I work for a company that has contractually bound me not to pursue work as a computer technician for any person or organization other than my employer.

I need to pay my bills.

I can make fifty to a hundred dollars in an hour's consultation, get a client's PC up and running, and undercut my employer's prices. That means: if I work forty hours a month as a freelance computer tech, I have rent for the apartment I share with my wife (she also works, so we'd be combining incomes). Given that we actually share the wealth between us, that would mean we could pay off all of our bills and start paying down student loans in a more aggressive manner.

I'm unhappy about this. I don't want to give up my job, because otherwise health insurance goes from $280/mo to over $1100/mo, and besides, I like my job. (I don't like the general manager but the other managers are bro-tier.)

Let's say I work sixty hours a month for my employer, and twenty for myself. That's a few hundred, after taxes and other withholdings, from my employer, and a thousand dollars from freelance work (before taxes - although it's technically under-the-table work, I feel I should declare it if it gets that far).

But to do that, I would be breaking contract, putting a weight on my conscience and risking being fired if my employer finds out.

I feel like I need to take the expedient route, so we can eat and buy gasoline and have a roof over our heads and all those other luxuries.

It's not fair. I should not have to break the rules and risk my livelihood... to make a livelihood. You know what? Fuck poverty with a rake, it sucks.

Observe the following:

1. I am Jewish.
2. I read Scientific American.
3. Malaysia bought an ad in SA, highlighting it as a wonderful place to invest in high-tech R&D and so on.
4. Malaysia also had one of the most hilariously offensive anti-Semites in history as prime minister. A choice quote:
[The Jews] survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others.
5. As I understand it, a significant proportion of the Malaysian public agrees with him.

Remind me why I'd want to work or invest in Malaysia again...?

You know, with all that's going on in my life - planning when to try for kids, moving to another city, starting a new job (which btw starts in an hour), and all that - it feels like it's been tough to get my brain working on creativity.

But, you know, a couple of years ago it was writing porn that really got me writing the most. Well, mostly porn.

See, it connects with this monster-girl chart... Someone created a "monster-girl encyclopedia" that's full of monsters that basically prey on men in order to have sex with them. Some fa/tg/uy created a 10x10 chart, with numbered squares in which ninety monsters and a few rule-modifying squares, and challenged other fa/tg/uys to roll d100 and write a story about an encounter with the indicated monster. I wrote a bunch, not all of which is suitable for posting here on FA.

I'm planning to go back to that. So, let me bring up the D&D site and roll... a 22. Which says "Pick anything!" Not that useful unless something stands out to me, so... nah. Rerolling... sorry, did mummy already. 78 is "none". Reroll. 80... okay, that's basically Arachne. Let's see what I can do here.

I didn't delete anything. I just moved half-completed works, or works I've lately revised, in scraps.

The recent death by suicide of a Rutgers student - a gay man, outed by his roommates with streaming video from a webcam - just makes me full of bleak moods.

It doesn't help that I'm going to be going to my own wedding in a week - I'm nervous, I don't like spectacle, couldn't we just be married and live together, raise kids and teach them how to be proper human beings, without all this fancy-pants crap? But I committed to the wedding along with the marriage.

Bah.

While playing D&D over Rosh Hashana with some friends, we were doing some premade shorts just to see how well we (the players and the DM) worked together, get used to one another's styles, etc.

We were doing one in which the players invade a tomb containing the corpse of a bugbear crusader which is animated by the desire to protect the tomb against desecration (and probably powered by human sacrifice). In other words, it's a very grumpy zombie with a taste for your blood.

The book states that the zombie crusader is armed with a javelin, a masterwork longsword, and a morningstar.

Enter the humor: one of us players (the DM's wife, playing an Elven rogue) asked, "What's a morningstar?" We told her: it's a particular kind of spiked mace or flail. This is when she started laughing her arse off, because she'd only heard of the words "morning star" in reference to Venus (which the zombie was obviously not carrying) and a certain brand of soy- and milk-based TVP, aka fake meat. She'd imagined the zombie wielding a breakfast sausage.

Hence, like I'm doing on /tg/, I'll ask here: if anyone feels like drawing a zombie bugbear crusader wielding javelin and sausage links, with the sword slung over his shoulder, I'd love to see it.

