…is pretty much summed up here, in a Cracked article on Skyrim. Here the writer is complaining that he does things in the game out of the right order, and it sort of fucks up the story:

King: Wanderer! Thank the gods you’ve come! The prophecy told us that a mighty warrior would arise, worthy of wielding Fjalnir, the God-axe, and slaying the evil Demon Prince Synraith. We believe you to be that warrior. What say you, traveler? Will you accept this task?

Me: Yea, verily I shall accept thine task and vanq- wait, Synraith? Fiery dude in a floating city? Cape made out of screeching souls? Ahhh, shit. I already killed that guy.

King: You … already slew the Demon Prince, the Knife in the Dark, the Void at the Heart of All Men, whose identity you did not learn until just now?

Me: Yup. I saw that castle floating up in the sky, and I wanted to know if I could jump up the rocks to get in the back way. It took a lot of reloads, but I finally managed to hop on up in there.

King: You “hopped on up” into the Abyssal Palace?

Me: Yeeeep, yep yep yep. Just squat-jumped on in there and looted the place. Then I killed that Sydney guy-

King: Synraith, Demon Prince of the Abyss.

Me: -yeah him. I ganked that guy. Mostly just to see if I could. Plus he looked like kind of a dick.

King: Indeed, the Foulest of the Foul was “kind of a dick.” But you vanquished him without the aid of sacred Fjalnir, the God-axe?

Me: Totally. It wasn’t even a thing. I just hid on top of a bookshelf where he couldn’t reach me and shot him with arrows. Then I waited until he forgot I was shooting him, and did it all again to get the sneak damage bonus. Took a while, but he died all the same.

King: Forsooth! Thine heroic deeds are … well, that sounds kind of fucked up, actually. Never thought I’d feel bad for He Who Devours. So you have no need of our sacred totem weapon?

So yeah, if you have the talent to bring off pretentious “Aragorn the King” dialogue, then do it. The problem is, most people don’t.

I have decided that if I finish this thing, or at least bring it up to 50,000 words, I’m going to buy myself a Kindle for Christmas.

The good news: the Alphasmart Dana I acquired will upload text to my Ubuntu laptop the same way it will upload it to my Windows 7 desktop — via the usb port, opening a text editor on the laptop (in this case LibreOffice Writer) and pressing the “send” button a couple of times. Nice.

The bad news: I can’t get the IR port on my HP 660LX palmtop to work. [Edited to add: well, it works fine. What I can't get it to do is connect with another computer.] The IrDA usb adapter doesn’t work with either Windows 7 or Ubuntu. I’m thinking of rehooking up my old Windows XP computer just to see if that will accept the usb adapter. It should — the software (on one of those tiny joke cds, FML) says it is for every version of Windows from 98 to XP. Why I want to do this: well, the HP is just a great little machine. I stupidly lost the serial cable — but neither my laptop nor my new desktop have a serial port anyway. On the other hand, the only other way to get info off the HP would be via the IR port, and infrared has basically gone the way of the floppy disk. My only other alternative would be to just retype stuff with the HP open, but that strikes me as, um, a giant waste of time.

One more addition: apparently there isn’t a version of ActiveSync, or whatever that program was, for Windows 7, so it’s questionable whether I’ll be able to get data off the HP even if I can get it recognized by the new computer. Ubuntu seems to have a few programs or at least hacks, but they are all these complex command line things, and I’m not that into Linux.

Of course, none of this is getting me caught up. I’m now over two weeks behind. Ulp.

…I’ve bitten off more than I can chew trying to write a Space Saga Adventure Thing in one month. I should have used one of those nice little “real world” stories I have percolating around in the back of my head. But when I started typing, this other stuff came out.

I am really glad I decided to change to a completely different idea for my novel.

Writing something in Wordpad with italics and bold and underline to see how it looks if I cut and paste into WordPress.

It won’t carry over my formatting! Frown. Oh well.