The Adventures of Salaried Man!

"To create a little flower is the labour of ages." - William Blake

Well, hell, ain't that the truth. I am proud to say that finally, after much time and effort, I have finally become a working stiff. My warm body will fuel the capitalistic machine and integrate itself into the great American Dream.

My wonderful internship (thanks Kelley!) at White Wolf Publishing has finally blossomed into a beautiful flower that is a paycheck. I'll be doing sales and marketing for DriveThruRPG, which sells .PDF (digital copies) of roleplaying game books. It's housed in the same offices as my internship, so I won't have to move my cubicle stuff far, if at all. Click the image above and BUY LOTS OF STUFF!!

Basically I'll be acquiring and maintaining publishers to host their products on our site. There are a couple things down the road that I'll be handling as well, but they might be top secret. So you'll just have to wait! I'll also be doing some traveling throughout the year on the company buck--to gaming conventions.

I know, I know. It's a rough life. But somebody's got to live it.

This post might be edited later with more info, but right now I'm off to finish up some ongoing projects for my internship.

Two-Times-Twitching Double Peace Signs

As my wife will attest, few things are driving me crazier these days than the way the news is delivered. Don't get me wrong, NPR actually does a good job, even if they interrupt every third sentence with a plea for money. Every once and a while I'll get a smattering of BBC or some regular print media that's worthwhile. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have more substance than that of which I speak.

CNN and FoxNews. I don't watch a lot of Fox News for obvious reasons. But CNN's Headline News and CNN.com are a few of the primary ways I receive information about the world around me. And it is weighing on my soul. They are all guilty (video link!). Every last one of them!

I speak of course, of the "Flying Tomato" Syndrome. Or, as the title of this post explains, the exessive use of quotation marks around items they consider newsworthy. I've been noticing it for a long time, but it wasn't till they started covering the Winter Olympics in Torino (remember this Bode Miller!) that I realized the full extent of the destruction wrought. Poor Shaun White, skateboarder extraordinaire and now-holder of one of those wondrous gold medals. He doesn't even know who he is anymore, as news reporters stopped calling him Shaun White and affixed the name "Flying Tomato" to him as a story hook and something that's supposed to make middle-aged-women-of-the-heartland-smile. I doubt any of his fans are middle-aged women.

Granted, most of the local news is actually gloom and doom. But there's some substance, some explaining of the world around us and the interaction between people. As far as I'm concerned, celebrities don't deserve news unless they do something good. The cult of personality needs to end at MTV for those without any real political power, especially if its just an exploration of their relationships. For the past two weeks or so there's been a top running story about the Cruise baby. Will he eat it alive? Does he keep Katie Holmes locked in a cage? It's name confuses Jewish people (audio link)? NOT news. There's a video of "Baby, dad, grandpa share birthday" but not of " Nepal protests give way to joy" on CNN.com right now.

So while it seems to be a severe prioritizing problem, is it really? I know that bashing 24-hour news cycles is becoming quotidian. But it is necessary. It is a business. The News is just as much a part of our education as adults as evolution/creationism is for our kids. People pick sides, but it is important. But nobody seems up in arms about the disturbing divergence from real journalism it has taken. It has become damn emasculated and fluffified. There's little or no coverage of warfare like we had in Vietnam. No pictures allowed of even the caskets of soldiers killed in combat. I haven't seen one story about a war veteran who was injured in combat. These are some of the most important stories of our time, and instead we get space taken up with "Teen diver bangs head on diving board". Blech.

Apologies for not updating this more recently in the past couple months. I've been a busy busy bee at work.