The left hand ...

I'm listening to KISS' "New York Groove" as I write down the thoughts I've been having since I stopped blogging actively in the past two years or so. I figure this would be a good enough place to start, and, if anything, this is a place where I can stimulate my own creativity through blogging. I'm not seeing myself as the next "Julie/Julia" or anything like that, though I love that movie and food in general.

This will be a place for movies, video games, music, and life to be discussed, in (hopefully) a funny way, something to make people chuckle a bit, and really just exercise my writing ability, while improving more every single day. That's really all I ask for, is the opportunity to write and improve.

I'm on Facebook, but that joint is for sharing pictures and status updates. I don't have a Twitter. Yet. I call this blog "Non-Zero Possibility" because it's a neat name, and I'm not really promising anything too insane for people to catch on to, just a neat place to come, read some thoughts, and as mentioned previously, giggle a bit.

I guess a little about myself is in order. I'm a writer from Long Island, NY, engaged to a beautiful and patient woman, making plans for the future. I do freelance writing as a part-time job for a company, as well as working for a video game company in Sweden as a Story Editor. Our games have been released as part of the Indie Games lineup on the XBOX 360, and are currently ranked in the Top 50 downloads/reviews section. I'm impossibly proud of the work I've done on the games, as they are suspenseful, scary, and challenging. The company is called Shining Gate Software, and the franchise I've worked on is called "Decay". To tell you any more about the storyline of the game would be doing a great disservice to the playability.

I've also won two national writing awards for my original fiction, one for my play, A Winter Idyll, the other for a screenplay titled Garysaurus Rex. I'm proud of both, and have been lucky enough to see A Winter Idyll performed live at my alma mater.

I'm very hardcore about film and gaming, having grown up with Spielberg, Zemeckis, and the other titans of the 80's. I've also always had a video game controller in my hand. These days, I'm a big XBOX 360 gamer, as well as DS and once in a while I blow the dust off my Wii and go to town in "Punch Out!"

I just returned from my first trip to Los Angeles, which also happened to be my first trip via airplane. I've always been absolutely terrified of flying, and it's always been something I knew I would have to do one day. Six hours, thirty-six thousand feet in the air, over six hundred miles an hour. That was apparently what I was dealing with en route to the left coast.

I remember seeing "La Bamba" as a kid, where there was a rather terrifying plane crash resulting in the deaths of Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and The Big Bopper. "The day the music died", they said. I was around five years old or so when I saw this movie, and have been terrified of flying ever since. Facing my fears, however; I learned that once in the air, it's not so bad. Levelling off and flying for a few hours isn't a terrible thing. The take off is what I take most issue with, as the idea of jetting off into the sky, a realm inhabited by birds and Superman, intimidates me a great deal.

That said, I faced my fear, flew back to New York with my beautiful fiance', and returned home no worse for wear. The trip to Los Angeles was short, but sweet, and another neat chapter in my life, one with epic travel and conquered fears.

I make myself sound like Herman Melville or something, but in reality, I'm just a dude who likes his feet on the ground and his head high in the clouds. My first words upon seeing the clouds beneath the wings of the plane were "This is how Superman sees the world ..."

- Rob