All entries written in December, 2010
December 31, 2010 at 9:01 am · Filed under Personal, Thoughts
Happy preemptive New Year! First things first–let me remind you that the coupon for The Gauntlet is still good until January 15th. It makes an already-cheap book even cheaper, so…what’s not to like? Just enter code RESOLUTION305 when you check out on Lulu. Go for it! Go for it, I say!
Christmas was okay. My immediate family and I ended the night by playing an hours-long game of Trivial Pursuit (which my father eventually won, much to my mother’s chagrin). But here’s the thing that made it really amusing–this was my parents’ barely-used edition of Trivial Pursuit from the very beginning of their marriage. So when you got a question like, “What’s the world’s largest airline?”, you really had to ask yourself, “What was the world’s largest airline in like 1980?” As you can imagine, this put my sister and I at a huge disadvantage. We’re talking about cards had a weird obsession with Humphrey Bogart. It was uncanny.
I had planned to return to the city Sunday evening, but I woke up to a driving snowstorm that didn’t let up until I was hiking through calf-deep drifts on the way to and from my friend’s house. Enlisting the help of my dad and sister the next morning, I was able to free my car from the driveway with surprisingly little trouble, and by noon, I was on my way toward the intractable madness of Queens.
Keep reading….
December 24, 2010 at 9:00 am · Filed under Personal, Reviews, Thoughts
This post is almost entirely for my sister. Since she was a little girl, she’s made a point of watching a mini-marathon of Christmas specials every year–many of them off my parents’ original 80s and 90s-era VHS tapes! For my money, the best parts are often the ancient commercials, many of which describe stores and products that have long since ceased to exist. I’ve gotten the jingle for “Faz” toy jewelry (which contained embedded cosmetics) stuck in my head several times over the years, and I’m convinced that an old episode of Sealab 2021 (the one about TinFins) makes reference to this even older commercial for a cereal called “Crispy Critters.”
Anyway, in the spirit of the season, here’s a list of several highlights from my sister’s yearly marathon. See how many of these you remember!
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December 18, 2010 at 6:44 pm · Filed under Announcements
As if it wasn’t cheap enough already! Lulu seems to have randomly selected The Gauntlet, book one of School Kids SG, for a 15% off promotion. Just enter code RESOLUTION305 at checkout. I’m certain this will work on the print version of the book, but feel free to try it on the downloadable version, too–if Lulu will take it, the already-low price of $2 will go down to an insane $1.69.
Merry Christmas!
December 10, 2010 at 9:01 am · Filed under On SKSG, Personal, Reviews, Thoughts
First things first–I’d like to remind you all of that $2 book offer I’ve had up for the last week or so. You can click on either the obvious ad or the normal link to the Store, both of which are just a few pixels to your left. Go on, go for it!
If you’ve been coming to this site for a while, you may remember seeing mention of the document-scanning project I’ve been working on for well over a year now. The most daunting thing about it that I haven’t brought up before is that I’m constantly generating new papers that need to be scanned, in the form of memo books and other handwritten notes. This leaves me with a conundrum: on the one hand, if I decide that I have to scan everything, I virtually guarantee (a) that I will be scanning stuff forever and ever, and (b) that I will wear out my scanner long before its time. Besides, constantly scanning or typing things up usually feels like a big chore–most nights, I’d rather be writing new stuff. But on the other hand, if I don’t scan everything, I risk accidentally losing a portion of my work irrevocably (due to fire, theft, or something else horrible), and as long as all my notebooks are the only copies of themselves in existence, I absolutely have to keep them all around in my apartment, which really isn’t big enough to support the amount of paper I generate indefinitely. I’d thought for a while about using that travel laptop I bought to replace any and all future notebooks, but I just couldn’t get around the fact that I like writing longhand.
My solution: the Livescribe Smartpen.
Keep reading….
December 3, 2010 at 9:00 am · Filed under Announcements
Yes, the all-caps is warranted, because finally, at long last, book one of School Kids SG has returned to the store!
This isn’t your younger brother’s The Gauntlet. The book has been completely revamped with new fonts that match the ones seen in books two and three, a new back cover in line with my recent rebranding, and best of all, some “director’s cut” style tightening of the original, seven-year-old text. Those of you who have already bought or read the book, have no fear: the story is still the same, with all the same events and characters you remember. But for any newcomers who may be reading this, there’s never been a better time to get into School Kids SG!
And that’s not all! As promised, the return of book one comes with an even bigger announcement–you can now buy a digital PDF edition of any School Kids SG volume for the amazing introductory price of $2 each! Just in time for the holidays! A PDF download isn’t exactly the same thing as an e-book, but I have it on good authority that some e-readers can handle the PDF format just fine, and in any case, this is the most wallet-friendly way to enjoy SKSG. Of course, if you like the look and feel of having a book on your shelf, that’s still available, too.
Oh, yeah. When I start posting infrequently, you know something big’s going down. I hope this has been worth the wait. I’ll be launching a sizeable promotions campaign over the next few weeks, so consider this your press release. You saw it here first!
