Curse of the Day:
¤ May you find your desire for work about an hour before bedtime.

¤ The 2003 Razzie winners have been announced, and Madonna has once again scored big.

Swept Away," a remake of Italian director Lina Wertmuller's 1974 classic about a bourgeois woman shipwrecked in the Mediterranean with her yacht's communist cook, swept the Razzies with nods for worst film, worst performance by an actress, worst remake, worst screen couple (Madonna and co-star Adriano Giannini) and worst director Ritchie.

The first cinematic collaboration between the aging pop star and the British director also suffered the ignominious distinction of being the Razzie's lowest-grossing worst film ever, having "earned" a whopping $598,645 in box office receipts, the Razzies award givers said.

Actually, since only about 50 people in the entire country saw the Madonna movie, you could speculate that most of the votes are being delivered on reputation alone, rather than actual first hand knowledge.  But it's not like everyone voting for the Oscars sat through The Others or The Pianist or Stab Wounds of New York either.

¤ Pravda, the newspaper and news service in Russia that is sort of their CNN, has become rather loopy in recent years and often posts totally absurd "Weekly World News" type stuff.  Like speculating that the Iraq Attack is a grab for technology from a UFO that the US wants and Saddam has.  Uh huh. 

That tabloid tendency aside, they have a very interesting interview online now.  It's with "Russian TV Guru Vladamir Pozner" and in it he talks about how the American media is so self-censoring, how that leads Americans to have such an unrealistic view of themselves and the world, and many other topics. Yes, it's a long quote, but the guy gives long answers to the questions. The questions are in bold.

What sanctions can there be?

There can be sanctions applied by advertisers. A channel cannot exist without them. It is possible to show a certain pressure on advertisers as well. In addition to that, there is public opinion, which presumably supports Bush. It basically happens because Americans do not have any other information.

Let’s take the opinion polls, which are conducted in other countries, including such America-friendly countries as Ireland, Great Britain and Mexico. Those polls prove that the majority of those countries’ populations are against Bush. According to the results of a recent opinion poll in the UK, 32% of respondents are afraid of Saddam Hussein, while 68% are afraid of George W. Bush.

Americans do not have that information. Moreover, they do not understand how some people can stand against them. They perceive such a position as ingratitude on the part of the whole world. It’s like “we are so fine, kind and sincere, but those people, who we feed, stand against us now”.

Why aren’t they informed? Because their mass media are not informed either. It is possible to find “for” and “against” columns in newspapers. Yet, as far as the television is concerned, there is only one opinion there.

The most daring one of them is a careful and a neutral opinion. More often one can hear things like, “go ahead, you guys”. You will never hear anyone saying on television that America might have serious problems because of that. No-one will try to understand why the whole world opposes America’s incursion in Iraq.

I assert that Russian television is much more liberal today than American TV. To my mind, it is the USA that has the least freedom of speech amid other democratic countries at the moment, speaking of television.

 

Where do you think American supremacy comes from? What makes them “make the world more perfect” all the time? Probably, they are not interested in somebody else’s opinion?

Americans are interested only in themselves, that’s a fact. However, Americans are not the only nation which thinks that it is perfect. There is a joke: the French do not think that France is the best country in the world. They know it.

On the other hand, Americans have a very dangerous combination. This is the combination of the feeling of supremacy and ignorance. America is a wonderful country. It has achieved amazing progress. No-one denies that, and a lot of people envy America.

I would not like to make general statements, but the majority of Americans are certain that the USA is unique. They believe that it is so very supreme, which makes any kind of anti-American criticism absolutely out of the question. This is the way the American mindset is. This is what American movies, television and schools teach.

¤ Sort of an amusing article about the Iraq War. Well, not amusing, but ironic at least.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. forces in Iraq have yet to find any evidence of the suspected chemical or biological weapons that prompted the invasion, a U.S. general said on Saturday. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, vice director for operations on the U.S. military's Joint Staff, also told a briefing that none of the missiles fired by Iraq so far in the war had been a Scud.

