Gene Splicer PHD

It's a great book.

Isn't it piled under cannabis? If it's not, WHAT THE HELL WAS I... Also, it seems MSNBC has apparently decided that something is a little off, because the link doesn't work, and searching their site (using Bing - might be part of the problem there) doesn't go anywhere either. But, anecdotally, I will say that high dudes who are likely to get testicular cancer are probably trying to microwave something they shouldn't.

George Granger brings the guns to bear and shells the crap out of Malibu. Stef is upset about the nine pounder in the dining room table, until... George leads an expeditionary force to Escorial and pounds it into gravel.

AOE 2 and Age of Mythology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaz_II It doesn't look good!

He's learning how to strategize, to get his way. He's learning how to play the game. He's not learning how to fix things, though. When he's thoughtful, he seems to sort of "get it" but the minute his dad or Robbie or his mom jump in the frame, he's back to reacting again. Just like a teenager, his emotional defense pops up and the rational thinking goes right out the window. So yeah, he's learning, but he's not doing anything with what he's learning other than getting people to see his way. Brad hasnt had his "come to jesus" moment with Will yet, I don't think. He doesn't realize yet what's at stake. He's just like Will - anytime Will comes into the picture, there Brad goes, off the handle or skidding sideways again.

Well, just so you know I singled you out only because you made some fairly "black and white" statements about how the law can be used to assist with parental authority - while I agree that that's one way to handle it, it almost never turns out to be a course of action that anyone should take without knowing the consequences and almost always ends up with a totally destroyed relationship between the parents and the kid. I'm glad your parents took the tack they did with you and that it's worked out well in your family and with your son. There are an awful lot of families, though, where this wouldn't work, mostly due to social factors that I won't rant about Parenting is hard. So is being a teenager.

Oh you don't have kids or spend much time with families with teenagers in crisis, do you ? There's a thing called choosing your battles with kids. You try to pick the battle that will have an effect, and you try to balance reaction to their actions, and vice versa. It's not as simple as calling the law or shipping them off to a school. It's a whole lot trickier than that, the risks are a lot higher. I mean, if a baby is screaming and won't quiet down, do you yell back? That just makes it worse, and do you think this changes when they become teenagers? It doesn't! They just yell louder back at you or throw things and leave, or tell you to piss off and go do what they want anyway, or have big hissy fits. What you are talking about here. Tim, is when it escalates and never gets better. My cousin's kid was 15 when they caught her with pot. My cousin asked my opinion (as the family druggie) what I would do in her situation. My answer was that she could go two ways. She could lock the kid down, search her room and her person randomly, ban her from seeing her friends, take away her phone, take away her privileges, random drug tests, hair tests, the whole thing. Up to and including a short stay in a rehab if it came to that. Or she could talk to the kid, find out what was up with the pot smoking, tell her in no uncertain terms that the pot had to go, come up with some ways to maybe push the kid to see some different friends, etc. - all of this with the never-voiced hope that the pot will be a temporary phase. My cousin went the lock down route. For a year. When she got her freedom back, the kid stopped coming home, stopped calling to say where she was, basically she broke free. And hasn't, except for short visits home, been back since. She got her own phone from some friends, found some couches she could sleep on, got a small job to put money in her pocket. Emancipation, really, only without the law. We all knew it would happen, we all saw the ugly, ugly looks the kid gave my cousin, the silence, all that anger. The whole experience so poisoned her about "home" that she didn't really think she had one anymore, so she bailed. And truthfully my cousin lost a whole lot more than a stupid battle about pot. She really lost the relationship. It's better but will never ever really be a good one again. Legally, my cousin could have had the kid dragged home when she didn't come home, could have taken away the phone again, shipped her off to a school or camp, could have taken all kinds of legal measures to keep her minor child under control. And my cousin, knowing what would happen if she cracked down again, has backed off. Way off. She will lose her daughter, in one way or another, if she escalated it again, and so she has chosen (wisely, I think) to let the kid find her own way. But there's no "winner" in this, Tim. You don't win when a kid sees no options and the parents can't see them either. The daughter didn't win, she had a harder adolescence because of her decisions and her mom's reactions. The mom (my cousin) didn't win, she basically lost all the trust her daughter had in her. Nowadays, my cousin sends a little money her way once in a while, keeps in regular touch, and hopes the girl doesn't end up on a stripper pole somewhere. Sometimes it's all that's left. Sometimes, parents have to let the really independent ones go their way, and make their mistakes, and hope it all turns out okay in the end. What Mark has created here is a situation that I think is waaay polarized, more for dramatic effect and storytelling than anything else. Brad is not interested in compromise. He's not interested in anything Will has to say, and is now very much on the defensive. And he's reacting, rather than thinking about options. And Will, in that fuzzy emotional/logical/stressed and dunderheaded way that teenagers have, is doing exactly the same thing. He doesn't care why his dad's being a dick, he just knows his dad's being a dick because he "doesn't care". He's overreacting to his dad's stupid decisions. The problem is that he has the resources to really escalate the situation to a point that will have no good outcome for anyone. Mark has said that this "battle" between Brad and Will in some ways reflects his own relationship with his son, who (I think) is a little older than Will. And I think he's putting little pieces of the battles he's had with his son in the story, only highly dramatized. What he's been really, really good at is overemphasizing that the kid's opinions matter- not because he's a special snowflake that has "needs" - but that you have to be nuanced in dealing with kids, because they will usually react, without any sense of balance, without thinking. If a parent just drops the hammer, the kid will hit you with it, really hard, because they have no sense of a proportional response. The baby yells, the parents yell back, the baby yells louder. It's a never ending cycle - so you learn to let the baby cry itself to sleep. You don't call the law on it. Part of dealing with a kid is including them in the decisions that affect them, even if they don't have a choice in those decisions, because it lets the kid in on what you're thinking. And that can lead the child to a better response than you would get otherwise. Brad is a business leader, and understands a proportional response, and absolutely refuses to include Will in his thinking process. That's a mistake, a big one. It means Will is reacting to his own situation without consideration of his dad's situation, so Will is operating in a vacuum. And a kid in that situation is likely to do, well, just about anything, because he's not a big thinker at this point in his cranial development. Also, he's Will, which (in my mind) means he's arrogant like his dad, and not exactly the smartest stick in the pile, and emotionally about ten years old. The problem is that he's got the resources to screw with his dad and the family, and they know it.

