Hello, Fall Semester. Will you be a bastard like Sping?

Classes are about to start again for all of us lucky bastards who are gambling our future earnings against our mounting debts. Were Henry the one writing this, he’d probably tell me it’s a sucker’s bet, while Mike would tell me that hiding out in an ivory tower is a wonderful way to pass a recession.

I like to view college as a few years of constant anal rape with the hope of a reach around at some point in the future.

That sounds bad, doesn’t it? That’s because I’m pretty burned out on college. And you know what? It wasn’t the classes that burned me out; it wasn’t the idiot students that are a decade younger than me; it wasn’t the professors who manage to go through an entire semester without learning the name of a single person in their class of 16 students; it’s the god damn price.

Up until this point, I’ve been taking out student loans to cover my course, and help a little with bills. I paid rent, bought groceries, and blew fun money from the part time job I had. It wasn’t much, but I was comfortable. My first semester back in school was a breeze. So was my second. By the end of the summer classes, I was beginning to worry. I’m now three years in, a Junior, and all I do is worry. Tuition has skyrocketed under Texas’s orgy of deregulation, and there’s no end in sight. I’m going to be in school for at least another year and a half unless something derails me, and more and more, that’s looking like it’s going to be the money situation. I had to take out a massive loan this year to make sure I can pay my rent while in class, because the jobs I’m finding in town are really damn hard on full time students

I am paying almost 400 dollars more for 12 hours of class this semester than I did last Spring. That wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t paying close to 175% of what I did three years ago.

When/if I graduate, will I even be able to pay off this massive debt in the following decade? Will I be paying off my student loans into my 40s? I think so.

Am I alone in this almost crippling worry? I’d like to hear what you internet heathens and social networking savages have to say about it.

Where has Sam been?

I’ve been gone for about a month and a half. What you didn’t notice the decline in the site’s level of profanity? Well, fuck you!

I got laid off a month and a half ago and suddenly I had nothing to say. It was depressing, really. I got laid off from a shitty, low paying, part time job in a filthy building that was giving me health problems like the first 20 minutes of Joe Vs. The Volcano.

I was working for a form printing company called Gulf here in town, and while it was by no means an ideal job, it allowed me to do stuff like Pay The Fucking Rent and to occasionally Pay My Goddamn Bills On Time. I took the job with them because I’m in college and needed to work at a place with semi-flexible hours from semester to semester.

I’ve spent the month doing odd jobs and freelance to pa my bills, but with the fall semester about to start, it’s going to get very hard to scrape by. I’ve been looking for freelance work on oDesk.com as a writer/editor/proofreader, but I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to compete with people in the Philippines who are willing to badly do what I do well for a dollar an hour.

I’ve also been applying for anything I could find that would allow me to make enough money to live off of and go to college at the same time. So far, no luck.

This is going to be an interesting couple of months for me, I think.

The 2nd Story for NYC Midnight

So, Monday I leave Texas for Oregon, which in today’s mad, mad world somehow manages to be on my way to England. Before that I wanted to share the 2nd flash story of the competition.

Title: A Place to Keep Them

Genre: Ghost Story

Object: Horseshoe

Place: Circus

SYNOPSIS: A young man on a first date becomes unexpectedly bound to the latest object of his affection, a free-spirit with a collection even more odd than his own.

Continue reading →

How I imagine it goes….

“You know, I really want to write something, like, deep and meaningful about MMOs or video games or something.”

“Yeah?  That’s cool.  You wanna, like, start looking at stuff to see what you should write about?”

“Nah, that’s a lot of work.  I think I’ll write about, um, you know, like, girls.  And video games.  And why there aren’t any girls that play video games.  Cause that’s cool, and also, like, girls would think it was sensitive and stuff.”

“Dude, you know that, like, studies and stuff show that more women play games than ever before, right?  That now it’s more an issue of finding out what games girls enjoy, and treating them like, better?”

“Eh, I dunno.  I think everyone knows that girls don’t play games.  I mean, like, when I’m all ‘Hey, are any of you guys girls?’ no one ever answers me.”

“Okay, so, should we like, go do some research and stuff?  I bet there are some studies and things out there….”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure I can figure it out.  I know a lot about being a girl.  I play one in WoW most of the time.”

I’m pretty sure it’s about 100% like that.

