Daily Blog Thingie
This news story pretty well just defies comment.

Woman stoned and drunk, T-bones a homeless guy (probably he was on the sidewalk or in a parking lot at the time, though that's not explained) so his legs are broken and he smashes into her windshield.  She drives home and leaves the car in her garage for two days, while the guy is still alive!  He's begging for help, and she lets him die there from blood loss and shock and who knows what else, and later dumps the body.

Her lawyer is arguing that murder is too much to charge her with. Which is what lawyers do, but I imagine if you took a poll you'd get about 95% approval to have her torn apart by wild dogs, much less tried for murder.  Small wild dogs, like wild dachshunds, so it would take her two days of terrible agony before she died.  I'm not sure how they'd break her legs first, but we could work something out.

I was amazed by that story for a good 10 minutes, but fortunately I was able to overcome that boring human decency stuff before too long, and sent the URL to a Kiwi acquaintance with the comment, "This is how they deal with jaywalkers in Texas."

That's of course not true, Dubya didn't get more than public flogging legalized for troublemaking jaywalkers when he was guv'ner there, but most of my humor is built on irony and exaggeration.

Like most foreigners (my acquaintance) considers all Americans vulgar and violent as a culture.  Which is of course correct, but they'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for us, blah blah, etc etc.

So what's with sleeping?  It's overrated, right? I mean you just like there for 1/3 of most days, accomplishing nothing.  At least that seems to be my current opinion, as I'm getting like 4-5 hours a night for the last week.  Stay up until I'm exhausted, drop into sleep the minute my head hits the pillow, wake up 4 hours later, doze for an hour, then finally get up out of boredom.  Sleep is for the weak anyway.

So I get into the shower and run it as hot as I can stand on my back and right side.  Always some portion of my back is sore, I think from sleeping in weird positions and sitting at a desk 90% of my waking hours.  Usually it's up between my shoulder blades, but for whatever reason the last few days my right side and ribs are just aching.  Not internally, just the muscles, but I find myself leaning to the left as I'm typing this since straight up or leaning right I get shooting pains in my ribcage area.  I slathered some Tiger's Balm on and took a couple of Advil, so now I'm sitting here baking pleasantly (if you've never tried Tiger's Balm, you should, it's like Asian Ben Gay but about 50x stronger) and hoping to avoid 2nd degree burns.

A few years ago I put too much Tiger's Balm on my back in one spot, and it burnses us, and the next day I had a huge red patch across my back everywhere my hand could reach.  Sort of the opposite of a suntan sunburn, where you have red spots everywhere your hand with the lotion didn't reach, with usually clearly visible finger swipes across the skin.  So anyway, the Tiger's made my back feel much better at the time, (it was up between my shoulder blades then) but I itched and hurt to lean back against anything for a week afterwards.  By which time the back muscles were starting to hurt again.

I guess it beats working in a coal mine though.

I made an update to the Hot or Not page yesterday, with a German site (http://www.binichschoen.ch) of the same concept.  As was pointed out to me just now, it's not German, it's Swiss.  .ch is Swiss, and .de is German.  I think I knew that, but as the site appears to be in German, I called it German.  On a second look now, the words aren't quite long and frightening enough to be German, though they seem to be somewhat similar to my untrained American eye.

A comparison.

Swiss:

(Wenn Du das Alter nicht mehr schätzen willst, kannst Du es oben links ausschalten). Bitte hilf uns diese Seite lustig, sauber und anständig zu halten. Klicke hier wenn dieses Bild nicht sichtbar

German: 

Jahren konnten sich immerhin fast zwei Millionen Zuschauer über die Zoten und Schlüpfrigkeiten von »Harte Jungs« amüsieren. Da durfte die deutsche Antwort auf »American Pie« kein One-Night-Stand bleiben. Diese Fortsetzung variiert entsprechend bloß die bewährte Idee: Immer noch wird Flo

Stupid American:

A similar page in German can be seen here, and thanks to maik for the email. I like having a "New Frauen" picture sorting option, it seems more exotic than "view women only".  The oddest thing is how low the average scores are.  Really hot pictures, ones that would be guaranteed 9.9's on hotornot.com are like 6's there.  Picky Germans?  Screwy voting script?  The site script doesn't seem to be as well done, since you can't get links to the individual pages with their scores very easily, and I can't make fun of the bio's since they're in German.

I'll try to get a couple of more stories posted today.  I've been reading my old ones steadily, went through 2 of my old horror novellas yesterday with mixed feelings.  Neither was any good, in terms of plot or characters or being interesting for 150 pages, but both were okay in terms of writing quality.  I didn't see any small ticky editing to do to spice things up or fix errors.

