NickCummings.com

You might remember that I attempted and subsequently failed to complete National Novel Writing Month in November of 2009. That’s all right; whatever; I’ve moved on.

But now it’s April, and April means Script Frenzy month! The premise is similar to NaNoWriMo, but instead of being tasked with churning out a 50,000 word novel, writers are instead given 30 days to write a 100-page script.

This is great for people like me because

• Scripts have these huge margins. Have you seen them? It’s just ridiculous.
• You don’t have to deal with all those irritating trappings of novel writing, such as description and flowery language
• 100 pages is, like, a lot less than 250 pages

Want to sign up? Great! You can keep me company and watch first-hand as I fall flat on my face at around page seven.

First, you’ll wanna head over to scriptfrenzy.org and sign up for a free account. If you participated in NaNoWriMo before, your old account information (and all those shameful memories of failure) are preserved and adapted to work with Script Frenzy.

Next, you’ll want to brush up on script formatting guidelines. Don’t let these overwhelm you; they’re there to help give you a head start on the structure of your writing so you can focus on getting that Star Wars/Harry Potter crossover you’ve been having those creepy dreams about nailed down on paper.

And last, you’ll want to add me as a writing buddy. I don’t know if that serves any overt purpose, but hey: strength in numbers, right?

One final note: You can write whatever kind of script you’ve been yearning for. Got an excellent idea for the next soul-wrenching, low-budget indie movie? Eager to plan out that comic book series starring an unemployed writer with a bachelor’s degree in English or journalism? Think you’ve got what it takes to bring a revival of Remington Steele to television? Those are all perfectly acceptable reasons to take up the Script Frenzy gauntlet. (Actually, it might be best if we just leave Remington Steele alone.) Hell, I’m just writing a videogame script — something that has no established format — and even that’s okay.

So if you’re interested, take a look and let me know if you get on board. Besides, April’s just as crappy as November, weather-wise; what better time to flex your latent creativity muscles and get something done?

This is what the rain can do to a person.

The rainy season unmistakeably arrived in Portland today: Streets are flooding, umbrellas are out, and Californian expatriates are preparing for the End of Days.

I’m no stranger to the gloom that perpetually overcast skies bring with them, but I’m also notoriously bad at preparing myself for the winter doldrums. Well, not this time! I’ve got a foolproof 30-day regimen that’s guaranteed to ease me in to Oregon’s annual unpleasantness with finesse.

During the month of November, I will write a 50,000-word novel, abstain from shaving (not that anyone will be able to tell) and blog about the whole unfortunate thing.

So why write a novel? I won’t deny the appeal of adding another outlandish boast to my repertoire for cocktail parties and art-gallery soirées, but I’m also chiefly interested in the lessons to be learned from committing myself to a major project I know very little about and forcing myself to get through it by the skin of my teeth. I’m notoriously bad at committing to work until the eleventh hour (thanks, college!) and I’m eager to see if there’s actually any reward to be found in pacing oneself when undertaking a massive effort.

As for the lack of shaving? That’s more of a “just get it over with” type of situation. As a man, I am theoretically blessed with the super power of growing facial hair. But thanks to some rather unfortunate genes and sour luck, I rolled a few natural ones at my moment of conception and wound up a couple decades later with a distressingly uneven smattering of facial hair.

Thankfully, I live in a city where an unshaven person who spends hours each day writing a meandering novel looks just as natural as a fat man in a button-up shirt, spurs and a ten-gallon hat raising a pair of pistols to the heavens does in Texas. (I have never been to Texas but I am told this is what life means to a Texan.)

It’s an altogether foolish plan for self-improvement, but at least my friends and family will get a few cheap laughs at my expense.

For updates on my novel, beard status and sanity, kindly subscribe to my blog.

I’ve never been content with just killing time. It’s been a full year since I finished my thesis and officially graduated, and I feel like I’m just as lost as I was then.

I know a few people going to law school. They’re friends, but we’re very different people. They’ve always been very big on their families, and civic duty, and religion, and all those things that I’ve respected but never felt drawn to. They’re both eagle scouts, like me, but they actually enjoyed their time with the Boy Scouts, which I did not. I just wonder if there’s a very distinct personality that’s destined for success in law, and the majority of people applying — those who just aren’t sure about the whole ordeal, like me — are doomed to slightly better-paying office jobs that barely compensate for the monstrous debt they’ve all picked up in the process.

I just noticed something. If you type “should i go” into Google, the top auto-complete result is “should I go to law school.” Are a lot of people as doubtful about the whole institution as I am?

