Well, you lot appear to have done the trick - “ficlets guy” Kevin Lawyer have emailed me regarding Blondie Babe’s ratings and comments:
Hey, I’ve sent Barbie Babe a note. I can’t delete the comments right now, but will look at all of her comments on Monday morning and see about deleting them.
Thanks for your reports!
Kevin Lawver
ficlets guy
Thanks to those of you who helped - you can stop now! 
Here are the ficlets I’ve written since my last update. Again, they’re accompanied by the opening line.
Head games (a sequel to One Little Push) - Nov 28th
Perhaps he should have been worried.
To Serve Man - Nov 29th
The kettle begins to whistle, and before the sound has a chance to pick up any real volume the droid lifts it off the small gas heater and pours hot water into the teacup, then uses the remaining contents to fill up a hot water bottle.
Booze for Thought - Nov 30th
“Your problem,” said Jake, “Is that y’dunno ‘ow to communicate.”
Help! Some teenage Neanderthal has buggered up my Ficlets account!
She, the intellectually-challenged Blondie Babe, accomplished this by going into every single one of my stories and giving them a single-star rating, as well as leaving a few bitter comments. This has skewed the Average Mark of each of my stories, which isn’t really fair, is it?
Why has she done this?
She did this because I dared to give two of her ficlets - the matchless epic “the outcome of divorce part two“, and her latest magnum opus, “hi” - poor marks. Actually, I only gave one a poor mark. I left a sarcastic comment on the other. Even still, my primary criticism of her work is that it isn’t work at all - these aren’t stories, and in most cases they aren’t even anything. They appear for the most part to be constructed mostly from random jabs at the keyboard with the sausages attached to her baboon-like hands, only occasionally resembling anything coherent, and even then only by accident.
What can you do?
You can help by going onto her Ficlets page and, rather than giving her stories negative marks, reporting them as Offensive, making sure to state why you’re doing it. For clarification, it’s because she’s mostly posting spam, and also because of her bitter attack on my account. Please make this absolutely clear in your Report, and please DO NOT DO REPORT ALL OF HER STORIES. We don’t want to stoop to her level - one or two will suffice (I’d recommend the aforementioned “hi” and this monstrosity, although feel free to pick and choose your own).
What if you’re not registered on Ficlets?
If you have an OpenID (such as a LiveJournal account) or an AIM/AOL account, you can sign in to Ficlets using those. I’d like to suggest those of you with a literary mind stick around on Ficlets and give it a go yourself, because it is tremendous fun when there aren’t mindless teenage arseburgers trying to ruin it for the rest of us.
Cheers for the help, people.
As much fun as I had in England visiting friends and family, there was this horrible feeling I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t anything to do with the people I was with, but rather it was about England, about Luton. It felt uncomfortable, it felt nasty, and it felt unsafe.
There’s an image most Brits like to have of Americans: by most Brits’ standards, Americans are generally loutish, selfish, intolerant and racist. I can’t speak for the majority of America but so far as California is concerned I’ve yet to see any evidence of this intolerance. It’s telling of British society today that within an hour of landing at Heathrow Airport and getting on a coach, someone shouted “Oi! Ginga!” at me, with the obligatory soft-Gs. it was, frankly, sickening. Another wonderful moment occurred during a walk into Luton’s town centre when someone who presumably thought I was Polish stuck their head out of their van’s window and shouted at me to go back to my own country. I remember feeling so angry about that.
British people also have this idea of the Stupid American, who has all the cognitive skills of a particularly unintelligent box of potatoes. Honestly, I think I’ve met and spoken to more dumb Brits in my time than I have dumb Americans. While the UK:US ratio is skewed (I’ve obviously met more Brits than I have Americans) I’m generally of the opinion that idiots exist everywhere, not just in one country. And the UK has plenty.
Now, I’m not trying to make this an Anti-Britain/pro-American thing. It isn’t. It’s more a look at the state of British culture. The intolerant manner I was treated by many in England is one of the reasons I left. No one here has thus far made fun of the colour of my hair. No one has thrown a beer bottle at me, or tried to mug me because I have ginger hair. Why it socially acceptable to do these things in England? Why is that? Why is it whenever a ginger-haired person is bullied, or beaten, or mugged, or mocked, simply because of the colour of their hair, they’re told to just get over it, or grow thicker skin.
Sometimes, I am very ashamed of my generation of Brits. Sometimes, in all honestly, I’m ashamed of Britain as a whole. Where did it all go wrong?
One of those antispam verification jobbies has been added to the Comments field on the blog now, in an attempt to combat the amount of Russian spam I get posted on my blog on an hourly basis. This verification was coded by Andrew, who was kind enough to send me the required code, files, and instructions for implementation. Cheers, Andrew.
I had considered setting up so that you had to register on the blog, but that acts more as a barrier for allowing anyone to post on your blog, not just the spammy spam spammers.
