You would think we'd get a new privacy law at least once every five years, just to keep up with technological advances, but no. Instead our corporate overlords, not content in forcing us to give up our data, now demand their God Cameras be placed all over the world so they can keep us under constant surveillance--cradle-to-grave omniscience--so they can flat-out raid our cars and phones for every…
Would you look at that beautiful cover? In related news, I have a new book out! DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF LOVE? is now available! From the back cover: "Do you believe in the power of love?" This is the question that faces Nelson Jeffries, a man in desperate need of money. His answer leads him to Ania, a Polish immigrant studying to be a nurse. Her visa is about to expire, and she absolutely…
So you've decided to suck up to AI companies. Life is hard for human beings. It's so much easier to surrender your agency to a machine. Thinking is hard! You don't want to put yourself through that. Besides, the techbros have our best interests at heart. That's why they get up every morning, to make life easier for us NPCs. They would never let AI give you bad advice. Of course, they're also CEOs…
Not too long ago I overheard a conversation in the waiting room at the doctor's office. An older couple were talking about how everyone had anxiety today. Anxiety here, anxiety there. We're all living in a state of anxiety. It wasn't like that when we were kids. What is going on with this shit? My first thought was, back when you were kids, admitting to anxiety was not just frowned upon, it was…
A loooooooooong time back I wrote a GF about how I'm among the last people who know who Laurel and Hardy were. Same for George Burns and Milton Berle and everyone else from back then who are about to pass into obscurity. At the time I wrote it I thought this was a fucking crime, but now that I'm pushing fifty? I believe it's just the way she goes, to quote a great philosopher. Young people today…
The laundry room where I live recently swapped out their old washers and dryers for new models. I later learned they did this because they were selling the complex and wanted to get a better price, but that's not today's gripe. The old machines used cards for payment. The new ones require an app. Because the future is not your friend, I ran into a terrible problem yesterday. I filled up the washer…
If you were to ask me for the best word to describe myself, I'd choose "reader." I do not remember a time when I was not constantly reading. My mom told me my first word was not mama (much to her chagrin) but book . I've often wondered why reading is so important to me. I suspect it was because both Mom and Dad were voracious readers. Dad didn't read around me because he only had me for an…
I always talk about how the world is currently the tire fire to end all tire fires, and I'm not the only one. I'm not in the habit of pointing out the obvious, but I say it because I'm always trying to remind people to find their fun. Fun isn't going to knock on your door and present itself, wearing its Sunday's finest and giving you a firm and vigorous handshake. Unless you're into that sort of…
I have a shit-ton more excerpts from my Playboy collection that might be of interest to us now, in the modern world, as opposed to, say, 20+ years ago when I first got them. So here's a few interesting images: You can probably guess that was written by Hunter S. Thompson. It was a letter to Hef celebrating the 50th anniversary of the magazine, but it might as well have been written 5 minutes ago.…
My first author photo. Whenever I talk with a friend I haven't heard from in a while, as I did recently, they inevitably say something along the lines of how they thought for sure my drinking was going to kill me. There are a lot of people out there surprised by the fact that I'm still alive. I am one of those people. As of today it's been four years since my last drink. It's been four…
I remember when I saw the movie, 12 Monkeys, in the theater on opening night. It was a perfect time travel flick, and it made sense 100% of the, uh, time, which is unusual for such fare. If you want to impress friends with movie trivia, did you know that one of the two writers of this movie also wrote Unforgiven? Anyway, when they announced a TV series was being made out of it, I had to wonder…