I am now in my... lessee... it's Thursday, right? I am now in my fourth day (of seven) of formal mourning for my brother, who took his life this past weekend.

With all due respect for the late gentleman, I am tired of this ritual. I've done most of my short-term mourning already and this isn't helping me with the long-term mourning in the least. I can put up with staying at my parents' home instead of in my apartment, for a whole week. I can put up with three services a day conducted in my parents' living room. I can put up with sitting on low stools instead of chairs, forgoing leather shoes and wearing sandals instead, you know? But for heaven's sake, can it be over now? I don't want to wait until Sunday. :<

If you have advices on how to not go insane due to lack of interest in or ability to sleep right now (2:15 AM) and the need to get up every day of this week at 6 instead of my usual 9 - yes, I know, unemployed except for tutoring, don't give me crap about this - I welcome your suggestions.

I won't even be able to cuddle with my fiancee for another two months, and that's bugging me as much as the lack of sleep and the irritability about early-morning services.

I don't particularly feel like going to sleep right now.

It's nearly 2 AM, which means that my brother's funeral is in a bit more than twelve hours.

My mother is sobbing aloud, which is not unexpected in the circumstances. I think I can hear my father trying to comfort her.

My mind is racing at double-speed. Oddly enough, that's what it does when it gets short on sleep and blood-sugar... I know it's time to sleep.

But this room where I can sleep, you know, it's too damn hot and I'm too damn worked up about everything.

God damn it all to hell, there's nothing I can do and that's worse than any death in the family.

Picture yourself in the Directorate of Meridia, a small but prosperous nation whose major exports are complex mechanical devices and disgruntled artificers. The Directorate is a technocracy ruled by its enormously wealthy Artificer's Guild, which holds its ridiculously complicated political meetings in the capital city of Guildhall (dominated, of course, by the ornate architecture of the Guild Hall).

Meridia is high-tech by D&D standards, because they have obtained the secret of perpetual motion machines and the finest clockwork. These were not obtained in the way most artificers learn their craft, but were a divine gift. A celestial being called Ophan descended from the heavens to deliver to the people of Meridia two things. One was a manufacturer's guide to these impossible machines; the other was the Testament of St. Asim of Acasi.

"Attend," said Ophan. "I grant to you today this gift, that you may become wealthy and powerful; study these books well, and live by them. You shall manufacture devices whose workings were thought impossible, and you shall learn and grow wise from the Testament of St. Asim of Acasi. But this you must not do: if you create of my gifts a machine which shall follow the Book of St. Asim, I shall remove from you my gifts and execute harsh judgment against you."

At least, that's how the old legend goes. Some say that there was a great uprising of Warforged in the past. Nobody really knows, but the fact is that Directorate law prohibits the design, construction, possession, sale, purchase, transportation, or other business with or of machines which think and act of their own free will. Directorate Security comes down very harshly on anyone breaking this rule - the sentence is death, plus forfeiture of all assets to the Directorate. A violator's technical notes will be carefully catalogued and described, then placed upon his workshop bench, before the workshop and all its contents are put to the torch.

Got it? Yes? Good.

Well, as you arrive in Guildhall, you notice two things. First, as you search the "Help Wanted" advertisements under "Security Services", you see a posting by a wealthy artificer seeking professional help in finding his missing daughter, a 12-year-old girl. Second, if you listen to the chatter of Directorate Security officers, you may overhear rumors that the vault containing the Testament of St. Asim of Acasi was breached, and the book itself stolen...

[SPOILERS BEGIN HERE]

Turns out: the daughter is a construct of the forbidden kind. She/it is missing due to theft by a radical political faction of the Directorate. The problem: the radical party's goons managed to nab the construct before it was finished its self-calibration routine, and so even though it was trying to obey the laws of St. Asim's Testament, it killed two of the thieves. Now, it's wanted for murder by Directorate Security, whose officers are notorious for being fairly clever and reasonably honest. Plus, if that strange being Ophan ever finds out what the girl is, it will lay waste to Guildhall in vengeance.

