Rough weekend over...

 

Week at regular work wasn't too bad. I creamed a bunch of tests on Friday, and am set to work a couple more Monday.

Then this weekend, the auction. Went well, and there was even another guy there who let me get a five-minute break, which I never get usually. (long story, but it's a boring story, so i'm not going into it)

Sunday was super fast, we were done by 2:30PM. There was a gun show down the road, so I'd had my brother go there ahead of time to see if they had any of the shotguns I was looking for. They did not. I met him there anyway, looked around at what they had, bought a backup steel baton and got my brother one too.

So now we're on the long 3-day work week cuz I'm gonna be counting down the days until the con. I took off Thursday, though I didn't need to. Just wanna sleep in so I'm not tired Thurs night.

Malf, on the other hand, is gonna be fucking beat. He apparently has to drive to Herndon, VA for work earlier in the day, drive all the way back to MD, then we head out to Williamsburg. He ought to fucking take a nap the whole drive so he's not worthless Thursday night, but he prolly won't.

I gotta make some CDs for the drive down. 

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Oddly, been looking at newer cars to buy. Don't really need one, but I'm about to pay off my current car and I really want one that I can plug a USB or SD card full of music into. That's a thing, right? I don't wanna stream from my phone.

Dunno, not a priority for me but something I'm thinking about.

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Book thing--the editor rated all of the stories I sent him. I sent them with no author names attached, and it's weird, but most of the higher-ranked stories are by men, so FML. 

I'm gonna slow the roll on these--I gotta get all of the invited stories in and see how many words I have total at that point, then I'll know roughly how many words I can accept on open subs. Then the tough decisions begin.

Settled on a name, at least. Am going to start working on a book trailer, and dive into advertising research in the next few months.

Hey, saw this recently--I played this module back in middle school! The memories! 

Nostalgia For Things That Didn't Happen

 

Had a WEIRD dream. Me and my brother, and some other people who might have been friends--not sure--were young and running wild on a mountainside at night, I think in Wisconsin.

Like, vividly. Part of the dream I still see in my mind--this outcropping of rock where we stopped to rest for a second, staring out from the mountain to the surrounding country, lit by a bright moon. An endless canopy of treetops below us. 

Then we took off, climbing and running and jumping, so full of energy and life.

And man, I woke up, and the disappointment was immediate: I'm older, and would never run through those mountains again...

Except, I'd never DONE that in the first place. Very strange. I still sort of feel sad about it, even though I know it's all bullshit.

 

Tired. Again.

 

 Another week of work, as the job continues to get tougher and tougher. Once we move to the govt's system, it's gonna be a nightmare. Our work will slow to a CRAWL. I experimented there briefly, and it's like being back on a 33 baud modem.

Like, remember the days of clicking on a jpg and watching it load line by line? Now imagine it's not a picture but a navigation bar. You get to watch the navigation bar pop out from the side at the speed of a snail.

FML. And the only people who don't seem to understand that this is going to FUCK this entire project is the govt. 

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Got through the entire slush pile of stories for this H'ween antho. Around 400 stories total. Have exactly 20 strong considers, plus another 60 or so considers. I'm going to weed that 60 down to 10, then pass those 10 plus the strong 20 to the editor all in one package so he doesn't know which ones I ranked high.

He'll send me back a list of how he ranks them, and from there we'll decide what to keep.

Still waiting on a lot of stories from the invited people. Not sure whether to remind them or not. I figure they'd, you know, be professional about it. Maybe have written down what they committed to in the contract...

But one author in particular emailed to apologize because she thought her deadline was March 1st. Said her kid was sick and she got busy, and basically made it seem like if she'd missed the deadline then oh well.

That's pretty fucked. You sign a contract that says you're gonna give me a story, you give me a story. I've announced you. I'm paying you above-pro rates. All these writers pretending they're short on money, but then they flake. (or, some have simply not been interested...which boggles my mind)

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Weight thing, I'm still at 198. Guess that's my plateau. 

Gotta figure whether I want to push through it or say fuck it, good enough. I assume if I keep this up, eventually I'll start dropping the weight. 1500 calories a day ain't much, and that's all I'm eating six out of seven days. (and sometimes 7)

 

Weekends Are Too Short

 

Sunday's here already...fucking sucks.

Am going to see 65 tonight, cuz I don't give a fuck about the Oscars any more. They always run long, are extremely boring, and if the host isn't someone I wanna see, forget it.

