interesting things

My next post will be the greatest post I have ever posted

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I know. You’re disappointed to be reading this one, aren’t you?

Let me salve your pain with links:

Want to go to a lawless state and murder desperately poor people? Now you can! For only 3,500 pounds sterling a day (plus weapon rental), you can cruise slowly along the coast of Somalia in a luxury yacht. If your luck holds, pirates will attack, and you can kill them.

(eta: I’m told this news report is a fake. I hope so.)

If killing Somalis in the real world is too spendy/morally bankrupt for you, you could always fight monsters on Hidlyda as a young Miracle Witch. It’s a free game, very Legend of Zelda old school, where you travel about fighting monsters, collecting loot and unlocking secret entrances until you finally come face to face with King Yeah Walusa. It’s pretty fun, even if I did have to reference the comment thread at Jay Is Games to find everything. And I scored a D. Huh. Save often!

But, if what you want is something beautiful and complex (complex for the internet, I mean), then look at this: Time Wastes Too Fast.

Links ‘n Stuff

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Boring! What you need is an action scene! a webcomic about writing. :)

Why I read Savage Love. (Link NSFW, in case you didn’t realize. Check out the first letter). It’s not for the advice which is sometimes so-so but is absolutely perfect for that letter. It’s because those letters are a window into people’s private lives that I would never see otherwise–especially the crazy, twisted thought processes they go through.

Mother fails to recover custody of her children when she showed up for a psych evaluation with 13 beers in her. Apparently, the psychologist did not put much weight behind her claim that it was no big deal since she could “drink like a fish” and therefore wasn’t drunk.

Book Marketing 101: an introduction by Andrew Wheeler. A book marketer talks about his trade. It’s the first in a series, and I plan to follow them closely.

Huh. I appear to have left out the “stuff.”

Two Things on a Satwosday

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First, via Emma Bull:

Oktapodi from Asım Varol on Vimeo.

I can’t wait to show that to my family when I get home.

Second, I just finished The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. If you know the book already, you know why it’s great. If you don’t, you should definitely read it. Let me talk about something briefly, though.

Three days a week, I ride the bus to downtown for my day job. Part of the trip involves a fairly high bridge. Now, I have a thing about heights, so I sometimes sit on the right side of the bus so I will be right at the edge of the bridge (no sidewalk) looking down, hoping that I will get used to it and get over it. (There’s a name for that sort of therapy, but it escapes me for the moment and my google fu is weak today.)

Most days, though… no. I’m too tired, too stressed, too whatever. I tell myself I don’t have enough resources for that, so I ride on the left side, I close my eyes, I look up. Anything but look down while thinking of this picture.

But yesterday, I took the window seat. And by chance, I happened to read one of the final chapters in the book, about the difference between real fear and worry (a minor part of the book, really). And what Mr. de Becker said made so much sense to me that I closed the book in my lap and sat looking out the window during the bridge part of the trip.

Yeah, there was a little tingle of worry, but I have never felt such calm at the edge of a high place in my whole life.

I’ve been talking a bit here and there around the web about self-imposed limits, but this is a biggie. I’ve always been a worrier, but now I’m wondering if I’ve let my stress levels push me into self-indulgence. Fears are there to be conquered, right?

Five things make a Friday post

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1) Child of Fire is now at 340K in sales rank at Amazon.com! What is that, one sale a month? Not too shab for a book that won’t come out for more than three months.

2) I’m already checking Amazon.com sales rank numbers! I’m doomed!

3) The Best Discount Gun Shop for Kids in Seattle–which is too bad, because that is a rocking park. Mango Eater and I had a blast there one day, just walking the paths.

4) A bookseller meets with a Random House sales rep to discuss orders from the fall catalog. Strangely, my book wasn’t mentioned. I know! Crazy! (seen via pubrants)

5) To wrap up the most narcissistic five things post ever, I’m now on Facebook. No, I won’t play Mafia Wars. No, I won’t take a quiz to find out how girly I am. I didn’t want to join, but my sis-in-law puts pics of my nephews there, and the only way to see them is to fork over my identifying information. Grrrrr, Facebook. Hate.

How I feel, sometimes

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First, some links, then some me

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1) It’s real because it’s science: Gay marriage causes earthquakes! Darn pulses of gay energy. (via Andrew Wheeler aka antickmusings)

2) Man arrested for calling 911 because his drive through order at McDonalds did not include a juice box. Expect to see this on notalwaysright.com in the next couple days, although it sucks that the employees were laughing at him because he couldn’t speak English well. How many languages do they speak?

3) How many Canadians flee their crappy health care system for our fantastic American system? Practically none! In fact, the idea that our northern neighbors avoid wait times by crossing the border is politically expedient bullshit. Meanwhile, a million California residents a year seek affordable health care in Mexico, which doesn’t even count the hospitals in Thailand and India that are specifically built to handle American patients.

4) Marvel Comics attempts to draw in women readers with series about large-breasted models. Can you see how this would fail? ‘Cause I sure can’t. Isn’t every female comics reader hoping to see Mary Jane Watson team up with a revamped Millie the Model to solve a crime?

5) Oh, look! It’s the classiest logo of all, for National Fist Bump Day. I’m sure their T-shirts will sweep the nation.

