Kerry Allen

If you pitch a hissy fit all over the news because a CARTOON takes a swipe at your favorite political ticket, and subsequently contend, “It’s just a stupid cartoon, nobody cares, it can’t hurt us,” you have successfully completed the transformation from Drama Llama™ to Hippo Crit™ (major characters in the upcoming Media Circus™ collectible card game). If nobody cares and it’s not hurting you, you shouldn’t be calling attention to it. And if people do care and it is hurting you, you still shouldn’t be calling attention to it, because it wouldn’t have gone viral if you hadn’t, and far fewer people would be laughing at you now.

Also, if you tell your supporters to steal your opponent’s signs as a “tangible expression of their loyalty,” you might also consider telling them not to go on the national news to announce that you told your supporters to steal your opponent’s signs as a “tangible expression of their loyalty.” Adding “thievery” to the ”racism” and “misogyny” and “widespread, generalized hate” themes at the parties you host scrapes a little extra altitude off the moral high ground you claim to be running on. In case you hadn’t noticed, the only people you’re impressing with this tactic are of the increasingly unsavory variety.

But keep it up, by all means. Your embassadors of ill will are scaring the waverers in a direction I heartily approve.

Very truly the other guy’s,

Ker

I gave up on the UF I’d been struggling to read for over a week because the protag is irredeemably, infuriatingly oblivious.

Let’s say… you’re in a situation in which someone is launching attacks against you that are becoming increasingly hazardous to your health. Around the fourth or fifth such attack… your left arm is magically turned into Skittles. You seek magical medical attention from a powerful sorcerer-type dude who’s on the same side you’re on but doesn’t like you very much, and the feeling is mutual. The powerful sorcerer-type dude who doesn’t like you very much never asks, “Hey, putz, how’d your arm get turned into Skittles?”

Would that not cause you to wonder at some point why powerful sorcerer-type dude who doesn’t like you very much DIDN’T ask what happened? Even if you’re such a little pissant to him, he can’t muster an inkling of curiosity about your peculiar affliction, wouldn’t you think an explanation would be helpful toward CURING it? Wouldn’t you think the lack of asking indicated some preexisting knowledge, like, I don’t know, the sort of preexisting knowledge that might arise from being in cahoots with the one who Skittlefied your arm?

For that matter, rewind a little bit. If your left arm got turned into Skittles, wouldn’t you be telling as many people as possible, “Dude! LOOK what that crazy sumbitch Bob did to my friggin’ arm!”, without even being asked?

Which brings us to another problem: repeated failure to share information between characters. The very first time it happened, I rolled my eyes because it was so blatant. Flashback: Gee, if only that waiter hadn’t interrupted us that time my mentor was infodumping about just this scenario, I’d know how to get out of it now that it’s happening to me. How inconvenient that we didn’t resume that incredibly important conversation after he capped off our coffee. By the fourth or fifth time, it was obvious the big mystery could have been solved and all the trouble resolved by Chapter Three if protag would just divulge information to the people who are far more capable of handling the situation than he is, so the continuation of the story is entirely dependent upon one character or another’s inability to complete a sentence.

But let’s get back to the obliviousness for a second, shall we? When repeated attempts have been made on your life, would you think it’s remotely a good idea to have sex with and sleep in the bed of and consume food prepared by a total stranger? See, for me, any one of those things would require at least a smidgen of trust, which I would have some trouble manufacturing on a stranger’s behalf right then, given the circumstances of multiple recent near-death experiences.

But why would the protag worry? He’s exhibited all the reasoning skills of a houseplant for the last 200 pages and come off none the worse for wear, except for a few Skittles. Clearly, nothing really bad is going to happen to him.

And even if something really bad DOES happen, IT’LL BE OKAY! Because someone more powerful, more knowledgable, and generally more competent will be along shortly to save him, like they have for the last 200 pages every time he’s aimlessly wandered into some potentially fatal situation 10 seconds after being warned about just such a potentially fatal situation!

I suppose it could be worse. At least it’s a male character being TSTL for a change.

I find it completely implausible that the villain has any interest in the protag because the protag is useless. You don’t become the Badass Evil Overlord by exterminating the village idiot.

And, contrary to how I suspect the rest of this book goes, the village idiot does not miraculously defeat the Badass Evil Overlord in the final minute of the darkest hour.

