Nick Miller doesn’t care about it. So why should we?

“You don’t do anything”, says abruptly Jess Day to her dear friend Nick Miller, while his other pals mess around, mumbling things they would say on his yet to be funeral. Cutting through the drunken senseless humor, Jess puts it all on the table revealing that she knows how-to-be-real and the reality was that Nick is a useless thirty-something, who lives his everyman routine without a care.
Unlike his friends, Nick doesn’t have plans to pursue any particular dream. Nick doesn’t wish to be a successful basketball player like Winston once did, he doesn’t aspires to be like the self-centered and bizarrely goal-orientated Schmidt or even like his teacher chum, Jess, who is infuriatingly capable of seeing colors on a black and white palette.
Drop out from law school, bartender at night and incapable of maintaining a normal relationship, Nick goes through his motions just because he has to. There isn’t any gloomy depressiveness to his approach to life, only a silent notion of acquiescence. Nick enjoys, as much as the next guy, the pleasures of everyday life. He vows for peace at his shared home and enjoys the company of those around him even in their off-days.
Miller is not really big on neatness. He takes what he can get, even if what he can get is his roommate towel, which he never washes simply because he can’t see the point of washing something that he only wears it while leaving the shower, thus, while he’s clean.
Attached to his past relationships, Nick doesn’t really wants to lose the emotional connections he made through the years. Yes, he’s an emotional train wreck when dealing with his old girlfriend and he may or may not have pushed his new girlfriend over the edge with his incessant and inappropriate calls while she was unreachable in China. But, above all, this fellow is true to himself in feeling what he’s feeling and expressing that.
He cares for his friends and lovers like they were his family, but he doesn’t necessarily pad them in the back every time their inner craziness comes out for a laugh (our laugh, mostly). His “letting go” problems may be critical to his unusual persona, but he can shut them off whenever he’s needed to.
Thinking that he could be approaching his own death, Nick flinched a little to the pressure of his friends, but it took only one moment of pitiful and clichéd immaturity to take him back to his, indeed, very real self. A guy who doesn’t need to swim long breaths in the cold, but who is happy just guarding wallets by the shore and waiting for his friends to return to his company. To Nick’s own conclusion, he doesn’t do anything that he doesn’t have absolute certainty it will serve him good.
Nick Miller doesn’t do anything because there isn’t a single thing he wants to do – which almost makes him the male version of Wonderfall’s Jaye Tyler. And on that contemplation, the part-time bartender bluntly leaves us with this: what’s there to do? Why do it at all? And most importantly: Why can’t we just live and do nothing?
The life, death and rebirth of Lila

I wrote this character for years and today I wanted to briefly share her story:
Lila Gilmore was born in Darwin, Australia. She never met her father, her mother died when she was about 6 years old and she moved to Melbourne to live with her grandmother. Despite the early loss of her family and a heart condition from birth, Lila had a normal childhood. At 19 she went into Trinity College in Melbourne and graduated in Biomedicine. At 24, after her grandmother passing, she went to Sydney for a graduate major in Speech Studies.
It was there that Lila met Brand. Dazzled by the mysterious energy emanating from Brand’s self-trust, Lila fell in love without realizing that her Icelandic boyfriend was actually using her heart as power source for his dark and dangerous magic. After nearly dying, fighting exhaustion, Lila was saved by her newfound friend, a skilled sorcerer called Adriano Strauf. Past an inevitable heart transplant, Lila regained control of her destiny and started to learn the about same hazardous powers that almost cost her life.
Years afterward, she applied to work at the Coven, an international sorcerer’s organization dedicated to secretly protect the world from the dangers of uncontrolled magic. As a conciliatory agent, Lila went to Brussels to work to the 11th Council alongside Adriano. Stopping world menaces became her day job.
Six months later, her actions called the attention of a treacherous covert organization called simple “The Corporation”. Facing the misguided Agatha Priest – who lost her father because of the machinations of the Coven – and becoming the victim of Agatha’s mystical cancer treat, Lila saw, once more, magic to be used against her and fought her way to be freed from another deadly trap. Kidnapped by a man named Byron just after her struggle with the disease, Lila was cured by Atlantean technology – the same that Agatha wanted to use to destroy the Coven – and forced to work as an agent of The Corporation, who owned the miracle cure.