6) And now I link myself, which sounds vaguely dirty. Thank you to everyone who offered to read an ARC of Child of Fire. I will forward your addresses.

Comments on that post are screened, so I’m not going to unscreen them to respond. However, I have your addresses. Thanks, again.

Dorktosterone, Part 2

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DEADLIEST WARRIOR.

Isn’t it enough for me to say “Viking vs. Samurai”? Isn’t that enough?

Maybe not, because this show is the epitome of dorktosterone. The hosts bring in guys who talk in deadly earnestness about the superiority of their patron warriors’ weapons and technique, which they demonstrate on some conveniently immobile targets.

Then the hosts “whoa!” over the chopped and punctured mannequins, and everyone talks about splattered brains.

And they pick the winner by running hundreds of computer simulations! Say no more! I’m convinced!

To make thinks even more delicious, an upcoming episode is billed at “IRA vs. Taliban.” Stay classy, Spike TV!

Dorktosterone, Part 1

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Just a couple weeks ago, MTV broadcast the sixth and final episode of season one for BULLY BEATDOWN (watch full episodes at this link), a new reality TV show that had me gaping at my tube.

Here’s the quick description: Jason “Mayhem” Miller, an MMA fighter who hosts the show, meets with young men who say a bully is kicking them around. These aren’t high schoolers, they’re grownup adults in their early twenties. Mayhem and victims together confront the bully in a public place, where the host waves $10,000 under their nose, telling them it’ll all be theirs, if their willing to go two rounds with a professional fighter in their own weight class.

Of course, if they get their ass beat, the money goes to their victims. And the bullies agree.

I’ve only seen four episodes, and they’ve all followed a very set structure. Mayhem in car introducing show. “Audition” video of the victims asking Mayhem for help. Mayhem meets victims. Mayhem and victim make offer to bully. Bully shows up at the fight gym to show what skills he has. Fight day: Bully preps for the fight with the trainer, who prompts him to say something nasty about the victims, and the bullies stupidly oblige (“A lot of my victims deserve to be bullied”). Victim meets the pro for that fight. Then, they get in the ring and the bully takes a nasty beating in front of a booing crowd, and everyone revels in it.

Afterwards, the bully promises to change his ways.

And really, without that final scene, which is almost certainly total bullshit in whatever passes for the real story behind these guys’ lives, but without that scene this show doesn’t even make sense.

“Vince” is a guy who answered a Craig’s List ad for an apartment vacancy and then beat up his roommate instead of paying rent. “Eriq” made copies of his ex-girlfriend’s car keys, then wrecked it, and he beats up anybody she starts to date.

What these guys really need is jail time, because they’re not just assholes. They’re criminals. And sure, the show wraps up with the bully humbled, often apologizing, but I’d be really curious to see if it took.

Still, watching these guys get the puke beat out of them is a fine, fine thing.

Talk about terrible titles…

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David Hines recently recommended a book called Meditations on Violence: a Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, and of course I snapped it up.

I’ve barely started it, but one of the early points the author makes is that too many people are willing to discount their own personal experience because it does not jibe with what a self-appointed expert tells them. One of the author’s fellow prison guards, a man who had a great deal of practical experience in fighting, did exactly this during a class of martial arts techniques.

My first reaction was: People don’t really do this, do th– And then I thought about Absolute Write.

The AW forums have see a regular traffic of newbie writers asking permission to do the most basic things. “Can I have an protagonist do unlikable things?” “Can I have an unhappy ending?” “Can I write this book in third-person present tense?” “Can I write a love story where the couple breaks up at the end?”

Frankly, that stuff drove me crazy. I wanted to say “Pick up a book! Read it! Does it work? Can you make it work? Why are you asking permission?”

And it would turn out that some person on some message board somewhere said books need happy endings, or maybe an agent wrote a blog post expressing their personal dislike of present tense. And none of that should dictate what a person can or should do.

Of course, the hard part in all of this is examining my own assumptions.

As an aside: today is the first day all week that I hit my daily word count goal. Yeesh. Tomorrow will be better, I hope.

Links to amuse and amaze!

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  1. Very few people in this world have ever thought to themselves I wonder what tops the bestselling list at Amazon.com’s “Apparel” section? To those few people, I say: Wonder no more! (I have to say, the comments on that product are hilarious. I laughed myself dizzy at work today.
  2. Divorced Brit refurbishes his apartment to look like the set of Star Trek: Voyager. Honestly, it has to be seen to be believed. Don’t skim by this link without a peek. This guy’s apartment in crazy-amazing, and to top it all off he drove himself into bankruptcy with a company called 24th Century Interior Design–apparently, he believed Trekkies from all over would hire him to do this to their homes.  Still… fucking Voyager???
  3. Best and Worst tattoos ever! I’m honestly amazed to see Centaur Patrick Swayze in a Chippendale shirt, with the double helix rainbow. I shouldn’t be, but I am.
  4. Six Creepy Abandoned Places! No explanation needed.
  5. Don’t practice your backflip in the kitchen!
  6. More Photobombers! These aren’t as funny as the ones I posted last year, but damn, that humping dog is an all new level of “Oh John Ringo No.”

Have a great day, everyone.