Terminator: Back to the Fan Fiction

It’s been a year and still there is no real progress on this awesome Fan Fiction idea. I started plotting out a story to match the video and was eventually overwhelmed by the complexity of my story and then by other projects throughout the year.

This is still a project I really want to write up, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. So I decided this year, I will set goals for it, like I am doing for all my other projects. I spent the second half of 2012 rewiring my writing brain to work more strategically and still retain my creativity. Most of that will probably rarely reflect in my blog posts, outside of the Weapons & Warriors posts,  because I usually just ramble a lot.

I skipped Nanowrimo (National November Writing Month) in 2012 because I was neck deep in edits for Devil Dog and Welcome to My Imagination, I still am. I spent a lot of 2012 in the editing phase because I was learning new techniques for writing to help me complete a book without having to rewrite it ten times. While I’m mastering these new techniques I am going to use them to set up a schedule to write out the Terminator vs. Back to the Future story.

Fan-Fiction Terminator vs Back to the Future

The time is drawing near. I’m still fixing some plot holes and organizing the story, but the “Terminator vs. Back to the Future” fan-fiction project is getting closer to being written. I’m going to aim for starting the first chapter this summer, so it’s still a ways out. The video that was done up by How It Should Have Ended Team is pretty much what the story is about. John Connor wants to kill Doc Emmit Brown so that the machines can never uncover and use his time traveling technology. I’ll go into more detail on the basic storyline at the end of this post.

Weapons & Warriors: The Ninja, The Truth of the Shinobi

Art by Steven DeVon Jones

They were once known as the Shinobi, but just saying the word Ninja usually makes people conjure images of ghostlike black clothed figures sneaking around and killing people without ever being seen. Believe it or not, that is the Hollywood ninja. The true Ninja is shrouded in mystery plenty enough by their own myths and legends that Hollywood has virtually deluded their existence to being magicians with weapons and martial arts. In reality, most ninja started out as farmers and labors. They made their weapons from the tools they used and learned martial arts from monks that had been influenced by Chinese refuges from generations before.

The victim of a real ninja probably looked right into the Ninja’s eyes as he died. More often than not, the Ninja would be so inconspicuous that they could waltz right up to their target and kill him without anyone realizing what was happening until he had already slipped away. They didn’t wear black pajamas. They wore what everyone else in the room was wearing. Blending in like a covert spy. Essentially, that’s what a Ninja really was, a spy who had been trained in sabotage, espionage, and assassination as well as combat.

Samurai were usually the enemies of the Ninja, and Samurai despised the Ninja who did not honor the Bushido code. A Samurai had to face his enemy and state his intentions before fighting honorably, even on a battlefield. A Ninja had no such limitations and because of this, Samurai were often known to hire local Ninja to sow chaos with their enemies and gain the edge without actually getting their own hands dirty and hurting their own honor.

Weapons & Warriors: The Ninjato of the Ninja

The greatest enemy to the Ninja was the Samurai. Ninja were not weak or poor swordsmen either but they were no match when they drew a katana to fight the masters of the warrior caste of Japan. Despite the vast array of weaponry that Ninja studied, they too studied the art of swordplay. They also mastered it and varied their style to counter that of the Samurai. However many historians believe that the Ninja adopted a shorter version of the katana instead of the bulkier length of the armored warriors. Samurai’s katana were a far superior quality of designed weapons than anything a Ninja could afford, and any Samurai who fell to a Ninja would certainly lose his precious blade to his slayer. Not all Ninja acquired a katana by theft or killing a Samurai, but it wasn’t unheard of. In fact, prying a katana from the bloodied hand of a Samurai was not only a wonderful prize, but an excellent reputation builder among the Ninja. Samurai did not give up their weapons while they still breathed.

Weapons & Warriors: The Black Egg of the Ninja

This device is based from a Samurai police tool called Metsubushi. Samurai carried small boxes and filled them with ground up peppers or dust. The box had an opening for blowing into and a tube on the other end for aiming the spray. It was specifically used to blind an enemy either to subdue or kill. This device still exists today and is carried by a lot of women, known as pepper spray.

The Black Egg Art by TL Jeffcoat

The Ninja adopted this and then took it to a further extreme. Ninja were not wealthy, so designing a box to do this specific task was beyond what most could afford to buy or had time to carve. The ever improvising Ninja turned to what was readily available, the bird egg. After emptying the egg carefully, they would then fill the egg with whatever they had at their disposal. In many cases this was a ground pepper sauce, like the Samurai used, but it also wasn’t uncommon for many Ninja to grind glass. The key to keeping the fragile eggs from shattering in their pockets was to use a flame to cook the outer edge of the egg to harden some of the interior and then empty the yolk and any uncooked white through a hole on one end. This made the egg more flexible, so that even if the thin shell cracked, it wouldn’t leak as long as the interior wasn’t broken.

Writer Ramblings: Limitless

Limitless

This movie is about a pill that opens your mind to limitless possibilities. Can you imagine the ability to see the patterns of the things around us that normally we all see as nothing but chaos? With the ability to see every pattern in every aspect of life, you could literally predict the future.

Well, yes and no. The movie takes it to a whole new level, but in reality, we can all achieve this on our own. The only limits in life are what we set for ourselves. Obviously there are still some kinds of limits. Someone paralyzed from the waist down won’t ever be able to run a marathon right? Maybe they can’t, but if they really want to, they can find a way to roll in one. No dream is unachievable, except immortality. That is even questionable depending on what you believe immortality would require. Me? Two things make me believe in immortality. The afterlife, because I believe there is one, and my writing. Long after I’m dead, someone will still be purchasing and buying my novels. Let’s hope that is still very far off though.

Movies that Stand the Test of Time

I love watching classic movies. I don’t mean Gone with the Wind or North to Alaska either. Although I’ve seen both and enjoyed North to Alaska, those are a little beyond my childhood. I mean movies from the 80’s. Timeless classics like Top Gun, Terminator, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi, Back to the Future, Aliens, Full Metal Jacket, Die Hard, etc.

Well I thought they were good back in the 80’s. I’ve discovered that not every movie I loved in the 80’s is still lovable today. Movies like The Never Ending Story, The Breakfast Club and Tron all left a bad taste in my mouth after watching them recently in the last few years. I even bought DVD’s of two of those movies with the “Oh man! I remember this movie. It was awesome.” Key word being “was.” Now that their opened I can’t return them either, now just something else that will collect dust till my next garage sale.

Well this holiday weekend I treated myself to two movies I loved in the 80’s. You might have heard of them: Robocop and Night of the Comet.

Well, Robocop lived up to the timeless classic I thought it would be. They didn’t try to push the envelope with graphics which turned out to be a good plan to make this movie still watchable in 2011. There are some cheesy special effects, but it was the 80’s and there are giant robots fighting. All in all, I watched it with my brother-in-law (much younger than me) who hadn’t seen it and he loved it. If you haven’t seen it and you enjoy sci-fi, futuristic movies then definitely try to watch it once, it’s streamed on Netflix.

The Night of the Comet on the other hand went the other way in a dramatically painful way. I finished watching it again out of pure nostalgia after watching it at least ten times in the 80’s. After it was done I found myself wondering how ridiculously easy I was to entertain back then.

If you’ve seen any old movies recently that you had fond memories of and then watched them again after many years then share them with me. It doesn’t matter if it’s the timeless good ones or the ones that should fade away from existence.