One of my plans this week is to get a short story out called “Casting Call”. I’ve never done a Kindle book as myself, so it is an experiment but also a chance to do something fun. I think the writing is pretty solid, though I keep fussing with the last line, but stories need a good cover. I posted two covers on Twitter and got some good feedback from Melanie Nilles (she also has some enjoyable books) and my coworkers (who are supportive in general). After various ideas, I realized that the two covers I came up with were less than amazing and a bit busy to boot. So, I came up with two different covers that were completely different in design. And, since I’m a fragile little beast, I thought I would ask those who read my blog if they were willing to give me some opinions on them.

This is the blurb I wrote for Casting Call:

For the last six years, Marla was a fixture of the wildly successful Donna’s Teddy Clubhouse, a show aimed for competitive Caucasian Northern American Girls 14 market. But, age betrayed her and she was fired for not having a profitable enough body according to the exacting standards of the production company. Eighteen years old and alone, she has no future in the holographic markets and no skills to find new employment. Does she abandoned her love of acting? Or are there shows out that don’t belong to the standard, cut-throat markets?

Casting Call is a short story set in a cyberpunk world of ubiquitous computers, razor-thin profitability, constant advertising, and microsecond management.

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One of my plans this week is to get a short story out called “Casting Call”. I’ve never done a Kindle book as myself, so it is an experiment but...

Ignoring the fact is Thursday, I had a terrible weekend. It was one of those weekends were the individual things that went wrong would have annoyed me, but when one is dropped on top of the other, it just turned into a weekend were I got… snippy (which is as upset as I normally get).

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Ignoring the fact is Thursday, I had a terrible weekend. It was one of those weekends were the individual things that went wrong would have annoyed me, but when one...

I haven’t been posting lately. There are a lot of reasons and most of them are purely inside my head. The big one was an… incident a few months ago. I was commenting on someone’s post and trying to point out something and they took it the wrong way. That happens, but I was asked to go away. And then they ranted about it on Twitter. Being that this was someone I respected (and I thought they at least appreciated me), it hurt more than I thought. And, ever since, they stopped commenting to anything I respond. Sadly, I noticed that they don’t comment to anyone after me, so I feel like I’m a roadblock for the enjoyment of everyone else. Realizing that, I stopped commenting (though I still read) and just not get in the way of other people enjoying said people.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, but I’ve managed to alienate someone pretty much during every major part of my life. With one person, I can say they are being sensitive. For two, I have to question myself. Somewhere around four or five, I have to realize that is me and not everyone else. I just open my mouth and stupid things must come out, though I usually don’t know they are stupid when I saw them.

I’m not depressed or upset about it. Just sad. Maybe I’ll figure out how not to annoy people and to shut up more often. Not an easy skill, for those who know me, since I am on the verbose side of friendly. I guess if I have a new year’s goal, that would be it: be quiet.

I haven’t been posting lately. There are a lot of reasons and most of them are purely inside my head. The big one was an… incident a few months ago....

A week or so ago, I decided I had enough of Ubuntu and the changes for Unity and switched back to Debian. I figured this would be a safe change since I always keep my home partition on a separate drive, so I won’t lose anything.

Apparently, I was wrong.

My home partition was on the main drive with a link to the old and separated partition. So, when I formatted my main partition, I accidentally blew away about three years worth of data.

Oops.

The surprising thing is that I don’t miss most of it. The stuff that is really critical to me (my stories and game projects) are in source control. For those, I need a catastrophic failure of at least four machines to lose them. Plus, I have hard copies of the one novel I’ve obsessed about for years (Flight).

Most of the files on the lost drive were… Stuff with a capital “S”. Like my DVD collection and books, they pretty much are just space that requires maintenance. I have trouble not buy DVD’s and books, just like I have trouble not starring articles in RSS that I never seem to get to, bookmarking things that I might need in the future, and saving “cool things” I might never use. Fluffy gave me a hard time just last weekend becaue I wanted to keep my Make magazines in the hopes that EDM might do a project in them.

So, I haven’t been devastated by losing three years of files. But, it also reminds me that I need to be a *lot* more careful in the future.

A week or so ago, I decided I had enough of Ubuntu and the changes for Unity and switched back to Debian. I figured this would be a safe change...

I’m not really big on the seven virtues, though I do aim for most of them in my life. One of them, patience, is what I consider my strongest. I am a very patience person, looking at the long-term things and willing to wait days, months, or even years to get something I want done.

Which works well with the plans on being a published author.

One of the most recent tests of that was Fluffy’s car. The 2001 Saturn had seen better days, but many of them were behind it now. During the heat wave a month or so back, I was driving back and forth from work without A/C or a working fan with 100+ heat index. Somewhere around there, we decided to get it fixed.

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I’m not really big on the seven virtues, though I do aim for most of them in my life. One of them, patience, is what I consider my strongest. I...

I’ve had a bad bout of customer service requests in the last month that have really been frustrating me. Call this a little rant, but also a suggestion for anyone who creates a public front-end, a website, or even a company that deals with the public. (If I complain about something, I’m suppose to give a alternative. Otherwise, I can’t complain.)

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I’ve had a bad bout of customer service requests in the last month that have really been frustrating me. Call this a little rant, but also a suggestion for anyone...

I love console games. I grew up with Nintendo, Sega, and even the odd TurboGrafx 16. My favourite was RPG’s, mostly jRPG’s. Oh, and Zelda. I love Zelda. As I got older, I managed to keep playing console games pretty much right into my mid-thirties (e.g., the last time I played a game was four days ago). Sadly, what they call RPG’s in today’s market is not what I enjoy playing.

