Not only is my book on Amazon, so is my face.
What? You haven’t bought my book yet? You should buy my book.
(This will continue for a little while. I do promise some actual content tomorrow but until then BUY MY BOOK BECAUSE LOVE.)
Month: May 2014
GO BUY MY BOOK
On Amazon.com. Right here. TWO DOLLA NINETY-NINE CENT.
Holy shit.
On search algorithms and found poetry
I’m stepping on my own announcement post, I know (BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES VOLUME ONE AVAILABLE ON AMAZON– TODAY!!! BUT NOT QUITE YET) but I just discovered that this is what you get if you search Amazon for “Benevolence Archives” right now, before the book is actually live:
At least I know the title is unique? 🙂
Here we go here we go here we go
NEWS: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 has been submitted to Amazon and should be live within twelve hours. I will be spamming the crap out of everyone I know with links once I actually have a link. $2.99! You can find that in the couch. And I get to keep just south of $2 of that before taxes! Wheeee!
Launching a new book on Saturday is not the smartest idea I ever had, but at least I’ve learned how Amazon works: once you submit it, it’s submitted. There’s no “hold this until this date” option that I’ve found. I think I’ll probably be okay.
PRETTY THINGS UPDATE: Yeah, it’s summer. The lilac bush is flowering! It’s one of the few parts of my lawn that I actually like. Soon it will overgrow the back door to my house and I will have to hack at it with something sharp and I will not like it again, but for the next couple of weeks it’s going to be my favorite plant.
NIGERIA UPDATE: This article, written by an actual Nigerian, says many of the same things I said in my piece from yesterday except she doesn’t say “fuck” every four words. That post is kinda blowing up; it really entertains me how much my traffic multiplies when I get angry and swear a lot. Yesterday was the highest-traffic day since the Inexplicable Surge several weeks ago. 🙂
SOON.
Unless you have spent a lot of time wandering through my archives or you’ve been here since very close to the beginning of the blog, you probably have not seen this post yet. It’s a shame, because it’s one of my favorites; go take a look if you like. And while you’re reading, note the part about the milkweed.
The fucking milkweed still isn’t dead.
However.
It’s gorgeous out tonight; it was crazy-humid all day but it’s cooled into a perfect evening. The boy wanted to play outside so I went out with him and my wife and randomly decided it was time to mow. This makes today the first day of summer, by the way; not only did I mow the front lawn for the first time in 2014 but I dodged the first couple dozen Deathwishes of the summer.
(There are ten thousand toads living in my yard. They are all named Deathwish on account of their constant insistence on hopping underneath my mower. I used to be careful about nudging them out of the way or mowing around them and then I realized that in three years of mowing I have never once managed to accidentally murder a toad with my lawnmower, which means that they can burrow or hang on or something like that, so I don’t bother dodging them any more.)
Anyway, yeah, I mowed. And I did something else tonight: I took another step toward unwelcome adulthood and spent good money on my lawn. It’s official; my lawn-zany neighbor has won. We hired Trugreen tonight. I was already strangely excited about it, which hurts me in my soul. But I am sick of hating my lawn and supposedly they help with that sort of thing.
Then I mentioned the milkweed. And the salesman dude (Oh. There was a salesman dude. He came by yesterday while the boy was taking his bath and came back again tonight at my request while I was mowing.) told me that they have some sort of liquid death that they will put on the milkweed and the milkweed will die in horrible pain. As will all living things under the circle they put the stuff on, straight down to the center of the earth.
Which is worth the summer’s $277 fee all the fuck by itself.
I am sooooo looking forward to this.
Calling all car people
Any suggestions on what to do with this? It’s been pulled out a little bit since I owned the car, and a couple of weeks ago it got caught perfectly in a wind gust and pulled damn near completely off, although it’s still pretty nicely seated around the actual door handle so it’s not gonna detach anytime soon.
I have tried jamming the edges back underneath the lip with various sharp and/or thin implements, not limited to but including butter knives, sharper knives, putty knives, flat-head screwdrivers, and a few other things. This works temporarily but looks like hell and sooner or later contact with my elbow works it out again. I just tried to glue it back in place with some glue that was supposedly rated specifically for adhering leather (and, not for nothing, that I purchased at an auto shop) and I may as well have poured water or just pissed all over my car door for all the good it did. There was literally no adhesion whatsoever from the glue, which makes me think that other kids of adhesive probably aren’t the right way to go either. Unless they are. In which case tell me about them.