Questions to be faced by the party:
- Do they capture or destroy the construct, or persuade it to join them, and turn it over to Directorate Security? This will likely lead to a public trial for the creator...
- Do they capture or destroy the construct, or persuade it to join them, and return it to its creator? This will likely lead to charges being laid against them by Directorate Security, if they ever find out.
- What will they do to protect the city from Ophan's wrath, either through preventing it from discovering the nature of the construct or through defeating it directly?

As I have it thus far:

Human refugees come to this foreign planet where they find two major civilizations - a city-dwelling race of farmers, and a hill- and mountain-dwelling race of hunters who hunt, kill and eat the farmers. The balance of power is maintained because, while the farmers have numbers and superior metallurgy on their side, they are temperamentally unsuited to sending armies forth to do battle. The hunters, for their part, may be faster, smarter and more cunning than the farmers, but they have neither hope nor intention of rooting the farmers out of their walled cities.

And in between them, there is a nomadic race whose ecological niche is "in-between" - they're omnivorous, fast-breeding, fast-learning, and physically very hardy. Not strong, though. They make their living as spies, traders, thieves, and so on. They're also the best apothecaries around, because they share knowledge and experimental results between each other but keep their findings secret from everyone else.

So, the human faction gets embroiled in political debate and intrigue over the matter of how to deal with these three nonhuman sentient species. Are they dangerous? Can they be negotiated with? Can they be walled off? Should they be wiped out? Should humanity try to share its technological blessings with them? Should humanity try to maintain the status quo? How should the human colony maintain its high-tech industrial nature, in this context? And so on and so on.

Central to the story are one recon officer, a battle-damaged veteran who is nevertheless respected by the colonists; a battalion commander who believes leaving human-ruled space meant leaving behind the ethics of human civilization; and a clan leader of the hunters, who shares an unusual bond with the recon officer which borders on magic.

The commander has a plan that involves arming the hunters with modern-day weaponry, in order to provoke a full-scale mobilization of the farmers. The hunters, with help from human advisors, will slaughter the farmers en masse; then the hunters' population will crash as they are deprived of large prey. The hunters' clan leader is neither too keen on rifles nor that worried about the ecological impact of accepting new technologies. The recon officer is strongly opposed to the idea, and in fact wants to have the human colony walled off from the rest of the planetary surface.

Various things happen. The clan leader's unusual abilities play a part, and the commander's plans do get underway to some degree. I'm not sure who will prevail, in the end.

---

I have to say that this all came from thinking about designing an RTS game with multiple factions, whose play styles would be very different. The farmers' faction would be focused on maneuvering large formations of heavy infantry; the hunters' faction would be focused on guerrilla warfare; the human faction would be focused on striking from afar. Human troops would be outnumbered even worse than the hunters, and would probably lack their skills in sneaking about and hiding, due to their use of technologies like aerial assault and motor vehicles. I also imagined that the human faction would be without heavier weapons like artillery - their heaviest weapons would be like HMMWVs with machine guns. I was taking some inspiration from the book Guns of the South, in which time-traveling white supremacists bring assault rifles and machine guns to Robert E. Lee.

Let's see.

One 20-kg kinetic artillery round (mass 20 kg, obviously)

One Everest-class Dreadnought main armament: accelerates the artillery round to 0.013c.

Using the rough estimate of c = 3 * 10^8 m/s (so muzzle velocity is 3.9 * 10^6 m/s), ignoring relativistic effects, and assuming no outside forces act on the shell during its flight to target, that means its momentum is 7.8 * 10^7 kg-m/s and its kinetic energy is about 1.5 * 10^14 J.

Which means that Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space.

I think there's a reason why I keep turning over two characters in my mind - Judge and Meatloaf, of the Nova Guard 10th Company.

Judge, the quiet, emotionless marksman who gives everyone the creeps... reminds me of myself. I used to be like that. I think I am still like that, minus the creepy bit. I've become more human over time, with more experience. But the essence of Judge... well, he's alone in life. Anywhere and everywhere he goes, he will be alone, no matter if he is traveling with his squad or not. They don't like him. And he doesn't care... at least, outwardly. Inwardly, I'm not sure. He might. And, you know? Like I said. I feel like that quite often.

