Blackmoor Vituperative

I had an idea a couple of months ago. It would be a marketplace for writers, editors, and artists to come together as collaborators. It would be driven by the authors: in the new model of book distribution, authors are in control. They set the prices, they decide where the book will be distributed, and they are the ones that get paid by the distributors.

But authors need talented editors and gifted artists. Most authors aren’t either of those things. How is an author to find an editor with a good track record, one who sees themselves as on the authors side? How can an author find a cover artist or map artist who can meet a deadline and produce work according to spec? And how can the editors and artists find the authors who need them and who will pay on time (editors and artists want to feed their cats, too).

So my idea was a marketplace for this, where authors, artists, and editors would meet as peers. Everyone would be able to review everyone else, but only if they’d worked with them. The marketplace site would make sure that everyone got paid, and would act as the middleman to keep everyone honest. For this service, the marketplace would keep, say, 10% of the transacction (which should be enough to cover the site’s costs).

I pitched this to the company I work for, but it was too far from our current business focus to interest them. I would love to get it started, but I don’t have the start-up capital or the business acumen to make it work. I wish I did. So, here it is: a business that I believe is desperately needed. If you have the resources to start a business but just lack the idea, feel free to use this one.

Minor hiccup in the remodeling. The contractors were putting in the floor this week, and after a day it became clear that although the color was what we wanted, the finish was much too rustic (“imperial handscraped maple“), with an uneven surface and dark lines around each piece of wood. I am sure it would have been lovely in a farmhouse or log cabin, but Castle Blackmoor is not rustic. So I stopped them, and they had to tear up what they’d put down. Some calm but firm conversations followed, and I gave the contractors more specific instructions on what I wanted (which I should have done to begin with).

Here is a photo of what I want.

Van Dykes are not goatees. Goatees are not Van Dykes. For pete’s sake, use the right term. Calling a Van Dyke a “goatee” is like calling your beard your “eyebrows”.

The $1 a month razor is actually $3 a month, including shipping. That actually sounds like a pretty good deal, if you like twin-blade razors. 60 of the Dollar Shave Club twin blades would be $36 (12 months at five cartridges per month).

Myself, I like the Bic Metal single-blade razor. You can get 60 on Amazon for $25. On the other hand, I still can’t find the box of those I bought a few years ago, and I really do need a shave….

I write to my Congress people every so often asking them to abolish the TSA (not reform, not privatize — abolish). If more people did so, at least the corruption would be more obvious.

I am here with my cat Vixen watching the snow fall, and feeling very grateful for how my life has turned out. I am not the smartest, wisest, or most hard working person I know. And yet, here I am.

I think I have generally made good decisions, but I have also made a number of mistakes. That my mistakes have not ruined my life is … I am tempted to say miraculous, but of course that’s nonsense. Good things happen to people who are better and worse than I am, and bad things happen to people who are better and worse than I am. There’s no secret plan. No hidden hands are pulling strings. Life is just chaos. We can ameliorate it a bit, but we can’t eliminate it. We can choose whether to build a house on sand, but the snow falls on the just and the unjust alike.

I’m not sure I would even want my life to have been perfect. Some of my most entertaining memories are from times when things went wrong. I once spent 24 hours in snowstorm, trapped in a crappy little Chevy S10 pickup truck that was nearly out of gas. I started the engine for a few minutes once every couple of hours, just to keep from freezing. All I had to eat was a frozen pizza I found behind the seat. I had nothing to drink at all.

It’s not 60 days in a Chilean mine, but it’s about as life-threatening as my memories get.

I have been really phenomenally lucky, all thing considered.

I wonder about my family and my friends, sometimes. They are good people, by and large. They have made decisions, some better than mine, some worse than mine. Chance and chaos have taken their toll. I look at their lives, and I would not trade with any of them. Do they feel the same way about mine? I really hope so. I hope that despite the things that have gone wrong, that they appreciate what they have, and would keep it even if offered the chance to trade.

The snow is a couple of inches deep now. I wasn’t expecting this. It was 60 degrees yesterday (15.5 degrees Celsius).

I really hated this house when we bought it. I hated it for not being what I wanted. I wanted two basins in the master bath. I wanted a vaulted ceiling in the living room. I wanted hardwood floors. And so on. I am more materialistic than I would like. I think it’s because I grew up poor (although even then, I never truly wanted for anything — I had a safe home, and food, and clothes, and toys, and parents who loved me).

Suffering is caused by desire, or so the Buddhists say. There’s some truth in that, obviously.

I have been noticing more about the house than what it isn’t, the past few days. Being grateful for what is, rather than resenting what isn’t. I would like to do more of that.

I just noticed that the yellow flower that bloomed yesterday, the first flower I have seen here, is covered by snow. I am going to go put a plastic cup over it. Maybe it will survive.

Because it’s not enough to have eviscerated the public domain by extending copyright protection to an INSANE duration. Now they want to make it SMALLER. Because, you know, who cares about the public interest as long as the media robber barons can make a buck and have more control over our cultural heritage, right?

Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

[…]

Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a plaintiff’s lawyer in the case, called the decision “unfortunate” and said it “suggests Congress is not required to pay particularly close attention to the interests of the public when it passes copyright laws.”

When it comes to copyright, Congress stopped paying attention to the interests of the public a long time ago.