Spent the weekend reading a LOT of these stories. Have gotten it down to only around 50 left to read. Weird part is a lot of these stories are GOOD. I was starting to get a little disappointed, but I mentioned it to the editor and he said that's the way it is; the first stories I'd get would be from people who had stories that had been rejected elsewhere, but toward the end would be professionals and others working on new stories.

Like, last night I literally hit 7 out of 10 stories that were good. Three went into Strong Consider, four went into consider, and three nos.

Gonna be hard to figure out which ones to keep. 

Also got the cover I'd commissioned(minus the title and credits)--it was the first draft, and it was cool but my immediate response was...there's no H'ween on it. No jack o'lanterns, costumes, candy. It was very October-ish, but not H'ween

I asked him to turn at least one of the pumpkins in the image to a jack o'lantern, and maybe have the figure in it holding a mask or something.

He tweaked it, and now it's definitely very cool. (he even put my original title on it, which I still like, but most people preferred some of the other titles so we'll probably land on the one that was highest ranked for the people I asked)

Anyway, gotta head out to the movie. Will let ya know how it is later--I've heard mixed reviews but usually I enjoy dinosaur movies even if they're not great. Then agan, the last two Jurassic flicks really disappointed me...

 

The New Scream

 

No, I don't do spoilers, but this time I WILL put some below after the big all caps warning so you can read them later.

But first let's discuss some non-spoiler things. Have had friends who saw it and were like "Man, best one since Scream 1". Quite a few. Had one friend who HATED the last one like I did, but said this was great.

I just wanted to see it before it got spoiled, in case there was a chance it was okay.

Saw it. Didn't love it. It's a little sad that it's PRETTY close to being a good movie. It has a good opening, unlike the last one. I wasn't sure where it was headed as they do something surprising and interesting at first.

But gradually the script collapses under the weight of character motivations that don't make any sense. People do stuff where I thought, "That person is the killer or this script is bad...", and then it turns out that person isn't the killer. 

Anyway, better than the last one, with some good moments, but still ultimately not a great entry in the franchise.

Anyway, after you watch it, come back here and read below to see what bothered me:

IT'S BELOW -- SPOILERS, SO DON'T READ ANY MORE UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE

There's a point where the love interest, hunky mysterious next door neighbor, sees ghostface in the building next door through his window. Ghostface is in the apartment with his girl. He proceeds to try to shout from window to window to warn his girl. Then he tries to call her.

Doesn't get through. Then there's like a big attack sequence that takes some time, and it appears the boyfriend next door hasn't A) Called the cops or B) run to the next-door building to try to save his girl.I said--"Either this is a bad script, or he's in on it." Well, he's not in on it.

In this attack, one of the lesbians is killed, and the next day her gf is joking and smiling. You wouldn't know she'd just lost her girlfriend. It was very weird.

Then the movie really goes off the rails, because D Mulroney plays a cop whose daughter lives with the main characters in the movie. She gets killed in the previous attack at the apartment. We see Mulroney come out, and he's teary-eyed. He says something really weird along the lines of "My other son died, and now my daughter too! You fuck with my family, you die!"

And I'm like...that's a weird phrasing to go with, and it felt really out of place. I thought immediately, "That's one of the killers. I'd bet a million bucks on it." I sort of figured the son he spoke of was maybe someone from the first Scream that got murdered by Billy, and he wanted to take revenge on Billy's daughter.

I was wrong on that score, but totally right that he was in on it.

Speaking of that, the ludicrous stuff really piles up. How exactly did he, a cop from Woodsbury, move to this city and get a high-ranking cop job right in the same city that these kids went to? (which is a big city) Even more ludicrous is, when he reveals his big thing and that his daughter didn't get killed in the apartment, he relates that he somehow went into the crime scene first with another body to replace his daughter's body, and that he used some prosthetics to make this girl look like his daughter.

What? You telling me that no paramedic or medical examiner or any of the cops had ever seen his daughter? That he could get another girl that looked THAT much like his daughter, that with some prosthetics they'd all buy it's her?Also, when they autopsied her they're not going to notice any of these things?Then finally, some of the people who get viciously mauled in this movie end up living? There's no effing way. One of the dudes gets stabbed like 50 times by two ghostfaces...It's a shame because if they just stayed a little more true to realistic character motivations, and ironed out those backstories, this might have been a pretty good movie.