You already know I was disappointed by the film, but if you fancy a spoiler-laden review of the film, you need only read on. I’ve kept the majority of this post hidden from the front page, for rather obvious reasons.
The review contains spoilers for both Futurama: Bender’s Big Score and, rather oddly, a mild spoiler for the Doctor Who Series 3 finale. If you’ve not seen either yet, I suggest you leave this review alone for now.
In three words: “Fun, but disappointing.”
I’ve written a few more ficlets since I last mentioned them, so here’s a list. I imagine I’ll end up doing weekly updates, ideally later on in the week than Tuesday (I would eventually like to get into the habit of doing a regular “Ficlet Friday”).
The stories are listed here from oldest to newest, and are accompanied with the opening line.
A transmuted Universe - Nov 23rd
There was something fundamentally wrong with the Universe.
Unfathomable (a prequel to The Shed) - Nov 24th
He feels, to put it mildly, distraught.
Job Satisfaction - Nov 25th
There was this lovely couple out on a date.
The parrots eat ‘em all - Nov 26th
His head was pounding now, as though the contents of his skull were trying to force their way out.
But Wait, There’s More - Nov 27th
“This is your task to undertake,” said Gerkyn the Wizard, “And yours alone. I bid you good luck.”
Writing a fledgling webcomic of my own severely limits just how much I can say about other webcomics out there. I can heap praise upon the comics that deserve it, such as Good Ship Chronicles, Truck Bearing Kibble, and Dresden Codak. But if there’s a webcomic out there that I dislike, one that I think is utterly undeserving of the praise it’s been showered with, that puts me in an awkward position. Instantly, I’m alienating any fans of Jump Leads who might also like this other comic. They’ll think I’m being a jerk. That said, I’ve generally kept to a strict policy of “Don’t mention the war.” The exception to this rule is Ctrl+Alt+Del, which is a festering pile of horseshit as I pointed out long before I started Jump Leads (incidentally, my views have changed slightly since I wrote that blog entry - now the characters and plot are so irredeemably rancid that there really is nothing to keep me going back anymore, so I don’t).
Which is irritating, because if I want to say something like, for example, “Dinosaur Comics isn’t a comic at all, and reading the archives doesn’t really make me feel like I’ve made any real dent in them because there’s no progression in the art style, no development of the characters, and no real changes except when the comic’s creator is smart enough to let someone else do a comic for a change,” I can’t, because I might piss off some people who are fans of Dinosaur Comics. Yes, alright, I know I shouldn’t really give a flying piece of monkey feces what people think about the things I think, but considering the fact that people reading the comic JjAR and I put together are also reading the comics that other people put together, I have to have some kind of respect. Or decency. Or whatever.
Which is annoying, really. It means I can’t talk about just how much I dislike Dinosaur Comics. It means instead I have to take all of my aggression out on Tim Buckley and his complete inability to draw more than one sort of face, create consistent characters, or use plots which don’t seem like ideas rejected by the Family Guy writing team. Oh, what a world.
Yesterday was a good ol’ day. We went to the Griffith Observatory with my stepsister’s family to celebrate her husband’s birthday, and while I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the trip having woken up in a real funk, I actually enjoyed myself. At a risk of sounding like a poorly-written piece of PR, there really is a lot to do there. We didn’t get to spend as much time there as we would have liked, though, as we moved on to lunch fairly quickly.
After that, we said our farewells and went on to see a couple of flicks. First we saw Enchanted, which was very cute, exceptionally silly, and surprisingly enjoyable. While I’d wanted to see this film for a while, I will admit I had low expectations but I was quite surprised by just how much I enjoyed myself. The film’s outcome was predictable in the same way that a man eating a cake can predict that he’ll be left with an empty plate when he’s finished. He may have expected the cake to be gone, but that’s not to say he didn’t enjoy eating it. A ton of fun with some very ridiculous musical numbers that work alarmingly well.
Afterwards, we saw Dan in Real Life. Again, this was a film I really wanted to see but had low expectactions of, and again those expectations were met and exceeded several times over. It’s a really great drama-comedy with a lot of heart and some very real performances from a few people, including (rather surprisingly) Steve Carell and Dane Cook. Who knew they could act, eh?
I’ve been playing Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune a fair bit lately, and I have to say it’s very good. The story and the characters give off a sort-of National Treasure vibe, but the gameplay itself reminds me very much of what a next-gen remake of Flashback might be like. Credit where it’s due, it was my Dad who first said Uncharted reminded him of Flashback, but the more I play Uncharted the more I wish some developer would snap up the rights to Flashback and remake it.
This is, of course, coupled with my deep desire to see Another World adapted as a feature film with absolutely no dialogue whatsoever.
I generally avoid updating WordPress because I’m absolutely terrified I’ll wind up wiping the entire bloody thing. But after changing the layout (or hadn’t you noticed?), I decided it was probably a good idea. So I did.
The site’s still here. It didn’t Guru on me or anything. Remarkable.