I’m going to imagine his dog does and spare myself further irritation by tossing this one in the donation box.

I decided yesterday to save a few bucks by not renewing my contact lenses and just nerding my way through life with my glasses.

About twenty minutes later, the frames of said glasses succumbed to metal fatigue, and not in a place I could tape together like all the stylin’ geeks do.

I had the clever idea of simply having the lenses ground down to fit the cheapest available frames.

Because I have a superpowered prescription and have never been able to afford the superthin $400 flat lenses, we’ve always used the smallest frame we could find to prevent them from being half an inch thick around the edges and breaking my nose with their immense weight.

We went through literally every frame at the optician, trying to find one the right shape and size that these lenses could be made to fit.

The only frames small enough to work were $280 some-designer-or-other.

(Also butt-ugly, but if they’d been $20, I wouldn’t be making an issue of that. Designer butt-ugly is just as butt-ugly as generic butt-ugly, and I reserve the right to mercilessly ridicule any schmuck who shells out $280 for butt-ugly frames because there’s some fancy name stamped on the earpiece.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah.

I can get THREE YEARS of contact lenses for $280!

So I ponied up for one box of contacts and made this OMG-do-not-show-your-face-in-public-ever repair to the glasses for 2 a.m. dog excursions and other not-worth-sticking-my-finger-in-my-eye-for-this occasions:

Smartical corgi iz stufft wit nollej!

That’s right. Scotch tape and toothpicks.

SUPER GEEK CHIC!

You know you’re jealous.

First thing—credit where credit is due for the following specimen of riveting comment spam: msLourena @ IP: 212.219.203.22, who clearly is a rising star in the arena of spamrotica. Darlin’, you should not be giving this stuff away for free!

Within the past couple of years, a company I used to work for has participated in vigorous “job creation,” creating FIFTEEN THOUSAND NEW JOBS!

IN INDIA!

They started small, only a thousand jobs or so, but when they saw that an Indian worker would accept as a yearly salary what one of their American employees expected for a week’s work, they decided to dramatically expand their “overseas resources.”

Now, they did give their American workforce every opportunity to become more fiscally attractive employees. They forced every American employee to part-time so the company didn’t have to offer benefits. They did an across-the-board pay cut. They “upgraded” to a “better” network that may have had a few bugs, but they almost always had it working again within eight hours, so all those impossible Americans had to do was work a different shift at a moment’s notice.

But NOOOOOOOO, those selfish, greedy Americans thought they were too good for those conditions and abandoned ship en masse, clearly leaving the company no choice but to resort entirely to foreign labor.

That company’s American workforce currently consists of about 30 people at the corporate office. And they are RAKING in the moolah because they’re paying their “overseas resources” 10 percent of the previous payroll while continuing to charge their clients 100 percent for their services.

The shareholders are pissing themselves with glee and cleaning up the mess with hundred dollar bills.

Meanwhile, 9.5 million Americans (the equivalent of the entire population of Georgia, the ninth most populous state in the nation) are jobless—2.2 million of those added within the last 12 months.

Gosh and by golly, what could the problem be, since corporate America is busily creating jobs to earn them thar tax breaks and keep the economy thriving?

Um… I’m no economist, but with my mad skillz at recognizing obvious cause-and-effect, I deduce that while creating jobs in China and India and Mexico is probably doing fabulous things to the economy in China and India and Mexico and fabulous things to the bank accounts of the corporate bigwigs, it’s not doing a damn thing for the American economy or the American worker. And when the corporate bigwig buys his German-made sportscar and his summer mansion in the French Riviera, his largesse isn’t “trickling down” to the middle or—god forbid—the lower class in America.

So unless there’s a stipulation that all this fabulous “job creation” is taking place IN AMERICA associated with any tax favoritism toward the wealthy, I don’t believe they should get a tax break. In fact, I think they should be taxed for every job they outsource until such a time when there are not enough Americans to fill the number of jobs they need to fill.

The government has been accepting Big Business’s kickbacks and kissing its ass for many, many years now, and it’s brought us to economic collapse. The model obviously isn’t working, so let’s not put it back together with a paperclip and Scotch tape and pretend that will get us back on track.

Incidentally, rich old white men patting me on the head and saying “I know best” absolutely enrage me like few other things can.