What to do, what to do...

First, go to Stephanie Meyer's home page and read the August 28th Part II post.

Go ahead... I'll wait.

All right, back? Good. For those of you who decided not to do that, here's the quick and dirty. Stephanie's latest project is "Midnight Sun", a re-telling of the original Twilight book from the perspective of the male protagonist, Edward. She passed a couple of copies of her unpublished, unedited, first draft to a couple people. And it wound up on the internet.

Now, we all know what Cory Doctorow thinks about this kind of thing, but not everyone is Cory. And I can appreciate that it's tough to know how to respond to something like this, and that she's feeling horrible that her trust was betrayed.

It strikes me as interesting that this occurred within a week of Mur Lafferty's assault on Amazon (which as I recall was amazingly successful, putting her for that day at #19 on bestsellers, and #2 on Science Fiction and Fantasy - second only to Mrs. Meyer herself), and I think that Mrs. Meyer's response was altogether perfect. In fact, I'm thinking of writing her a letter. When I see Scott Sigler, J.C. Hutchins, Philippa Ballantine, Tee Morris and (insert genuflection here) Mur Lafferty's success with selling material that they initially released for free over the internet, I can't help but think that ALL this is going to do, is open new people to Mrs. Meyer's work, and make her next book even bigger. I hope that book is Midnight Sun, I really do. After seeing how much MSH and other people have enjoyed them, it would be a shame to keep them from their next fix, something that brings them so much enjoyment.

Here's an idea...

The WSJ is reporting that more artists are steering clear of iTunes. (h/t BNA) Not because of any kind of principled stand against DRM, or anything like that. Goodness, no.

Apparently, the argument is that selling single songs on iTunes in some cases is crimping overall music sales.

In other words, because people can get the individual "good" songs off iTunes, they don't feel it's necessary to get everything else that was shoveled onto an album.

Here's an idea.
Make more good songs.

I'm still in awe of what was, at the time, my favorite album in High School. Def Leppard's Hysteria. Looking over the list of songs, I think at one point or another they were all released as singles, with the possible exception of "Don't Shoot Shotgun", which is still a great song. In fact, I probably need to re-buy this, because my audio cassette of this is long gone.

But I can't do it at iTunes and I can't do it at the Amazon music store. Dagnabit.

Techdirt puts their own thoughts forward (they do this much more often than I do), and point to a trend that chills the very blood. The possibility that someone could pull a popular song from iTunes AFTER it's become popular, to see if it gets more people to buy the CD.

(sigh, headdesk) Isn't the answer more outlets? I thought technology was supposed to make things more convenient, not induce maniacal rage in your potential customers (which is exactly what a move like that does).

Case in point - I am looking for a legal mp3 copy of the soundtrack to the movie TRON. Anyone know where I can get that?

Yet one more reason I love my little white brick.

Dragon Ball DS trailer doesn't disappoint its audience - DS Fanboy

Holy Jumping Catfish! (Yes, I love my DS. Hey, at least it's one thing you can count on in the coming era of Hope and/or Change.)

According to DS Fanboy, DragonBall DS hits US shelves in November.

I said it was my birthday, Dagnabit.

Completing my set of released Donald Duck Disney Treasures sets. Yay!

A new do.

MSH got some kind of wild hair (heh) last night, and chopped off most of Queso's.

My geek is showing...

Saw a reference to today's WSJ Op-Ed from Senator John McCain, and in the blurb (thanks, Best of the Web), McCain makes the following statement.

We should work toward the establishment of an independent, international peacekeeping force in the separatist regions, and stand ready to help our Georgian partners put their country back together.

It's at this point that I say to myself... Hmmm... this sounds oddly familiar...

Ayup. Honestly, this is probably more a comment on my geek than a real substantive critique of Senator McCain's position, but still.

Book Binge!

Taking a break this week from my normal, video game playing, podcast listening ways, I have rediscovered these rectangular objects laying around the bedroom. I think they're called... "books"?
Yes, I've been binge reading. Three books in the last week. All of them finished within 24 hours of picking them up and getting serious about reading them.
I guess it's a defense against my wife's attempts to get me to read Twilight. Which, for the record, will never ever happen. ever.

This week I've blitzed my way through...
Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher
Valiant: Lost Fleet 4, by Jack Campbell
and Summer Knight, by Jim Butcher

Easy reads, quick. And guess what's next on the plate? Oh yeah, more Dresden.
Death Masks, by Jim Butcher

The terrible weekend.

So, I'm running late to work today because I turned off my alarm and went back to sleep.

And when I call in to say I'll be about ten minutes late, I find that my supervisor's husband had a heart attack over the weekend (he's okay, or as okay as can be expected - he's coming home from the hospital today).

And when I get here, I find that another co-worker's house was robbed over the weekend. Whoever did it had to have known the family, and (more to the point), known their large dog, who didn't stop the robbers. They took a PS2, Xbox 360 (left the Wii - guess they're not Nintendo fans), laptop, Blackberry, and... some guns and ammo. So, as a favor to my co-worker, I took a look at what Texas law has to say about that... currently it looks like it's a "State Jail Felony" (Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 31.03), punished by 180 days to 2 years in State Jail (Tex. Penal Code Ann. §12.35). Except... they burgled a habitation, which makes it a 2nd degree felony, punished by 2 to 10 in the "institutional division" (See Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 30.02, and Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 12.33). Which sounds a lot scarier than "State Jail". And they're referred to that way in the statutes. Stupid kids.

And that's not all. Turns out that another co-worker who had a mole removed a couple weeks ago just found out it was cancerous.

Makes my life look like berries and cream, I must say.

Picking it up.

Posting earlier this week, I realized that I've missed blogging.

Missed it a lot.

I don't imagine the internet has missed my semi-coherent ramblings so much, though... all the same, a quick update is in order.

We'll keep it to big events... within the last year or so, I've...
passed the Texas Bar...
been hired as a regular employee at the e-discovery shop I've been working for...
and moved to an assistant project manager position there...
my podcast, Geek Survival Guide, is a finalist for a Podcast Peer award in the Comedy category, and has been nominated for TWO Parsec awards (Best Speculative Fiction Comedy / Parody Podcast and Best "Infotainment" Cast)
and I've lost over fifteen pounds (largely as a result of participating in my OTHER podcast... GutCheckCast)
My daughter, (The Queso Kid), is headed to the fourth grade. She was commended in both of her TAKS tests in the third grade (reading and mathematics)
And my wife has left her position with a charter school here in town. She's helping a friend who just gave birth to twins, and now has three kids in the house under three.
I've started (fitfully) writing a little, and have a couple of ideas for books. Of course, ideas are cheap. It's sitting down and writing them that's hard. But I've got a lot of world-building done.
And that's about it. Doubtless there's a lot of other things I could mention (my love of Glenn Beck... my continuing hair loss... my continuing fascination with Pokemon, and bunches of other games for my Nintendo DS...) but we'll save that for another post.

Now... if I could just get ScribeFire to do extended posts...