writing

April 27, 2019

On and on (DOG EAR)

was supposed to get $100,000 after taxes. Yes, my company was offering an early buyout and I put in for it. I’m near retirement (or ReTyrement) and I was ready to bolt. Activated the offer, waited for five weeks, then found out that my company was not genuine on this. Hardly anyone at all got it. Bait and switch. Well, shit. So today I was in a scrum call, listening to everyone grab the conversation string in a heated argument, making their points with long-winded reasoning, just double-lung blowouts of dialog. I started doing what I usually do, figuring out […]
May 1, 2019

Two reasons (CAT EAR)

had a great insight on Don Quixote today, a little curiosity I read. On the ride home, I considered it. I lay on the couch to sip wine, pop peanuts and let the idea stew while watching dumb anime. And then the two little creatures found me. As you might have seen on my general blog, we’ve adapted two kitties, Chinki and Ritz. They are adorable family members, each as big as your hand, who came up to see what Daddy was up to and to get their cold little noses into everything. Picked up a couple of ribbon toys […]
May 8, 2019

For myself (DOG EAR)

won’t say who said this (they, alone, will know the bitter salty tears I wept) but a friend told me that he’d played my interactive fiction StoreyMinus a few times and went “Meh”. That’s a tough nut to swallow, if you are into swallowing nuts. I mean, how many hundred hours have a spent coding this monster? For those who don’t know about it (which, outside of my friend, is pretty much everone on Earth), StoreyMinus is my interactive fiction written with the Squiffy game driver. It involves a fictional character in some sort of situation in the tunnels and […]
May 15, 2019

Inventory (DOG EAR)

’m reading Don Quixote right now (which is  long, slow novel, which means any guest reviews in the interim are welcome). It’s a great book, and for those who don’t know it, it’s about a threadbare Spanish nobleman (more of a country nobleman) who, having read far too many books on knights and chivalry, saddles up his bony horse, slaps on his corroding, mismatched armor, and with the help of Sancho, his squire, rides about looking for adventure and excitement. Of course, he gets the crap beat out of him by everything from indignant peasants to ignorant windmills. It’s quite […]
May 23, 2019

Early ReTesterment

bout a year or so ago, I took a week off and hung out at the beach with the wife. Mookie the cat loved it – she’d watch the ocean for hours. And I planned to work on whatever it was I was writing then. Just six days of yawning mornings and productive days. Didn’t happen. No, I played computer games. I read. I walked on the beach. I ate too much. And I took a lot of naps. Hardly wrote a thing. Recently at work we were offered buy outs (actually, I thought they said buy outs, but they […]
May 30, 2019

Your audience (DOG EAR)

eorge Carlin once said he played Spy at the Airport. “Your job? Find him!” The other day I was left on a seat in the terminal, waiting for an unlikely meetup (long story, but I didn’t know any flight information for the arrival). Since I had to sit for hours and watch for a specific person, I watched people. And I’ll say this – unlike the 70’s when Carlin referred to this, there was nobody I would categorize as being particularly spy-ish. I can’t imagine someone who’s fought their way up the bloody rungs of the KGB dressing in flip […]
June 14, 2019

Sulking in his tent (DOG EAR)

nd there will be pasta! From a top-end Italian restaurant!” I’m still stinging from my corporation’s hi-jinks. On top of everything else theyve done wrong or badly over the last few years, they offered a buyout. Of course, it was phrased to sound like it was fair and equitable and dispassionate. But it turned out that they were just golden-parachuting a lot of their overpaid, underperforming execs, tossing handouts to forty-year deadwoods and picking off one or two incompetents. So yes, I didn’t get it. What I was to get was an “appreciation” lunch, a little thing put on by […]
July 12, 2019

Among our subscribers (DOG EAR)

n Doctor Horrible’s Singalong Blog, a supervillain who maintains a video blog boasts on his podcast how he is going to attack the city. He gloats about his plans, his goals, and his likely success. Then he clicks off. The next image is him (quite disheveled) blogging a few hours later. Shakily, he notes that he should count the LAPD and Captain Hammer among his viewers. “They were waiting for me. Captain Hammer threw a car at my head…” Longtime readers of this blog will remember a couple of weeks back, where I reviewed The Decision Book. My wife had […]
July 26, 2019

The Brick Joke (DOG EAR)

as watching an Indian movie (not a Bollywood movie – there is a difference, I found out) the other day with the wife. In it, some young guys break a father’s wide-screen TV. They manage to replace it (with circumstances too weird to convey here). Once the TV is in, they take the old TV up several flights of stairs and out onto a lower roof, where (one, two, three and away) they throw it up to a roof another flight up. Evidence is hidden. They are safe. Some time later in this movie, another plotline, a darker and more […]
August 1, 2019

Millennium (DOG EAR)

love the English language. I love its flexibility, the way you can make up words that work in the context of story. And I love that, with all the reading I’ve done, I have access to words and phrases dating back to the Napoleonic Era, even older. It’s a blast, when a character slips out of town without a forwarding address, to say they slipped their cable. But as I work with millennials, I’m beginning to find out just how short their awareness-horizon is. Recently I used the word “powder keg.” Emptiness. And “goldbricking”. “Featherbedding”. Blank looks at “Snipe hunt”. […]