• Life,  Tech

    I Blame the Internet

    by But I’m not sure how to fix it. Maybe I should reel back a little bit. It’s not a new problem I’m talking about, but it seems to get worse every day. There was a time, I think, when people were mostly polite to each other. But that day seems to be kind of in the past. There is a lack of respect for individual people by individual people. I’ll give an example. A while back, we brought home a new pet, a ball python, a chunky, docile little snake who will never get appreciably bigger than the 3-ish feet long she is now. She’s cute, and I think…

  • Life

    Taking Things for Granted

    by Human beings tend to take a lot of things for granted. It’s not a matter of faith or knowledge or hope or anything, but an underlying assumption that what is right now will always be. How we reconcile that in our own heads with another well-known axiom that change is constant is a question somebody far smarter than me is going to have to answer. I can make guesses on things based on my experience, but what it really needs is a whole lot of experts on human psychology, biology, and probably at least one or two other fields. But the fact remains that we take a ton of…

  • Life,  Philosophy

    People Are Hard

    by Hard. Complicated. Difficult to understand. I think a big part of that problem is that every person is different, even if we can consider certain general personality traits that reach across many people. I think I’m wired differently than most people, although I’m not sure that was always the case. I do think it’s possible to adjust your own mental wiring, to decide there are things you don’t like about yourself or your personality and consciously over time change them. I grew up in a certain environment in a certain time. Paired with my genetics made some significant impacts and adjustments to how I look at the world, how…

  • Life

    Yeah, It’s Cold

    by It’s the 22nd of January, 2019 And it’s cold. In fact, it’s been cold for days. The night-time and early morning lows have been well under -20 with, I think, this morning has been the coldest yet at about -26. My car is not enjoying it. And not enjoying it to the point where it actually completely refused to start yesterday, and required no less than four attempts at jumpstarting, before we elected to take it to the garage and have the battery checked. That battery had not given me a lot of issues, or really any, so far this winter, but it has not been nearly this cold.…

  • Pets

    Introducing Reese Slitherspoon

    by The secret to coming up with a good snake name, at least if you like snakes, is to sit down and make two lists of words. The first should be a list of things that snakes are and do: long, slinky, slither, hiss, etc. The second is a list that sounds like each of those words, rhyming words, homonyms, and so on, and see were those take you. Other things you can add to that second list are characters associated with snakes in your media of choice. Insert your favorite Harry Potter reference, and you have one, here. Don’t forget mythology. If there had been a classical Greek Naga…

  • Pets

    The Emotional Life of Cherry Shrimp

    by So, the shrimp for my work aquarium finally arrived. When this posts, they’ll have been in the tank for a little over a week. Picked up on the way in for a late shift, the car was already nice and warm and they didn’t suffer any ill effects even though I had to stop for gas. A little extra water testing to make sure things are all good, a little bit of water spillage, and the Jacques Pack was released, not into the wild exactly, but into their new home. Hopefully they’ll be happy, although I really don’t know what shrimp psychology is actually like. Are they capable of…

  • Life,  Parenting

    My Youngest Turns 16

    by Holy crap, my youngest child is old enough to drive. She elected not to go write the test today, already having enough on her plate, but could have. Maybe on the weekend. But my youngest child is old enough to drive. It’s crystal in my memory holding her for the first time, her holding my finger for the first time, the sheer amount of hair (with blonde highlights) she was born with, bringing her home from the hospital, and on. It’s not so easy for me to wrap my head around the idea that it’s been sixteen years since that day she finally came into our lives. It should…

  • Writing

    Star Trek – A Chekov Story

    by So, I keep mentioning that I’m doing the fanfiction thing a little bit. In fact, I have seven stories and the novel written in the Star Trek prime universe, all set in the time between the last episode of the original series and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Six of the stories have basically gone through the “make it pretty” stage, and the seventh is not only complete and has had its final read through, but I’ve published it on Wattpad, plus made a pdf version of it available here. Under the wonderfully horrible title of “Between a Rock and a Klingon”, that story uses recently-promoted lieutenant Chekov as…

  • Writing

    What I’m Working On Right Now

    by So, looking at the list of writing goals for 2019 you might guess that I’m working on more than one thing at time. You’d be right to guess that, and I thought it might be fun to run down the list of projects that I consider currently actively in progress. At the moment, I’m not actually working on any short fiction in the first draft stage. Instead, I am working on drafting two novel-length projects at the same time. One, Battlefield, is the final book in the Troll Wars set to get a first draft, and so far is a little less action oriented, a little more introspective, and…

  • Pets

    This is Sonic

    by This is Sonic. You might have noticed that he’s a snake. He was the second reptile to come live with us, but he has not been the last. More on all those another time. Sonic came to live with us just after my oldest daughter’s ninth birthday – somehow, the ninth birthday has become when you get your first non-fish personal pet in our family. A teeny tiny noodle at the time, eight or nine months old, he was only managing a very small prey. He’s a little longer these days, but still not terribly big around. He’s a Sunglow (or Sunkissed) corn snake, a colour morph, and he’s…