. I’ve had this knife in my pocket and completely forgot it was there. It chokes up really nice and favors, due to the size, a forward filipino knife grip. That’s like a forward sabre grip with the thumb on the back of the knife. It has some really nice jimping so it stays perfectly still for cutting.

The blade itself is very strong and ridiculously sharp, the serrations are probably the sharpest serrations I’ve ever encountered, kicks coldsteels ass cold haha. Once you have the edle alignment right this little thing cuts like no other knife I’ve ever owned, it’s scary smooth cuts.

Overall I just love how small and compact it is and how much deadly power you can get from such a delicate knife. If you need it for household shit as an everyday carry I’d recommend it, it carves through cardboard and plastic like it’s possessed, it cuts anything. And I wouldn’t be that hard pressed to use it for defence if I was inclined. Not home defence, I’d probably go for the more traditional baseball bat, my personal favourite the cold steel brooklyn shorty. But if you were in a country that allowed legal carry of lock knives under 3 inches, I’d say take this.

Not if you’re fighting the punisher though, fuck that shit haha.RBRLwo2.png

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First impressions of Fallout 4 (totally not a review)

I’m a little ashamed to say I’m on my second play through. Not because I have no life but because when I got into work, one of my friends told me he was on his fourth and I was dismayed.

I’m gonna try and refrain from fangirling too hard because that makes me sick and it just isn’t me. And this is by far a perfect game but its pretty freaking close.

The game itself didn’t take too long to install and load up although I wished I would have just downloaded it so I could have had my own private mini midnight launch instead of waiting feverishly for the post and deluding myself that it might have come a day earlier like that one time ages ago I may have imagined. Although obviously I fucked it up and had to reinstall it because I let it download the update mid installation so it was all installing from the net and I couldn’t see the entire loading bar which drove me nuts so I had to reinstall for sanities sake.

But when it was finally loaded, I started and found myself oddly gripped by the opening live action cinematic and then created my character of which I based on David Morrissey’s depiction of the Governor from Walking Dead. And before you jump down my throat calling me a philistine for using that version and not the fu manchu moustachioed comic and novel version (all of which I’ve read exhaustively, except the latest novel I think), I say fuck you David Morrissey is better looking, face it.
I think his face and his depiction of the Governor is also a lot more rounded and likeable and I was actually sad to see the show stick with the comic storyline and his death, when they went off the rails mid season and used the books a little I thought he might have been remodelled into an ongoing character and that would have been more interesting than just sticking to the source material with a few deviations.
I think his character was perfect for the character displayed by the voice actor for the male protagonist in fallout 3 Brian Delaney. I was initially sceptical about the voiced protagonist as the previous games had silent protagonists and voiced protagonists in rpgs like mass effect can get a little annoying and break immersion slightly because it feels less like you are the main character and more like you’re watching the main character do stuff.
But I have to say it really sold the immersion and the emotion at the start of the game, the game didn’t kid me and expect me to care about the main characters wife or kid (like in fallout 3 where you’re supposed to care about your fictional dad played by Liam Neeson) but I was very aware purely through the voice actor’s acting that the main character did care about his wife and child and that sort of sold the emotion of the game.
And when the ‘event’ happens, I really felt like someone who had been tossed into this hostile landscape, whose home and everything he’s known had been destroyed and had to sleep on the floor of truck stops office while it rained and radiation clouds blew through with only a dog to keep him company. It really felt morose and beautiful and that you had to live another day to get revenge and to rebuild a life for yourself and make something beautiful out of all the ugliness that surrounded you and I really loved it.
Despite that, I was proved right about the downsides of the voiced protagonists, mainly and I see a lot of chatter about this, it’s almost impossible to be evil.
Now I suppose you could just kill everyone but its hardly enslaving people and eating babies a la Fallout 3 is it. And the evil dialogue options just sound angsty and mean in Brian’s voice, he just seems too nice a guy to do all that fucked up shit. So twinned with my David Morrissey Governor smooth talking gunslinger character, he came off less monstrously evil and more misunderstood monster. Less Count Dracula more Frankenstein’s monster.
And to be honest I really dug that, good and evil are so subjective so losing the karma system and making good and evil more ambiguous seemed like a step in the right direction. If anything the karma system just evolved into the companion approval system, so depending on which character you pick to come with you, determines what you want to say or do to impress them. But again not one companion is Hannibal fucking lector, where would be the practicality of that? Every character, evil, cruel, vindictive or not has to be in some way likeable or redeemable so that you enjoy their character and want to follow their progression and I think Bethesda delivers on that well.
The factions are also really interesting and have their own sort of style; on my first play through I sided with the minutemen and set about uniting the settlements of the commonwealth, basically creating a people’s army. I don’t know what it is about this game that’s different from elder scrolls, in Skyrim and Oblivion I really didn’t see a problem with joining the mages guild and using the magic I learned for a little bit of thieving on the side. Or joining the fighter’s guild and then turning those talents to assassination, but in F4 the factions are a little more involved, a little more compelling. I couldn’t swear allegiance to the minutemen and then swear an oath of service to the Brotherhood of steel, it really feels like you’re either one or other and each faction is heavily tied into the main plot of the game unlike in Elder scrolls where each faction is its own quest line in a way. I can’t say which I like more to be honest; I think they both have merit.
The game play is great, the exploration (which is always the crux of rpgs like this) is top notch, the anal crafting is minecraft levels of addictive, I literally had to pull myself away from it just to actually play the game main game it’s so intoxicatingly addictive.
I think they really nailed the levelling and perk system too; it’s perfect for someone like me that likes to create a lot of distinct characters and loathes everyman grinders who spend ages making a character that’s good at literally everything. I’m sitting her playing my talker, small guns character and I can’t wait to start a big guns character who swings bats at people, now I’m playing that character and I can’t wait to play my slashy stealthy character who uses silenced weapons and crafts his own explosive traps.
But the game as a lot of people have said; is not really an rpg, the dialogue wheel is a little stunted and the voice actor does make it seem like you’re further away from the actions than you’d like.
Overall, I’m enthralled by it, I want to get lost in it, I almost feel like I rush it just to try and absorb everything I can get, I want to experience everything and I can’t wait for dlc.