Scud missiles, along with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, are among the arms that Iraq was barred from possessing by U.N. resolutions after the 1991 Gulf War. President Bush and his ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair accuse Iraq of having violated the resolutions and say President Saddam Hussein could provide weapons of mass destruction to groups like al-Qaeda.

So since the WMD accusation was Bush's whole excuse for the invasion, what happens if the troops get all the way to Baghdad and can't find anything?  And it turns out that Saddam was telling the truth all along? Does that mean the US forces say, "Our bad, sorry." and leave, sweeping up the shell casings and tank tracks as they go

Somehow I doubt it.

¤ Article analyzes Bush's Iraq Attack kick off speech, picking every statement for truth or lies.  It looks like more true than false, but not by much.  There are at least 20 clear lies.  I didn't hear the speech or read a transcript, until seeing this one, and I was amazed at the stuff Bush said that is just not even remotely close to the truth.  I would think that the major media would call him on it, and report a little critically (you know, like how the media is supposed to do?) but not a word have I heard.  Interesting to compare this to the quotes from the Russian media guy in the news item listed above, and imagine if we had any real independent major media in the US, rather than a bunch of bland corporate-owned profit-seeking propaganda sympathizers.

The italicized is Bush's speech quote.

Recognizing the threat to our country, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly last year to support the use of force against Iraq.

True, unfortunately.

America tried to work with the United Nations to address this threat because we wanted to resolve the issue peacefully.

False. A good part of your Cabinet has been clamoring to finish off Saddam for years, Rumsfeld and Cheney in particular - they wrote a letter to Clinton begging him to take Saddam out. And, of course, deposing a nation’s leader, dictator or not, is not a peaceful route.

We believe in the mission of the United Nations.

False. Otherwise you would submit to its authority.

On the subject of porn, Malaya sent me a text message out of the blue Saturday asking for a photo of my hips.  Now I wasn't even sure what she was talking about, but since it was a hot afternoon and I was nekkid and I have my digicam sitting on the desk all the time, and she's seen um... everything in photos by now, I figured what the hell.

I set the digicam on the 15 sec timer, put it on my desk, pointed it towards the snake aquariums, and took two shots of each side.  Then cropped them to the same height and put them all on a page, 1-4 in order.  She loved them, as I had hoped, and talked much of kissing the hips and working her way around to the front and kissing everything else visible.  And yes, everything was visible.  I am such a slut.

Anyway, I censored one shot with a black box over the naughty part and let another female friend see it and she liked it, and then Starina had happened to mail in about something else and was sympathetic and as a reward I sent her (Starina being the flaming gender-switching alter ego of a normally sensible male reader/emailer) the censored shot. The interesting part was later when Starina mailed in asking to see the uncensored ones, and I had to think about it.

See if you follow me here:

Women (the vast majority of them, anyway) do not like to see nudity or porn, or even men in revealing outfits or poses.  However they love to see a man they know and lust for in virtually any sort of photo. They sometimes like to see strangers, or celebrities, but always on their terms, which are virtually impossible to predict or determine. They are very selective, and they want to see it when they want to see it, and the rest of the time they do not want to see it and will think you an insensitive piggish brute for forcing such an image into their personal space. And yes, it's taken me months of examples and careful questioning to learn this. And no, it's not fair.  And yes, it will be held against you if you, foolish man, send them a sexy picture when they aren't in a mood to see one.

However Starina isn't a woman, a fact that no doubt vexes her at times.

I know how men are about nudity.  I would say "female" nudity, but that's not what I mean.  What I mean is nudity of a person of a gender they are interested in snogging.  This is usually a female, but sometimes a man, depending on the preference of the viewer.  Anyway, we (men) are always eager to see it, whether the nude individual is a friend or relative or total stranger.

So I've got female friends who wouldn't like to see me nude, and homosexual male friends who know I'm not gay and not interested in them, or any man, in that way.  And yet they would love to see me naked, since that's just how men are.

