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B A Start Poll: What companies will still be around 1,000 years from now? Will we still drink Pepsi? Eat Cheerios? Use Faber-Castell colored pencils?

I saw of these one time. IN A DREAM. Figures my clairvoyance would be limited to videogames.

Whoops. This is what would happen if I played hockey.

Those of us from New Hampshire call Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday “Civil Rights Day”. Just to be contrary, I think.

Not to belabor the writing thing, but I am embarking once again on a month of productivity. Like a twenty-five-year-old, I’m starting to flesh out. I’m shooting for an additional 30,000 words by month’s end.

Joining me on this journey is the ineffable Greg, prompting us to name January Agnowrimo, for “Alex’s and Greg’s Novel Writing Month”. Why not “Greg’s and Alex’s”, you ask? Ganowrimo, pronounced after the fashion of a third-grade bully.

Your results:
You are Superman

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Does your prose reveal your gender? Somebody thinks so. I tried this doodad three times, twice with passages from my nano concoction and once with a B A Start post.

Iteration 1: A scene in which two members of a ship’s crew (both males) get into an altercation. Result: Female.

Iteration 2: A scene in which the main female character plans to tell her love interest a secret. Result: Male.

Iteration 3: This post about my perpetual interest in mod culture and fashion. Result: Male.

Having taken the prerequisite salt grain, I’m a little surprised. I know content and grammar are unrelated, but still.

So, this is cool. Does there seem to be a rash of bubble-to-line web music toys? First I run into musicovery the other day (which, by the by, has this rad animated .ico thing going on) and now this TuneGlue business.

Time was being a rock snob was hard, expensive work. Now all it takes is a Rhapsody subscription and some time. The rock snobs are making their knowledge available to the general public, an action I always thought was completely contrary to their ethos. The idea was to know good music and keep it from everyone else in order to maintain coolness. Now, I’m the music guy at work. Me. It’s a world gone mad.

I’m guessing, though, that they’re just toying with us. They still have their ivory tower CD collections, their secret stashes of the real dope. The sanctum sanctorum is still out there, guarded by grim mop-topped acolytes.

Does everyone else find 50’s-60’s mod style intriguing? Please tell me I’m not alone on this.

Maybe I spent too much time watching The Prisoner as a kid, or maybe it was Julie Newmar in Catwoman garb giving me a few ideas about just what it was the grown-ups were all so interested in, but the aesthetic lodged itself in my pre-pubescent mind as being odd and foreign but irrepressibly fascinating.

Somewhere in the yet-to-be-digitized index card system in my head, filed under “fantasy worlds” in a bright yellow folder between “Arabian Nights” and “Norman Rockwell’s America”, one can find this weird realm where there is a dearth of lines and an abundance of uniform shapes. People wore triangles. The cartoons became freaky art pieces. Airline aisles became runways. The whole world was built with construction paper and green-handled safety scissors.

And from whence came this land of over-exaggerated poses? My guess is the film quality. Early color film always looks like someone got a little crazy with the saturation and brightness bars in Photoshop and left them set to “blandify”. What to do when lost in a world of washed-outedness? Make big bright blocks of color and put them on the women.

Words on zee nets is that someone is thinking about a Firefly video game, a massively-multiplayer online deal. This is dumb. You want to make something good? Here’s how you do it:

#1: The base ingredients. What do we know about the Firefly universe? Interstellar travel, psychics, cannibals, and legalized prostitution.

#2: The spices. Q1: What does Firefly feel like? A: Old West. Q2: What’s fun about Firefly? A: The language, sharp-shooting, wild stunts with spaceships, Kaylee.

#3: Mix until smooth. So, what we want here is a workable plot line which fits in the ‘verse but doesn’t feature any of the main characters. E.g. — playing as Luke Skywalker is lame, but playing as Kyle Katarn is awesome. We’ll set this in the post-unification, pre-Serenity timeframe.

You play as a newly-recruited Alliance agent who is sent undercover to gather up a young woman from a far-flung dirthole planet. You book a seat on a civilian transport (NOT the Serenity) and head out. You have some adventures on the way there and get to know the crew.

Once you get to Dirtonia, you discover that the woman you have been sent to bring in is a Companion, and a psychic one at that — which makes her wicked good at her job. The Alliance wants her for the River experiment. You, being a good guy, decide to go rogue.

The overall plot pits you against an Alliance bigwig who is oppressing a dusty planet known for harboring Browncoats during the war. You and your ragtag band of misfits (you end up Captain, due to some serendipity) free the locals from his reign, cleaning up the single-horsed town.

Gameplay switches back and forth between rpg-action and flight-sim (reavers are out there). You meet up with various lesser characters in your travels (e.g. the Serenity’s original engine guy — you know, blonde tattoo dude? — is on your crew.) and hit some of the locations from the show. Lots of shooting, quipping, and Blue Sun cola.

Joss? Call me.