Various and Sundry Items of Interest

My short-story "Amid the Steep Sky's Commotion: a Tale of the Airship Ozymandias" has been published in Khimairal Ink, Volume 7, Issue 1.

Behold!

The story is free to read and download, so please do so.

I'd rate it PG-13 for one scene of violence and a few sexual innuendos, so read it before you show it to your kids.

Enjoy!

First of all... last night, Alyssa climbed up on me to do a chest-bump, and then laid on my stomach and started messing with the collar buttons on my shirt, as she is wont to do (she likes buttons). Cuteness close up.

Secondly... every day I have a huge sneeze attack. Usually it happens at work, but today it happened in the driveway. Since today is my early day at work, I left at the same time as Alyssa did. So as my wife was turning around in the driveway, she stopped and rolled down the window so Alyssa could yell "Bless you!"

I thought she yelled "Love you!", so I said "I love you too" and got in the car. Then I realized she actually said "bless you" so I opened the door and yelled "Thank you!", but the window was already rolled up. I started to close the car door when my wife stopped again and rolled down the window again.

I believe the technical term is Alphonse and Gaston.

Anyway, it was cute. The end.

Despite what people may say about Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series, she's spent so much time developing the characters in such a strong fashion that I'm pretty much forced to keep reading to see what happens to them.

And then I get mad when they react just like they're "supposed" to.

Anyway, I finished Bullet today, and I really wish that more bullets had hit more of the main characters because, to be honest, there are way too many of them and many of them annoy me.

On the bright side, there was only one typo in the entire novel, which, given how many typos there have been in some of the other books, was pretty great.

The book suffered from the usual Hamilton failings -- Anita is a deus ex machina, she always seems to come up with a new power, new characters are being added left and right, cliches and descriptive phrases are reused and overused, and in the end I didn't feel like we'd reached any sort of climax. (That last one happens every other book or so.) This book's cliche is "creamy goodness" -- Anita referring to her breasts, and the fact that they are large. At least she only "relearned how to breathe" once. There were also new lycanthrope groups with their own lore -- doesn't that always seem to happen -- and the first, oh, 15 chapters, in which Richard and Asher finally come to terms with the Anita situation, are so "let's get this crap out of the way because I'm tired of writing it" painful that I speed-read them just to get them out of the way.

And there was an epic shitload of sex. Multiple partners, lots of guy-on-guy action, and through it all Anita somehow managed to be tetchy about it despite the fact that she's openly admitted she likes doing two guys at the same time. In a way it's staying true to the character, but after five books and two novellas of group sex, I think it's time to retire that and just let her enjoy herself.

There were some good parts, though: Claudia the wererat kicks ass, Anita actually fights, many of the secondary characters are happy, and there's a huge plot point about halfway through that I can't even talk about because it's a big fat spoiler. Suffice it to say that the next book had better pay it off instead of stringing us through another book or I'm going to be quite pissed off.

So, I didn't love Bullet. I felt unfulfilled after the ending, disappointed by the massive quantities of sex with relatively little plot movement, and generally displeased with the sheer amount of new characters that Hamilton felt the urge to describe in long, loving paragraphs just so Anita could whine about how much she hates-and-loves having sex with everyone. The setup for the next book promises to be pretty good (as long as there isn't any boring CSI: St Louis crap in it), and I'm really, REALLY hoping some main characters get killed off. Anita's always whining that she can't save everyone -- well, she seems to do it an awful lot, and for once it'd be nice to see what happens when someone she loves dies because she has to choose who to save.

But look at the bright side: it was still eons better than Cerulean Sins. That book was just BAD.

My next book is The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet's Nest, which should be MUCH better.

Work is more like high school than I thought.

Example:

I am a programmer who works very close to the art department. I also have close ties with the trafficking department and the research department, and I have friends who work on the first floor. Sometimes I get invited to lunch with the art department; sometimes with the traffickers. Often I eat at my desk or by myself in the cafeteria, watching TV on my phone.

