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Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Julian Lighton" journal:

April 18th, 2012
10:57 pm [Link]	Favorite songs A while back, I decided to go through my music collection and make a playlist of my top ten favorite songs, with only one song from each artist. These are the songs I decided were my absolute favorites at the time I made the list. Some of them could be replaced with other songs, likely by the same artist. Odds are that if I made the list today, it'd be similar. Because I feel like it, I'm sharing them with the world. (Or at least the small subset that reads my LJ.) In no particular order: ( Here there be YouTube links... ) Tags: music (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
January 7th, 2012
02:56 am [Link]	A farewell to Magic I'm selling off my Magic cards next week, (I have about 10,000 cards by my rough estimates), and the process of sorting all my cards left me feeling somewhat nostalgic. I played for about ten years, from Beta in 1993 to Scourge in 2003. For the last couple of years, I was only playing in prerelease tournaments, due to the combination of the decline of the regular Sunday tournament at my local store and the fact that I wasn't buying many cards any more made it hard to stay competitive. I was also working on Shadowfist at the time, which required the same sort of mental energy that Magic does. I don't regret the time or money I spent. (It's even possible I'll make a profit selling my cards, but I doubt it, and can't really tell anyway.) I had fun. I was good, but not great. The fact that I was never spending that much money on cards and refused to buy singles made me an eccentric deckbuilder, never playing the standard archetypes of the time. I like to think that if I'd gotten serious about it, I could've competed at high levels. That might've happened if I'd stayed in Pittsburgh, where I was friends with somebody who later became a regular on the pro tour. Then again, it might not have; I wasn't that active a player back then, and didn't play Magic with Erik much. Most importantly, if I hadn't played Magic, I'd likely never have played Shadowfist, and that would have been a huge change. Through Fist, I met mnemex, and through him, directly or indirectly, I met most of the people on my friends list here. ( more reminiscence behind the cut... ) Current Mood: nostalgic Tags: gaming, geekery, magic (Leave a comment)
June 6th, 2011
03:36 am [Link]	In retrospect... ...helping them move a body would have been far easier. Current Mood: exhausted (5 comments \| Leave a comment)
May 23rd, 2011
05:00 pm [Link]	Critical Shift: Aftermath And here we are at the end of my Shadowfist fiction, about 47,000 words total, 17,000 of which are the CS story. I don't plan to write any more of it, or at least that's what I'm telling myself. (The fact that I left a seed for the Empire of Evil story should be ignored.) I'm posting this now because it's short -- it could've been left in the last full chapter, but I think it works better as an epilogue. ( Critical Shift: Aftermath ) Tags: fiction, shadowfist, unofficial official fanfic, unreleased (Leave a comment)
04:52 pm [Link]	Critical Shift: Apocalypse This chapter of CS is the third-longest thing I've written for Shadowfist. (Fourth, if you count the OmniFAQ, but that's a very different beast.) It contains the only scene I knew was going to be in the second half of CS before I started working on it again, and even then, I wasn't completely sure of the exact motivations. (It's the last one.) ( Critical Shift: Apocalypse ) Tags: fiction, shadowfist, unofficial official fanfic, unreleased (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
May 22nd, 2011
01:47 pm [Link]	Critical Shift: Revelations In which some things finally get explained. This is the shortest of the final three chapters, and the first section with Rei and Song is the one that I wanted in chapter four, but just couldn't fit it into the chapter's structure. ( Critical Shift: Revelations ) Tags: fiction, shadowfist, unofficial official fanfic, unreleased (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
May 20th, 2011
05:24 pm [Link]	Critical Shift: Compromises This is the first truly new bit of fiction I wrote. The TFT Dragon frame was new, but it pretty much followed along how I planned it out way back when. The second half of the Critical Shift story, on the other hand, was much vaguer in my head. I had some idea how it ended, but not the details, and everything in between was uncertain. This is certainly not the story I would have written back then. A number of elements are just things I wouldn't have thought about using, or wouldn't have been comfortable with. It's also a lot longer than the previous chapters. The first three combined are about as long as the fourth, and there was a section that was going to be in this chapter, but I ended up bumping to five for a variety of reasons, mostly pacing. I don't know if the length is because the plot really starts moving forward here, or because I'm writing differently. It was a bit tricky to get started on this one. I eventually just started writing what ended up being the first scene, realized what the chapter title was, and everything started rolling from there. ( Critical Shift: Compromises ) Tags: fiction, shadowfist, unofficial official fanfic, unreleased (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
May 19th, 2011
02:24 pm [Link]	Tim Powers Movies In a conversation with my sister that was spawned by the fact that On Stranger Tides is being sold in grocery stores, I came up with the idea of other movie franchises deciding to "adapt" Tim Powers novels. Ocean's 11+n: Last Call Twilight: The Stress of Her Regard (That last one is my sister's fault.) Tags: prattle (4 comments \| Leave a comment)
10:10 am [Link]	Critical Shift: Bargains This was the last piece of the story I wrote back in the day. It and chapter two each picked up a segment while I was working on the second half, but they're mostly old work. It sort of links to the other main story of the Critical Shift set, which is how the Ascended are dealing with the changes. (Hint: Not well.) That story wasn't really planned to be written, and I am not listening to the little voice in my head that is telling me to write it. ( Critical Shift: Bargains ) Tags: fiction, official fanfic, shadowfist, unreleased (Leave a comment)
May 17th, 2011
07:25 pm [Link]	Critical Shift: Rebirth The Critical Shift story is done in primary writing, and mostly done in revision. I'm not posting it all now to keep from overflowing people's friend lists, but expect a chapter every twoish days until it's done. (There may be delays due to internet problems at home.) I didn't mean to wait so long between posting the first chapter and the second, but I was shorter on time than usual this past week. ( Critical Shift: Rebirth ) Tags: fiction, official fanfic, shadowfist, unreleased (3 comments \| Leave a comment)

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