Shojo Beat Canceled

Apparently I’m not keeping up with my anime and manga news as much as I should be, because Shonen Jump arrived in the mail today with a letter stating that Shojo Beat has been canceled by Viz Media!

For those non-manga fans, in Japan people tend to purchase magazine collections of serialized comics that are often categorized based on their target audience, the most common being shojo (girls) and shonen (boys). Here’s a breakdown of the most common types of manga– note that readership is not necessarily constrained by target demographic. Here’s Shojo Beat’s definition of shojo:

Shojo (show-joe) means “girl” in Japanese. Shojo manga are often characterized by a moody, abstract art style, with close-ups of characters’ faces intermingling with dreamy backdrops. In contrast to action-oriented shonen (boys’) manga, shojo manga ruminate on themes of emotion, love, identity, and responsibility that often play out internally. That said, shojo manga are by no means just for girls. Shojo stories are about aspects of life that concern everyone—boys and girls, old and young. Note: The word shojo normally appears with a circumflex or macron over the first o, as in shôjo; we removed it for the sake of simplicity and readability in the magazine.

American companies and distributors have attempted to release similar magazines in the US; earlier examples are Viz’s Animerica Extra and Pulp, and TokyoPop’s (then Mixx) Mixx-zine and Smile magazines. Smile even had the same “girls” demographic as Shojo Beat and was a home of Sailor Moon for awhile. (As a side note, back in those days I had the opportunity to interact with some of the people at Mixx, which had it’s own bizarre internal politics and public controversy that might be worth examining.) None of those magazines are around anymore, but Viz’s serialized publications eventually became Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat. Holly and I were big fans, and are pretty disappointed with the news. It sounds like others might be disappointed as well. We were automatically subscribed to Shonen Jump for the remainder of our subscription, but we canceled that; Shonen Jump has never had stories that really interested us quite as much.

This departure leaves the American serialized comics market pretty bare- the only thing we’re subscribing to now is Yen Plus, which is nothing if not diverse with Japanese, Korean and American stories for different audiences. Yen Plus has an unfortunate tendency to use their magazine for what is basically advertising- that is, they’ll show a graphic novel’s worth of stories from a particular title to try to get you to buy the graphic novel series and then drop the title. Despite that, it’s got some interesting stuff, particularly if you’ve got diverse tastes.

NYC Midnight Flash Fic Story #1

So I entered the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction contest for the second year. Flash fiction is a short story that uses 1,000 or fewer words. I made the finals last year, but failed to place. More importantly, it was a fun way to generate some solid story starts in a variety of genres.

Here is story one from this year’s contest.

The required prompts were

Would You Like to Play a Game?

Okay, as many who read this blog know by now, I’m relocating my family to Leeds in August. We’re taking about six suitcases with us to the United Kingdom, which leaves 95% of our belongings in storage. I can’t stand my board games sitting in storage for a year or more, pieces silent and dice still. So I’m offering them to foster homes while I’m in the UK.

Kurt wanted a list of all my games, but I’m a little busy for that, so I let my iPhone do the heavy lifting. Here are all my games. Let me know if you want to drop by and use them for a few dozen months.

Just click an image to see the games in detail.

Hall of Fame Weekend II

lognhornI’m not a big baseball fan, but after last weekend’s once-in-a-lifetime NCAA Austin Regional, I had to buy tickets to the Super Regional. 

For those who don’t know, last Saturday the University of Texas and Boston College played the longest baseball game in NCAA history, 25-innings and over seven hours. Austin Woods provided the real drama, however, picthing 13 innings of no-hitter ball. The President of Vince Young University called Woods’ overture the single greatest athletic performance in school history. We’re really hoping Woods can replace Roger Clemens as the greatest picther Texas has ever produced. Seriously, I need a voodoo doll for this purpose.

Better, on Sunday, a worn out UT team entered the bottom of the 9th-inning down 10-6 to Army in the Regional Championship game. The longhorns rallied to first tie Army 10-10, and then won the game on a walk-off grand slam that left the score 14-10 in favor of Texas. Monday, it was announced that Woods’ cap would be going into the Baseball Hall of Fame in honor of the 25-inning victory.

So my son and I are heading to game 2 of the Super Regional between Texas and TCU to see who goes to Omaha. We expect a good game, but it couldn’t possibly approach the drama of last weekend? I mean that would be greedy, right? Like VY stealing two Rose Bowls greedy.

Here’s a little bit from the historic game.