I hate “promotional pricing.”

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So I got a nice letter in the mail from my cable company the other day…

This is something that really burns me about cable companies in particular, and I’m not even sure why because it’s not like I don’t think that companies are not allowed to change their prices every now and then, but I think it’s more of the concept of “promotional pricing” that just doesn’t bode well with me. It’s honestly why I’ve never been too excited to switch over to Verizon FiOS because it’s nearly impossible to get an actual monthly price out of their website – one fee is free for 6 months, then adjusts to $19.95, another is $69.95 for 2 months and then jumps to $99.95 … it seems really deceptive to not just come out and say, “Here’s the price – it’s X dollars less than what you’re currently paying.”

Of course, the truth is probably that because our two big players in town tend to sync up pricing and aren’t really “competitive” anyways, they need to resort to this kind of crap to trick people into switching back and forth.

Also, you’ve gotta love how they’re dressing up a letter that’s basically saying, “Hey, your bill is going up…” by instead presenting it as “Now you’ve got this kind of promotional pricing – congratulations!!!”

But the most ironic of it all? That’s not even my correct cable package listed. I actually purchase digital cable and a 20 Mbps Internet connection from them. I guess I’d probably better give them a call next month before they issue my next bill…

Phlegm is My Life Now

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I don’t really have anything non-disgusting to write about – I just thought that the title sounded funny…

I was actually up in the air on whether I should’ve written last week’s humor column about the fun and exciting world of bronchitis … it probably actually would’ve been easier than writing about “3D Toothpaste,” but after I looked back and realized that I’ve actually already written several columns about being sick – all right around this same time – I decided that it was probably best to wallow in my own misery in private and pursue the regularly scheduled topic for my weekly humorous endeavor instead.

Admittedly it does get a little weird after having written my weekly column “regularly” for the last four years now in that sometimes the temptation is there to fall into patterns of writing about the same types of seasonal topics year after year. Apparently being sick and cold is somewhat popular for me in Januarys, talk of Hurricane Season is an easy way to kick off the summer, and of course, I don’t think I ever don’t write about Christmas and Christmastime stuffs throughout the month of December because, well, I just really, really like Christmastime!

It might just be that I’m too close to my own writing and thus over-analytical about it, but sometimes I wonder if other people catch on to these patterns and if so, do they get tired of reading about the same jokey topics at the same time each year. For the most part, I like to think that the holiday-related humor is a given and somewhat excusable, and for what it’s worth I do try to change it up from year to year – this week will feature a Valentine’s Day column that has a fun spin that I haven’t entertained before. But as for the rest of the year, I guess I just don’t want my writing schedule to become too formulaic, because even if my readers don’t notice it, eventually writing the same things over and over has the potential to become boring and overdone for me to write, too! Then I run the risk of repeating jokes and concepts, and I just feel like I spend more time covering my tracks that I do writing new humor…

Talk about the lazy writer’s conundrum – write about your life and what you know, but also don’t forget to go out and do lots of interesting stuff so that you’ve got plenty of different things to write about!

Also, don’t get sick. Well, you can get sick once or twice, but after that people are going to get tired of hearing about it…

Reasons Why Being Sick Sucks

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  • I feel “yucky.”
  • I’m bored.
  • One hour I’m hot, then the next I’m freezing – I feel like I’m an old woman going through menopause.
  • I have a lot of work to do that isn’t getting done.
  • I can’t get past level 3-5 on Angry Birds.
  • I want to eat, but I don’t want to eat.
  • I was already sick recently around Christmastime, so rumor has it there was still some infection lingering that is now resurfacing. Isn’t that double-dipping???
  • Cold showers are a torturous way to reduce someone’s fever when they’re already freezing.

When One Character Falls, Another Arises…

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To follow-up on my post from last week, I did finally settle on just creating a new character entirely – this time a Dragonborn Paladin, which plays a lot different than the Eladrin Swordmage, but still retains the defender role to make the transition easier for the rest of the party (and me). Initially I was really torn on which direction to go, however it’s kind of funny how once I started to develop a vision for the new character, it became a lot easier to let go of the old one.