But depressingly I didn't see any point in any small edits, since the stories weren't lacking in the microcosm, they were lacking in the universal level. There's no point in fiddling with the wording of one paragraph to make it read more smoothly when the overall thing is boring and pointless.  So I can't see posting any of those on this site, they just aren't entertaining to read. =(

I don't recall being all that violent when I was first really writing a lot (18-20ish), but man are some of the stories OTT (Over The Top) in the violence and gore and horror elements.  Not really scary, just tastelessly gross.  Gore for the sake of gore. I enjoy good gore, the scene in The Magistrate Suit where Klavaise actually makes and then dons the "suit" (I'm trying to discuss it spoiler free, for people who've not read that story yet.) is just awesome, since it's in the context of the story, and it's so surprising and horrible when it happens. And inventively disgusting.  I read that and I'm like, "Yeah!  Oh my god!  Ewwww!  Cool!" all at once.

In comparison, many of my older stories are just pointless exercises in gore. I think I'd read Clive Barker's Books of Blood stories, and various other short story compilations, and enjoyed the gruesome stuff in them for the shock value, so was determined to exceed that in my own writing.  Which isn't necessarily a bad idea, I just didn't execute it with much verve, at least in hindsight.  At the time I liked it well enough.  Like one story has a guy with 3 warring personalities, and he decides to become a serial killer, but 3 (the personality) suggests to 1 and 2 (who argue constantly, but have more control over the body than 3) that instead of just "hammering some winos" they kill something that people will be shocked and horrified by.  He wants better media coverage, apparently.  So then the character sets about finding women with new babies, and killing them and cutting off the baby heads and storing them in jars of formaldehyde.

I mean okay, it's a premise, but to what point?  That's what the whole story is about.  There's no build up, or rising tension or climax (3 eventually gets control for a minute and in a fit of revulsion disembowels the body, while 1 and 2 are arguing and then trying to hold the guts in as they push back into control), it just sort of ends after half a dozen jars are fiilled.

I wasn't much on physical details, since there's no real mention in the story of how he's finding the houses, why the police aren't protecting people, or finding him wandering around the streets late at night with a machete and a jar of formaldehyde, where he gets the formaldehyde in the first place, where the husbands or other people in the new mother's families are, etc.

And no, I don't think that story will be appearing on this site either, sorry. ;)

The funny thing in it is that 1 and 2 are sort of idiots, but amusing idiots, and they are always trying to use long words but mangling them.

Two thinks for a minute, trying to remember some of the other big words he has heard in the past. He remembers some, and uses them, but not very well.

"Well you can't even revolve your own infernal cowlick. You are so impotent that you don't know how to belay your congratulations."

This sentence left number One temporarily stunned. He scanned his own portion of Jimmy's mind, trying to come up with an absolutely devastating retort, but was cut off by the seldom-heard number Three. "Now boys, let's be cool. We need to make a decision here, not quibble endlessly."

"Yeah," One says, eager to suck up to Three, "Let's not nibble like embezzles."

I forget the term for words used incorrectly, ones that are phonetically similar, like "revolve" for "resolve" in the above example.  But they have long cracked me up.  And there's nothing like elements of bad humor in pointless stories about infanticide by decapitation to liven things up, after all.

This is something I've long noticed, how odd and erratic emailing patterns are.  On the D2 site I work on, some pages generate zero email, and others generate 50 letters a day.  Sometimes you can predict it, if you have something controversial or opinionated, then you figure people will want to talk back or give you feedback.

But other times it's impossible to say, you'll do a page you think will be popular and not get one mail about it, other than some broken link message.  And other pages you'll do quickly thinking it's not going to be of much use, and get a ton of mail about it.

This site has gotten more hits each of the last two days than it did the previous 3 weeks combined, since I've been pimping it somewhat on the D2 site, and I've gotten 3 emails the last two days.  I'm not begging for mails, I certainly get more than enough on D2 stuff, but it's just odd how some things generate feedback and others don't.

I don't personally mail sites very often, so I can see how it is for other people.  I'll look at a site and very seldom feel compelled to write the author, even though I know that I appreciate that when it's a site page I created.

On this site I have detailed hit counters galore, at least until I this gets too busy and I have to disable it for eating up too much of the server load.  So I know exactly which pages are being viewed and how often.  I love that, since I like stats. We don't have such counters on the D2 site, since the traffic is so enormous that the stats logs would fill the HD up in days, and really slow the server as it compiles them on the fly.   So there we often wonder which page is getting viewed the most, and try to judge by emails, but there's no accurate way since emails aren't at all representative of total views of something.

The three mails on this site the last two days were all about the hot or not page, which got 33 unique views.  Each of my stories here got around 30-60 views, and this main page got hundreds.  So it just goes to show you... 

Well I don't know what it goes to show you, but I find it interesting.

I figured the Dirty Slang page would get the most hits and search engine clicks, since it's, you know, dirty.  It's got naughty words and stuff, and you know how the kids love that sort of thing.  But since nothing on this site seems to be showing up on search engines (yet?) that probably explains things.

I've been poking Tycho to drop me a link somewhere, so perhaps that would accelerate things. I'm not sure why I want more visitors, other than just because I'm a dirty whore.  It's not like I'm making money off of ad banners or something, (not that anyone is at this point) and enough traffic and I'd have to pay more for hosting.   I think it's just my selfless extrovert nature, that I so want to provide my brilliant witty entertainment to the widest possible audience.  *cough*

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