Quick Note On Writing

One of the best feelings in the world is coming across a short story you wrote years ago, and not remembering how it ends. That whole feeling of “what’s about to happen?” is that much better when you know it’s something you wrote. Especially when you come across funny scenes and clever twists that you don’t remember writing. I swear, either my memory is going or I have elves in my attic. Either way, it’s a great feeling.

Book Coming Soon

 I'll be self-publishing my first novel soon. I've got a few test readers looking at it now, and if it doesn't need any major changes, I should have it out in the next couple of months.

Once it's out, I'll post links to all my blogs telling you where you can buy it. If you wanna. In the meantime, I've started a separate blog for it here.

Dream: Robin Williams D&D

I'm blogging less lately because I'm working on a novel, which takes up most of my writing energy. But last night's dream was a doozy, so I wanted to jot it down. It was somewhat inspired by the Time Traveler's wife. If you haven't seen the HBO series, you really should. It's much better than the theatrical version, and I'm sorry to hear they canceled it before the second season. I really hope it gets saved by a letter writing campaign or something, just so they can wrap up the story.

In the dream, Robin Williams was in my D&D group. He had already passed away in the dream, but apparently he had been able to time travel when he was alive. Unlike the Time Traveler's wife, he could control when and where he went, though he couldn't change world events. When he got his diagnosis, he wanted to see how our campaign ended before his disease got worse. So he jumped into the future a bunch times, and played through the rest of the sessions as a marathon.

Based on some things he said in our gaming sessions, I also suspect he had jumped far enough in into the future to see all the crap coming up - COVID, Trump, etc - and didn't want to have to live through all of that.

From our point of view, he was in our group, he died, we mourned, and then he just kept showing up to sessions. We asked him questions, but he refused to answer very many of them. But he did make the DM promise not to artificially extend the campaign just to get more sessions with Williams. At the end of one session, the DM announced that all we had left to do was fight the final boss, so the next session would probably be our last.

When the day of the final session arrived, my car wouldn't start, and I didn't want to miss our final day playing with Williams. So naturally, I borrowed my neighbor's riding lawnmower and drove it to the game. We were playing at some sort of rec center. We knew it was going to be the last time we saw Williams, so the players had brought cake and put up some party decorations. When we heard that Williams had arrived, we all went out to the parking lot to greet him.

He showed up wearing a sequined outfit that would have made Elton John look drab. For some reason, Lady Gaga was with him (I don't think she was in our D&D group). She was dressed to match. They performed a musical number together right there in the parking lot. Unfortunately I woke up halfway through the song.

Is It Time To Ban Religion?

No, of course not. My feelings toward religion are the same as they’ve always been: Believe what you want, worship how you want, as long as it doesn’t affect me.

Except, you Christians aren’t holding up your end of the bargain. Each and every year you try to pass more and more religiously-motivated laws. And they aren’t even actually based on religion, so much as misinterpretations of religion. You can’t show me a single verse in the Bible that states abortion is a sin. But you’ll happily vote for anti-abortion laws that ruin other people’s lives.

Every year. More laws against abortion. More laws against LGBT people. More laws against women. And then random laws that come out of nowhere, like requiring schools to post “In God We Trust” in schools.

YOU broke the contract. I was perfectly happy with the old system, where everyone lived how they wanted, and we all just stayed out of each other’s way. But when Christians try to force non-Christians to live by their rules, that’s when they go over the line.

So yes, you certainly deserve to be told, “Your religion is illegal.” You certainly deserve to have your religious freedoms taken away. As much as you like to shout “I’m being persecuted! I’m being persecuted!” it’s never actually been true. At least, not in your lifetime. If there were any justice in this universe, you would find out what religious persecution actually means.

So no, even if I had the power to make religion illegal, I wouldn’t. As much as you deserve it, and you really do deserve it, that would still be hypocritical of me. Because I still believe in religious freedom. The freedom to follow whichever religion you want, and the freedom not to follow any of them.

But there is one thing I would do if I had unlimited power. I would make it illegal to pass any religious-based laws (you know, like it already says in the First Amendment), and any politician who even proposes a religion-based law would immediately be banned from holding office ever again.

...And I'm not happy with you either.

The Joys of Herding Cats

Ugh, this week was a mess. I had to wake up to an alarm three days in a row, due to various doctor appointments and such. Wednesday morning was the worst. I had to get up at 5 AM (I work nights, so usually I wake up around 8 AM), wrangle the cat, and drive her across town to the cat dentist for her follow up appointment.

