If he wasn't afraid of it and did it, that's not bravery.
It's being afraid of something but doing it anyway that represents true courage.
He did what he thought was the proper thing to do for him in his position. As to his feelings on death, unless words from the man himself are forthcoming I wouldn't judge him.
You joke, but this is exactly what people who quit serious addictions go through. Everything in life pales in comparison to the addictive behavior. Over time this usually gets better as the reward pathways in the brain rewire themselves, but anyone with a serious drug dependency will tell you that life really, really sucks without having what they feel they need.
While your post is a bit snarky, I mostly agree. However, you said this:
"Quitting was easy when it came to nicotine. I quit cold-turkey and had life suck for about a month and a quarter."
Calling something easy that has a 97% failure rate is just wrong. According to Wikipedia:
"Research in Western countries has found that approximately 3-5% of quit attempts succeed using willpower alone (Hughes et al., 2004)."
It goes on to say that "The typical effort of a person that finally succeeds is the seventh to fifteenth try."
Sure, my mother quit a ten year pack-a-day habit on her first attempt. My father's trial, however, was much more brutal. I smoke myself a pack a day and find it as difficult to control as an opiate addiction.
Nicotine addiction is no joke, and just because you quit on your first attempt with nothing but willpower alone is an interesting anecdote, but flies in the face of what we know of smoking addictions today.
If only. Here in the States, at least, you're not allowed any codeine without permission. You get acetaminophen or aspirin OTC for pain relief, that's it.
If the pain is any worse than that (slammed finger in door, but finger not broken, vomited from the pain) well, you're out of luck. Unless you go to the emergency room. And wait 8-12 hours. And hope they give you something. And have them charge you $500-$1000 or more for the privilege. Hope you have insurance.
Me, I used lots of ice the first day and ignored it best I could for the next week of pain.
Go on, guys: continue to generalize. Sweeping blanket statements that cover large numbers of people are what breeds scorn, anger, even schadenfreude attitudes among those better off. Sure is easy to write off those less fortunate when you can play 'blame the victim'.
To be clear, everybody's got their own shoes to walk in. Society is constantly in flux and a million variables contribute to the circumstances of each person's life.
As science advances, I would be surprised if it did not become more and more apparent that genes comprise what we call 'talent'. I am not advocating to avoid responsibility of the self and the choices each of us make, but your genetic character has way more influence than you realize in how your life turns out.
The basic example is how two people may see the color blue but internally they may see something entirely different from the other. This effect is pervasive. If someone has lower amounts of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, causing them to have the perception of lower energy levels, life would be harder, no? Yet of course they are treated the same as anyone else. 'Screw them,' you think. 'I could do it, so why can't they?' Maybe it's because they're not you.
Some of the comments I've read on this thread show such a lack of empathy they appear to come from a mindset of solipsism.
I disagree, you saying your friend is gone. Time had moved on. You're saying this happened over a period of a few years, right? That's a few years that you basically didn't know him anymore.
Things change; people do, too. He walked his path, you walked yours, and they didn't coincide any longer. That doesn't mean he's like a barren desert in his mind: that he's a brain-dead crackhead who's burnt into only ashes. Just because you feel he's a different person doesn't mean he doesn't exist anymore.
And if you mean that the person you once knew was gone, well then you're right. But that happens with everything. You can know someone all your life and never know each day if that will be the last day you ever see them again.
The continuity of time appears static, and our environments and people within them seem at times to be stable, but they are not. Things fluctuate all the time, but just because you can't relate to your friend anymore, believe me, I think he lives in a whole different world than you do.
Happiness, or at least acceptance, is what is important. Being unhappy all the time is what grinds the purpose of existence into angst.
Well, it's available at some dentists. At my local dentist it is $70, so not exactly cheap for just a quick high. (I have no insurance and so it wasn't exactly free.) When I went to have five teeth extracted in the same session, you're damn straight I took nitrous, I wouldn't call that being wimpy.