Even as I'm preparing to get engaged to a kind-hearted, intelligent and accomplished woman, in my darker moments I ask myself again and again: Do you want a relationship? Wouldn't you rather be alone? Don't you want to stay feeling alone? It's familiar, after all... comforting... no need for change.

And Meatloaf, now... What's the essence of Meatloaf's character? It's his fatherhood. Well, here again, I think this is relevant to me. Anxiety over the future - for anyone contemplating settling down and forming a family who doesn't get anxious is an idiot - and guilt over the past.

I recently posted in a drawthread, on /tg/. I asked for a sort of wallet-photo type of image, of a Space Marine in civvies standing with his daughter, a woman in her 20s. We'll see what comes of that.

Here's our cast:

Capt. Joker, hardass but honest and fair
Hon. Ironwood, bitter and arrogant and very, very old
Gunner Meatloaf, kind of a jolly fellow, the company's best cook, angsty about his role of absentee father.
Tech-Adept Torque, a bit nerdy, shy, does technical things. Augmetic eyes.
Tr. Figgy, would be the perfect Marine if not for his sanctimony and love of violence. Explosive. Hates mutants like Judge with a passion.
Tr. Sparky, arsonist extraordinaire. Character not well-developed. Childlike curiosity, don't confuse with stupidity. In love with Straps.
Spec. Judge, marksman. Probably a blank. Extremely laconic, emotionless, virtually invisible to anyone not specifically looking for him.
Tr. Straps, cheerful optimist. Command section's corpsman, in love with Sparky.

Ironwood is partly bitter about the lack of sensual pleasures afforded to him by his new body - no more clinking of glasses with his friends. His friends are all dead, anyway. But he can't enjoy the taste of anything. He can't feel the hearty slap on the shoulder that soldiers exchange in greeting. Nobody can reach his shoulder, anyway. And he used to be an officer - a captain of captains, feared by his enemies for his tactical genius. Now he no longer exercises command authority. Captains consult with him - when they think they need his advice. The rest of the time they use him like a battering ram, charging forward to smash aside the enemy. Stupid. Unsubtle. Hah! He was better than that, once.

Brother-Trooper Figgy was recruited from an Imperial world where the local Church was hardcore anti-mutant and where purge-raids to the slums were not uncommon. Though he was taken in at 14, he had time to absorb the bigotry inherent in the Imperial cult. He loathes the abnatural with a passion. He barely tolerates the chapter's Librarians and Librarian-cadets, but can deal with the idea that their mutation is both a blessing and a curse from the Emperor. Someone like Judge, though, is beyond redemption in his eyes.

Meatloaf met a wonderful woman on his first year of leave after a deployment. "Don't get attached," they said. "It's bad for morale," they said. "If you don't get killed, you might live a thousand years - your lover will be dead in sixty! It's not worth the entanglement." But he didn't listen. Well, that was many years ago, and his was one of those rare cases where a child is conceived. His daughter is in her early 20s, and like any father, Meatloaf thinks of her often. Even though he doesn't see her for years at a time. Somewhere buried under his fairly jolly personality and fatherly affection is the knowledge that, unless he gets himself killed, he will probably live to visit his daughter's grave when she dies of old age.

My mind wanders in strange ways along strange paths.

First: this will focus on the command squad of a somewhat unconventional Space Marine company, the Nova Guard 10th Infantry, who patrol and train in the Tiji sector. This company is the first posting for recruits who pass through Basic. During their stay with the 10th they will receive career training, in accordance with their special skills and passions. Those who survive may graduate to Tac or Airborne units, or apply for specialty training in fire support, armored cav, CQC, and so on.

Part of the process of induction involves recruits giving up their identities - it isn't that they're no longer persons, but by becoming Marines they give up property, wealth, family connections, and almost any hope of having children. (The drug therapy used in the implant process tends to cause infertility as a side effect, apart from the whole "being away from home for ten years at a time".) Instead, they become known by the nicknames assigned to them by fellow recruits.

Thus, the captain of 10th Company might have been born Mariusz Wajkowcik, but only the Chapter's surgeons or chaplains would ever address him as such. To everyone else, he's just Joker.