We Interrupt This Blog

 

Hadn't weighed myself recently. I've still been on the modified diet, but cheated here and there with an occasional slurpee or regular meal. Still have only had pizza once since January 1st, which is INSANE.

So today I stepped on the scale and it said 198.4

That's the first time I've been under 200 in quite some time. I guess I'll just stick with what I'm doing and see what it looks like at the end of the month when I hit the con. Usually it takes time to really show, once I've lost the weight, sort of like the body settles to where I really am--and even if I stop the diet, I'll probably keep losing weight for a while.

Also funny that I went to my doctor not that long ago, and he mentioned at the end that he was marking me as obese because it would help with some billing or something. I'm like "Doc, I'm 6'0 and " at the time I weighed 210 on their scale(because they don't get you to take off your coat or remove your wallet/phone/keys). "I'm obese?" I ask him.

He says no, but doesn't really explain why he's marking that.

---

Went over a friend's house for the fight Saturday. Haven't watched an MMA fight in quite some time over there. Turned out to be a WASTE of time. What a joke of a fight.

The good news is, this is the friend who for a while had really lost it mentally. The whole Trump thing had broken him, and he couldn't hear reason or sanity.

Weirdly, we discussed some mild politics and I even put out some stuff that would have made him go ballistic, but he was very reasonable and even agreed with me on a few things. Turns out he's stopped watching the news, which I find is the best thing anybody could do nowadays.

I wish I could get my dad off of FUX news. I don't know what the answer is to getting us back to when journalists were journalists, and not just media meant to divide us and cause fear. 

--

More H'ween antho reading. Now that the deadline has passed, the tide of entries has slowed. Appears I have somewhere around 120 stories still to read, then I'll take another pass at the Consider folder and weed out some of the ones on the fence. See if I can get the Consider down to about 20 stories.

Biggest things right now are to get the title nailed down, then press the cover designers to really get down to work. The editor has gotten very helfpul for me--dude is worth it by a mile. I'd have had a hard time navigating all of this without him.

 

 

 

Hell Week Continues

 

This past week has been the first time I've REALLY thought about whether I wanna keep doing this job or not.

They pushed me into this lead role, which I didn't really want. Now things just keep stacking up. The amount of things I have to do, on top of being the only real tester(I have two trainees) in the most-complicated division, is INSANE.

Then this past Friday the developers push like 10 tickets into my lane--that leaves me two days to try to get them done. Biggest problem is that most of them are from my least-favorite developer--this guy does the worst tst documents. There's never a way for me to look at his documents and understand what's going on, so I have to Teams call him and have him walk me through it.

Every time I point out how bad his tst doc is, or where he's forgotten a step or a screenshot. I say, "You see how there's no way I could possibly figure this out with your tst doc, right?" And he laughs, says sorry, and then never works to fix them. 

Usually it's only about one a week, so I can hack it. This time six of the tickets are his. I start trying to figure them out...

Monday rolls around and they push another eight tickets across. None of this stuff is supposed to be migrated after Friday--they know that doesn't give us enough time.

I get none of the tickets cleared by Tuesday, which is the end of the cycle. I'm frustrated as fuck, and pissed, and our manager is trying to get me to test all these tickets "at the same time"--which wouldn't be good even if I knew WHAT THE FUCK THEY WERE ABOUT.

Wednesday I call a meeting with him and another developer whose tickets are tied in, and we spend all day(was a 9.5 hour day) going through it all. I get sort of an explanation for some of the stuff, but still dicey on others. I clear one VERY big test(46 steps) but nada on the others. 

It's just frustrating, and then on top I get messages about having to approve vacations and moves, stuff I haven't been told anything about. Like, how do I know if I should approve them? Nobody's told me jack shit about it.

Ugh.

--

Reading continues on the H'ween antho. Got SMASHED this week since the cutoff for open subs was the first of March. I gave some leeway though, so truth to tell, I'm still getting smashed.

I'd caught up and was only about 50 stories behind at one point, but now I'm well over 100 behind. Definitely over 300 subs--I'll give a total at the end.

Starting to see subs from people I've heard of in the horror writing world. Not big people, but at least known names.

Still don't have the perfect title, which is annoying.

---

We sent our female dog to the inlaws house. Was becoming too hard to keep them separated. Let one out to go the bathroom while we keep one inside, then let the other out. Keep one in a cage to keep them separated, then after a few hours, switch.

Much easier for her to have the run of the other house. But the brother is all wigged out cuz these two are inseparable.

Not fun. Gotta get her fixed as soon as we can.