Blogocentric Formulations

Sleeping In & Rifts

PROMPT: It's Saturday! Did you get to sleep in? Make a few creative excuses for why you were able to sleep in this morning. If you didn't get to sleep in, what woke you up?


As usual, the thing that woke me up this morning was a brain already thinking about the to-do list I have to do today. Today is an errands kind of Saturday, so I'm balancing the checkbook, paying some bills, figuring out how to go about tackling my wife's student loans that are about to become payable, plus I need to get a haircut, take the car in for an oil change, and all kinds of fun stuff like that. I think my brain woke me up because I did get to sleep in for a while (at least later than the 6AM I usually have to wake up for work during the week), and it probably thought I had slept enough; that if I got any more rest I wouldn't have enough time in the day to accomplish all those errands. Gee, thanks brain; how kind of you.

Pretty much anytime I can sleep in past 6AM, I consider it sleeping in. I don't really need much sleep though (I can get by on three to five hours a night and feel full rested after six or so), so a lot of weekends I'll wake up at 9AM or 10AM which may seem like sleeping in, but I'm only sleeping that late because I stayed up until 3AM or 4AM writing or working on something else. If I'm really exhausted, I might sleep for a full eight hours, but I rarely sleep more than that unless I'm sick or just completely and utterly exhausted.

So no, I didn't get any more sleep than usual last night; I just went to bed really late and my overactive mind is to blame for convincing the rest of my body that I had slept enough and it was time to get up and get going.

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PROMPT: What property (book, comic, toy, etc.) would you love to see adapted for the screen? Movie or TV, and why?

RIFTS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifts_(role-playing_game)

Without question, the property I'd choose is RIFTS, a tabletop roleplaying game that I've played pretty close to since it first came out in the early 1990s. I haven't played with a group in a long time (apparently when you're an adult with real responsibilities, it's hard to find a likeminded group of adults who are all regularly free on a given weekend to play! ), but I still check in from time to time on the new sourcebooks they've created and where the property is going.

Once upon a time, Jerry Bruckheimer's production company had this property under option to try and make a movie out of it, but like so many projects, it just never got off the ground. This property is amazing, though; it's one of the most comprehensively detailed and unique ideas for a post-apocalyptic Earth setting I've ever read about. Everything is so detailed and well thought out; it's just a joy to get lost in this fictional world and imagine all the possibilities for stories to be told within the world. Long story short, Earth suffered a catastrophic event where the majority of the human population died almost instantaneously, and that aggregate release of psychic energy tore open the fabric of space and time, causing Earth to become almost like a train station with portals open to nearby and far-off worlds and other dimensions. Monsters started pouring through the portals (called rifts... get it? ) and Earth quickly became a feral place filled with monsters, aliens, magic users, and psychics. To protect themselves, the remaining human population quickly formed into small communities and used the plentiful number of new discoveries to create technological advancement like energy weapons, power armor, and vehicles.

It's the one property that I would love to see on screen more than any other, and one of the few jobs that I would probably agree to write myself on spec (i.e. for free) if the opportunity presented itself. There are just so many opportunities and directions you could take a world like this, I'd love the opportunity to help envision it... or at least see someone else create it.

As far as television or movie, I think an ongoing television series would be the best medium for the story because there's so much detail it could be an ongoing series, but I'd worry that the costs of special effects and costumes and makeup and whatnot would make it cost-prohibitive and I think it would be a disappointment as a cheesy low-budget sci-fi series. So I think I'd rather see it as a movie (and hopefully a successful franchise like STAR WARS or LORD OF THE RINGS).