“Nah, it’s an old piano. Don’t touch it.” Joe pointed at the DO NOT TOUCH sign displayed above the keys.
Ed looked closely. The piano was carefully dusted, but one key had some extra wear on it. He hit it a few times. Nothing happened.
“Do not touch that,” the butler commanded. “That piece is not part of the auction.”
“Whatever you say, Al,” Ed said, tapping the broken key a few more times just for giggles.
Elsewhere in the mansion, unnoticed by anyone, the door to the cave silently slid open.
Word Count: 95
Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!
I’ve said this before: I could send my kid to his school for the next nine years or I could buy a new car every year for the next nine years, or a really nice car every two years, which might be a bit more reasonable. My current vehicle is old enough to drive itself and has 150,000 miles on it. It looks good for its age, honestly, but anything even vaguely resembling a close inspection will reveal certain, oh, let’s call them beauty marks that make it clear that if I tried to trade this thing in I might well have to pay the dealers to take it off my hands.
I went to pick the boy up today and there was apparently some sort of athletic event going on, because the lot I parked in, which was usually empty, was full. I get a weird sort of class anxiety whenever we go to big school events because you can tell from the parking lot that most of the people who send their kids here have tons more money than I do. (And I should be clear: everyone there has always been perfectly nice. This shit’s in my head.)
However! It is mid-January. In northern Indiana. Everyone’s car is covered with road salt and sand and shit and looks like hell. No one’s car looks nice in northern Indiana in mid-January. Go ahead; take it to the car wash. It’ll look like shit by the time you get it home.
I glanced at the car behind me, a dark blue or black station-wagon-lookin’ thingy, as I was heading into the building. See? I thought. That person’s car looks like a piece of shit, just like mine. You’re being ridiculous. Stop it. Those folks are like you. Nobody rich drives a station wagon.
And then I got a closer look at the hood of the car.
Who else had no idea that you could spend a hundred thousand motherfucking dollars on a station wagon?
Rumor has it that Hugo nominations are going to open up next week, and I have two– count ’em, two! different works that will be eligible for nomination.
(Yes, indie authors are eligible. I checked.)
The first is my novel The Sanctum of the Sphere, published in April of 2015. This would obviously be eligible for the Best Novel Hugo. You are a ridiculous person if you nominate Sanctum for Best Novel. I wrote Sanctum. I really like it. I think you would really like it if you haven’t read it. But it’s not in Best Novel territory. (I love you to death if you’d actually consider it. You’re crazy, but I love you. Also, keep reading.)
My second eligible work is my short story Warrior Jayashree and the Young, published on this site on May 6, 2015. Jayashree is eligible in the Best Short Story category. And … well, I really like this story, and I’ve read previous nominees, and damn it, I think it’s competitive with a number of them.
I have no idea how many people other than myself are reading this that are eligible to cast ballots or nominate (you have to be a member of WorldCon to do that,) and I do not plan to nominate my own work. But I would be very grateful to discover that Jayashree passed muster with a couple of people.
(Note that I am not eligible for the John W. Campbell award, as that one does specify professional publication.)
I will be attending WorldCon this year one way or another, as it’s in Kansas City and we have friends there. I’m hoping to be there in a professional capacity (as a vendor) and obviously to be a nominee would be insane, but I’m not crazy. Still, it’d be nice to see a vote or two, if anyone is able and willing to do so.
So, I thought switching to a certain theme was a temporary thing, only then THERE IT WAS, and now I can’t find the old theme again, so I guess I’ll fuck around until I find one I like.
And to think, I was about to put up a post about how I needed to find better uses of my insane amount of free time!
You may recall that I bought a new winter coat on The Amazon the other day. This is the coat in question, the Carhartt Men’s Big & Tall Arctic Quilt Lined Duck Traditional Coat. Which is a hell of a name, but then it’s a hell of a coat.
We had subzero air temperatures yesterday morning (yesterday? Monday? Hell, I don’t remember) and way subzero wind chills and I had a variety of out-of-the-house errands to run, so I wore the new coat.
With a T-shirt on underneath it, and the coat not zipped up. I had the hood attached.
I was overheated– not quite sweaty, but almost– by the end of the excursions. This sounds like a bad thing. It’s not. It means that this sumbitch gives neither a damn nor a fuck about wind in the -20 degree range. Which means it is exactly the coat I wanted. There are plenty of pockets, the cuffs at the wrists are perfect— a frequent problem with oversized coats, since my arms don’t exactly match my chest and stomach– and the fabric on the outside is tough as hell and looks like it could probably stop a knife in addition to cold.
My only problem right now is that the hood is a little stiff and driving with it attached is kind of obnoxious because of how it pushes my neck and head away from my seat, but I assume that’ll loosen up and the hood is removable anyway.
Four thumbs up would wear again. You folk who have Actual Winter where you live should seriously think about this thing.
There is little doubt by now: this is going to be the most awful presidential election of my lifetime, pretty much by any definition of the word “awful” you would care to choose. I live in Indiana, so I generally don’t get a choice on who either party nominates. The only time in my adult life that it mattered was 2008, when I voted for Obama, who narrowly lost. That election didn’t really involve having to carefully choose my candidate, as I’d lived in Obama’s district in Illinois. I believe I’ve voted for him every time he’s stood for public office, actually, and Hillary’s people were doing their best to make their candidate as unpalatable as humanly possible.
I would have been an Edwards guy in 2004 had it mattered; Kerry had the primary wrapped up by the time Illinois’ primary rolled around, and I think we all dodged a bullet with that guy anyway. And I swear to God I can’t come up with a single competitor Gore had for the nomination in 2000, so I suspect I didn’t vote for whoever that was.