Finding the cat was the hard part. On Tuesday Kara heard us mention the vet, and she spent the next 24 hours in hiding. Smart cats are a pain. Wednesday morning she was hiding under the couch. This was probably the most annoying place she could have hidden, because our house is so cramped, that it’s difficult to move the couch. We had to move a few other pieces of furniture to get the couch away from the wall, only for Kara to hide under another piece of furniture.

I thought I had her, and then she just sort of dissipated. I blinked, she turned into a dust cloud. It’s a cat thing. We spent the next half hour tearing the room upside down looking for her. Upending furniture, moving various things around, trying to catch our breath. We’re not as young as we used to be, and moving furniture around at 5 AM is not how I like to wake up. I’d closed all the doors in the house so she couldn’t run into any other rooms. But the cat was just… gone.

Finally I pulled open the curtains, and she was just sitting in the window sill, laughing at me. I picked her up and put her in the cat carrier. Usually she fights me on that part, but this time she was fairly complacent. The last few times she went to the vet, I used up half the Band-Aids in the house. This time she growled once, but didn’t struggle or scratch me. I think she’d decided I’d suffered enough. I still wound up bleeding, though. Apparently there’s an exposed nail on the back of the couch, that I scraped against trying to reach her earlier.

It was an easy enough appointment, just a follow up. She’s recovered nicely from her oral surgery two weeks ago. She no longer has any teeth, and we’re still experimenting with finding the perfect wet cat food. When we got home, Kara forgave me as soon as I let her out of the cage. I’m very thankful that she’s caught up on her shots, so this is the last time she has to see a vet for a good while.

Dream: Gators and Beholders

Sometimes my dreams have a semi-lucid, fourth wall quality to them. I'll feel like I'm acting out the dream as if I'm making a movie, and all the characters are just actors. This means that I know I can't really be harmed, so I'm not scared no matter how intense things get. On some level I know every monster is just a guy in a suit, like the ending of Altered Beast.

Last night I was in a swamp, holding an alligator on a leash. The dream's "script" said that the gator was supposed to help me, to lead me to some bad guys like a police dog. But the gator kept biting me instead. Gator's gonna gate, I guess. The bites didn't hurt; it felt like he had Nerf teeth. But it was still annoying, and I kept yelling "No!" at it.

Then the gator ran off, and attacked a small child. It didn't hurt the kid either, but I still had to stop it. I jumped on the gator's head (oddly enough, I had played a bit of "Pitfall!" last night before bed) and it released the child. But then I was so angry that I started pounding on the gator like Ralphie fighting the bully in "A Christmas Story". 

That woke me up, but I fell right back asleep. 

The next dream had sort of a "Snakes on a Plane" plot, but the tone felt more like Alien. I was on a cruise ship, and a bunch of Beholders were loose, attacking the passengers. (If you're not a D&D player, a Beholder looks like a floating head with a single large eye, a gaping mouth, and a bunch of smaller eye stalks that can fire different kinds of magical beams).

But these weren't your typical D&D Beholders. One looked like a giant hand, with eyes on the end of each finger. Another looked like a beach ball, with smaller beach balls on its eye stalks. It could fire more beach balls out of its eyes, which would bounce around before exploding. That scene had a "Killer Klowns from Outer Space" vibe to it, with circus music in the background.

Another Beholder looked 8-bit, reminding me of the movie Pixels. It could summon Atari characters to fight for it, like the helicopter from Chopper Command. (Okay, I played more than just Pitfall last night). The helicopter attacked not by firing weapons, but by landing on groups of passengers. Another Beholder had a very human-looking face, giving it an uncanny valley appearance.

I didn't actually see any of these monsters defeated. I mostly spent the dream running around from room to room, running into different Beholders and watching them attack groups of passengers. The dream still had a movie quality to it - I never really felt like I was in danger, I just ran because it was "in the script". 

Even with all that going on, I still had time to stop and casually visit the ship's gift shop. 

Fun With Words

My wife used to work for Nielsen, the TV ratings people. When they send techs out to your house to put a box on your TV, that's called an "install". Makes perfect sense. But when they send people over to remove the box, that's called a... take a guess... a "deinstall".

Now of course, anyone who has owned a computer since 1995 is probably probably used to the word "Uninstall". But here's the thing, Nielsen has been putting boxes on people's TVs since before the home PCs were common. Nielsen's use of "Deinstall" may well predate the computer term.