Hmm. Here’s the top result: Should You Go To Law School? Not Unless You Want To Be A Lawyer.

I know better than to go by just one person’s authority, but this is a pretty well-reasoned statement. I don’t think law’s the path for me.

So.

Now what?

So, funny story — I haven’t posted here in a month. And this is after I promised frequent updates, right?

Well, I have been blogging daily, believe it or not. Just not here.

For the last couple months, I’ve been pouring heart and soul (and carpal tunnel-ridden hands) into editing and writing for a gaming blog called Silicon Sasquatch. It’s a project I started with Aaron Thayer, a friend and fellow graduate of the University of Oregon School of Journalism, Communication and Terminal Unemployment. Our mission has been to deliver daily news, analysis and reviews on anything related to videogames and gaming culture with a definite emphasis on the Pacific Northwest.

Writing about games is something I’ve dreamed about doing for as long as I’ve been able to read, and while it’s not quite as lucrative as I’d imagined (we’re never going to make any money, ever) I’m having a blast maintaining and improving the site on a daily basis. I’ve become addicted to Twittering and Digging each story and tracking traffic to an obsessive degree.  I’ve got Photoshop macros built for resizing and downsampling images for the site, and I’m working on developing a watermark filter. I’m positively smitten by this fake little not-capable-of-profit business I’ve built for myself.

In this month alone, we’ve more than quintupled our page views: We’re now averaging more than 1,000 views per month, and the average continues to climb daily. We’ve also started receiving comments from real, actual people that we don’t know, which is exciting. But the most exciting thing was when Aaron’s review of an indie game called The Path was picked up by the game’s developer, Tale of Tales. They quoted Aaron and posted a link to our review from their site, which continues to give us exposure. It’s a minor nod, but to know that someone’s paying attention is pretty exhilarating.

I miss writing about other things, but between working full-time (for my dad, but hey, it’s work) and working on the gaming blog I just haven’t had time for anything else.

In any case, I hope you’ll check out the work we’re doing on the gaming blog, even if games aren’t your thing. Any and all feedback is totally appreciated.

Portlanders, rejoice — we’ve finally got a reason to hate our lives!

My friend and partner in crime sent me a link to BusinessWeek’s list of the most unhappy cities in the United States, and guess what? We won!

The victory was determined by factors like depression, suicide rates, divorces and crime. Personally, my favorite component is the number of cloudy days: a staggering 222 per year in Portland.

I’m not sure I’d call this list fair by any stretch of the imagination; the article’s hefty disclaimer only reinforces the lack of scientific validity backing it up. Notably missing are factors like quality of public parks and transportation as well as air quality. Bad weather gets me down like nobody’s business, but living in a place that’s smothered in trees and foliage also makes for a healthy, cozy place to live.

Oh, and the beer helps.

Excerpt from Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

If you’re at all interested in how copyright law is evolving with technology, you really ought to pay close attention to The Pirate Bay’s trial. Currently underway in Sweden, the case pits the founders of the BitTorrent search engine against music industry representatives. This might seem like a clear-cut case in favor of the plaintiffs, but there’s a significant grey area: The Pirate Bay doesn’t actually host any of the files on its site, nor does it produce its own torrent links to copyright material. Instead, the site merely lets a user upload torrent files, which another user’s BitTorrent client of choice can use to connect to the host user’s computer to download the file directly.

The real beauty of BitTorrent, as you probably know, is that it pioneered the concept of distributed file sharing — that is, everyone who downloads from the host (a “leecher”) is also a “seeder” who actively hosts bits of the file to other downloaders. In this way, everyone’s computers collaborate to ensure that the more users there are downloading a file, the faster everyone obtains it. It also relieves the majority of bandwidth pressure from a host, and theoretically enables download speeds to increase exponentially as more users seek the same files.

It’s important to know how BitTorrent works because it may explain why, just one day into the trial, the prosecution has dropped half of its charges against The Pirate Bay. The site’s founders are no longer being accused of “assisting copyright infringement,” which leaves only the less sinister charge of “assisting making available copyright material.” While the site’s founders suggest this is indicative of the prosecution’s failure to understand the technology of the site, the prosecution countered by suggesting they were just simplifying the charges.

If you’re interested in following the case closely, I suggest you head over to TorrentFreak.com. They’ve established themselves as the definitive source for torrent-related news, and they’ve been following the case intently.

I’m not sure how I feel about The Pirate Bay’s position in this case. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I’d never torrented copyrighted material, but I can’t condone my actions as ethical. I think that The Pirate Bay’s best-case scenario is they’re found guilty of negligence by fostering a Web community where people connect to exchange copyrighted files without being stopped. But all the same, I think this is going to be a landmark case in shaping how people can interact and share information over the Internet.