There is a post about how fucking stupid our current primary system is and how desperately tired I am of two tiny rural white states getting to decide who each party’s nominee is every single election cycle, but I’m too tired and aggravated to write it right now and pretty much everyone who lives outside of Iowa and New Hampshire can probably write it for me anyway.
Assuming there’s still multiple candidates by the time May (fucking MAY!) rolls around, I don’t know who I’m voting for. There’s plenty of time for one of them to genuinely piss me off by the time the primary rolls around, and Hillary’s starting to show signs of listening to the same type of idiot, if not the same literal idiot, who cost her the nomination in 2008. I like Bernie’s positions on issues more than I like Clinton’s, but that’s not always the most important thing and I don’t know what he’s going to be like once/if the Republicans start pointing their guns at him instead of Hillary. He’s shown some troublesome difficulties with thinking on his feet in the past, he’s too damn old, and– while this probably shouldn’t make a difference– he’s attracting all the PUMA nitwittery this time around, which doesn’t really reflect on him as a candidate but is still one of the things keeping me from anything resembling full-throated support anyway. I also feel like Hillary will be more effective as a president than Bernie will in a lot of ways. Then again, she’s also much more likely to start her administration by picking up a small country and throwing it at a wall just to prove she will, and I’m more than a little tired of that bullshit too.
I like to eat my friends/ I make no bones about it I like to eat my friends/ I couldn’t live without it!
If Hillary is the nominee she’s going to beat Trump or Cruz like a rented mule. I’m fully aware of all the polls showing Bernie ahead of both of them by wider margins than Hillary is now, but it’s way too early to take them seriously. Sanders needs to do a hell of a lot of minority outreach before I’ll be comfortable believing he’ll win, for starters– but the same thing was true with Obama and look what happened there.
(People forget: the early line of attack against Obama was that he wasn’t black enough, and that the Clintons’ historic popularity with black Democrats would ensure Hillary the nomination– “Obama’s people” were all supposed to be young white liberals. Of course, as soon as Obama started winning contests, the narrative changed and suddenly the black people who he wasn’t black enough for a few weeks beforehand were only voting for him because he was black. Just because Bernie is weak with minority Democrats now doesn’t mean that he’ll stay that way.)
I am less concerned with the “Boo! Socialist!” attack than I probably should be, mostly because the Republicans will be running an out-and-out fucking lunatic no matter what happens, and I think “Boo! Socialist!” will not be as effective when their candidate is crazy enough to make a GWB 3rd term look palatable by comparison. Rule 1 of the GOP for the last couple of decades is Things Always Get Worse, Yes, Even Compared to That; their frontrunner is an open fascist, so I don’t know how that can really happen, but it will. I have to believe that sooner or later this bullshit will bite them in the ass, but it hasn’t happened yet. Bernie’s positions are a lot easier to lie about, though.
No one can explain why that iPad has a Wu-Tang Clan logo on it, and I WANT TO KNOW.
So, yeah. I’m not sure that this piece really has an overall point to it other than this is what’s on my mind at the moment and I’m kind of tired of talking about, y’know, my life. I’m pretty certain that one way or another this will be the lowest-turnout presidential election in American history, and it will probably deserve to be. We’ll see if I’m wrong. I’d love to be.
I will probably not be super interested in arguing in comments, by the way. Particularly if you’re in the mood to set me straight on Sanders. Feel free to keep that to yourself.
So it turns out Chatroulette is still a thing. Who knew?
Today was a morning full of errands and minor home improvement tasks, an afternoon of nothing, and then full-time Daddy Duty all evening. I may or may not have mentioned my wife’s new job; I think I have but I can’t remember specifically doing it. At any rate, I have officially ceded the title of Breadwinner; she came close to doubling her salary by changing jobs and even if I still had last year’s job she’d still be like 20% above me.
So this means that when Lord High Muckety-Mucks from her new company are in town, she has to go to Big Fancy Dinners to entertain them. So she’s there, and I’m a househusband today.
(Hey, it’s better than “unemployed.” I did my first job application today where I had to admit that technically I don’t have a job any longer, although I suppose I could put self-employed on there and list Prostetnic. Maybe I should. Hmm.)
(Actually, I really should. Author/Publisher/Marketer/Owner/Technically-can’t-call-myself-a-CEO, dating back to 2013? Hmm.)
Yeah, this post was gonna be about something and now all I can think about is how I should redo my resume. What was I gonna say again? Shit.
This question is a bit too long for Twitter, and I’m not prepared for the torrent of mockery I’ll receive if I put it on Facebook, so quickie blog post it is:
There used to be (it may still be around; I kinda doubt it) a website where you’d be paired up with some random yahoo on their webcam, and you yourself would be some random yahoo on your webcam, and you could chat with that person or click and be sent on to the next random yahoo. My recollection was that the site was about half thirteen-year-old girls having slumber parties and half masturbating old men who were hoping to con those thirteen-year-olds into taking their shirts off. There was no chatting; only horror.
This predated both Snapchat and Tinder by a good margin– I want to say I lived in Chicago during its heyday, which would put it in the early-mid 2000s– but you can see how it might have informed both of those services. In fact I’m pretty sure it was mostly pre-smartphone, since it relied upon having a webcam.
I cannot construct a Google search that helps me, and I can’t remember the name of the site. Just don’t ask me why I want to know; I just remembered it existed last night and for some reason it still bugs me that I can’t recall the name.
Rumor has it that Hugo nominations are going to open up next week, and I have two– count ’em, two! different works that will be eligible for nomination.
You may recall that I bought 
So it turns out Chatroulette is still a thing. Who knew?
This question is a bit too long for Twitter, and I’m not prepared for the torrent of mockery I’ll receive if I put it on Facebook, so quickie blog post it is:
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 