Behold Joker! He's not the Chapter's golden boy, but he runs the 10th because he's good with the recruits. He knows how to lead men into battle, and is ready and willing to pull his men back in retreat to strike again at a later time. He has a reputation as a hardass in matters of field discipline, but is also known for being absolutely fair and honest. He also has a certain amount of tolerance for the antics or occasional insanity of the rookies under his command. Has a weakness for chess, at which he generally loses. And from the Marines under his command, he has picked half a dozen to accompany him personally as his command squad.

Behold Meatloaf, the biggest Marine in 10th company. Meatloaf is loud, he laughs readily, he can cook (Meatloaf is the only man in Imperial history who knows how to make a delicious meal out of reconstituted nutrient paste, or so he claims), and he's the squad's heavy-weapons specialist. His weapons of choice are automatic slug-weapons, like heavy bolters or autocannons. His gear, these days, includes his most prized possession - a servo-skeleton that allows him to fire on the move with no loss of precision, built out of salvaged Orky bitz by Torque. Meatloaf is a little too proud of his hardware.

This brings us to Torque, 10th company's apprentice Techmarine. Shy, soft-spoken, and possessed of of a number of mechanical arms, he tends to spend spare time tinkering with bits of machines or building miniature fortifications out of canned rations. He is also responsible for most of the squad's non-standard equipment. When it comes to fixing machinery, or salvaging ruined hardware, Torque is the man to go to. He is also the squad's demolitions expert. When it comes to making sure something gets blown up and stays blown up, the melta-wielding Torque and the pyromaniac Sparky are the ones the rest will defer to.

Which brings us to Sparky, the squad's arsonist. He's not the most mentally stable, but he keeps his flamethrower in good working order. He understands combustion on an intuitive level, allowing him to perform stunts like touching off a fuel depot while standing in the middle of it, and walking away with nothing worse than singed eyebrows. Other than setting things on fire, his favorite thing in the world is to blow things up. Nobody can clear enemy positions faster. He often makes his assaults under Judge's covering fire.

Judge is the weird one. Something about him unsettles everyone else. He's not talkative - but unlike with Torque, who is simply too shy, it's because Judge has nothing to say. When he does, he says it in a quiet, emotionless monotone. Perhaps it's his voice that creeps out his fellow Marines. Perhaps it's his absolute lack of tact, or the fact that he doesn't appear to care about anything, or that his face looks like the face of a statue... or that he can be (and has been) ignored, while wearing his bulky, heraldry-adorned armor, standing in an open field and firing on the enemy. There's just something fundamentally wrong about him, as though he's a blank spot in the fabric of the universe. But he's a damned good marksman, the finest in the company. That's why he's been awarded the right to carry a long-barreled bolt rifle into battle, instead of the general-issue carbine. It's also why he hasn't yet met with an accident at the hands of someone like Figgy.

Figgy might be the perfect Marine - in doctrine, in discipline, in manners, in every way - except for a real nasty streak of ruthlessness that rivals that of Judge. Judge is ruthless because he doesn't understand mercy. Figgy is ruthless because he likes it. He's also the anti-Torque, as far as his weapons go. As the squad's special-weapons bearer, Figgy has the dubious honor of carrying and firing temperamental and unstable plasma weapons. They malfunction in his hands a lot more than they do for anyone else, for no reason that anyone can discover. He's been shocked by overloads, shot by his own weapon's backfires, and badly burned at least once by a catastrophic containment failure. His stoic streak won't let him complain, though, and Straps has always been there to patch him up.

Everyone's best friend (except for Judge, who has no friends, and doesn't care) is the corpsman, Straps. An apprentice Apothecary, Straps's skills in the healing arts are mostly limited to battlefield first-aid - or, of course, recovery of gene-seed, should it become necessary. Having spent most of his time working on his apprenticeship, he's somewhat neglected his marksmanship training, so he carries only his sidearm for personal defense. Straps stands out for having a bright and sunny personality, an optimist in a sector full of hostile aliens, rebellious colonies, and warp-maddened cultists.

Lastly, there's the ex-Captain Ironwood, now known as Ironhoof. Often irritable, fairly arrogant and abrasive, and by far the oldest serving soldier in the 10th, Ironhoof is the company's Dreadnought. He's completely bulletproof, he's strong enough to go hand-to-hand with minor gods and win, and he's a genius-level tactician. While he's technically a subordinate of Joker, this comes with the implicit caveat that Ironhoof will follow Joker's orders provided Joker doesn't actually give any orders Ironhoof might object to. Joker defers to Ironhoof's wisdom on most serious matters.