Escaping after a few missions, Lila came back to the Coven and became determinate to find more about her captors. Changed forever by their technology, Lila was no longer capable of performing bigger levels of magic, but her endurance turned into superhuman. Borderline immortal, Lila could heal faster than any other person and perform supernatural physical stunts, making her an indispensable asset. Performing missions for the 13th Council and “Department C” (ruled covertly by the bosses behind every Council), she found Byron once again and turn him against his own Corporation. Romantically involved, the couple was the wildcard in service of an endangered Coven ’til they were stripped of their duties by master schemer “Trinity”, an artificial magical intelligence in charge of the (supposedly) extinct 3rd Council.
Erased from existence thanks to the godlike powers of the 3rd, Lila and Byron faced their biggest challenges ’til the day they split, following an untimely visit from Alexis, a future agent whose Trinity knew nothing about, but who held information on the puzzling past of Byron.
Succeeding the discovery that Byron was the real orchestrator of her kidnapping years ago – driven by a misplaced feeling of identification, transformed into a deranged love – Lila found that the her lover was the main head in charge of the Corporation, who forced himself into a memory wipe to get closer to her without raising suspicion.
On her third year at Trinity’s service, with Byron on the loose, Lila was joined by an Italian savant and a teenager with a direct brain link with the Coven databases. After dealing with an ex-agent who threatened the exposition of all of the 3rd Council secrets, Lila and Byron stood face to face to one more twist.
Fighting him for the last time, Lila stepped into the Cosmos Door – something that they both uncovered years ago. A fracture in creation itself – and became one with the Universe for about 150 years. Byron, incapable of following her into the time/space break, stood guard, pledging repentance until the day of her return. He died from starvation weeks later she entered the door.
Waking up on the future and regaining her physical body, Lila met with a young Alexis, raising her as a daughter and telling everything about her paradoxally future in the past. Sought by a group of people aware of the overgrowing power of the Corporation, Lila took for herself the mission of defeating their omnipresent control.
Discovering that the Corporation spread through history with an army of different and all-powerful Byrons, Lila organized a team of rogue agents not connected to any group through time. Her foster daughter Alexis, a reawaken Brand (freed from the coma and compelled to work for her against the Corporation) and a cloned memoryless Byron, created from the remains found at the Cosmos Door.
Fighting wars from the beginning of time ’til the end of it, Lila and her team unveiled the main truth about the Corporation existence: Our universe wasn’t the first one. It was created by the last living being of the previous universe, which existed with different life forms and different physical set of laws. The purpose of the Corporation was to create a man on every single time that could be the last one standing, so they could conquer the next Universe by becoming its god.
At the end of the world, Alexis, Brand and clone Byron sacrificed themselves trying to destroy the ultimate Corporation personification, leaving Lila as the last life form standing. Dehumanized because of their own masterplan, the Corporation was stripped of life and lost the battle against Lila, who was considered the only being left; She automatically became the god of the next universe turning the Byron consciousness into nothing.
As her body and mind turned into god, Lila recreated existence and started another universe from scratch.
PS: There are about a thousand pages of this sitting back at my hard drive, so yes, I was brief on this post.
All in all it’s just another conspiracy in the wall
For some reason I’ve always been fascinated by conspiracy walls. Come again? “Conspiracy walls” is the term I use to define that particular moment when characters in thrillers are faced with the solution (or the mere contemplation) of a puzzle in the form of a mosaic of clippings, colorful lines and pictures posted in a convenient wall – usually hidden from other characters. Sometimes, it can be a beautiful handwritten timeline.
Since childhood I wanted to have one just like it in my bedroom. Needless to say, my mom was never a big fan of the idea… Mothers, they just don’t get that “it will RUIN the wall” is not a valid argument for a twelve year-old. Therefore, it´s not a shocker to anyone if I admit that the first thing I did when I moved from my parents was create my own conspiracy wall – more like a clipping of posters, prints and flyers – right there on my living room.
Conspiracy walls can be used to solve robberies, murders, terrorist plans, paranormal mysteries, alien invasions and even marital problems! Efficient as I am, I prepared a small gallery of some of my favorite displays in comics, games, movies and television, just cuz:
PS: My mother was wrong, it did not ruin anything, but don’t tell it to my landlady.
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- uncoolzilla: Nick Miller doesn’t care about it. So why should we? http://t.co/KlzaqCkO
- uncoolzilla: The life, death and rebirth of Lila http://t.co/DSQ2ZKNi
- uncoolzilla: All in all it's just another conspiracy in the wall http://t.co/rtu1BOcu
- uncoolzilla: There is nothing about Alice http://t.co/HmX4eva7
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