 

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Dexter vs Dexter

As usual I have nothing more than a topic in my head to start this semi-literate ramble brainfart type endeavour and the longer I stay away from fallout 4 the harder it gets to breath. But I really enjoyed the dexter books hence the name of the blog. I also really liked the show and I wanted a somewhat side by side comparison, keeping the spoilers to a minimum.

The first book is called ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter’ and it’s essentially the basis for the first season of the tv show. Which I shamefully admit I watched before I started reading the books because I’m a pleb, there you go, happy now?

I do this a lot in fact, I watched the walking dead before I read the comics and then I read the novels but the comics came first so that doesn’t count. I watched the silent hill film before I even knew they were games, the same with the resident evil series. So all around I’m a big media pleb, ain’t life grand?

After the first season of the show it gets a little squiffy. In the first book it wraps up nicely, ok I lied there are gonna be some spoilers. But in the show it wraps up a little skew because in the show, he kills the ice truck killer but in the book he lets him live and he recurs later on in the fourth and fifth book and becomes somewhat of a pivotal character.

The book is a lot more morally grey since he doesn’t actually have inner conversations with his dead adoptive father Harry and instead communes with a supernatural entity inside himself which he calls the ‘Dark Passenger’. He alludes somewhat to this in the show but it’s done a little cack-handedly in my opinion because it’s brushed off as if it’s an addiction whereas the book goes full fahrenheit/indigo prophecy syndrome with fucking demons and voodoo and ancient Babylonian gods.

… Which I actually rather liked but someone obviously conked that on the head because it never really goes back to that in the book and the show gives it a wide berth for probably good reason, it begs beliefs I guess. Too tinfoil hat, Alex Jonesy I guess, I thought it was fun but I guess that was a rabbit hole that might have taken the books up the garden path and since I really liked the following books and I’m still reading them into book seven tells me it wasn’t all that bad.

The first things you notice between the books and the show, in the show he’s this bad ass judo serial killer who kicks the entire ass all the time for some reason. It was cool but in the books he is less John Wayne and more John Cusack… in con air, the film where he didn’t do much.
It’s not that I don’t like him being more vulnerable but I feel like a lot of the time he doesn’t get to be the hero of his own story and after like the tenth time he’s faced death but been saved at the last minute it gets a little annoying.
I mean I don’t begrudge it for using a device like that, I try my fucking damnedest to avoid that ‘ooh he’s about to be killed but then someone saves him at the last minute’ thing, but it’s like literally an unavoidable tension building device. I can’t really think of one of the books from the series where it doesn’t happen except the first now I strain my brain.

