Happy July the Fourth. Independence Day. Also known, arguably, as National Atheists' Day--two hundred and twenty-eight years since a bunch of people founded a new country to escape the theocratic oppression of a christworshipping nation. Yay. In the US, you'll never be forced into any sort of theology, like using currency adorned by Ra the OneTrueDeity® or pledging allegiance to the flag of a country lesser even than Jehovah.
I can't work out why anyone would ever pledge allegiance to a flag in the first place. Flags don't really make very good allies.
Anyway: go ahead and celebrate Independence Day this year. Just...don't do anything illegal. Like setting off fireworks. Or doing anything else your government prohibits. You'll probably want to read through the USCode before doing anything at all. You never know what you're not free to do in the Land of the Free.
Hopefully there are no laws against linking to the USCode from a personal website residing on a private server written in an opensource coding language. But, there probably is.
Oh well. Let's move on....
There's not really a lot of news yet on the various elements of suck going on around here; the whole FirstPacific thing is still going on--the latest news there is that they haven't yet worked out what rent's supposed to be this month, since they take the various utilities for the entirety of the complex, divide the total cost by the number of units, and then append that fraction onto the actual rent bill...which may or may not be legal...anymore, I tend to assume that, if FirstPacific are doing it, it's probably not. And JestBuy are back in the news: the Bank of America, in working to remove JestBuy's fraudulent charge of US$378.71, are running into problems getting the company to exist on the phone, let alone explain the nature of the charge. Although, at this point, the Bank of America are starting to understand that there's no way to have a ThirdParty expert examine the laptop to ascertain whether the drive was replaced, let alone whether its replacement was justified, since the laptop is now back with JestBuy, having been replaced after only 2,475 hours with a newer, cheaper model. So that, for the moment, remains a dead end.
Leaving me with nothing better to do than try to remember how to get back to doing the stuff I'd be doing if people would stop sucking at me. Like Pandemic.
Which is its own mess. With everything else going on around here, I had to abandon it--again--for a while; now that I have some time to play with it again, it turns out that the stuff I've already written no longer looks much like the story I figure I'm writing now. So that's probably a lost cause. The simplest thing to do might be to give up on it and start over again. And I've got roughly eight weeks to get some version of the novel finished and ready to print.
Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a problem. Historically, it takes me an average of three weeks to write a novel. Historically, though, I'm able to get away from everything else for twelve hours a night so I can do that. At this point, I'm not sure I can get away from the suck for twelve hours at all.
Something to find out, I guess.
So, that's the plan at the moment: to ignore the suck and get the damned book done. And, of course, to kill anyone who tries to stop me. It's always worked in the past.
But, don't worry: I should still be able to update the site here every few days, once I'm done with the novel for the night. I won't be gone altogether.
More later....
--Gremlin

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.