C'mon, everybody's had that episode at some point or another in their childhood where they were dared to drink their own urine and tried it... uh, right?
Uh.. ok, it tasted bad. Really bad. Wasn't the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth, though....
(don't every try to scarf ground peruvian torch with a spoon. It's like eating someone's diseased vomit.)
Well, you're still advocating that prohibition is more important than a person's right to self-determination (as someone else in this thread somewhere said). I can understand the dangers of addiction; but when someone feels like they need a drug because of problems, and no drug like it is available, they are gonna do what they have to do. Take codeine for example; it should be a legal, over-the-counter drug in any sane country (albeit possibly combined with APAP or something else to prevent abuse). Most countries allow over-the-counter codeine. In the U.S.? Are you crazy? Of course it's not allowed, people might get high off of it!
Even allowing small amounts of codeine, hydrocodone, etc, is better than the current situation. Right now, people have to go to their dealer and buy black-market Vicodin or something even more potent, or find a shadow-market (poppy pods, kratom, etc).
Something to chew on from the book Trainspotting:
"Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road..."...and I gotta say I feel the same way. Fuck 'em if they don't want me using what I want to use.
You take that back about UGK or they'll have a pack of trill niggaz run up in your home!
Oh, and Pimp C didn't overdose on promethazine. Well, not just too much purp, but sleep apnea combined with the drug did him in.
Some of the stuff on their first album was pretty awesome. Later stuff not as good, but not bad.
I guess living in Houston allows me to think this way. Geto Boys could rap too, and DJ Screw....maybe it's just because I could take a tight lean, myself. I keep telling myself there's a novel somewhere in all of this......
... for $125 last year, after I had opened and played it extensively.
Not that anyone cares, but I turned around and bought a Tabernacle of Pendrall Vale with it (a Legends card from M:tG) to complete my Legends set. Then I sold that set on ebay for $1k in November last year. Let's break down the math:
~$75 ebay & paypal fees ~$100 owed to parents ~$200 owed to brother ~$300 xmas 08 gifts ~$300 lended to friend
left me with about thirty or forty bucks. granted, I didn't have to spend that much on christmas, and three hundred of that is being paid back now by my friend, with a hundred in interest (it was his offer for the interest, it was kind of an emergency loan and all of my money), so I'm seeing some of that money.
Not that this is off-topic or that anyone is going to read past the first sentence, but whatever...
"Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road..." - Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)
"It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it." - Terry Pratchett
"Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be." - Bob Dylan
"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten." - Hunter S. Thompson
Horror writers also have it really hard, and traditionally always have. While recently (within the past few years) horror has experienced an uptick of popularity (especially within the vampire and zombie genres, as unfortunately is shown by Stephenie Meyer's successful Twilight), overall it is extremely difficult to make a living in the horror field.
In one of the past few issues of Cemetery Dance magazine, Brian Keene (an average working-man pulp horror writer with a few novels under his belt) gave a no-holds-barred interview where he basically states that one would have to be pretty insane to attempt entrance to the horror market. He says, about becoming a full-time writer: "Never. Never in a million years. I expected to work in a foundry or a call center for the rest of my life, and occasionally get a poem or story published in some small press fanzine.... I got incredibly lucky.... Beyond that, maybe it's because I'm a realist about this.... I view it as a business." He also talks about how much work he does: "I was writing [two books] at the same time - one book from 6 AM to noon and the other from 1 PM to 6 PM. Seven days a week." Keene's main success is from Leisure, a mass market paperback house, and Bantam, an imprint of Random House.
A lot of horror's survival is dependent on the specialty press, who tend to print limited editions of books that may be hard sells to major publishers. The internet does play a role in this, where fledgling new writers join into groups on forums for support. Brian Keene was also one of these, part of the "Horrornet Cabal", an informal group who met at horrornet.com (now defunct). This group also included mentors like Richard Laymon and Brian Hodge, allowing writers like Tim Lebbon and Tom Piccirilli to rise up from the sludge on the bottom of the 'net.