Now personally, both words sound bad to my ears when I really think about it. The opposite of "install" should be something like "outstall" or "unstall". Do you say indoors and unindoors? Inside and uninside? Inner space and uninner space? No, it's outdoors, outside, and outer space. Granted, I don't know the etymology of "install", so maybe "uninstall" is perfectly grammatically correct, though I doubt it. In any event, I've gotten used to uninstall, and it would be hard to start using a different word at this point.

That's the thing about words. It's not about what is correct, it's about what you're used to saying. This can be annoying, because apparently I've been surrounded by people who say everything wrong my entire life. Here's a few I wanted to rant about.

Let's start early. Back in elementary school, it was standard procedure for budding physicians to inoculate each other against the most sinister of maladies. Of course I'm referring to Cooties. Our tried-and-true method had a 100% success rate: "Circle, circle, dot dot dot... now you've got your Cooties shot." You administered this vaccine by using your finger to draw a face on your patient. After drawing the outer circle, you drew three dots to represent the eyes and mouth. Or maybe that third dot was a nose? I don't know, I never completed my medical degree.

But during my discussions with colleagues as an adult, I've found that in the majority of the Cootie-inoculating world, they skip the third dot. Skip the third dot? Come on! How's it supposed to look like a face with only two dots? Besides, our method makes for a better rhythm:

Circle circle (4 syllables)
Dot dot dot (3 syllables)
Now you've got your (4 syllables)
Cooties shot (3 syllables)

Doesn't that make the rhyme work better? Look, I realize our method might not be the most preferred, but you can't argue with the results. We never had a Cooties outbreak that entire year, so those two-dot plebeians can suck it.

Here's another one that kind of threw me for a loop. How do you pronounce the second syllable of "Experiment"? I swear I've said "spear" all my life, and that's what it sounded like other people were saying as well. But apparently most people say "spare"? That might just be an accent thing, but I'm still surprised that I didn't notice other people were saying "spare" until it was specifically pointed out to me. Now that's all I hear.

You know the phrase, "You've got another thing coming?" Or is it, "You've got another think coming?" I've always said the former; I just recently heard the latter. Or did I? Have people been saying "think" all my life, and I didn't notice because they sound so similar? It's just as well. "Think" sounds just awful, and if I'd actually heard someone say that version in my presence, I probably would have set them on fire.

So, how do you pronounce GIF? Hard G (because it stands for graphic) or soft G (as the creators intended)? I've heard so many people argue about this one, attempting to use actual grammatical evidence. You know what? Those arguments are dumb - there are no actual "Rules of Grammar", just a bunch of precedents set by classist snobs. In any event, show me any "Rule of Grammar" that is consistently applied and I'll be shocked.

This is the only rule that applies here: When you create a new word, you have a responsibility to make the pronunciation known before people get used to pronouncing it a certain way. If you choose to sit on your thumbs instead, you're not allowed to get mad later. The GIF guys had their chance, and now they have to live with the consequences.

It's kind of like the "mice vs mouses" thing. Back in the 80s, before the average citizen owned a computer with a mouse, I read an article about the peripheral in a computer magazine. It said that when referring to a computer mouse, the plural is "mouses" instead of mice. And then, as far as I can tell, nobody ever mentioned it again anywhere. I hope the creators of the mouse aren't as picky as the GIF guys, because they made absolutely no effort to get people to say "mouses", and now that ship has long sailed.

Honestly I think most people are willing to learn, they're just not willing to relearn. Just look at me. When I type, I still put two spaces after every period. I know better, but this is how I was taught, and I have no intention of changing. If they didn't want us to type this way, they shouldn't have taught this way. Yes I know it's an obsolete holdover from typewriter days, but so what? Lots of things are obsolete but still popular, just look at the Republican Party.

This is why most people become more conservative as they get older. The human brain becomes more rigid as it ages, and less open to new ideas. I'm not immune to this. My eyes roll just as much as yours when kids start putting down "Friends" for not being as progressive as more recent TV shows. I recognize that a lot of 80s movies are "problematic" now, but that doesn't make me like them any less.

But I also reject a lot of the "older is better" crowd. People who prefer music on vinyl because it sounds "warmer". No, you just get nostalgic feelings because the scratchiness reminds you of how music sounded in your youth. VHS is coming back into fashion for the same reasons. How in the world are we supposed to explain modern concepts like "gender fluid non-binary trans masc" to people who think VHS is superior to Blu Ray? Most of the time it's easier to just explain it to their children, and wait for the older generation to die off.

Anyway, I believe I've lost track of the original point of this blog, which I think was something about words, but I'm too lazy to scroll upwards and find out. Peace out.