An open letter to our bass-loving neighbor:
Congratulations! You truly are the most inconsiderate apartment resident who has ever lived. Your incessant use of whatever it is that causes the ultra-low-frequency rumble really demonstrates how incomprehensibly rude you are.
I pray every night that you are forcibly sodomized by howler monkeys with HIV. I’m sure I’m not the only person in this building who longs to see your bloated corpse, festering in the noonday sun, with the shattered wreckage of – what? Is it a speaker that makes that noise? The world’s largest sex toy? – the noisemaking monstrosity protruding from your rotting skull.
In short, you are a fucking retard. You are a Hefty bag full of crap who deserves nothing better than to be dragged face-down on a gravel road with your feet nailed to a truck bumper. If there is ever a fire in this building, I seriously hope that you are trapped in your apartment by the mysterious noisemaking device blocking the door.
Eat a bowl of dicks.
Your neighbors
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That time between 3:00 AM and 4:00 AM has always been a magic time for me. Most of the night people are winding down for bed, and most of the day people haven't awakened yet. It's very peaceful in its solitude.
Peaceful, that is, unless you're sitting at your PC, bleary-eyed, desperately clicking that Stumble! button and hoping for gold.
I can usually find it, too. And when I do, I'm compelled to send it to my wife and friends. Last night must have been a surprise; I sent out at least 10 Stumbles. I didn't get to bed until 5:45. And I got back up at 10:00, so of course, what's the first thing I did? Stumble.
Soon I hope to be free of this stumbling prison. Just as soon as I've seen every lolcat, hot chick, and viral video on the internets.
That can't take too long...right?
Right?
I'm a fan of alternate history. Like most people, I'm also a fan of free stuff. When I found out that Baen publishing had a free library full of books, I wandered over to give it a look-see.
That's how I discovered Eric Flint and Dave Weber's 1632. The shtick is pretty straightforward: what if a coal-mining town in West Virginia suddenly and inexplicably (at least, inexplicably to the characters; you get to know the full story (hooray, dramatic irony!)) were swapped with a correspondingly-sized patch of Thüringen, Germany, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War? How would that change the face of European culture in the mid-seventeenth century?
I inhaled the book. Voraciously. Sure, some of the dialog is a little stilted, and some of the characters are there more for exposition than character development, but it's fascinating to see how modern democratic ideals are received among the populace of a Europe that was much more brutal than we imagine it to have been. Writing that last sentence also brought to mind a point — verb tenses necessarily take something of a beating from the characters. How does one describe the words Cardinal Richelieu would have spoken in 1640, in a universe where the West Virginians did not appear (the in-story name for the event is the "Ring of Fire")? Or how about Mark Twain? The man won't be born for another 200 or so years, but he's already dead. But I digress.
After I inhaled 1632, I moved on to 1633 (big shocker in the naming convention there), which is also available for free. Then I purchased 1634: The Galileo Affair. The Ring of Fire universe has become too big and complex for a single book to hold the whole story, so the authors have multiple books telling concurrent stories from different places in Europe. (Only in Europe, so far, but who knows what the future will hold?) On Wednesday, before I saw the sneak preview of The Transformers (I won't be reviewing it until it's out in theaters so that I don't spoil anything), I picked up 1634: The Baltic War. Included inside was a free CD, jam-packed with all of Eric Flint's writings under Baen's imprimatur. Totally free. In fact, the CD specifically says on the outside that I'm encouraged to copy and distribute the stories, as long as I'm not selling them. How fucking amazing is that?
Baen has just created a devoted fan. I'm going to be buying every one of the Ring of Fire books, because even if I can get them for free, I want to support the folks who make the content. This is a rights management scheme for the modern world. This is the sort of thing that makes people heroes to the geeks. This is damned smart marketing.
Oh, and another thing that's awesome about the Ring of Fire stories is that expansion upon the universe is encouraged. Fans are actually supplied with pretty much all the materials that they need to write stories in 1634. The cream of the fanfic crop get published in a series of compendia called The Grantville Gazette, Grantville being the podunk West Virginian coal mining town whose arrival in 1632 creates the nucleus of the story.
I'm not always a fan of the quality of open-source work — a quick perusal of all the abandoned crapware at SourceForge should be enough of an explanation — but for every thousand or so shitty text editors, you get something like the Gimp popping up. The Ring of Fire series is kind of the Gimp for alt-history/SF stories.
If you want a copy of the CD, and you're reading this post, you probably know me in person. Ask me for a copy of the CD, and it's yours. Gratis.
I'm off to hunt for skins and plugins to make more spiffier. Huzzah.