Another massive difference is the scope of the book, in the show we follow all these other characters like Batista and his sister Deborah as they have their own arcs but in the book it’s a first person narrative from Dexter’s perspective so these characters become window decoration. And this may sound like a criticism but when you’ve got a TV show about a blood spatter expert by day serial killer by night, I don’t really give a shit about how his friend’s love life is going unless it somehow connects to the serial killy stuff you know, it’s just fluff, useless TV show filler nonsense and the book cuts through it like crate paper to get to the good shit.

That being said the structure of a TV show meant that he had to kill someone per episode and the show handled that quite nicely, a little like the freak of the week supernatural/Buffy style. But in this case the monster was human. But even supernatural couldn’t keep that up and the books don’t even really try to have a murder per however many chapters. On average he’ll killer around one or two people a book, which is perfect because it really allows for a lot of emotion and tension and it really gets into the right frame of mind, it’s deliciously descriptive without making you want to gag like American Psycho levels of gore. It’s subtly macabre, casually sick and twisted, I love it ha-ha.

I think the biggest difference is that Dexter’s kids are fully fleshed out characters… somewhat in the book, whereas in the show they’re just flaccid annoying extras, in the book they have inner workings of their own. And spoiler alert, although there evil father isn’t in the books, what he left behind inside them is enough to make them interesting as they turn out to be just like Dexter. That being said, Lindsay hasn’t really gone into that aspect of their characters yet. Dexter has promised to ‘show them the ropes’ but he never seems to get around to it. He’s always so wrapped up in himself and his work and his ‘other work’ to really take the time and I can’t help empathising with that I guess.
Dexter is an animal and he deals with things as they come I guess, his own self interest and self preservation will always trump training his foster kids how to murder people.
In terms of where the story is going I think that’s going to be a big future problem because spoilers, his brother, the ice truck killer seems to take a keen interest in the kids and there may be a clash of who’s wings they’ll be taken under, Dexter being discernibly the lesser evil.

I genuinely love and get swept up in these books, I suppose in a scary way I and Dexter (Jeff Lindsay the author) have a similar inner voice and I love his style and his wit and the more and more I read the more influenced I get by his dark wit.

That’s fangirling enough for one blog haha, thanks or reading/.

 

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Hype… hype never changes.

I, like probably millions of other manchildren (and maybe actual children) are hyped as fuck for Fallout 4 which releases next Tuesday, by released I mean I get to wait half the day for it to install on my Xbox one -_-.
I just thought I’d have some fun rambling about it because I’m constantly in these facebook groups either bitching about New Vegas (I won’t shake that fucking tree here ha-ha) or laughing at people comparing it to modern shooter graphics.

I’m almost at a loss for the levels of fanboyism I’m holding in, sheer unadulterated pure uncut 100% Columbian hype.

But I can’t help feelings a little bit iffy, I don’t know if it’s just because Fallout has become so mainstream over the years. For a title so niche to gain such mainstream appeal is good but also troubling to me, I hasten to add I didn’t play the original Fallout games until I saw Fallout 4 was being released and I needed an outlet for my building hype.
So I’m by no means an OG Fallout gamer, but I’m not a dirty casual either, I’m a console peasant who played his first Fallout game on a ps2, yeah it was Fallout BOS. I liked it because it was like Baldur’s Gate with guns and powerfist and it’s actually the first and only Fallout game where you got to play a ghoul.

After that I saw Fallout 3 come out and being a massive Oblivion fan it completely had me and had me bad, for months. I truly loved that game, the music, the atmosphere, the guns. Although overall it ranked as something of a letdown but as the constant apologist I blame myself for building it up so much something I’m desperately trying to resist with Fallout 4.
It was mainly the story and the levelling system I took issue with, coming out of Oblivion I found just putting numbers into a stat sort of unsatisfying as opposed to actually practicing the skill to build it up in Oblivion. Which I found more realistic; the more you swing a sword the better you get at it, but in Fallout it didn’t matter you just levelled up for completing missions and could spend skill points however you wanted even in skills you didn’t use.
But I had issues even with that system in Oblivion to be fair because I couldn’t resist once I had trained with one skill to the max to train with another until I mastered them all, which took some of the punch out of the game. The new levelling system for Fallout 4 looks pretty interesting and I’m actually really happy that it’s been streamlined and something that always annoyed me about previous Fallout games has been addressed.