I'm thinking we might follow these guys from the time they're first picked, through their patrol routines and calls to action, a period of leave or two, and then close the season with the following scenario:

Joker and company are dropped into a city on an economically-collapsed agriworld, where warlords fight each other and the Imperial governor for power and food resources. The mission of the 10th is simple: capture or kill the most powerful warlord. Make an example of him. Show the others that no place is outside the rule of law. The Marines expect it to be simple and easy. They are terribly, terribly wrong: the warlords unify in the face of an outside threat. The Marines find themselves vastly outnumbered and outgunned by a determined enemy. As their cavalry backup gets pinned and their air support goes down in flames, what they thought would be a cakewalk turns into a thirty-six-hour nightmare. There's no question of completing the mission, only a desperate struggle for survival.

Shamelessly ganked from  littlemacha and her journal:

HOW OLD DO YOU ACT?

[x] You know how to make a pot of coffee.
[ ] You keep track of dates using a calendar.
[x] You own a credit card.
[x] You know how to change the oil in a car.
[x] You've done your own laundry.
[x] You can vote in an election.
[x] You can cook for yourself.
[x] You think politics are interesting. (I'm a taxpayer. I want those yahoos in government to stop wasting my money on corporate subsidies and put it to good use. HCR by reconciliation, baby!)

TOTAL SO FAR: 7

[x] You show up for school late a lot. (D'oh!)
[x] You always carry a pen/pencil in your bag/purse/pocket. (Hell yeah.)
[ ] You've never gotten a detention. (Kidding? I got in trouble all the time for being a smartass and a graffiti artist.)
[x] You have forgotten your own birthday. (March is a busy time.)
[ ] You like to take walks by yourself.
[x] You know what credibility means, without looking it up. (Okay, who doesn't?)
[x] You drink caffeine at least once a week (or at least twice a day, as the case may be).

TOTAL SO FAR: 12

[x] You know how to do the dishes. (It's so simple...)
[x] You can count to 10 in another language (two languages, in fact).
[x] When you say you're going to do something you USUALLY do it.
[x] You can mow the lawn. ("Can" and "do", different things.)
[ ] You study even when you don't have to.
[x] You have hand washed a car before. (Yeah, not just my own, but also in fundraisers for school or student groups.)

TOTAL SO FAR: 17

[x] You can spell experience, without looking it up. (Unfair: I've known how to spell since I was, what, ten?)
[ ] The people at Starbucks know you by name. (Starbucks? Gross! Gimme Chock Full of Nuts any day.)
[ ] Your favorite kind of food is take out. (Hell no, my favorite kind of food is made in the kitchen by me or someone I know.)
[x] You can go to the store without getting something you don't need. (Who has the money, these days?)
[x] You understand political jokes the first time they are said.
[x] You can type pretty quick. (I got banned from an online typing game. It said no human being could possibly be that fast.)

TOTAL SO FAR: 21

[ ] Your only friends are from your place of employment.
[ ] You have been to a Tupperware party.
[x] You have realized that practically no one will take you seriously unless you are over the age of 25 and have a job.
[ ] You have more bills than you can pay.
[x] You have been to the beach.
[x] You use the internet every day.
[x] You have been outside of your home country 3 or more times.
[ ] You make your bed in the morning.

TOTAL SO FAR: 25

[x] You have filed a tax return
[x] You have used a pay phone
[x] You have been served alcohol without being ID'd (when I was 19, even).
[x] You have purchased stamps at the grocery store
[ ] You have purchased a lottery ticket
[ ] You still have and use a VCR.

TOTAL: 29

Hey, it's only three years off.

Tried to make apple crumble; ended up making lots of dense, fragrant smoke, apple-cinnamon-flavored charcoal (I'll need steel wool to clean it out of the Dutch oven) and a fair amount of delicious apple-caramel.

But before I can say that "Hey, I'm open for xyz!" I want to be sure I can actually do it.