It’s still a bummer to see him, and likewise his ties with the other PCs go, but further talks with the DM hinted that it’s still up in the air how he might continue on in the story as an NPC, so that could be cool. Of course, ultimately it’s probably better off that way anyways – the idea that I was entertaining was that he could come back as a revenant, filled with hatred and a burning desire to seek retribution against his enemy, but the more I thought about it, the concept wasn’t very realistic for our current campaign because it’ll probably be a while before we face the big boss guy for the real fight. Pursuing a drive like that would’ve been a suicide mission for him – it would’ve worked in a video game where he dies and then comes back 15 levels higher and ready to kick some ass, but not coming back at the same level that he died at. We’ve still got a lot of leveling and growing to do, and that character concept would’ve wanted no part in the teamwork angle of it.

So anyways, so far I’m liking the new character – he doesn’t really have a major sink into the plot like the last, but I’m sort of just developing him as we go and I think that’ll be a nice change. Also, most notably he has a much different personality, in that the paladin is very noble and polite, whereas the swordmage almost got his ass thrown in jail for mouthing off to the Lord of the town we’re working for! So far I like playing a more charismatic character – it should be fun to see where it goes from here…


“Niiice kitty, errr, I mean displacer beast…”

the politics of vacation time…

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So I came across this great/depressing chart over at one of the failblog sites this evening:

job fails - I Love This Country!

Now keep in mind that this is looking at government mandated vacation time – not what individual companies offer – but I think what was even more amusing was the 145-post international debate that formed in the comment thread below the graph! It never ceases to amaze me how people can get so fanatical about “freedom” when whether we’re talking about vacation time or healthcare, it means that some big corporation usually has the “freedom” to screw them however they please! Funny, it’s always the ones who already have benefits, not the ones who don’t that shout about their right to choose to not have mandated healthcare and paid time off from work.

Some of my absolute favorite comments…

  • In the USA, we have the freedom to negotiate whatever vacation we want. The idea that it’s generous to force employers to give holidays is just populism for suckers.
  • A lot of countries just don’t report information accurately. That’s one reason a lot of countries pretend their health care systems are better than the US’s (they just throw a lot of babies away).
  • so, you have a “right” to the labor and products of those in the healthcare industry?? That’s called slavery. No one has a right to even one second or one penny of another’s life. Period. Thus there is NO RIGHT TO HEALTHCARE
  • (Source: Wikipedia)? Anyone can contribute to wikipedia which makes all of its content suspect and unreliable.
  • Probably why most of the European countries with the highest benefits are broke as s**t, right?

Fortunately, there were also many, many voices of reason to balance the scales…

  • Health care? Paid holidays? Insurances? It must be a cultural thing, because I can not for the life of me understand why you’re so afraid of your own government!
  • They’re wouldn’t have to order you to do it if you’d be fair and actually give your employees some vacation time.
  • But you can have guns !

So to summarize, apparently it’s better to give your boss the option to treat you fairly on his own whim, high unemployment rates and greedy corporations are no excuse for not just negotiating better benefits with your employer, America is free and thus better, and Wikipedia is stupid and inaccurate, even though it has 40x more contributors to moderate it than any printed encyclopedia ever did.

Also, did I mention freedom?

In closing…

  • Why must the people from my country be idiots?

life as a juggling creator

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So tonight I finally put my writing goals and objectives up on the white board in my office to help gauge my progress and needless to say, I’ve got a busy year ahead of me.

Even though I know that I sometimes get too wrapped up in productivity to the point where I’m inadvertently causing myself more warm than good, I feel the need to add a little more structure to what I’m trying to do because there are so many facets right now that otherwise I don’t think I’d be able to keep track of them all. When I look up at the board beside me, I see a lot of different things on my plate this year, but I don’t necessarily think that it’s an unreasonable amount. They’re there because I think that’s what I need to accomplish this year to move my business forward, and if everything goes right, hopefully next year I’ll be creating an entirely new list to focus on as opposed to carrying over stuff that didn’t get done in 2011…

That said, I think the biggest frustration that I have to work through so far is that I don’t necessarily want to work on what I have scheduled to work on right now! Now last year I was working under the philosophy that I should just work on whatever I’m in the mood for at that moment because there’s no use wasting time on something I’m not feeling, but the problem with that is … several of the things on my list for this year were technically carry-overs from last year. See, I’d dive in and spend a good, solid weekend working on something, then change directions the following week and do something completely different, so not only did the first thing not actually get done, no doubt things will have slightly changed when I finally end up circling back to it and I’ll have to spend more time tweaking and deciphering the first pass instead of just doing it completely the first time!