Pistols, they never get pistols right, because you find one at the start and use it until you find some super mega blaster or some huge shotgun and then you never see it again but finally Bethesda have made pistols their own skill as opposed to just reducing it to small guns and big guns. So in a way they’ve streamlined it but also made it more intricate since every type of weapon not just its class has its own skill so you have a small guns skill but then an individual pistol/shotgun/assault rifle skill that focuses on one particular type of weapon with its own special attributes. Which I think is such a great idea because now you can literally make and use any gun you feel suits you best and your play style. Whether you want to be a long range sniper or a hip shooter pistolero or a shotgun surgeon. I think it’s just a great idea that gives every weapon a use and a purpose as opposed to just being something that clutters your inventory and is never used.

All games have their problems and they all reach a state of terminal velocity where they can’t satisfy the way they could at the start.

Also I had problems with the story of Fallout 3, not necessarily with the quality, I have taken to taking videogame storylines with a pinch of salt as of late, because they will always be secondary to fun gameplay and I’ve come to accept that. Waiting for an emotional rollercoaster of a game that Spielberg would be proud of is just too much to ask and games that try are hit and miss coming somewhere between tear jerking if a little tacky Last of Us vs. Engaging if completely insane pretty much any game by David Cage (Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit Syndrome, Beyond Two Souls) but I digress, I’ll get into that in more depth in a later blog probably.
The problem I had with the story is that there wasn’t very much of it, and that’s not to say they weren’t lots of quests and characters, what I mean were there were certain main quest lines that had achievements attached to them. And the problem I have with that is it just makes the game seem less fluid, less pick up and play, I liked how in Oblivion you could literally walk into any tavern or come across a stranger and be swept up in a harrowing quest and then get a piece of special equipment.
There are elements of that in Fallout 3 but I just felt like it was more rigid and a little less forgiving. But regardless of that I still found myself just exploring for hours completely ignoring the story for the most part. I spend probably 80% of my time on Fallout 3 just exploring and making up or piecing together stories from the surroundings and things I find and I think that’s a great strength of all Bethesda games. A lot of the times they just sit back and let the surroundings tell the story, they give the gamer the pieces and they have to put it together themselves which makes them that more engaged in the story.
That was just one thing I worried about looking over the leaked achievements for Fallout 4, they’re doing the same thing with the main story quests, giving them achievements for completion. I dunno, I just think money and the xp and the fun alone should be reward enough, but it’s just a pet peeve.
Another thing that worried me is the changes to the dialogue, it’s changed from a box of text where you select lines, to a more Mass Effect style dialogue wheel, now I see a lot of ‘genius’s’ and gaming hipsters saying this is Fallout ‘Dumbing down’ and to an extent when games fall into the mainstream there is a level of streamlining they go through to maximise their appeal like with Skyrim. But to anyone with common sense, the reason dialogue wheel replaced the text box is because we have a voiced protagonist for the first time in Fallout history and he only has so many words he can say, so unfortunately dialogue will be more limited.

Whether this improves immersion into the game or makes it worse I can’t say until I play it on Tuesday (More likely Wednesday, fuck took like a week to install eso and now I never play it -_-). I can’t say listening to Captain’s Shepherd’s monotone voice for hours on end with its varying inflection from anger to *shudders* flirtation increased anything but my threshold for cringe.

But this is Fallout, this is Bethesda, Bioware is but flies compared to Vigo!.. I mean Todd Howard.

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Green Sunday; Ramblings of a Zombie Apologist

I know the first instinct you have when you hear ‘zombie horror’ to the most cynical of hipsters is to utter a collective angsty yawn. But give me a break. I’m writing a zombie story, Green Sunday is a for lack of a better term, coined by Shaun of the Dead a RomZomCom. Just give me a chance, come back! Hey! It’s nothing like Walking Dead!… Hmm that may have backfired.
Well for the people that got through that and are still reading which is probably all of three people, I thank you and now I shall begin my zombie apologetics.

The reason I wrote this story is two-fold, I wanted to write a zombie story, but every motherfucker wants to write a zombie story, especially every crazy motherfucker like me that wants it to actually happen. But I wanted to write it from the perspective of someone like me, someone who wants it to happen. I thought this might help me understand why I want that and why that’s crazy. I realise it’s a state of cognitive dissonance, I want the zombie apocalypse to happen so I can use my collection of sharp pointy things and have a blast but I also don’t want it to happen because I like not having to cut my friends and family into bits because they’re trying to eat me and more importantly Fallout 4 is coming out next month. Maybe next year.

