Thursday, January 19, 2012

Question Begins

Welcome to what I hope will be the first weekly (or daily or monthly or however long it takes me to keep remembering that I actually have a blog) entry at The Question Mark.
For the past few years, I've been unsuccessfully juggling both a boring blog of unsavory content that nobody read and a desire to share my taste (or distaste) on a wide variety of topics and concerns in either written or spoken form to anyone who will listen. This blog, therefore, is the result of me dropping both of those juggling balls in favour of a much easier-to-handle alternative.

For starters, let me address the surprisingly small elephant in the room: the blog's address. Believe me, tqmark.blogspot.com was NOT my first choice for a URL. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and it sounds like the email address of a boring, middle-management executive type who works at a company called TQ Mark & Co., who spends all of his time driving around in a bland silver luxury car with all the personality of a cardboard box that has a face drawn on it with magic marker. However, thequestionmark.blogspot.com was already taken...by some woman named Veronica whose one and ONLY blog posting was a one-word test on July 15th, 2002. Thanks, Veronica! I'm glad my blog has a name more awkward to pronounce than most of the countries in Africa, just so you could test out your fonts or whatever back before the general public knew who Iron Man was.

Anyhoo, if you're going to be kind enough to waste your own precious time reading my unsually structured run-on sentences and overuse of parentheses (like this, for example), I suppose it's only fair that I introduce myself to you first so at least you know what you're getting yourself into. You're still in the shallow end of the pool, kids; there's no shame in pussying out and calling for the lifeguard yet!

As mentioned in the bio at the top of your computer screen, I consider myself both a writer and an actor, in the same way that Schwarzenegger considers himself both an actor and a governor; I may not be the greatest at either, and most of the time I'm a punchline who thinks he's in on the joke, but at least I have fun doing both. Plus I can time-travel.

I call myself The Question Mark mostly because I like speaking the phrase "the question mark" aloud, and partly because I harbor a somewhat disturbing yet completely normal (and in no way homoerotic) fascination with The Riddler. Riddler & I actually share quite a lot in common: we both enjoy question marks, we both fancy puzzles and word games, we both look dashing in green, and every now and then we both get the shit kicked out of us by a man dressed as a bat (don't ask).

Because of my career choices, my passions tend to hover around the obvious: movies, television shows, videogames, books, and geek culture in general. And for the record, "geek culture" has become so mainstream thanks to this Inter-net thing that frankly I'm surprised that they haven't just changed its name to "everyone culture" already. But that's a topic for another time (wink wink ambiguity).

If you're wondering what kind of writing I do, it's pretty much anything, though I'm mostly focused on novels. I'm in the middle of a series of 20 books titled The Chronicles of Everywhere, of which I've finished 7. They're fantasy-action-comedy-adventure-first person shooters about the fantasy genre in general. I've also started work on some other novel series, one of which has to do with vampires (not the sparkly kind) and the other with a group of wacky globe-hopping demon hunters (definitely the sparkly kind).
And if you're wondering what kind of acting I do, I'm a lot like Christopher Walken or Morgan Freeman: I'm not as talented as them, hell no, but because I accept EVERY role I'm offered. You can see the work a friend and I did at www.watchstiffs.com. And now I'm going to stop plugging myself before this blog becomes nothing but a giant commercial wrapped in text.

So if you look to this blog in the coming weeks (or months or days or...oh, we've already danced this dance, haven't we?), you'll continuously find some new and exciting things for me to ramble about, and for you to comment on at your leisure. I promise you that, unlike with my first Blog-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named (it was named Strawberry Toaster Oven), I will actually put more of an effort into updating and posting and whatnot.
So if you love movies, videogames, TV shows, videogames based off movies or TV shows, books, movie adaptations of books, TV spin-offs of movies, movie versions of cancelled TV shows, cancelled books adapted from spin-off movies, or everybody culture...then this is definitely the place for you. Welcome aboard.
And if you're one of those folks who's sniffling with disdain right now, your mouse hovering over the CLOSE button as you mutter, "Sorry, loser, but geek culture isn't for me! I'd rather read about socio-economics or watch YouTube videos of cats bumping into things!"...then this is still the place for you. Everybody's a geek once in a while.
Just don't expect me to post any videos of cats.