Case in point – I have a Disney-related project that I’ve been trying (in vain) to get launched for several years now. I think I finally know what I want to do with it, but right now there are at least three or four other things in line before I’m letting myself work on that one. Worse yet, we might be going over to Orlando tomorrow and I always get ramped up about working on this while and after I’m there, but as much as I’d like to just hop over and start writing away on that one, there’s a reason why it’s located in the list where it is. It’s more important for my business to get these other things done first, no matter how much more fun the Disney project sounds right this second because otherwise, all the work that I’ve done on my current project goes to waste instead!

So anyways, I think it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out over the next year. It seems simple enough to make sense, and frankly, I hope it works out because getting all of this stuff done would be a big leap forward for my business! All I do know for sure is that my leap-frog method of working last year only got me so far – hopefully less juggling and more focus on individual projects will be a good change of direction. We’ll see…

Thin Post : Giving Up Soda, Easier Than I Thought…

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I never would’ve thought it could be possible, but lately I’ve hardly found myself drinking any soda at all.

That coming from a guy who used to get headaches if he didn’t have caffeine by a certain time each day, I think, is quite the accomplishment!

Sara has always said that I need to cut soda out of my diet if I want to lose any weight because apparently it can be just as bad as regular soda in some respects, but I’ve always just shrugged it off with the thought of, “Well, at least it doesn’t have any calories. I’m going to drink soda either way, so 0 calories is better than some calories, right?!” So for the longest time I just drank tons of Cherry Coke Zero, to a point where I’d go through about 2 cans during the day and then another glass or more when I got home (32+ ounces?). It was a lot, and like I mentioned, I basically got addicted to the stuff, not in that I craved it, but in that my body started acting up when I didn’t have it.

The worst it ever got was when we were on the cruise a year ago – I didn’t feel like paying $45 for access to the soda fountain for meals, so I figured I’d just go without for the week. Two or three days of evening headaches in, I randomly ordered a rum and coke at one of the shows and it went away almost instantly. From then on, I either had at least a drink a night or took a can from the mini-bar just because I figured I had to…

So anyways, oddly enough this week I’ve gone through maybe an entire can the entire week, and that includes several days of starting a can and then not finishing it and sometimes not even coming close. The big change for me – I’ve really been focusing on drinking water lately. Whereas I used to just keep a glass cold in the fridge, now I’m carrying around a bottle that’s getting filled three or four times a day … it started off as just one – mostly before and after doing WiiFit – but now it’s built up to me drinking nearly four bottles (just over 64 ounces) each day and even when I’m presented with soda, unless I’ve got the right kind of meal in front of me (i.e. one that I probably shouldn’t be eating anyways), soda just doesn’t seem to be as appealing as it used to be.

A couple of other things I’ve noticed that seem to help:

  • Rather than keeping it in the fridge, I’m drinking more of it room temperature. I mean, our water cooler keeps it relatively cold, but not ice cold, and besides, I think keeping it in the fridge was also a hindrance because now I have easy access all of the time.
  • I try to take big strides by drinking a quarter or half of the bottle at a given time (the bottles I’m using are the smaller Zephyrhills bottles – 16.9 ounces), starting with my pills first thing in the morning.
  • While I haven’t necessarily felt like drinking water helps to reduce my appetite by filling me up before meals, I feel like it might help cut down on snacking while I’m bored, which is another problem of mine.

Of course, the one downside to drinking so much water is that now I’m peeing almost constantly – probably making two or three times as many trips to the bathroom as before, but there’s not really much I can do about that! At this point I’m not sure I’ve seen any physical benefits to this new development, but we’ll see in a few weeks if it starts to have more of a positive effect when I get a little better at exercising on a regular basis.

