crazyfish

I have memories of a British Show I used watch as a kid. Growing up, I never got the name of the show. All I remember is that the show was about a stupid guy. The guy was really dumb, and his antics could quite possibly cause WWIII. No, this isn't Mr. Bean. Whenever he gets caught being really stupid, he would pout his lips and keep rubbing his arms against his sides in a strange and pathetic manner. That was his signature act that would draw a lot of laughs. Oh I also remember that the theme song was whistling or flute based. I can't really tell. And the show could be based in the early 90's, 80's or 70's. I can't remember. All I got are vague clues. But it's bordering me that I'm having images of this show and not being able to place them.

I found the book too slick for my liking. The trailer already feels too slick. Not me cup of tea.

That was a highly emotional scene, which I liked very much. I remember seeing the opera a few years back in Los Angeles. While I can't claim such lovely circumstances like in this chapter, I can confirm the opera had me in a trance for a few days.

Yeah I dunno. Sounds more like a rape torture scene to me.

Claude awoke to darkness. His body was resurrected to the myriad pains and aches, and most distressing of which, was the whirring shredding pain in the back of his head. The ground felt cold against his cheek, and the smells were disturbingly earthy. He tried to move, but his knees and feet were bound, as were his hands tightly behind his back. All his wriggling and contorting to free himself succeeded only in making his wrists raw with pain. He yelled, “Thou rascals!” but the echoes evaporat

“Would you put on a shirt already?” Gilda screamed at Charles, who was flexing his flabby muscles at the kitchen sink. She snapped shut the clamshell of her vanity mirror and arose from the dining table, with a dour expression pinching in the newly farded eyebrows. Charles kept on with his schoolboy poses while Dimov, still in his work suit and tie, yawned idly at the dining table. He thought it was about time to commit the ultimate sacrilege to the gods of the Friday Evening and spend the res

Interesting. Are they going to have the fake American ending, or the original downer ending?

Before making the last left turn for home, Alex pulled into the strip mall with its monk and nun roofs and its beefy red signs and its mosaic of red brick. The curvy font of the bakery sign shunted him forward to its abode, away from the slipshod profile of his mother, back in the car, languishing against the door. The shop smell of sugar and butter, lemons and vanilla brought him in relation to all things fresh and sunny of his boyhood, all those moments virtuous and vernal. Bells tinkling hai

Yeah, I'm going to be odd one out here. I'm not one for invisible prose. I read authors less and less for story these days , but because I enjoy the way they write. The problem for me isn't hard words per se but hard words that don't suit the level of diction the prose suggests, or hard words and a prose style that doesn't sing so to say. There are plenty of writers who rock hard words, but readers don't complain because it all so fits e.g. Cormac McCarthy, Will Self. It's also a matter of audience. For every reader who complain Blood Meridian is a pretentious tome, there are others who enjoy its paragraph long sentences and 50 dollar words galore. Mind you this special group isn't especially obscure. Goals, audience and artistic inclinations are what matters. If reader entertainment is what you care for the most then simple is best. Go for a conversational style. I'd advise writers that readers as a whole care lot more for story than prose, so really simplicity should be the default. But if you long to use your vast bank of big words, you should be resigned to a smaller slice of readers. Also you should be ready to work twice to hard to make the prose work. With big words, come big expectations. I get excited over the prospect of reading interesting imageries or allusions, or well crafted sentences and the like. It's disappointing to come across prose full of big words, but with a decidedly adolescent workmanship. If I'm going to be patient with your writing, you had better offer me something magical. The simple fact is, it is lot easier to disappoint a reader with a mannered style than with a simple style. To get to the level where your mannered style is readable, takes hours of fussing and obsessing over sentences, years definitely of practice. You don't just make a go at it. Even with all the practice and polish, you'd still get readers that smatter about you being pretentious and all what not. But hell, if that's what you want to do, then go for it. The shelves are replete with books with invisible prose, so I'm quite happy Cormac McCarthy didn't listen to those who told him to stick to simple.

since you're writing YA focused stuff. You might get some traction on wattpad or figment. but these sites are really big. You can't just post and hope to get visibility by magic. You have to do some kind of work to get more visible.

"I really really really reallly like women," says he, eying cute boy #346 . Here's to 2014 and finding the one who truly loves you back.

It seems like a hipster haircut or a model-boy haircut. It doesn't seem to be a practical look, if you're an office professional or something However, I say you should go for it. You got all the time in the world to settle into boring haircuts like everyone else. You might as well have fun with your hair while you still have hair.