As an unpublished horror author myself, I like to think I understand the punishing nature of the industry. Keene thinks it's impossible for an author to write a novel in a dark room and have it sell - that self-promotion is a required part of an author's work - and while I'd like to disagree, I'm not sure I can. Like Keene says in the interview, that if you're a mid-list author then you receive none of the publisher's promotional budget and instead your book will sink or swim on the bookrack based on the whims of the masses, you may not have a lot of options for self-promotion. Yet, good writing should stand on its own. I've been writing seriously for two years (I've felt the call for decades) and, while I have my share of rejection slips, I believe the main reason why I've not been published is because I haven't written anything "good enough". An example of this can be found at http://tyrus568.livejournal.com/. Pulp, and pulp in bad form.
Any author knows that being published online by an online mag is only a mediocre step up from nothing. Having your name on a bookshelf or in a print magazine is the defining factor. This may change in the future, but for now, the internet is predominated by wannabe "writers" and hacks.
I'm afraid that doesn't seem to say much. I would assume that most people who would take speed for classwork would "work circles around" their classmates...
I would have gotten a PS3 for Christmas this year but for this. So I got a new PS2.
I've had numerous PS2 games sitting around still in the shrink-wrap since my last PS2 died (it was a launch PS2). Final Fantasy XII, Gran Turismo 4, God of War 2, Shadow of the Colossus, etc waiting to be played. Would have been a nice excuse to pick up a PS3 for Christmas, but without backwards compatibility I just had to get a PS2.
High accident rate? I heard on the news last night that the climbers that died on K2 recently only had a 2 in 3 chance of coming down. 1 out of 3 climbers die in the attempt. A 33% risk of death is a little higher than 1.6%. I say Let's get into space.
Reminds me a lot of writers and their problems. When it comes to editing their own rough drafts it can be extraordinarily difficult to force themselves to remove pieces that they know need to go. It's like ripping your own child apart - how could you do that?
But you do it anyways cuz you know it will make it better in the long run:)
That could have been very useful for a friend of mine, a woman who wanted to file an attempted rape charge. After being at the police station in a "little white room" for about six hours being interrogated and badgered they basically gave her a report to sign and said that it would make it all go away. I understand that she was naive not to demand a lawyer or to realize that she was free to go at any time, but they did not let her know this. They also turned off their tape recorder at certain times to make threats. Apparently they do this to keep the crime statistics in their area low.
After she signed the form, which basically had her admit that she was not the victim of any such abuse, they filed a charge against her for filing a false police report.
While this theory is interesting and may be part of one subset of reasons why we sleep I believe that the evolutionary thrust to reproduce dangerous events in our dreams is only a small one. Most lethal threats happen too quickly for anyone to react before they are dead. While many people report the "slow-down" effect in life-threatening situations, the fact is that time won't be "slowing down" if you are shot in the back of the head; it will have "stopped".
I suppose many of these instantaneous deaths have to do with our level of technology, but falling into a hundred-foot sinkhole or getting your back broken by a rampaging rhinoceros in early times I imagine could barely be prevented either:)
I imagine my dreams as a giant full-screen tv in my head that's tuned to the Yggdrasil channel...
I don't know, it depends on the individual case. I didn't feel like I had a case when it happened to me.
I walked up to my neighborhood Wal-Mart and bought some shit and was running back home (I was in a hurry). I had some huge headphones that I had on me that had coincidentally broken on the walk up there, that sucked. Anyways I had them in the pocket of my jacket, but they were too big and sort of hanging out. I was running on the side of the road when a car pulled up over the curb and onto the grass and a guy got out and told me to freeze and lay face down on the grass. I had no idea what to do so I obeyed, but I felt like what I did was wrong (sure was.) I just didn't know if he was like a detective or plainclothes peace officer, like if he had a gun or would shoot me if I refused, you know?