John Scalzi, on writing 2,000 words each morning…

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I found this interesting post by John Scalzi about holding himself to writing deadlines each day that sounded interesting to me…

Why 2,000 Words Works For Me

Why 2,000 Words Works For Me

Basically he’s created a rule for himself that for the first few hours of each day, he does nothing but writing for his next book – 2,000 words or until the clock strikes noon, and the latter caveat is simply so he has an out if after a few hours things just aren’t flowing on that particular day. No surfing the web, no checking e-mail, taking calls or having meetings – just a set 3-4 hour interval first thing to do nothing but create the work that he actually gets paid to create before opening up the flood gates for everything else, productive and not so much, that comes with the rest of the day.

After having a couple of really bad weeks recently of putting my humor column up days and even weeks late, I feel like having a bit of structure to my writing process might help with making deadlines … even though I have a feeling in the beginning this would be tough, especially since currently I tend to write on a when I feel like it basis. Even if I couldn’t set a fixed time each week to work on the next column, though, I think stating that once I sit down to write, I’m not leaving for two hours or until it’s done would definitely be reasonable.

As it stands today, I estimate that each column takes roughly four hours from start to finish, however that estimate encompasses a lot of procrastination, wandering attention spans, etc…, so I’ve gotta believe that two truly dedicated hours could cover that, or at least cover the vast majority. Sure, the time without Facebook and Twitter and my e-mail and random blogs sounds rough, except that if I can effectively cut my writing time in half by focusing on what I really need to do, that’s two extra hours a week to surf, tweet, and otherwise screw around … oh yeah, and I’d actually be making my deadlines for a change! 🙂

Believe it or not, this week’s column is actually already done, but I think this is definitely something that I need to put a little more thought into giving a try here in the near future. I may be caught up by a random creative fluke now, but next week will be here before we know it and consistency would be one hell of a stress reliever for this typically tardy humor columnist…

Death of a D&D Character

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It’s amazing how attached one can get to a fictional character of their own creation.

In this case, I’m referring to the character I’ve been playing in a D&D home campaign for a couple of months now. Realistically, we’ve only played about half a dozen sessions because we only play once every other week – so that’s probably about 30 hours of game time – but I guess this is the first character that I’ve really gone all out with as far as developing not only a personality to play as, but also quite the elaborate backstory … and one that intertwines with those of the other players and even the current plotline itself, to boot! That’s one thing I’ve got to hand it to our DM – he’s been really great about using our backstories to help drive the story … as he likes to say, it’s not just his world, it’s all of ours.

That said, it was definitely a bit of a downer when Friday’s session culminated with my swordmage, Searil, not only going down for the count, but in fact pretty much getting obliterated out of existence! He died along with another character, two more were captured, and the final two just narrowly escaped from a combat that could’ve very easily been a TPK had one of the lead characters in the plot not sacrificed himself up to our combators in exchange for letting the others go. It was definitely an epic battle, but still disappointing in the end because now I’m faced with the daunting task of rolling up a new character and at this point I’m really torn at which direction to take…

One option would be to kind of cheat death and come back as a revenant, which would essentially give me the ability to re-use the same character with only a few tweaks for the new race. Part of me likes this idea just because I put so much into the character and was really enjoying his part in the story, but on the downside, this was totally the idea of another player in case his died and I’d kind of be afraid of stealing his idea if I carried through with it.

I also don’t want to feel like I’m choosing this option just because I don’t want to let the character go, which is definitely a possibility.

Option #2 would be to just wave goodbye to Searil and roll up a new character entirely. Again, this is a daunting task because I put so much into the last one I’m almost not quite ready to do that all over again. I guess I could always just kind of leave things open and develop the backstory as I go. If I go this route, I just know that I want to avoid fabricating some weak relation to my last character (this was his uncle’s cousin’s roommate’s ex-girlfriend…) because I think that would end up feeling like I’m just trying to wedge him into the story wherever I can. If I go this route, I definitely want to just wipe the slate clean and start completely fresh.

Of course, the worst thing is that I’ve basically only got a week to do this because after missing a week, we’re technically playing catch-up and running two weeks in a row, which unfortunately ends up being a lot of pressure because I’m worried that I’m not going to have time to give it what it needs and deserves. It still amazes me just how much deeper I got into this character in only a short few weeks than I ever have with any of my LFR characters – I know it’s just the nature of each kind of game, but I guess ultimately you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone…

🙂


RIP – Searil Darksbane
“Please don’t come back as an evil death knight that wants retribution
against whatever character I come up with next to replace you…”