A dress, Susan said. No lace, no frills, no body bags. The wrap dress looks ok, what do you think? Hmm nice, will keep that in mind. Natural fibers are nice, linen cool, silk best. I need to rest for a bit. What exactly would you doing in this software engineering job you got? We should definitely get you more silk ties. Why do malls have to be such igloos? Maybe I should get the wrap-dress. Let’s try Macy’s. Where kind of country is Laos? Hmm, I knew that. Is anything made in the USofA anymore?

First of all, it isn't fair to say that the Indian Government doesn't care about the poverty. They do. Very much so. perhaps even more than places like US. There are schemes upon schemes upon for social welfare. However like Ron said, you have consider the scale of the problem. One billion people, 300 million under the poverty line. I'm afraid, it'll take more than just free stuff to the poor to fix problem. Another big issue is that the government services are notoriously unreliable even though they might be "Free". Wealthy can afford to pay for better private solutions. The middle class bleed themselves to afford the private solutions, leaving the poor to contend with the bad government services. Also, you shouldn't confuse gay rights problem with a poverty problem. The British were the ones who criminalized homosexuality, the law stuck through the Indian penal code. The middle and high classes are just as illiberal on these things. The wealthy and middle class are more likely to think that being sophisticated or being better than the "masses" means adopting outmoded British ideas. This leads to some humorous cultural situations. What is truly an Indian heritage(complicated thing in itself, India is mix of cultures) and what is really something imposed by the British gets mixed up in the consciousness. And complicating the issue is the profound insecurity about Indian identity in face of the western cultural hegemony.

I was attending a physics conference in Puri, India when in the hotel lobby, I literally dropped what I was doing to read the paper's headline about the Apex Court recriminalising homosexuality. My reaction was shock, but then muted to a shrug. Take this for example. An Indian colleague of mine, a fellow particle physicist, 30, about to get married, is still trying to convince the fiancee's family not to pay a dowry. Not to mention that his own family still hasn't come around to accepting his views on the dowry, which from his estimates will be a lot of money because he has a PhD. At least the girl is of the same brahmin caste as he is. His previous girlfriend was of a different caste and that was very hard for his family to swallow, but luckily or unluckily for him, the girl rejected him. He's educated to the top tier that places his family far above the unwashed unsophisticated masses who are struggling on less than a dollar per day. How could I be shocked about court decision when my colleague is still contending with his family over dowries, when it's still frowned upon for women to travel alone, when I can't get running water of drinkable quality? I'm not saying gay rights takes a back seat to destructive sexism or economic underdevelopment, but I feel one needs to be extraordinarily patience about these issues. You really can't force progress from the top-down especially when politicians are angling to cast the gay rights issue as western immorality vs pure Indian culture. Then consider in the meantime, the diplomatic row with US brewing over an Indian female diplomat who was stripped-searched and booked on charges of underpayment of wages The press and politicians have made noise about diplomatic immunity, how the US has tarnished Indian pride. (Curiously no one is talking about the Indian pride of the diplomat's poor maid who was reputed to be have been paid 3 bucks/hr). The government has even gone so far as to place US diplomats under extra legal scrutiny and played stupid tit for tat games. I'm sure, in a few days, the Indian police will find a suitable crime to arrest US diplomats, just so as to humiliate them. And eh look, one politician has even proposed that any US diplomat suspected of homosexuality should be booked on criminal charges ... How convenient. One thing is certain: change isn't happening fast enough. But it is happening. The Apex court decision was a reversal of a liberal lower court decision. My colleague is proof-positive of the incremental progress that is happening all over India.

There has never been a time in which the justice system has been fair to the rich and poor alike. Not in the west, not in the east either. Religion is a good check on the poor, never for the rich. The rich would do their many sins and then give money to the church in the hopes of God would erase their sins. In fact, a point could be made that justice has become fairer in the modern times. Being the prosecutor who brings down big men with money with terrible crimes has always been a career making move.

