Today was a good day. Lots of lazing about with Lime, some good reading, and tonight I met up with an old friend named Sang Joon. We talked about a zillion different things. He didn’t seem to mind that I’ve become a crappy drinking buddy in my old age, switching to hot cocoa after three beer. I came home to find most of the file I’ve been trying for ages to download has come through, and the rest should be there once I awaken… yes, I shall have my very own PDFs of HOL, the satirical look at RPG gaming …
Month: November 2004
Pens in China, Coke in India, and A Neglected Column
At Simon World there’s a post about this bit of news: China’s annual pen production now totals 29 billion, accounting for 80 percent of the global market share. Simon notes that You never see a pen in the picture of the desperate and impoverished. Flies, malnurished kids and dust. But no pens. And that’s true. When I traveled in India, kids asked me for all kinds of things: candy, chocolate bars, money (of course) but the most stunningly common request was for pens, ballpoint or otherwise. I was shocked. So I suppose eschewing the pen would be an effective form …
Spammers Hitting Me Like Mad
Well, thank goodness I got the new version of MT installed, along with the new version of MT-Blacklist, which is working fine. The last week, some comment spammer out there has decided to do his (face facts, it’s very likely a guy) best to spam the living hell out of blog. I have been hit several hundreds of times a night, and usually about a hundred spam comments get through the filters. Which means about fifteen minutes of cleaning up, each and every day. It’s a bit of a chore, but I am hoping that eventually, the baddies will be …
The Lesson I Learned Today…
I posted some things in anger and frustration this week. Those of you who saw them, saw a side of me not everyone gets to see. But parts of the posts were unfair, and even stooped to the level of an-eye-for-an-eye. So I removed them from my website and decided to talk to a couple of people and get a reality check. After the reality check, I decided I knew more clearly where I stood, and decided that with one person, I could work things out, while the other person was not worth my time and my energy. How did …
How little things come to one…
I don’t know why, but lines for writing often come to me in the shower. I don’t sing, I think about characters and how they might speak. Here’s today’s little absurdity: “Goddamn it, man! I feel like a hematologist practicing in a bloody Seventh-Day-Adventist’s Colony! town full of Jehhova’s Witnesses! Note sure I can use that, but ah well… EDIT: Saturday, 6 November 2004: Ooops on the wrong denomination. Thanks to Kangmi on the correction, though on the point about “colonies”, being an SF writer I can say (with the freedom of artistic license) that everyone has colonies in one …