So, for the next couple of months, I'll be interested in taking requests: what would you like to see written out into a story (which you haven't the time or inclination to do yourself)? Is there anything?

Do you folks have advice, either legal or general, on interpreting state laws that regulate the production of art?

I would like to know more about the boundaries of obscenity laws and the like in my state, but I'm not sure I fully understand the wording of the relevant statutes. I don't want to hire a lawyer, because that is pretty expensive. I'm just looking for resources that I can access on my own time, either for free or a nominal fee.

It needs to have more than just a cookie-cutter setting, but the setting isn't the big thing. I think the big thing is the characters, the way they think and act, what they have to say. Because really, the plot-lines of a lot of Shakespeare's plays don't require the settings that Wm. Shakespeare put in to be compelling. The relationships between people and the people themselves, that's where it's at.

Wow, just wow [links to BBC].

A plane was diverted to an emergency landing because one of the passengers was an Orthodox Jew who decided to put on t'filin, sometimes also referred to in English as phylacteries. Fellow passengers became confused and declared him a security threat.

It gets better! This comment was posted to a blog story about it:

SOUNDS LIKE A RECIPE FOR A STAMPEDE TO ME

I would get scared if somebody got up and started
preaching or doing a holy dance on the plane.

Get real. Either pray before or pray quietly.

God has his exortations about trying to SEEM Godly.

I dont care who it is. With all the stuff going
on with terrorism it is folly to get on a plane
and get into overt religious activiy.

That would scare my mule altogether. I would hurry
up and get away from that person.

I don't even know what "scare my mule" means.

I think I know why I haven't done anything creative in WEEKS.

I need to have a serious talk with the doctor.

I got in from Ireland yesterday.

They take security seriously in Ireland - the Irish, that is. The TSA and customs/immigration, not so much. Our TSA screening was ridiculous: "Take off your shoes, put them with your bags into the scanner." The operator was having a conversation with someone coming up behind him! Never mind that we were wearing heavy coats over sweatshirts covered in pockets, eh? But Irish airport security had us take all our coats and stuff off, they searched our bags, they asked us serious questions about what we did, where we went and with whom. They smiled, they were polite and even friendly, but they weren't kidding around.

At least someone's looking out for us, eh?

Well, Saturday I'll have to get up early enough to make it to the morning services. We made it home safely, and with minimal inconvenience. I lost my notebook that had half of my notes on the stuff we saw, but so it goes.

Ireland, bitchez

There will be photos.

And possibly also writefaggotry, we'll see.

I wanted to create an interactive story. I'd narrate a setting with a character in it, you (readers) would post with suggested actions, I'd narrate the character's action and subsequent changes in setting.

I tried it on Gaia and FAF. Haven't tried it on /tg/ yet, but I haven't gotten any responses on either Gaia or FAF. Is this just fundamentally not a good idea outside 4chan, have I done something wrong, or have I not whored it out enough?

---unrelated:

I'm introducing a character that I'm fond of. I want to write about transgressions of professionally-required boundaries, about romantic interest where there should be (at best) a warm but distant relationship, about unethical human experiments... I have the last part down, but the first two parts are tricky. I wonder if I should have taken a course in clinical ethics before trying this.

"You've used your Citation to build business," it says. "Now use it to build esteem."

This is an ad in Businessweek by Cessna and the Special Olympics administration (is that J. P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation?) asking people who own, or have as a company resource, a Cessna Citation to donate its use to transport athletes and families from wherever to the site of the Special Olympics this year.

I read Businessweek not because I run a business, or because I am so wealthy I need their advice (I'm a grad student, what do you think?), but because (a) it's well-written and interesting, and (b) a previous resident of this apartment moved, and decided to let the subscription run out for this address and get a new one for his new digs, rather than change his listed address on the existing subscription (because he is wealthy and can afford that). In other words... it's free.

But seriously, even in the business world, are there that many people, or that many firms, that own small airliners (as opposed to contracting with a conventional airline for business travel)? I'm pretty sure that Bank of America, AT&T and IBM, three firms I know a bit about due to family (and having worked for AT&T myself) do the latter; if you need to go cross-country or overseas in a hurry, they'll point you to their favorite airline. Of course, you have to pay up for the ticket, then submit it to your employer as travel expenses.