Zombie stories are tricky because essentially they’re too easy, you can’t write a story just about zombies. Zombies are just an inciting incident, they’re just a framing device for what is essentially a disaster movie and overall a character drama. It’s not about the zombies it’s about how the characters react to the zombies. The zombies aren’t characters, they don’t have back stories or motivation, they’re just flesh eating monsters that could be replaced by nearly anything; Aliens, flesh eating penguins, fish men, the world’s worse case of herpes.

They’re not important to the story except as an obstacle and to be honest people like watching people kill people, they don’t really want to see people killing animals and with aliens that’s sort of a grey area. There must be something in our brains that just prefers to watch people die, harking back to the coliseums.

So why choose zombies if they’re so overdone? For that exact reason. I wanted to write a story satirises the oversaturation of zombies into our culture and to mock from the inside people like me. Nutters that are preparing or at least fantasising about it really happening. Saying something is overdone is just a way of trying to lower the market value so you can do it when no one’s paying attention and come out the omega hipster, like me ha-ha. No.

I’m a writer nothing is overdone if it’s done well, everything can be turned on its head, when someone has an expectation that’s when they’re the most vulnerable to have their expectation completely levelled and you have them by the seat of their pants.

I wanted to write a zombie apocalypse story that wasn’t really about a zombie apocalypse and to mock zombie apocalypses and this spate of summer teen movies like Hunger Games just a bit. So I thought instead of making a straight up zombie apocalypse story or a post apocalyptic story, I’d write a post-post-apocalyptic story.

It’s always been the case that the most far-fetched thing about a zombie apocalypse is the idea of it actually happening or indeed ending the world. Even an air born virus probably wouldn’t end the world, it could kill 80% of the worlds’ population and would definitely change the world but it wouldn’t end it. So how could a virus spread by touch/bite spread so quickly, and how could it overcome every army/police force/pmc of the world? Or indeed happen in a country like America where ‘There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass’ as Isoroku Yamamoto Fleet Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during World War II is according to wikiquote is misquoted as saying.

But obviously I don’t live in America, I live in England, but we still have armed police and despite what you may here about our gun laws, we still have guns, knives, cricket bats. I set it in America essentially to mock America and open it up a wider audience. America is always rife for parody as it has the delightful habit of taking everything to its greatest extreme. Although this ‘prepper culture’ has spread to the UK, it started and it lives in the US. And really for the story to work it needed an isolated are and although there are small villages (like the one I’m from) and lots of open spaces and countryside. I wanted a small mountain town to really capture the isolation possible even in a semi-thriving small town.

Ok I realised I’ve been waffling around the point, the story is I suppose a little more like Dead Rising the videogame. I.e. This shit is done on purpose, it’s not an accident or a virus, this is an isolated incident done for a specific reason. Not as a test but for fun.

Green Sunday is named for the main character, Sunday is sort of a modern homage to Red Sonja, and before I start pandering telling you how she’s a ‘bad ass/asskicking’ woman and the quintessential and much sort after ‘strong female character’, I posed her as more sort of a Don Quixote character or a Sherlock Holmes. She’s the main character but as a whole She is left a mystery and the story is told through the eyes of her cohort, her Dr. Watson; TJ.

That way I felt that she could remain a mystery and through TJ she could be this tough character but waves of softness could be intermittently shone on him from time to time for a potential romance (I say potential because I’m in the process of writing it and I’m not sure Sunday really likes him, sometimes I have a scene planned out and it goes down a completely different path which better fits the character themselves).

Waffle fit yet again, tangents, tangents everywhere! The story is about a zombie game show, I got it out, there it is. Beautiful isn’t it? Not really *Shakes head*.

Ok so the generic ‘Sinister Corporation with ties to the government’ moves into town and seals it off to play their own little internet zombie game show. So it’s basically Battle Royale meets Dead Rising or Resident Evil. I’m trying to capture the irony of the main characters being zombie obsessed Youtubers caught in what is essentially a zombie internet reality show. And they have to fight for their lives over three gruelling days of bloody violence.

That’s it in a nutshell.

I’m having a hell of a lot of fun writing it, the zombie stuff is always good fun, with a feckless neckbeard fanboy character propelling the story and lots of crazy people brought into the town to fight and rich assholes paying to hunt zombies, it’s a delicious clusterfuck of gore and black humour.

The first ‘beta’ chapter is up for you to read on inkitt, I’ve proofread it but it’s still away with my editor, so hopefully within the month I can re-upload it after it’s been professionally edited and then move onto the next chapter.

Follow this link Green Sunday to read the first chapter and review it and tell me it sucks ass just read it ha-ha.

See ya.

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