A Ray of Sunshine

Long couple of days at work.  Brain full of lock stuff.  Not feeling the "writing" vibe tonight.

Instead, I give you something my little sister CJ wrote:

Is it just me or does anybody else hate those posts that are like "LIKE, SHARE AND COMMENT IF YOU LOVE JESUS!...if you ignore though u will die a slow, painful and miserable death. Also the devil will take your soul and you will go to hell...YES hell!" Isn't life about being kind and giving to the community, not liking someones status.

I copied & pasted that directly.  Her words, exactly as they appear.  She is eleven years old.

I could not be prouder.  :)

101 Interesting Things, part fifty-three: Resettable locks!

Yesterday at work, I had an interesting and exciting opportunity come up.  During my downtime, I read trade magazines and practice picking locks (by the way, I think it's so cool that I get to play around picking locks when we have no customers!), and one of the articles in this month's Locksmith Ledger (or whatever the magazine was called) was on opening & servicing safe deposit locks.  It included instructions and pictures on various kinds of safe deposit locks, including resettable locks, which I didn't know existed.

Lo and behold, just a couple hours later that day, a customer brought in a lock that he had no key for.  It turned out to be a Sargent & Greenleaf resettable safe deposit lock (though it only had the one keyway).  So, because I'm all excited about that now, I'm going to give y'all a crash course on locks (using information that is freely available elsewhere on the internet, just so's I know I'm not giving away any trade secrets).

What would I tell teenagers about sex? A response to Forward Thinking.

I read over on Daylight Atheism (note to self:  update sidebar link!) that there's a new blog carnival on the 'tubes called Forward Thinking.  This month's prompt is, "What would you tell teenagers about sex?"

My first thought on the subject was, "Shit, I am the last person who should be advising teenagers about sex."  My second thought was, "Wait, I have a fourteen-year-old brother and an eleven-year-old sister.  I will probably be talking to them about sex at some point."  So I decided to get some thoughts together in some semblance of order, and here they are.

Jesus and Gender

I was totally planning on writing some Tooth and Claw tonight.  But as I lay in bed this morning, drifting in and out of sleep among interminable Snoozes with NPR talking at me, I had something of a dream.  I was in an academic setting, probably informed by whatever was on NPR, and I realized at some point that I wasn't actually going to be able to talk to people about this in an academic setting.  At least, not right then.  So I'ma talk about it here.

In my dream - and maybe, possibly on NPR, I was half-asleep and I'm not sure - they/we were talking about societal happiness and well-being.  In my head, regardless of the scenario, I rifled through a pile of half-remembered statistics and surveys, as well as multiple pieces of writing on the two subjects and how they seem to maybe be the same thing but really aren't.  I mean, to a certain point, happiness and well-being are correlated.  If you're in a truly shitty situation, nothing going your way, everything flushing down the tubes, you're not going to be happy.  And if you're on a hot streak, yeah, you're probably going to be happy about that.

It's the middle thing that's kind of the problem here.

OK, this is a little much. Even for me.

I'm trying to make Tooth and Claw be Like Reality Unless Noted, because that will make filming on location easier when I get a movie deal for it.  Ha!  Ha!  No, seriously, it's because the mood is best served by setting it in a world that's just like ours, only slightly off-kilter.  Tee-hee, still lying.  It's actually something of a behind-the-scenes homage to the playstyle of my gaming group, where we'd take real details from the real world (culled from our knowledge of the town or Google Maps) and then just overlay our campaign on top of it.  Jeez, I need to stop this.

OK, so all of those are partially true (or at least, in the case of the movie deal, earnest wishful thinking).  But the reason that actually gets ink on the paper, as it were, is that I am lazy and know nothing; and "the internet exists" means that a bit of on-the-spot research makes stealing details from reality way the fuck easier than inventing plausible details from whole cloth.

But sometimes, reality is a bit... shall we say, "generous."

Excuses!

I should probably mention that I'm on a road trip this weekend.  So there won't be an update until Tuesday at the earliest.  Y'all have a great one!  :)