He HANDCUFFED me face down in the grass on the side of the road and called the cops. a few minutes later the cops showed up and when they saw what the store security guy (which is what he apparently was) had done they acted pretty disgusted with him and immediately told him to get me up and comfortable. They asked the guy if he had seen me doing something or what, and he said he was positive that I had stolen a lady's purse. Said evidence was the headphones halfway sticking out of my jacket pocket, which he saw from a distance and just jumped to the conclusion that I had a purse, since I was running.
The officers asked him if he had seen this, or if there had been a report that a purse had been stolen, but nothing. He had just jumped to the conclusion and unlawfully detained me without performing a citizen's arrest, and off of wal-mart property.
I didn't complain, I didn't bust nothing. The cops drove me the mile home and I wished em a safe night.
Probably should've sued the guy. It was embarrassing, degrading, and extremely dangerous for me to lie down when he told me to. He could've mashed me up a bit or even cut my throat. So stupid.
(offtopic)
Why? Lasers would actually show [i]damage[/i]. Things like electric shocks, waterboarding and kidney jabs, well, you can't prove they did it to you, can you?
Kinda like the beaten-wife syndrome. Who wants to beat the crap out of your wife and then everybody knows you did it, when you can just jab her in the side every day and she's the only one who knows as she's pissing blood again?
Well, how would this ever be enforced?
Parents are allowed to take their children in to see an R-rated movie right now, so I think you would agree that a parent could buy the game for the child (how would the cashier know who the game was for?) so enforcement couldn't happen at the sales counter.
How else would this ever happen? A cop walk by your apartment window and see a kid gutting someone in a video game, or something?
Slashdot Mirror
The man was not afraid of this absolute.
That, is bravery.
If he wasn't afraid of it and did it, that's not bravery.
It's being afraid of something but doing it anyway that represents true courage.
He did what he thought was the proper thing to do for him in his position. As to his feelings on death, unless words from the man himself are forthcoming I wouldn't judge him.
You joke, but this is exactly what people who quit serious addictions go through. Everything in life pales in comparison to the addictive behavior. Over time this usually gets better as the reward pathways in the brain rewire themselves, but anyone with a serious drug dependency will tell you that life really, really sucks without having what they feel they need.
While your post is a bit snarky, I mostly agree. However, you said this:
"Quitting was easy when it came to nicotine. I quit cold-turkey and had life suck for about a month and a quarter."
Calling something easy that has a 97% failure rate is just wrong. According to Wikipedia:
"Research in Western countries has found that approximately 3-5% of quit attempts succeed using willpower alone (Hughes et al., 2004)."
It goes on to say that "The typical effort of a person that finally succeeds is the seventh to fifteenth try."
Sure, my mother quit a ten year pack-a-day habit on her first attempt. My father's trial, however, was much more brutal. I smoke myself a pack a day and find it as difficult to control as an opiate addiction.
Nicotine addiction is no joke, and just because you quit on your first attempt with nothing but willpower alone is an interesting anecdote, but flies in the face of what we know of smoking addictions today.
If only. Here in the States, at least, you're not allowed any codeine without permission. You get acetaminophen or aspirin OTC for pain relief, that's it.
If the pain is any worse than that (slammed finger in door, but finger not broken, vomited from the pain) well, you're out of luck. Unless you go to the emergency room. And wait 8-12 hours. And hope they give you something. And have them charge you $500-$1000 or more for the privilege. Hope you have insurance.
Me, I used lots of ice the first day and ignored it best I could for the next week of pain.
"Space transport became very routine and ordinary and more reliable..."
Your odds of death in getting to orbit in the Space Shuttle is 1 in 64.
The odds of death on D-Day were 1 in 62.
Go on, guys: continue to generalize. Sweeping blanket statements that cover large numbers of people are what breeds scorn, anger, even schadenfreude attitudes among those better off. Sure is easy to write off those less fortunate when you can play 'blame the victim'.