Skydive is sweet. Live mesh was cool too, but I guess they're killing that. I'm a M$ partner so I get 25 gb free. If anyone has onenote, it can sync to a web (skydrive) notebook, meaning you can have a notebook that syncs in addition to documents.

And those who can't teach gym teach politics

It's like one big cliff, reading this story. You'll be on the edge of your seat. CJ has a way of keeping you clinging to the edge. It's what goats do. Also, eating anything in sight, and bleating. They do like their cliffs, those goats.

I had a little racing cat when I was a boy - probably 15 or 16. We called it "heeling" and getting one of the hulls up was, er, "up on one". When we were standing on the monohull that was in the air, and trying to hold the boat from going over, that's "hiking" or "hiking out". The boat had hike straps for passengers and I had a little trapeze thing that I'd put around me to hike out. When I had it up on one I generally stood on the "up" monohull and leaned waaay out. The goal was never to get up on one, though, as you mention it makes the boat really unstable and steering gets hard (I had an extender on the rudder, but the way it worked it screwed with the way the rudder reacted).

It's also called texting your mom with MOM MAKE ME A CHICKEN SANDWICH AND THIS TIME TAKE OFF THE SKIN. YOU KNOW I HATE THE SKIN YOU ALWAYS FORGET. EVEN WHEN I TURNED 25 YOU FORGOT GOD I HATE YOU SOMETIMES

It's not gaming that's the problem. People who are broken will play games in broken ways. Also, ridiculously overhyped attention to the wrong factors helps portray professional gamers as "sick". Which is a shame.

Why don't you officially change your cliffhanging schedule to every other week? If you're that busy, give yourself some slack. It's not like we can't wait for another cliffhanger every two weeks instead of a cliffhanger a week. Sheesh, dude. Next thing you know you'll be trying to catch up on cliffhangers, and one should never be in a hurry near steep inclines.

I think the defining moment of the season was the very last shot of last year's episode, the flower pot. Walt has now turned a serious corner.

Calibre rocks.

