So, as I mentioned in the last post, I've been entirely off of the Internet for a week. Not surfed a bit, not read any email, not even looked at any porn! There's an interesting story behind this, but I can't get into it since it involves personal info about other people that they don't want mentioned online.
At any rate, I'm back on now, and while it's very late and I need to be in bed about 2 hours ago, I will catch up on recent events tomorrow. Or not.
It's interesting to get back online after some time away. All the little soap operas and dramas and blogs and controversies that you've been following have continued to play out without you (the nerve!) and when you get back on, after a vacation or technical problems or whatever, you have a chance to decide if you really care. Sure, you've read every post on Perez Hilton for six months, but now that you've missed a week, do you care enough to actually swim back through the archives to see what happened while you were away? Do you even care enough to start reading the site again, knowing that you never really missed it while you were offline?
I don't mean to single out that one gossip blog, but it's a useful question across the board. I think most of us end up reading a lot of sites we don't really care about (including this one) just out of habit, or because it's the Internet, and they're free. And what else are you going to do to kill time at work? Besides actually working, I mean.
Really though, how much would you miss them if you deleted half the sites on your bookmarks? And more importantly, what useful thing could you do with the hour or more you'd save a day by not looking at webpages you wouldn't really miss if they vanished from the Internet tomorrow? It's something to think about, anyway.
One thing I did miss while offline was email, and I got some odd examples. One long time reader had a baby (well, his wife actually did the grunt work) but I don't know if he wants that news attached to his online name, so no public "congrats" from me. Well, aside from this semi-anonymous one.
I did get a few other emails worth quoting, and here they are, without the sender's names attached. The first one is pretty NSFW, but how likely are you to have the boss reading over your shoulder right now anyway?
Female Input
I've got one you've missed off of your list...
While my guy is straddled over my face as I suck his dick a girlfriend inserts an ice cube into his arse, he spasms as it goes in, his rectum tightens on the cube and the melting sensation as he shoots his load drives him crazy enough to let me and my girlfriend get some quality time together without him needing to be part of it all... It's called the ICE BUCKET!
Rachel
Xx
P.S. feel free to send me a complimentary T shirt from 'Get Offended' I'd like the one that says I do all the things your girlfriend doesn't.
Great site, needs more input though LOL
I deleted her email and myspace link from her signature, even though I doubt she would mind the attention. Speaking of myspace, I'm not going to get into a rant now, but seriously, and no offense meant to people who set up their myspace pages with fuscia and aquamarine color schemes, but has anyone
ever seen a myspace page that wasn't jaw-droppingly ugly, and/or mispropotioned? I mean ones by real people, not
corporate extensions that import their own design aesthetic.
Email #2:
Back in the days of heavy diablo 2 LOD gaming, i stumpled upon a short (well.. rather long, actually) story, following a single char. (a barbarian, with a 4-letter name, Thug or something) throughout the acts and quests of Diablo II. I have tried going through your fiction and The Dark Liberary on Diabloii.net, without luck..
I'm not 100% sure that you wrote it, but allmost. And if I am mistaken, I'm hoping you can help pointing me in the right direction in my search..
I only remember parts of the story..
It starts with a flashback to Harrogath, there "thug" looses a battle for the lady he loves, and therefor ashamed must leave.. He comes to the rouge camp, and starts helping them against the dark forces that hold the land.. In tristram his appointed merc dies, due to greed, in the monestary he finds a deadly wounded scorcerer, and swears revenge on the smith..
Act 2, joined by a paladin, they find Duriel, the paladin dies.
act 3, joined by a necromancer, they trace down a sorc empregnated by the witchdoctor Endigu, battles against a paladin-turned-bad (Trevinon or something), and "Thug" takes on Mephisto alone.
The story, as I remember it, ends with our hero arriving at Harrogath.
As you can tell, I don't remember the charecternames, wich makes a google-search difficult, so I am hoping you can help me.
I don't know if he wants his online name attached to this, so I didn't include it. He's from Denmark, though, and English is probably his 4th language, so we won't sweat the typos. I find it interesting that people still remember/stumble over D2 fanfic, but I'm mostly posting this in case someone knows the story he's talking about. It's not one I wrote (I never hewed anywhere near the actual game storyline) and I didn't read many others, so I can't help him. Can anyone else?
Email #3:
I just wanted to say that Marie Callender's is one of my favorite chains in existence. Your initial comparison to Denny's shocked me (although it was before you visited, so that's forgivable). IMO, Marie Callender's ranks about as high as a chain possibly can among all restaurants, and it is in the highest tier of its type. I suppose more visits might help sway you, and more of a love for pie. ;) Pie is my favorite dessert, and of all the bakery restaurants, MC makes them the best. I will agree with you about the old people.. what the hell is up with that? And also, breakfast is extremely hard to find. Most MC restaurants don't even serve it. However, if you can find one that does, they are a cut above everyone else. Since no MC will serve me breakfast in my area, the current breakfast winner is Mimi's Cafe (their lunch/dinner is just par, but their breakfast shines).