I tried to think of a parallel, like if a woman was doing a website I liked, and I thought she was cute and had traded emails with her a few times, but she was in no way ever going to be interested in me.  She's married, or I guess I should say that she's a lesbian, just to make the parallel as exact as possible. Would she care if I saw her naked, assuming she trusted me not to post the pics everywhere, or her face wasn't in them, etc?

I have no idea, I'd assume she would not want me seeing that, but that's not really the point.  The point is if I would want to, and of course I would.  I would knock widows and orphans out of the way to get a better look.  Even though I knew I had no shot at ever doing anything with her, and knew that she had no interest in me.

Again, that's just how men are. And how men and women differ.  I know gay men aren't any different; I know less about how lesbians would judge the issue, both in terms of looking and being seen.  Perhaps one would be more interested in seeing a man naked, since they would have no potential desire for him at all, and it would be just like a science project, or a way to satisfy their curiosity.  Any lesbians reading this want to mail me their thoughts, I'd be glad to hear them. I love this sort of stuff.

So the end result, if you remember what I began talking about here. Malaya, my cyber-sweetie, got to see the full on pics and loved them.  Another woman who is a friend didn't want to look but did eventually and admired the view but didn't want to see the full on pics (which I wouldn't have shown her anyway).  And Starina, hobbled with a man's indiscriminate sex drive, got to see the censored version and wanted desperately to see the full on shots, and assured me it wouldn't create any difficulties in our friendship, etc.  All the sort of stuff I'd say if a cute chick had such photos and wasn't letting me see them. And yes, I now feel like a cock-teasing bitch.

In a very immodest way I can now imagine how so many pretty girls get to be such cock-teasing bitches. It's a lot of fun to have people, even men, interested in you, and wanting to see you.  Hot for your body, to put it bluntly. And you don't really want them to see it, but you like the attention and it's an ego boost, and you want to give them some reward for their attention, but you aren't going to show them what they really want to see.  So you dress sexy or show them a censored pic, and of course that just makes them more interested and makes them tell you how sexy you are, and then you want more of that, and so on.

I'm a goddamned slut after about 3 weeks of thinking I'm semi-hot from the right angle, and with 2 or 3 admirers.  Pretty girls have a world of admirers and have this their whole lives.  So have some more sympathy for that pretty girl in the tight top who looks at you like something she fished out of her drain when she catches you staring at her magnificent body that she's obviously dressed up to show off.  Just not to you, you filthy animal. She wants to show it off to hot guys.  How dare you lay your slimy eyes on her toned belly.

Try not to hate her, and try to understand the circumstances and events over the course of her life that have turned her into a vain, self-centered, teasing little bitch.  Okay, on second thought you can still hate her, but hate her with compassion...

In slightly related news, Starina took the URL of the censored shot and tried changing a bit of it from my relatively obvious naming system, and found the shot posted above, "flux-2003-0322a.jpg" and another one showing off some really ugly pants I was wearing around the house.  But did not look further and wouldn't have found the nude ones anyway, since I take this sort of potential snooping into consideration when I put up something I don't want everyone to see, and give it a name with enough differences that no one will ever guess it, short of having a program try about 50,000 potential character combinations.  And if you want to see my dick that badly, you probably deserve a look.

Anyway, I bring this up since an email on the same topic came in Saturday morning.  This is from Doomster.

I know you've said that you felt that your D2 novel was not complete yet, and that you would only show it to someone if you felt it was, and provided that he would give you some constructive feedback. But, after reading your 1st chapter, I feel compelled to read the rest of it. Or to put it more accurately, I'm damn bloody curious and I want to read the whole thing, or as much of it as you've got written down.

I've managed to sneak into some part of chapter 2 that you posted, by screwing around with the numbers of the html page of your D2 novel {changed gathering 1-1 to 2-1 etc]. So, if you would kindly email me your D2 Novel, I'd be eternally grateful to you. Not that that's worth very much though...but..ahh well. 