Try having Livia Soprano for a mother ... that might change the views of the "Family Forever" folks When the dependability of your family bonds is what determines whether you lived or died through a crisis, I suppose shitty new year dinners are a small price to pay. I and my family are not close emotionally, but paradoxically enough I can count on them when shit happens because we're old-fashioned about these things. However, we don't especially need to feel close to each other. I suspect if we did try for something more, we would hate each other so fiercely that it's simply not worth the trouble. We are like a bunch of electrons stuffed in a bag--there's just one metastable configuration that demands we can't be too close to each other. I view these things like a tragedy of the commons problem. If everyone did their part, family love is a grand fine thing. But no one is especially tasked with keeping family love(you could argue that the mother is specially responsible for family unity, usually that means, she is supposed to bend over backwards to make everyone happy. But that these days that's outdated), but everyone is expected to uphold it. So some will give more than they receive, and there are those who receive a shit more than they give, and there are those who would give but grumble and curse and gripe about it and you'll never hear the end of it. I'd argue that family love wasn't especially great either in some mythic past either. Take a look at the history of royal families to feel the deep abiding love. In the past, people put up with shit more because it determined their survival literally. In this day and age in western countries, when you really don't need family networks to survive, family love is just a quaint spiritual notion. Nice if it's there. A bummer if it isn't. There's no reason to bend over for family bullshit when basically you can survive on your own--ah 'progress'.

You sir, win 2345 brownie, er, cornbread points.

Y'all pipe the fuck down, and let me work in peace! I got some boy-breaking to do over here.

Some guys like to be broken

You made me hungry

Yeah you gots to pay for art. Name credit in a book isn't payment. There are so many books clogging up the marketplace fighting for the limited attentions of the reader, so yeah, name credit means nothing unless your book is a bestseller. Either save up for money, or look for artist willing to barter, or look for artist who's looking to practice their skills on you. Anyway as with these things, there are options with every budget limit. Illustrated art is the more expensive option. It simply takes more time and more care to get the look you want. Go to deviant art to look for artists and such. Anime/cartoon art tends to be the cheaper option because it's simpler to draw. But I wouldn't use it from a marketing standpoint. Customers associate cartoon/anime art with children's books, so beware. The art should be detailed enough to avoid the cartoon look. You want a good deal of realism to signal contemporary m/m drama. You don't want fancy art techniques either. You want simple clear images. These days, the cheaper and easier option is photoshop art with royalty-free stock photos. You can do these yourself. If you don't have photoshop, you can make do with open source gimp. Go a stock photo website and buy yourself royalty free images and edit them for a cover. I wouldn't ordinarily suggest the diy option. Good enough art doesn't cut it in the marketplace. You need to be able to make a professional-looking, genre appropriate, eye-catching cover. If you're going this route, you should ask for people's opinion before using your work. Also don't sweat being original. Go for a simple cover that communicates a solid core idea. Also look through the bestselling books in your chosen genre and study the covers for guidelines. There's the ultra cheap option, www.Fiverr.com That's a crap shoot. but you can strike gold and find someone who can make you a passable cover for five bucks. Remember any hack can call themselves an artist for five bucks, so before you buy the work, you should ask for general comments You can go with premade cover art. These are covers that the artists already made. You just need to choose which ones fit the theme of your book. Although they are premade, usually the artist sells them only once. You can strike gold and find a fantastic cover for about thirty bucks or so. http://www.bookcoversale.com/#!premade-book-covers/c10qz http://www.goonwrite.com/ http://cormarcovers.wix.com/cormar-covers http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,123703.msg1837120.html#msg1837120 There's the custom option with photoshop art. this can go any where from 0 bucks to gazillion bucks. Cormar does custom covers for 60 bucks, which I think is a steal for her skillset. I think you can scrounge up sixty bucks and get yourself a good custom cover. Well good luck.

History rife with petty nobles fighting other petty nobles and they can only come to common cause because there's a guy with a bigger war boner than all of them combined. They fight off big guy and instead of building on their new found unity, they go back to infighting. The problem is endemic to any community brought together by an external threat. If the sense of togetherness is based on the mere fact of discrimination and prejudice, it's bound to crumble as soon as the threat fades away.

It's funny the shitty things we let happen or do just because we are afraid of being alone. The shitty relationships we endure because we don't want to be alone. The serial cheesetastic flings we do just because we can't stand the thought of sleeping alone in bed. We're born alone, and we die alone. Then sooner you learn to enjoy your own company, the better off you'll be. Anyway yeah it sucks not to have anyone to call your own. It also sucks I don't have million dollars. Look on the bright side. It's a hell of lot easier to get partnered up than to earn a million dollars.

But the above statement isn't implied by what you originally said about ugly and awkward virgins. But I'm not going to bust your balls about that because I get what you're saying. I'll just say that I live in India at the moment, and the fact of a 21-year-old male virgin is very normal. They simply have other things to worry about. He's worked up(More probably isn't, more likely just being young and superficial) so he's especially prone to taking drastic/bombastic decisions. Some choose sex blitz on grindr, others choose art show. But yeah, I agree with you. He has the temerity to foist his hangups upon us in the name of art, which might be fine if he was at least aware of himself, but well ...