To be clear, everybody's got their own shoes to walk in. Society is constantly in flux and a million variables contribute to the circumstances of each person's life.
As science advances, I would be surprised if it did not become more and more apparent that genes comprise what we call 'talent'. I am not advocating to avoid responsibility of the self and the choices each of us make, but your genetic character has way more influence than you realize in how your life turns out.
The basic example is how two people may see the color blue but internally they may see something entirely different from the other. This effect is pervasive. If someone has lower amounts of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, causing them to have the perception of lower energy levels, life would be harder, no? Yet of course they are treated the same as anyone else. 'Screw them,' you think. 'I could do it, so why can't they?' Maybe it's because they're not you.
Some of the comments I've read on this thread show such a lack of empathy they appear to come from a mindset of solipsism.
I disagree, you saying your friend is gone. Time had moved on. You're saying this happened over a period of a few years, right? That's a few years that you basically didn't know him anymore.
Things change; people do, too. He walked his path, you walked yours, and they didn't coincide any longer. That doesn't mean he's like a barren desert in his mind: that he's a brain-dead crackhead who's burnt into only ashes. Just because you feel he's a different person doesn't mean he doesn't exist anymore.
And if you mean that the person you once knew was gone, well then you're right. But that happens with everything. You can know someone all your life and never know each day if that will be the last day you ever see them again.
The continuity of time appears static, and our environments and people within them seem at times to be stable, but they are not. Things fluctuate all the time, but just because you can't relate to your friend anymore, believe me, I think he lives in a whole different world than you do.
Happiness, or at least acceptance, is what is important. Being unhappy all the time is what grinds the purpose of existence into angst.
Read better horror. Dan Simmons, Jack Ketchum, and Ramsey Campbell are a few good starting points. For short stories, Kelly Link, Joe Hill. YMMV.
Well, it's available at some dentists. At my local dentist it is $70, so not exactly cheap for just a quick high. (I have no insurance and so it wasn't exactly free.) When I went to have five teeth extracted in the same session, you're damn straight I took nitrous, I wouldn't call that being wimpy.
Now, the 40 vicodin I got for afterwards helped.
C'mon, everybody's had that episode at some point or another in their childhood where they were dared to drink their own urine and tried it... uh, right?
Uh.. ok, it tasted bad. Really bad. Wasn't the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth, though....
(don't every try to scarf ground peruvian torch with a spoon. It's like eating someone's diseased vomit.)
Well, you're still advocating that prohibition is more important than a person's right to self-determination (as someone else in this thread somewhere said). I can understand the dangers of addiction; but when someone feels like they need a drug because of problems, and no drug like it is available, they are gonna do what they have to do. Take codeine for example; it should be a legal, over-the-counter drug in any sane country (albeit possibly combined with APAP or something else to prevent abuse). Most countries allow over-the-counter codeine. In the U.S.? Are you crazy? Of course it's not allowed, people might get high off of it!
Even allowing small amounts of codeine, hydrocodone, etc, is better than the current situation. Right now, people have to go to their dealer and buy black-market Vicodin or something even more potent, or find a shadow-market (poppy pods, kratom, etc).
Something to chew on from the book Trainspotting:
"Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road..." ...and I gotta say I feel the same way. Fuck 'em if they don't want me using what I want to use.
You take that back about UGK or they'll have a pack of trill niggaz run up in your home!
Oh, and Pimp C didn't overdose on promethazine. Well, not just too much purp, but sleep apnea combined with the drug did him in.
Some of the stuff on their first album was pretty awesome. Later stuff not as good, but not bad.
I guess living in Houston allows me to think this way. Geto Boys could rap too, and DJ Screw. ...maybe it's just because I could take a tight lean, myself. I keep telling myself there's a novel somewhere in all of this......
... for $125 last year, after I had opened and played it extensively.