No, not really, although that would ALSO be fun. My idea is half-baked, which may imply that I am fully baked I'm not sure I can clearly articulate the thought, but bear with me. First, you divorce yourself from the characters. They're in your head now, but in THIS story, they're not. They are independent beings, and you have no idea what they're thinking or doing or planning. How can this be? I don't know. Now, set yourself in the story. Choose an age that's appropriate for the story. Whatever. - Sit down and have dinner with the family at Escorial. Engage Stefan and JP in a conversation. Would they like you? Would you like them? Would you have anything to talk about? Again, whatever. Point being, you don't know what the conversation will be about. You just go with the flow and tell us about it. - Move around in the story. Go to a game with Matt. Observe him, take him to bed... Take Stefan shopping.. Go see David, tell him about Robbie. Take Brad out back and pistol whip him. Still with the whatever. Think Galaxy Quest, where the cast of a show ends up in the show, which happens to be a real place and they have no idea how to be the characters they're acting. Or flip it around - years ago I read a story where the crew of the starship Enterprise beamed up from a planet, but didn't end up on the ship - they ended up on the set in Burbank. Suddenly cameras! Escorial is real, the characters are real. If they walked into your living room, what would you say to them? How would you introduce them to your family? Tell us the story through the eyes of Mark Arbour the individual and not the author, and not through Wade's or Will's point of view, but your own. In order to do this, you have to make the characters very real, and the timeline too - because you'll be moving along the same storyline as the characters are. And you judge them and their actions according to YOUR moral compass, not theirs. So, within the confines of the universe you've created, interact with your characters as if they were totally real, and you are totally there. You can't dictate what they do, you have to let them go do their thing, and tell us about it. Which is probably exactly how you write anyway, or, you may need to address this while baked. Whatever I TOLD you it was half baked...

I would like to see Mark Arbour as the narrator. Not the storyteller - the narrator. Divorcing himself as the storyteller, he goes into the story. How does Mark see the characters when he puts himself there in his own voice? THAT would be revealing

I've got rocks in my garden that are older than he is. That guy is so old he farts dust. His wrinkles have wrinkles. The only thing older than James Savik is his unfinished story, you know, the one with the spaceships and stuff. He's not around much, probably because it takes so long to feed him those strained green beans at the home. And I bet he can't type much, what with the arthuritis and the gout. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: One more year under the belt! Happy birthday to one of my favorite writers! Also, it's time to talk about your next car. That's right, James, it's time to talk about Buicks. Like the 2012 Buick LaCrosse. Leather-appointed seating, ice-blue ambient lighting and the soft-touch instrument panel surround you to make your ride smoother and more enjoyable. With MSRP starting at $30,170 and a 25/35MPG, there has been no better time to invest in a 2012 Buick LaCrosse! So head on down to your local Buick dealer and test drive one today. You'll be glad you did! *Includes under-seat Depends dispenser. Factory-installed dashboard magnifying glass available.

It's a good punishment, I hope there are stronger ones coming for the school administration. I was actually expecting and hoping for the death penalty but this actually sends a better message, I think. Paterno loses his wins back to the time when they started hiding the scandal, there's a clear message there for other schools that this was what could happen. The fine being paid to help victims - and not touchable by the school - is also a good thing. The scholarships - that's gonna hurt, so does the postseason ban. I think its a fair punishment. There are more coming, we'll see what happens when the criminal cases are done.

I've done two book reviews on the book's page on Amazon to let people know the story was stolen, and they're deleted within hours. So the author is obviously watching that. However, he's not watching this: http://www.goodreads...s#other_reviews So at least there is a place to notify people that it's plagiarized. Hopefully it helps drop some book sales (and KC has been there today, putting the word out).

Support for anything to do with Windows XP stops in 2014, I wish it were sooner. Security Essentials support for later operating systems will continue. I have seen nothing about killing off security essentials - do you have a source?

Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear. The windows media (whether you download it or have them send you a disk) is a full version of Windows. That's how windows 7 works, anyway and I've seen nothing on the partner site to make me think MS will do anything differently this time. This means you can do a clean, fresh install with the upgrade media. When you do the install, it will ask if you are upgrading or want to do a custom install - the custom install is a fresh installation. At some point in the process it will ask you to insert an older version of windows (a disk) to verify that you own it, after that it finishes the installation and asks for the Windows 8 product key.