October 2014

Ebola? What ebola?

You have nothing to worrEBOLAbout.

The wife and I always talk about “movie moments,” those bizarre/humorous/impossible experiences one would think are too bizarre/humorous/impossible to occur in real life. Today I went to the doctor for my first physical in several years. Upon entering the large lobby area, I immediately noticed that the admins and nurses behind the wide counter were all wearing gloves and disposable surgical masks. I’d been to this place numerous times before and knew it wasn’t the norm. When it was my turn to check in at the counter, I was standing beside a woman also checking in with the second admin….

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AHAHAH—wait, Breaking Bad toys were at Toys R Us?

A Florida mom got enough signers on a Change.org petition to pressure Toys R Us into pulling a line of Breaking Bad toys from the shelves. I’m sure there are plenty of “bad message” toys still on those shelves that people could point to and say “How is this acceptable?” and we could do that all day. As a boy (yes, still) I can speak from experience that the coolest toys will almost always be the ones that concerned moms will abhor. We want badasses with guns and giant beastie things with movable jaws that can rip open the stomachs of…

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Reviews and the Art of Dignified Silence

The Gordon Ramsay show Kitchen Nightmares’ most popular episode features Amy’s Baking Company and its—I’ll say—passionate owners, Samy and Amy. Prior to the episode airing, the couple was known to occasionally scream at customers, kick people out, and attack negative reviewers on Yelp. Since the episode’s premiere in 2013, and the onslaught of new (probably mostly) trolling reviews on Yelp, death threats, legal actions, and so on, the pair have decided to take a more strategic approach to their upset customers, public detractors, and instigators: they scream at customers, kick people out, and attack negative reviewers on Yelp. While their…

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2 Deals in 1 Day?!? What is this madness?

Though this sort of thing risks some kind of temporal rift tearing open above a major city’s most recognizable landmark, we’re going ahead with it anyway. 1. Frederick is Free for Kindle. And not just to borrow, to own. No strings attached, just go to Amazon’s A Warm Place to Call Home (a demon’s story) page, click Buy, and it’s yours for zero dollars. Asinine, I know. Spread the word. 2. The Dig is $0.99 from BookBub, and that’s for every device: Kindle, Nook, iPad, Kobo, Blackberry (just kidding, haha, Blackberry lol). Go to BookBub site. Pretty exciting for a…

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Welcome to the new site!

Howdy! How ’bout these new digs?! I’m a nerd so all things shiny and/or animated always grab me, but so too does simplicity. This site is built on the WordPress platform, so I can now make sweeping changes, add content, and create blog posts like this one directly from my phone. Mobile device users visiting the site will receive pages scaled perfectly for their screens without the need to zoom or tap a tiny link surrounded by other tiny links. If you like the site, you should be able to post a comment below, or if you find something funky…

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The Amazon Exclusivity talk…

It hasn’t been easy deciding whether to accept Amazon’s persistent push for authors to sell exclusively through them. For those who don’t know the background, Amazon provides certain benefits to authors who enroll in KDP Select, such as inclusion in the Kindle Owners Lending Library (“KOLL”, through which Amazon Prime members, once a month, may “borrow” any participating ebook for free), Kindle Unlimited (“KU”, a new subscription service which offers unlimited Kindle books for a flat $9.99 a month), KDP All-Stars (a new monthly bonus plan, paid on top of regular royalties), as well as certain marketing/merchandising opportunities like “Free…

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