Not that anyone cares, but I turned around and bought a Tabernacle of Pendrall Vale with it (a Legends card from M:tG) to complete my Legends set. Then I sold that set on ebay for $1k in November last year. Let's break down the math:
~$75 ebay & paypal fees
~$100 owed to parents
~$200 owed to brother
~$300 xmas 08 gifts
~$300 lended to friend
left me with about thirty or forty bucks. granted, I didn't have to spend that much on christmas, and three hundred of that is being paid back now by my friend, with a hundred in interest (it was his offer for the interest, it was kind of an emergency loan and all of my money), so I'm seeing some of that money.
Not that this is off-topic or that anyone is going to read past the first sentence, but whatever...
"Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road..."
- Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)
"It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it."
- Terry Pratchett
"Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be."
- Bob Dylan
"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."
- Hunter S. Thompson
Horror writers also have it really hard, and traditionally always have. While recently (within the past few years) horror has experienced an uptick of popularity (especially within the vampire and zombie genres, as unfortunately is shown by Stephenie Meyer's successful Twilight), overall it is extremely difficult to make a living in the horror field.
In one of the past few issues of Cemetery Dance magazine, Brian Keene (an average working-man pulp horror writer with a few novels under his belt) gave a no-holds-barred interview where he basically states that one would have to be pretty insane to attempt entrance to the horror market. He says, about becoming a full-time writer: "Never. Never in a million years. I expected to work in a foundry or a call center for the rest of my life, and occasionally get a poem or story published in some small press fanzine. ... I got incredibly lucky. ... Beyond that, maybe it's because I'm a realist about this. ... I view it as a business." He also talks about how much work he does: "I was writing [two books] at the same time - one book from 6 AM to noon and the other from 1 PM to 6 PM. Seven days a week." Keene's main success is from Leisure, a mass market paperback house, and Bantam, an imprint of Random House.
A lot of horror's survival is dependent on the specialty press, who tend to print limited editions of books that may be hard sells to major publishers. The internet does play a role in this, where fledgling new writers join into groups on forums for support. Brian Keene was also one of these, part of the "Horrornet Cabal", an informal group who met at horrornet.com (now defunct). This group also included mentors like Richard Laymon and Brian Hodge, allowing writers like Tim Lebbon and Tom Piccirilli to rise up from the sludge on the bottom of the 'net.
As an unpublished horror author myself, I like to think I understand the punishing nature of the industry. Keene thinks it's impossible for an author to write a novel in a dark room and have it sell - that self-promotion is a required part of an author's work - and while I'd like to disagree, I'm not sure I can. Like Keene says in the interview, that if you're a mid-list author then you receive none of the publisher's promotional budget and instead your book will sink or swim on the bookrack based on the whims of the masses, you may not have a lot of options for self-promotion. Yet, good writing should stand on its own. I've been writing seriously for two years (I've felt the call for decades) and, while I have my share of rejection slips, I believe the main reason why I've not been published is because I haven't written anything "good enough". An example of this can be found at http://tyrus568.livejournal.com/. Pulp, and pulp in bad form.
Any author knows that being published online by an online mag is only a mediocre step up from nothing. Having your name on a bookshelf or in a print magazine is the defining factor. This may change in the future, but for now, the internet is predominated by wannabe "writers" and hacks.
I'm afraid that doesn't seem to say much. I would assume that most people who would take speed for classwork would "work circles around" their classmates...
I would have gotten a PS3 for Christmas this year but for this. So I got a new PS2. I've had numerous PS2 games sitting around still in the shrink-wrap since my last PS2 died (it was a launch PS2). Final Fantasy XII, Gran Turismo 4, God of War 2, Shadow of the Colossus, etc waiting to be played. Would have been a nice excuse to pick up a PS3 for Christmas, but without backwards compatibility I just had to get a PS2.
High accident rate? I heard on the news last night that the climbers that died on K2 recently only had a 2 in 3 chance of coming down. 1 out of 3 climbers die in the attempt. A 33% risk of death is a little higher than 1.6%. I say Let's get into space.