In high school, I was a geek who had close ties to the losers, the smart kids, the bad kids, the journalists, and the occasional athlete. Sometimes I ate with the bad kids, sometimes with the losers, often at my desk in the journalism room listening to music on my CD player.

Then as now, I had ties with a lot of different groups but I wasn't actually part of the team with any except for one (the journalists in high school, my own team here at work). In high school, I saw myself as an outsider; here at work, I'm a contractor. At school, outsiders were sometimes gobbled up by existing groups, although I never really was; here at work, many other contractors have been hired on as real employees while I toil away on a contract that is six weeks from ending. At school, I struggled to build and maintain an identity; same here.

At least for that last one I know who I am and if others don't really like me, then that's their problem, not mine. No one here dislikes me, but I am seen as kind of a weird dude.

Just like high school, only slightly less weird, given the other people who sit in my area.

So we have these band-aids in our breakroom here at work -- not Band-Aid Brand, but knockoffs, more like those old-style Curads from the 80s with the breathable fabric strips. I have a small cut on my thumb that, because of its positioning, keeps getting tugged when I use my mouse. So I put a little band-aid on it so it could heal.

I took the band-aid off about half an hour ago. The band-aid was so sticky that it pulled the cut apart even further.

And, insult to injury, left adhesive goo on my thumb which then got on my phone's touchscreen, my computer spacebar, and my mouse. Yay.

Counterproductive band-aid is counterproductive. I'm going to be bringing some of my own, I think.

They must think I do a good "Dad" voice... the Dunesteef cast me as the father in "A Place So Foreign" by Cory Doctorow. Yes, THAT Cory Doctorow.

Go forth and listen.

For lack of anything better to do tonight, I watched "New Moon". I didn't intend to parody it -- after all, I didn't abhor "Twilight", I just didn't enjoy it very much -- but I realized after the first scene that I simply had to live-tweet it, to make sure I didn't miss anything.

I'll admit that it had some good parts, and once Edward and co. left Forks it actually started to make sense. But it's like the author suspends all common sense when there are vampires present. And the movie was so disjointed, at least in the first couple of acts, that I found it hard to keep up.

In the end, I'll say this: I'm really hoping that this movie is the low-point of the five films. Because it's hard to get worse than this.

So here you go: mah tweetz. And yes, they're in reverse order.

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# Well, New Moon was pretty atrocious. I really hope the next one makes more sense because this one made NONE. And Bella was a joke. 4 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE! What an idiotic ending. It was going so well until he asked her that. Epic facepalm. 8 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Oh wow, no more Edward closeups. He looks like a mime with bad contacts. 13 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# @VOIDMunashii well that sucks. What a waste of all that dramatic tension. 14 minutes ago via TweetDeck in reply to VOIDMunashii

# Oh, Jasper, that was a great line. I wish you'd delivered it better though. 15 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Is this the end? Did this movie even HAVE a climax? 16 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Don't we still have to resolve the whole Victoria thing? Only got seven minutes left to do it. 17 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# By validating her stalker tendencies with Edward coming back, you've made all the teen girls think it's okay to act as Bella did. Fail. 18 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Aww... How idyllic... 20 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# It's like Richard said in, I think, The Killing Dance: superior strength and speed is only an asset if you're the only one who has it. 22 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Vampire choke slam ftw! Finally someone stronger than His Edwardness. 23 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# You see nothing, Errol, because she is an empty-headed teenager. 25 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# What a pale imitation of the council scenes in Burnt Offerings and the other Hamilton vampire novels. 26 minutes ago via TweetDeck