Chapter 2 was up, (not anymore) at least the first 1/3 or so of it, with a bunch of notes, but it was a totally rough draft that I had only put online since Malaya wanted a quick peek.  Which is why it wasn't linked from Chapter One.

The Doomster is confused here though, since it's not the D2 novel that's finished but not very good.  That's Miss Pretty Lies, which is a contemporary horror story.  It's entirely finished (though it needs a lot of work) and is online now, but you'll never guess the URL, so don't bother. And you don't really want to read it anyway, it's crappy now.

The D2 novel is no more done than what Doomster saw; just chapter 1 in a semi-final version (some typos and a few repeated thing that need work) and a bit of chapter two and a bunch of notes about that chapter and the rest of the novel. And it's on hold since I concluded that there was no point in writing more of it now, since it has no commercial viability as a "Diablo II Novel".  But since it's very loosely inspired by, I can pretty easily modify parts of it and make it an entirely new story. At first I was looking at that as a huge, unpleasant, and onerous chore, but as I've been thinking about it the last few days, it's beginning to seem more like an opportunity than a bad thing.

Writing it in the Diablo world/mythology was easier in some ways, since I didn't need to explain what the classes were, describe how the spells and skills worked, etc.  However it was also limiting since I was going to have to explain a lot of things in terms of what I was changing.  Some skills were going to work very differently, lots of them were never going to appear at all, and the world itself was greatly changed from how it appears in the game.

As I said a couple of paragraphs ago, it was at best "very loosely-based" on the D2 world, and had as many original or different things as it did actual game elements. And all of the best stuff is not at all Diablo II, but is interactions between the characters, battle scenes, and other such stuff that can (and will) take place in an original world, one that has nothing to do with Diablo II at all.

So yes, I think I've made a decision, and it's going to require going over chapter one and making some major changes, mostly to names and spells, and it will be de-Diablo-ified.  I don't want to write any more until I figure exactly what I'm changing, and once I make those the rest of it will go just about as I had it planned, I'll just need to change a few things here and there in my planning, and put in more introduction and background info, since characters will now be a mystical sorceress, rather than a Diablo II sorceress.  Nothing in D2 is exactly original, they've just taken common fantasy character archetypes and given them their own unique spin, mostly in terms of spells and how the game mechanics work. Nothing at all like the game mechanics are in the story I'm writing, and the spells are easily changed, and I think will be improved upon.

If I want a Sorceress to have a very powerful fireball attack in my novel world, and describe it as much different than the D2 version of Fireball, that's fine, and readers will take it for how I describe it. Whereas if I had the exact same thing in the Diablo world most of the readers would be thinking, "Pfft, Fireball is a crappy Clvl 12 skill, and doesn't do jack for damage even at Slvl 40."

As for posting that version here or not, I dunno.

In theory I'm writing this to get it published and get money to live on and you could all buy the damn thing in paperback.  Using the Amazon.com link from here so I'd get an extra 5%, ideally. *cough*  And therefore I wouldn't want to post it online and steal my own thunder, much less worry about someone seeing it, snatching it up, and trying to sell it as their own story to some other publisher.

Actually, rather than Amazon.com I think I would buy 50 or 100 copies at the wholesale rate and resell them directly here.  Retail price plus shipping for a personally autographed copy, or something like that. That's assuming it happens, I've still got this site going then, etc.

I think I will have this site going, I'd keep it up even if I were big famous writer man.  I doubt I'd be doing long daily updates at that point, and I would hire some webmaster to handle and add technical stuff, forums, etc.  But I'd like to keep the site going, and would probably buy up ericbruce.com, which is taken by some really crappy home page, or at least it was 14 months ago when I was looking into getting my own domain name, a search which ended up with blackchampagne.com, a journey that is described in some of the very early blogs.

But that's entirely off the topic at hand.

And this is long and it's light outside, so I'm going to bed.

There will be several new site pages announced Monday, when there are more people reading this, so come back for that.  Pretty please.

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