Or just tell me to take the car to a detailer, assuming some sort of detailer is even the right kind of person to deal with this. I don’t need an actual mechanic to take the door apart, do I? Because that would be both expensive and insanely annoying.
On “awareness,” with swearing
I published a little mini-rant on Twitter yesterday morning that was brought on by one too many Tweets about the kidnapped Nigerian girls and a tweet that literally suggested I should retweet it to cure cancer. I know what “literally” means, guys; the Tweet actually read the actual words “Retweet to cure cancer!”
I just now (I’m writing this Thursday night) found this picture on the Internet somewhere. This has got to be the stupidest picture in the history of photography itself.
tl;dr: Dear Twitter/meme activism: go fuck yourself. Longer, more profane version follows.
I mean, what the fuck is the endgame of any of these fucking pictures? Do these three assholes seriously think that a fucking human trafficker— not generally a genre of man known to give a fuck— is going to 1) know who the fuck Ashton Kutcher is or 2) give one single wet shit that that coddled Hollywood wankstain thinks he isn’t a “real man?” Really, world? Sean Penn and fucking Justin Timberlake think they can shame a motherfucker into not doing something because they don’t think he’s a “real man?” Do you seriously think that the average “man” involved in human trafficking wouldn’t literally eat Ashton Kutcher if he felt like it?
What the fuck is this nonsense? Who the hell are these assholes even talking to right now?
Themselves, that’s who the fuck. This isn’t activism, it’s fucking masturbation, and the bastards don’t even have the fucking decency to lock themselves in the bathroom while they’re doing it. Christ, this is so goddamned stupid that I’m hurting my brain even complaining about it. And, granted, this particular picture isn’t about the Nigerians, but it’s functionally the exact same shit.
Here’s a clue, dude: there’s one person in America who can actually do anything about the lost Nigerian girls, and unless you are seriously suggesting we invade Nigeria to find them, even what the fuck he can do is more than a little limited.
President Obama does not read Twitter. And there is no universe in which social media pressure convinces a bunch of Nigerian religious extremists– who, I suspect, don’t actually have fucking Twitter accounts– to give the girls back.
Wait, no, this picture might be stupider:
I love Michelle Obama, guys. She’s without a doubt my favorite First Lady, not just of my lifetime, of all time. But holy Christ does this picture make me want to vomit. It’s cynical and opportunistic and self-promoting and jesus fuck woman the President of the United States sleeps in your bed, what the fuck are you doing showing off your concerned face on Twitter?
Did anybody ever stop that Kony dude, by the way? Twitter was mad at him too, right?
Fuck.
(Not to slow my roll or anything, but: while I’m slightly more sympathetic to the idea that people are “raising awareness” with this shit, they’re “raising awareness” by making the the statement “Here! I did nothing about this! You should do the same nothing I did!” Well, great. Tweet all the fuck you want, those kids aren’t coming back without massive political pressure or some sort of military intervention– which is not happening– and Twitter will produce neither of those things anyway. “Awareness” is bullshit.)
(Sidenote: Misspell “human” the wrong way and WordPress autocorrects it to “Juan.” As bad as human trafficking is, Juan Trafficking is… well, way different.)
On making friends
Non-WordPress folks can sit this one out, I guess, as it doesn’t have anything to do with you guys, and it’s totally a post about me making a mountain out of a molehill anyway.
I am– no, really, I’m devoting an entire post to this announcement– about to make a new folder in my bookmarks, and I’m going to put links to a bunch of y’all’s blogs in it.
Why am I doing this? Because while I throw a lot of Likes around on WordPress, what I’m really not doing very much is engaging with people who I actually know, where “know” means “interact with on my own blog.” I’m subbed to a bunch of you, but WordPress’ subscription reader absolutely sucks, and it means I’m missing posts that I would probably enjoy reading all the time. I’m an old-time Xanga dude, right? I got my start over there. It amazes me that with the huge array of ways in which WordPress is vastly superior to Xanga that it seems to suck so bad at basic community-building tools. The process of “keep track of what my friends were writing” was infinitely easier over there.
Don’t tell me about an RSS reader. I don’t RSS. I’ve tried it a couple of times and I can’t figure out why anyone would ever use it. Bookmarks and the “Open All” command it is.
So, yeah. If you’ve been subbed here forever, and you comment a lot, or if I recognize your name because you like every post, chances are I’ll be dumping you into that “Blogs to Go Read, Dammit” folder at some point or another, and you might actually start seeing me interacting with you at your own sites once in a while, because this is nonsense, and it’s high time that I start reading what y’all have to say more regularly than I do.
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