Some days, I question if I should keep playing console games.

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I love console games. I grew up with Nintendo, Sega, and even the odd TurboGrafx 16. My favourite was RPG’s, mostly jRPG’s. Oh, and Zelda. I love Zelda. As I...

Yesterday, I was so excited about the petition getting approved and only been a class and a week from graduating. Today, I had a doctor’s visit to follow up for the problems I had at GenCon and a checkpoint on the pre-diabetes thing.

105.

I ended up not eating before I got there so I had a fasting blood sugar. Their little prick test put me at 105. Which is very good news since I was 137 the last one (which was a fluke) and around 122 for the rest of them. And the A1C test came back as 5.5, which is right in the “perfectly healthy” range of things for a three month average.

So, just to get that level down just a little bit more and keep on exercising. The doctor doesn’t think I need to worry about it too much, but I’m going to keep on it mainly because the fear of diabetes is getting me to change my health. Which is probably the best, long-term thing at this point.

In completely other news, I got my personalized license plates today. Yes, a completely vanity thing in general and it will increase my annual license fee by 1%, but still… it’s cute.

Yesterday, I was so excited about the petition getting approved and only been a class and a week from graduating. Today, I had a doctor’s visit to follow up for...

It has been an interesting week. Beyond the usual of just getting homework done (unit 7 of 12) and the final petition out, I also got caught up in the final throes of a massive undertaking I was doing at work. I’m trying really hard to keep with my original estimates (since last year I got dinged for giving poor estimates), but this last week is going to be an absolute killer. And things outside of my control are blocking me.

But, that is life. I’m doing a bit of extra hours this weekend to make sure I can get everything done.

I also got involved with a mental puzzle with Kingdom of Loathing. Yes, it is entirely optional in my life, but the intellectual challenge of doing it is really obsessing me. I know it can be done, just trying to figure out how to do it.

Beyond that, I’m getting ready for enjoying a 4-5 day holiday with my dad up at the family cabin. Which means I have to work extra hard this week to finish a day early so I can not feel guilty about taking Friday off.

It has been an interesting week. Beyond the usual of just getting homework done (unit 7 of 12) and the final petition out, I also got caught up in the...

The first day of GenCon was fantastic. Amazingly, I still retain my ability to separate discomfort and pain from enjoyment, so I actually had a lot of fun. I played in a new game, Eclipse something where I got to play an uplifted octopus. I even got to use my ink blast attack. But, I think that storyteller will never let someone use corpses as distraction maneuvers like that again. It seemed like a fun game, basically Shadowrun in space, but they had some stupid “only 30 sold a day!” which means, I won’t touch it for the year. I don’t know why, but I really, really hate those type of promotions. Yes, they are because of printing problems and everything, but they always make them the first 30 people which means people who don’t zerg rush the dealer hall never have a chance.

My second game was with Quest Cards. Pretty fun, in a Warhammer Quest type of way. Basically, a game you don’t need a storyteller but you can keep levels and equipment between levels. Warmhammer Quest might be more fun if I can make the boards out of LEGO, but still fun. The DM running it had no pre-regs for the next session, so I got four hours out of a two hour ticket.

My final game was a HERO system based on Sky High. Half the players were regulars with each other, but I still had fun. Not as much as I could, since it was a mostly roleplying game and I didn’t have the rapport the others did. Still, I love HERO.

Speaking of HERO, 6th edition came out at GenCon. I couldn’t find it for three days (they weren’t on the map), but I ordered the books and got a CD of the game. Oh, and got a chance to thank Steve Long for doing a wonderful job. I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while now, mainly because I’m going to develop my steampunk world in HERO 6 as I write in it. HERO Games also had printing problems, but they made some CD’s to get around it which is a far better way of handling it and why I happily handed over $75 when I wouldn’t even try with Eclipse.

I also got a chance to chat with authors, but they deserve their own post.

Weight Loss (7.4 of 14.7 kg) Commission (15,238 of 15,000 words) MfGames.Tools The first day of GenCon was fantastic. Amazingly, I still retain my ability to separate discomfort and pain...

This week, the landlord started the process of getting rid of a dying ash tree in the front yard. When we moved it, it was pretty obvious that only half it actually lived. This is the same tree that I had a bad feeling about and the next day, it dumped a large branch where I normally parked the car.

So, good thing.

Sadly, tearing up the tree took a few days. The first day, they cut off most of the excessive branches. The next morning, the garage door wouldn’t close. After a bit of investigation, I saw that the “safety” transmitter had been knocked off the hook, so I put it back on and I had a working garage door.

On the next day, they cut down most of the tree. In the morning, the garage didn’t work again. Looking at it, it fell off probably from the shaking of the ground. I also noticed that the wire was chewed up from the garage door rollers going over it. So, I had a pleasant hour or so repairing the wiring on the garage while chatting up Fluffy.

Very fun.

When I got home the next day, they removed all but the stump of the tree. A bunch of stuff had fallen in the garage and the transmitter got knocked off again. I put everything back. I figured they were done.

Nope, the final day, they dug up a really big pit in the front yard to get rid of the stump. When I got home… more things knocked over and the transmitter was on the floor. It was the last day, and while I was getting tired of it, I could finally leave it in place.

This morning, I found a half-dead rabbit inside my garage, trying to get out.

And the transmitter was on the floor.

And the wires chewed up.

I’d like you to know, red herrings look like tree stumps.

Weight Loss (6.8 of 14.7 kg) Commission (12,876 of 15,000 words) MfGames.Tools This week, the landlord started the process of getting rid of a dying ash tree in the front...