My chain restaurant scale system:
Fast food: big 4 (McD, BK, Jack, Carls), etc
Borderline fast food: KFC, In-n-out, El Pollo Loco, etc
Quick food: Baja Fresh, Quizno's, Fatburger, Subway, Thai Spice, etc
Crap, but open: Denny's, IHOP, Norm's, Mel's, etc
Average: Coco's, Baker's Square, Ruby's, etc
Good: Red Robin, Islands, Mimi's Cafe, BJs, etc
Excellent: Outback, Olive Garden, ** Marie Callender's **, Claim Jumper
Just one man's opinion. Get the beef stroganoff or turkey dinner. But yeah it helps if you are a pie lover. :)
Think I'm gonna go stop by today and pick up some muffins...
--Justin
Now there's a man who knows what he likes, and has put some thought into it. Honestly, he should post up a webpage with discussions of all the restaurants, pros and cons, recommended dishes, etc. I'd look. In fact, there has to be a website like that somewhere now, doesn't there? One that's mostly about user input and comments, with ratings, voting options, etc?
At any rate, I wasn't entirely sure I'd ever been to Marie Callendars, but his mention of the old people jogged my memory. Mostly since the only MC's I've ever been to is on a major road in Walnut Creek, and since I drive past there with Malaya all the time -- at which time one or both of us makes a joke about someone's grandmother coming out with a take out box perched on her walker. We
did eat there once, in November of 2003, and here's a link to prove it. Looking over that "review" now... eh. I don't remember anything other than that I had a turkey pot pie, and that the side dishes were plentiful, and the corn bread hunk was elephantine. I've never been back, but thanks to Justin's email I might consider it. The problem isn't so much the food quality, it's the selection. Neither Malaya or I ever eat that kind of Middle America cuisine; and it seems like glorified TV dinner stuff to me. It is, literally -- compare old style aluminum tray TV dinner options with a MC's menu if you doubt. They have stuff like plain pasta dishes, turkey with mashed potatoes, salisbury steak with peas/carrots, beef stroganoff, etc. Those types of dishes are just not found on the menus at non-diner restaurants in Northern California, and since Malaya or me grew up eating those "meat and potatoes" type meals we never think about cooking them, or going out to eat them.
Why not? Good question. They're certainly hearty fare, filling and relatively balanced in nutrition, although the way they make them at restaurants like MC's (huge servings and filled with butter, cream, salt, sugar, etc) ups the calories to frightening levels. Still, we find a way to fit Claim Jumper into our diets every few weeks, (though we usually get sandwiches and take half home to eat the next day) so why not glutton out on a meal with meat, veggies, and some kind of bread, especially when we don't have to fix it ourselves? Maybe next week.
Email #4:
I'd like to buy an ad on your page:
http://www.blackchampagne.com/articles/email-scams.shtml
The ad would be for a website which offers business e-mail hosting.
I don't have a huge budget, but I'm sure that I could pay you something.
Please let me know if you're interested.
Thanx,
Rebecca
Believe it or not, this is the first email I've ever received asking to place an ad on this website (IIRC). Well, the first mail from a real person; I get plenty of spams with various ad exchange options, but those don't count. I'm not going to take her up on it, since I don't want to put ads on my website, but it's interesting that someone would ask. I haven't checked my hit counters in months, but I can't imagine that articles page gets that many loads, or shows up anywhere near the top of any Google search -- not to mention the fact that it, like all my articles pages, hasn't been added to in more than 2 years. (Automation of archiving by subject, you say? Good idea.) I wonder how she found it in the first place?
The ironic part is that I'd probably have put in the link to her whatever right in this update, if she'd included the link in her email, and it would have been seen by far more people in this update (for free) than would likely ever see it on that old article archive page.
That's it for the interesting emails of the past week+. I may post more if/when they appear, but I'm doing some time-consuming real life stuff that I can't talk about yet, and I'm working steadily on rewriting my novel, and I'm dabbling in finding an agent via query letters, and I'm way behind on work on the HGL site after a week without online access. Plus, with the HGL beta (allegedly) about to get underway, I've really got to put in some work on that to get all caught up before the beta info explosion brings countless new readers.
In other words, spending the time to post long updates (or flesh out some of the two dozen+ backlogged reviews) on this site is going to be scarce for the immediate forever.
Labels: mailbag