Reminds me a lot of writers and their problems. When it comes to editing their own rough drafts it can be extraordinarily difficult to force themselves to remove pieces that they know need to go. It's like ripping your own child apart - how could you do that?
:)
But you do it anyways cuz you know it will make it better in the long run
That could have been very useful for a friend of mine, a woman who wanted to file an attempted rape charge. After being at the police station in a "little white room" for about six hours being interrogated and badgered they basically gave her a report to sign and said that it would make it all go away. I understand that she was naive not to demand a lawyer or to realize that she was free to go at any time, but they did not let her know this. They also turned off their tape recorder at certain times to make threats. Apparently they do this to keep the crime statistics in their area low.
After she signed the form, which basically had her admit that she was not the victim of any such abuse, they filed a charge against her for filing a false police report.
While this theory is interesting and may be part of one subset of reasons why we sleep I believe that the evolutionary thrust to reproduce dangerous events in our dreams is only a small one. Most lethal threats happen too quickly for anyone to react before they are dead. While many people report the "slow-down" effect in life-threatening situations, the fact is that time won't be "slowing down" if you are shot in the back of the head; it will have "stopped".
:)
I suppose many of these instantaneous deaths have to do with our level of technology, but falling into a hundred-foot sinkhole or getting your back broken by a rampaging rhinoceros in early times I imagine could barely be prevented either
I imagine my dreams as a giant full-screen tv in my head that's tuned to the Yggdrasil channel...
Is it good or bad that the top google results for your handle (tyrus sithius) are from razor 1911 greets from 1996?
I googled my real name and just saw other people's successes......
I don't know, it depends on the individual case. I didn't feel like I had a case when it happened to me.
I walked up to my neighborhood Wal-Mart and bought some shit and was running back home (I was in a hurry). I had some huge headphones that I had on me that had coincidentally broken on the walk up there, that sucked. Anyways I had them in the pocket of my jacket, but they were too big and sort of hanging out. I was running on the side of the road when a car pulled up over the curb and onto the grass and a guy got out and told me to freeze and lay face down on the grass. I had no idea what to do so I obeyed, but I felt like what I did was wrong (sure was.) I just didn't know if he was like a detective or plainclothes peace officer, like if he had a gun or would shoot me if I refused, you know?
He HANDCUFFED me face down in the grass on the side of the road and called the cops. a few minutes later the cops showed up and when they saw what the store security guy (which is what he apparently was) had done they acted pretty disgusted with him and immediately told him to get me up and comfortable. They asked the guy if he had seen me doing something or what, and he said he was positive that I had stolen a lady's purse. Said evidence was the headphones halfway sticking out of my jacket pocket, which he saw from a distance and just jumped to the conclusion that I had a purse, since I was running.
The officers asked him if he had seen this, or if there had been a report that a purse had been stolen, but nothing. He had just jumped to the conclusion and unlawfully detained me without performing a citizen's arrest, and off of wal-mart property.
I didn't complain, I didn't bust nothing. The cops drove me the mile home and I wished em a safe night.
Probably should've sued the guy. It was embarrassing, degrading, and extremely dangerous for me to lie down when he told me to. He could've mashed me up a bit or even cut my throat. So stupid.
(offtopic) Why? Lasers would actually show [i]damage[/i]. Things like electric shocks, waterboarding and kidney jabs, well, you can't prove they did it to you, can you? Kinda like the beaten-wife syndrome. Who wants to beat the crap out of your wife and then everybody knows you did it, when you can just jab her in the side every day and she's the only one who knows as she's pissing blood again?
Well, how would this ever be enforced? Parents are allowed to take their children in to see an R-rated movie right now, so I think you would agree that a parent could buy the game for the child (how would the cashier know who the game was for?) so enforcement couldn't happen at the sales counter. How else would this ever happen? A cop walk by your apartment window and see a kid gutting someone in a video game, or something?