#Oh ha ha ha. Vampire elevator music. The humor was completely lost because the scene was too short. 28 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Is that the Dakota Fanning vampire? 29 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# I swear every time Edward is on screen this film stops making sense. 30 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Robert Pattinson looks really old with his shirt off. 31 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# I bet they sold this role to Christopher Heyerdahl as "you'll be like Mace Windu, but in Twilight." 34 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Aaaaand we're off to Italy, because that TOTALLY makes sense not having a satellite Volturi office in, like, Memphis or something. 36 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Okay, that was good. An actual emotional response from Edward. 37 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Thankfully the film has stopped being quite so disjointed. 39 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Is everyone in Forks and environs emo? Grow the hell up! 45 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Okay, now that was stupid. You need to push off if you're going to cliff-dive. In a fair world she'd be toast. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# This one werewolf dude reminds me of JT Tepnapa, only not a good actor. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# Okay, the transformation effect was pretty decent. Too bad the wolves look so unbelievably fake. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

#He knows parkour, huh. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# It's like Morla and werewolf Remus had a baby. And that brown wolf is the least realistic of all. Whatever happened to practical effects. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# Why doesn't the black vampire sparkle? about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# This director really loves the spin-around-the-actor shots, huh... about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# This scene would be a lot more impactful if Jacob wasn't wearing jorts. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# Stalkerrrrrrrrrrrr! about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# Aaaaand now Jacob just lost all his brownie points with me. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# Just got my first real laugh of the movie when Bella saw both their hands on the armrests. That was genuinely good. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# "Facepunch"? Really? Let's just bludgeon our viewers with subtlety. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# That turn was so High School Musical. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# After school special style foreshadowing? Check. about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

# I have a feeling a huge chunk of book is missing here. This movie has made no sense since Carlyle stitched Bella up. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# "Quill" and "Embry"? Unbelievable. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Are girls really this stupid and reckless? Going with a biker because she's depressed? Facepalm. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Oh look. Edward leveled up. He can project into Bella's brain. Just like a Laurell Hamilton vamp. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# She's still going on like this three months later? Unbelievable! about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# You're freaking kidding me... Now two werewolves are going to idealize her even as she spends a multiple-month montage in her room? about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# You're really going to fall asleep in the woods? If he turned you, you wouldn't last a week. Dumbass. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Meanwhile Edward looks high half the time. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# This whole movie feels like a trailer. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Okay, this "take a walk scene" is so clumsily written and acted. Bella's "realization" is weird, and the reason itself makes no sense. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Does Edward ever look at his choices in life and think he could've had a much better life not pretending to be 18 forever? about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Is she going to whine about being turned for the next two hours? Because if so this is going to get exceptionally tiresome. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Kristen Stewart is cute, I guess, if you like goth/stoner girls, but the most beautiful girl ever, as Edward believes? Sorry. Fail. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Oh and it's giant forehead girl from Grey's Anatomy. And the girl who plays Alice is hella cute. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Oh jeez no wonder teenage girls eat this up. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Did I just see Christopher Heyerdahl among the Volturi? about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Robert Pattinson looks really unhappy. Not the character, the actor. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# I miss Joan-of-Arcadia-era Michael Welch. He was so much cooler. And what's up with emo Edward? about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Holy cow. If the dialogue is this bad on screen imagine how atrocious it was in the book... about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Could there have been any more cliches in the first ten minutes? High school friends establishing shot, Edward slow walk, reintroducing dad. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Wow Edward looks like a poorly cg'd statue. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

# Doing my due diligence as a geek and watching "New Moon" just to say I got it over with. about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

###

The End

I can't believe it's taken me three years to figure this out.

During last Thursday's "Private Practice", I commented to my wife that Naomi is a child -- that is, she's all id, she whines and cries if things go even slightly wrong, and she can't deal with true strife (like when her daughter got pregnant).

Then I started to realize that every character on that show is either a cliche or a subversion of a cliche.

Addison: Woman from rich family goes to college, becomes extremely successful, but somehow can't get her personal life in order.

Pete: Good-looking guy with a checkered past and a dead wife who's into alternative medicine because he's tired of dealing with infectious diseases. Single dad who somehow balances a relationship, a job, and his kid.

Naomi: Basically a child who can't deal with anything, including her own child.