For the first time in a very long time, I got a good night’s sleep and woke up refreshed on New Year’s Day. I woke up late, but not hung over. The party at Mike & Rob’s was fun. I enjoyed the hospitality and the company. However, if I was a bore or a boor, I have only myself to blame, as I only had two glasses of wine all night.

I am not done writing Bulletproof Blues, which is disappointing. I’d hoped to have the text done by now, and be working on the layout. I am not in panic mode yet. As long as it’s done and up for sale on DriveThruRPG by Mysticon in February, I’ll be happy.

I am a little worried about when I’ll be able to play after we move, though. I game rarely enough as it is. Once we relocate to Charlottesville, I’ll be at least an hour away from any gamers I know — or, indeed, from anyone I know, other than my sweetheart. Kind of a bummer, that.

On the bright side, I have recovered from the horrific food poisoning I got at Carytown Sushi on Wednesday. I am actually hungry for the first time in four days.

I recently got the hatch of my car fixed at Pouncey Tract Collision. They did a great job. I just wanted to start off with that, because I keep forgetting to blog about it.

This has been a great weekend. We went to a friend’s Christmas party on Saturday, and then went out to dinner at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. Great food, but ludicrously overpriced. About double what we would normally pay. But it was a celebration, so what the heck. The food and service really were great.

Today we made lasagna and gingerbread cookies, and invited some good friends over to watch Christmas specials and movies. We watched Santa Claus (the crazy Mexican movie where Santa fights Satan), Elf, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas. That was great. I firmly believe that Christmas is for everyone, regardless of religion or lack thereof, and I love sharing it. As usual, we made too much food. We’ll be eating lasagna for the next week. Lucky for us, we really like lasagna.

Tomorrow we go to fill out the loan paperwork for our house. Yay!

It’s been a crazy December. The craziness actually started in October, with my wife being in car #2 in a five-car accident on the freeway. She is almost healed up from that, and she has a shiny new Honda, so all’s well that ends well, but still, it was a crazy time for a while there.

I am spending a lot of time working. I haven’t counted the hours, but I would estimate somewhere around 60 to 70 per week. I don’t mind that: it’s close to the end of the project, and everyone’s antsy — and I love my job. But it means that I have not had as much time to indulge my hobbies as I would like.

One of those hobbies is my car, a 2003 Hyundai Tiburon. I have been meaning to do some cosmetic work to it for, well, months, but for a lot of those months, every weekend it was either raining or over 100 degrees outside. Bleh. Lucky me, my car was hit in a restaurant parking lot. That time of the year, I guess. The lady who hit me was honorable and asked around for the owner of the car. The insurance settlement was enough to repair the damage she did, and also took care of the cosmetic stuff I had been planning to work on.

Another hobby is a superhero roleplaying game I am working on. I would really, really like to have it completed by the end of the month, and on DriveThruRPG by mid-January. But we’ll see.

I am not the only one with problems. A dear friend of mine —

Let’s sidebar, for a moment. English is a great language, rich with the diversity of the many cultures we have absorbed or conquered, but I feel it has a few serious deficiencies. One of these is our word “friend”. I think we need at least three words for what is currently referred to as “friend”. We have “acquaintance”, of course — someone whom we have met, and perhaps encounter socially from time to time, but whom we do not actually know and with whom we do not intentionally socialize. Then we have:

The social friend: You drink with him at parties, and maybe have lunch with him once in a while just to have some company. He’s amusing, most of the time, and you don’t mind talking to him, as long as the conversation stays light. You might know his political or philosophical beliefs, but if so, it’s because he volunteers that information to anyone within earshot, not because you actually want to know, and not because he has any interest in what you think. You’ve never met his family, nor he yours, and if something serious happened in your life, you’d probably think of telling him the time you ran into him, but you would never make a call specifically to tell him your personal problems, nor would he think to make such a call to you.

The good friend: You have lunch because you enjoy each other’s company. You help each other move, if you don’t have plans. You talk about your kids, or your spouses, and you actually listen to the other person. On the other hand, you probably don’t talk about the intimate details of your marriage problems, or how broken up you really were when your cat died. You might not ever be truly close, but you respect each other and you like each other.

The dear friend: You have known each other through good times and bad. You have disagreed, sometimes quite seriously, but your friendship has persisted long after those disagreements have been forgotten. If you go out of town, he’s the first one you ask to watch your cat, and if he asks, you agree immediately. If he calls you and needs a ride because his car broke down in Pennsylvania, you ask him for directions. If he is in trouble, you respond. It’s just that simple.

So, as I was saying, a dear friend of mine had some personal issues a week or so ago, and for a while I was worried about him. I still am, actually, but not as much as I was a week ago. But it was really surreal for a while.

On the other hand, it hasn’t been all bad. After literally years of searching, we have finally found a house that is closer to where my wife works (she commutes an hour each way right now) and which she likes. This was no small feat. It’s also nearly $100,000 less than some other houses we were looking at just a few weeks ago, which pleases my wife more than pretty much anything else ever will. As it happens, the interest rates just bottomed out, so we are getting a good deal all around. Barring unforeseen catastrophe, we should be moved into our new (to us) house by the end of February, which is outstanding.

So… crazy, crazy month. That’s what I am saying.