What do you think? Should sites like The Pirate Bay be shuttered to protect copyright holders? Should BitTorrent use be regulated? Or should filesharing continue unimpeded?

Melissa and I are both graduates of the University of Oregon journalism program. So, as you might imagine, we’ve both spent a lot of time pondering what the hell we were thinking going into a dying industry at the precipice of the greatest economic upheaval in decades.

Living in Oregon, there’s not much in the way of mass media. There’s not much in the way of anything except for trees and grass, really. And after months of unsuccessful job hunting, the prospect of going back to grad school continues to rear its head. And because Melissa and I are both strong writers with a critical and argumentative mindset, law school continues to be recommended to us by our families and friends.

I don’t really want to go back to school. Seventeen contiguous years of education culminating in recitation, late nights and largely unsatisfying work will do that to you. But the reality of this market is even more imposing.

Realistically, my dream job would involve some pretty broad ideas:

• Music
• Culture
• Writing
• Design
• Communication

And I don’t really see a career in law lending itself to those qualities. At best, I’d be an outsider to the innovators and creators, and I’m not sure I want to attain my ideals in a purely vicarious sense.

Nevertheless, we stopped in at Borders to take a look at some practice tests and other supplemental materials on considering and applying to law school. But even for a standardized test, the LSAT is in a league of its own when it comes to condensed tedium (not from concentrate).

As a child I adored logic puzzles. Of all the worksheets and exercises I did in my younger years, logic tables – discerning whether Susie sold more lemonade than Jamal, or determining the birth order of the eleven children in a fictitious family by piecing together a series of bizarre facts – were my favorite. (So much so that at the end of third grade I requested as many xeroxes of additional logic puzzles to solve over the summer as I could obtain from my teacher. In hindsight, I think that may have been the moment where I first began to realize the full extent of my nerdiness.)

As for journalism? I guess I could keep trying for an internship at a publication, but I hear that’s more of a trust-fund thing now.

I heard that Facebook turned five years old yesterday, and I cringed. Really? I thought for sure I hadn’t squandered my entire college career on one Web site, but the facts are clear:

1. I joined Facebook in the summer of 2004, just months after its initial Harvard-only launch
2. I’ve accessed the site almost every single day since then
3. I can’t find a job, but I’m still using Facebook all the damn time

In other news, I’m pretty sure I’m the last person on the planet who hasn’t filled out his requisite “25 things about me” note to share with friends on Facebook. It’s nothing personal, really; I just don’t get much out of it. I mean, what’s the fun in doting over a 25-item list when I can pay lots of money to write whenever I want on my own little slice of life?

Melissa pointed out to me that even Time Magazine’s Claire Suddath is pissed off about it, with hilarious and pointed observation to justify her rancor. I feel like a crotchety old man for harrumphing in agreement with her, but there are just some things best kept private for one reason (author is boring) or another (author is a certifiable creeper).

Dear Reader,

Hi!

I haven’t been here in a while. I’ve been living this fascinating life where a lack of job prospects has lulled me into a significant creativity slump. Basically, nothing’s happening so I’ve got nothing to say. So yeah, I’ve broken a few pledges when it comes to writing continuously, but trust me on this one: the garbage I would have produced is a far more frightening prospect than the total lack of content I opted for instead.

But that’s all ending today. I’ve streamlined (deleted) the majority of my website and this blog is now the primary feature. In the coming days I’ll restore all the old stuff — contact information, my resume, a list of things I’ve done — through the WordPress infrastructure. At the same time, I’m vowing to update my blog at least once per day. I really haven’t planned how I’ll do it, and there’s a pretty solid chance it won’t be worth reading, but what the hell. What’s a writer without his shitty, off-the-cuff generic prose?

Always and forever,

- Nick

Hey gang. I’m overhauling my website, and that includes this here blog. You’ll be seeing some changes in the near future (honest to gosh!) and perhaps chief among them is the name of this blog.

As of today, I’m retiring the title “Will Write 4 GP.” It wasn’t ever very clever, and it mostly just confused people. I don’t think GP has been currency in a video game since like 1995. It makes me look old.

This also means I won’t be restricted to writing only about video games. It turns out there are some other things I like, too! I think. I’ll keep you posted. But by no means am I finished writing about gaming; in fact, I hope to have something to announce on that subject soon.

I’m looking forward to writing again, and I hope you enjoy reading.