Sam: Attractive, confident, successful, likeable and well-liked man who wants the one woman he can't have and also has asthma (to prove that there's SOMETHING wrong with him). Because it's clear that, even though he's divorced, it wasn't HIS fault.

Cooper: Male slut with a heart of gold who says he wants sex but really wants someone to love.

Charlotte: Female sex fiend, ballbusting blond bitch, but she grows feelings about halfway through season 2.

Dell: Young single dad working in a traditionally-female occupation (midwifery) and being EPIC AWESOME at it. Also an attractive guy.

Violet: The most cliche of all -- the psychiatrist who can't get her own feelings to work right.

Sheldon: The least-attractive male character on the show, he makes up for it by always being funny and helping the other characters by dispensing nuggets of wisdom just before we go to commercial. Eventually redeemed as a sex object by boinking one or more female main characters.

I think that's everyone. And every stereotype, too, except the Quiet, Bookish Asian Girl Who Volunteers At A School For The Mentally Disabled.

Now tell me they didn't write that show to hit all those stereotypes. Go on. I'll wait.

The problem with being good at my job and working quickly to get things done is that people expect me to be good at my job and always work quickly to get things done.

Today around 12:40 I got a request to confirm a certain file would be usable and, if so, submit it for inclusion on our website.

I happened to be having my lunch and watching a TV show on my phone at the time. You know, having a break.

At about 1:15 I got an IM asking if I'd seen the e-mail and what steps the sender of the file might need to take. I told her to submit a support ticket and I would begin the process, and let her know if the file wouldn't work. She did so, and I began the process. Total time: 40 minutes.

Nothing wrong happened.

Except that I achieved Manage Expectations Fail. My own efficiency bit me in the ass. The sender is used to getting things from me very quickly, so the one time I wasn't quick, she followed up. Not that I wouldn't have done the task -- it was item 3 on my "stuff to do after lunch is over" list -- but it just amused me that she hoisted me by my own petard.

And now it's too late to slow down. I've set the bar pretty damn high. Good for me when it comes to performance reviews, but not so good if I decide I don't want to reply to an e-mail right this second.

Ah well. Better not to leave it sitting there anyway.

This weekend, I edited four stories, two of which have been sitting on the back burner for a while:

"My Pillow" -- a horror story I wrote maybe two or three years ago. Based upon the names I used, I'd put it around the same time Sloan and Hahn were both on Grey's Anatomy at the same time.

"Dreaming of Suzanne" -- a horror story I wrote around the same time. It was originally one of the most graphic and unpleasant stories I ever wrote, but at least the villain got his comeuppance at the end. I revised it a bit to make it slightly less horrible, but it's still pretty bad, at least IMO. I also gave it a name; before "Dreaming of Suzanne" it was just called the remodeling story.

"Bring on the Storm" -- a sci-fi story I mentioned a few months ago, sort of a cross between Tank Girl and Waterworld (and yes, I know one is about a desert world and one is about a water world). It's out for the first time, and has really only been peer-reviewed by one other person.

"Section 3A" -- a sci-fi story I finished last week. It's only 1350 words, making it the shortest complete story I've written in the past five years that wasn't intended to be flash. I think it's funny.

Plus, I have "Vengeance in Blue" and "The Man Who Evacuated a Planet" to rewrite. I usually rewrite my stories before doing really intensive edits -- I print them out and type them into the word processor again, updating and adding and refining as I go, and then edit them again.

After last night, I now have 11 stories out: 27 Jennifers, 113 Feet, Amid the Steep Sky's Commotion, Belief, Bring on the Storm, Dreaming of Suzanne, Greener, My Pillow, The Next Time Around, The Plumbers and the Princess, and Section 3A.

I still have to resubmit Bittersweet Symphony -- I'm finding it pretty hard to sell, but I've run out of ways to refine or improve it. Maybe while I'm at lunch today I'll find another place to submit it, though I'll probably have to mail it because I'm running out of online-submission publications.

So, that was my weekend.