Author: Teel

There are now three major challenges in my house, plus the regular old ones like keeping things clean that I never seem to get to. Two new challenges walked into my house at the same time on Saturday night. One of them is the David Blaine book thing, and it is a doozie. The other is Mortal Kombat : Deadly Alliance for XBox, which I am borrowing from Heath until Thursday night. Because I knew it would consume me, I put off even looking at David’s book Saturday night, and instead played MKDA until around 6AM. I haven’t turned it on since, but considering I don’t have it very long, I think I’m going to have to go play it a bit more. Oh, and the third challenge: Finding a job. I’ve already applied at a couple of places this morning. We’ll see what happens. I haven’t officially heard back about the graphic design job I applied for a couple of weeks ago… huh.

The puzzles in David’s book were designed by the guy who created A Fool’s Errand and 3 in Three. Before I got my hands on the book, if you had asked me what the most challenging, puzzling, mind-bending enigmas I had experienced were I would likely answer in this order: Women, 3 in Three, and A Fool’s Errand. I don’t believe I ever ‘beat’ any of these challenges, though I certainly proceeded farther through them than anyone else I know (well, except for the challenge of women; I know some people who have proceeded farther than I on that challenge). So this is going to be particularly interesting and difficult. I’m thinking of playing both games for a while to get my mind into the groove of how this guy thinks.

So these three challenging things are drawing me, and I can only do so much at once, but I would certainly like to solve all three problems. Or if I solve the David’s book problem, maybe I don’t need to solve the job problem as soon. Except I think it’s going to take me quite a while to solve this book. So after I finish a couple more Jumble Jitters, I’m going to go try a little MKDA, then get back into reading the actual text of the book before I try to solve its puzzles again.

I just wanted to complain here that the check that was supposedly mailed 7 days ago from somewhere in the continental US is not here yet. It’s fairly frustrating.

So, I know I mentioned that I felt that E*TRADE’s fees were fraudulent, or at least uncalledfor, because they did not exist when I signed up. I didn’t want to go back through the signing up process at E*TRADE to determine what exactly they put into their Terms of Service that allowed them to impose fees on my account without giving me notice, but I’m sure it was something similar to this phrase in another site’s Terms of Service that I’m going through right now:

(click to enlarge)

In case you can’t read legalese, it says they can start imposing fees anytime they want, in any amount they want, for any parts of their site or services they want, and all they have to do is have a file somewhere on their site called the ‘Agreement’ that says they’re going to start charging fees. They don’t need to email you, or put a notice on the site, they just need to add a phrase or two to a document you thought you’d already read, and then just by accessing the site (or in the case of some of the services of this site, just not removing the content you’ve uploaded) you are agreeing to pay them whatever amount they choose. How about that?

I just thought I’d share, for those of you who thought I was exaggerating or being unfair. Companies really do this. You’ve probably agreed to dozens of things like this already. When the fees show up, know they were in their legal rights to charge them.

I just wanted to let everyone who posts, anywhere on Modern Evil, that I’ve just finished going through and turning on the ‘pings’ to both weblogs.com and blo.gs for all sections of ME and all blogs hosted on ME.

This means two things.

First, and why I’m posting, is that when you post a new screen should appear in between ‘rebuilding’ and the ‘saved’ screen saying it’s pinging those two sites, and that may take a moment. Which means that posting may take a second or two longer than it already does. If anyone out there is having it take more than a full minute to post something on ME (from the moment you first hit save to the moment you see ‘done’, please email me and let me know.

Second, it means that every time something gets posted anywhere on Modern Evil or its blogs, a link back to that thing should appear on both weblogs.com and blo.gs. This will hopefully mean more random traffic to the site(s), and in turn may mean more random comments, more new authors, and who knows? Maybe a movie deal.

I admit I’m really just keeping my hopes up for a movie deal of any kind. There probably won’t be a movie deal based on pinging those sites.

So that’s that. Any questions? No? Alright then. Back to your scheduled business.

Continue reading Pinging update may slow posts

Today while I was riding the bus, the second most interesting thing was the guy who got on drunk at 11AM and who harrassed a bunch of 10-12yr old children who got on after him. He kept me from reading my book about writing screenplays by talking to me about how much he likes IFC.

But then there were the kids. I assume they were part of some class, possibly on a field trip or something. 20+ kids, like I said, all around 10-11 years old, got on the bus with what appeared to be one adult supervisor. They played along with the drunk guy for a while, talking about sports and whatnot, until he started getting extra-creepy and they moved to the other end of the bus one by one.

Near the end of my ride, the kids closest to me were asking me what I was reading. Syd Field’s Screenplay, a long-trusted guide for people who want to write screenplays, which I do. They asked me if I’d made any movies and I admitted that I have not, but plan on it. I explained the difference between a writer and a director. I mentioned that I had written a couple novels, though none have been published in print yet, Forlorn is available online. They wanted to know what it was about… but as those of you who have read it know, that’s hard to say. So I described it as best I could.

This was the most interesting thing that happened on the bus today; the kids were not only interested in my novel, they asked what website it was on so they could go read it. I gave them a card as I hurried off the bus at my stop, and this message goes out to the kids on the bus. Thanks for being interested. The novel is over here. Know that you have helped further inspire me to do whatever is necessary to get my books published.