JamesSavik

I don't touch alcohol... anymore. I've been clean and sober 4 years Oct. 1st. Now I strike out on a regular basis with higher class people.

Now you're thinking Billy. Which as Old Bob suggested earlier, is the point of this exercise.

I pronounce the Western cow opera as dead, dead, dead stick a fork in it, its done. It has been overdone, under written and over exposed by all of the tv networks 1000 or so mediocre to awful cow operas. Had cowboys and indians had killed themselves at the rate that Hollywood woould have you believe, there wouldn't be any left of either one. It can happen to any genre and exactly by that formula: by producing schlock and believing naively that the audience will always be there. My complaint against gay fiction in general is that with the exception of a very few authors: Driver, Dewey, Comsie, Freethinker and maybe even Graeme is that the life that gay characters lead, I don't recognize it. I recognize Driver's characters, Dewey's angst, Comsie's My Only Escape and Freethinker's world is the one I grew up in. I don't recognize gay characters as popular, top of their class, with clubs and places to go, accepted by family and friends and even respected. This is probably a generational thing but it is so foreign to my experience that it might as well be science fiction. There are some hard realities about being gay and I fear that we set up a lot of young people for disappointment by making it sound like it is all wine and roses. How's this for a story: A twenty-something gay professional who is quietly out takes a job in state government that nobody else wants. By force of will and intelligent management over the years he builds that department into something to be proud of. By the time he's forty, it is the best performing department of its kind in the state. At the request of some friends, he takes a public stand on a bill that would prohibit gay marriage in the state in the 2004 election. Meanwhile a state-senator needs to find a job for his useless son-in-law without a degree and he picks that job. The state senator must first get rid of the guy holding the office. He proceeds to tear down the man and anyone that stands with him. Management at the agency sides with the senator because they can't afford to make an enemy out of someone on the budget committee. He is asked to resign for the good of the agency with help promised to get another position but it never materialized. Would you read it? Probably not. It's real. It's my story in a paragraph. Moral of the story? No good dead goes unpunished and at some level, every government is feudalism.

Stale scenarios perhaps? Like the new kid in school (no offense Cosmie ), new kid in town, new kid on the boat, new kid on the ranch, new kid from Australia, New kid from Dixie, new kid from New York, new kid from England... WTF was wrong with the old kids???

Gay online fiction: a subset of romantic fiction involving gay people; this and a number of other websites bread & butter. Have we reached the edge? Some of our best authors have moved on. Others haven't posted new material in months & years. How many variations of the boy meets boy story can there possibly be? Has the genre gone stale?

Happy Birthday Martin! Have a great year!

Congrats on the promotion! I hope you, your cat pals (and other pals ) are all doing well. Miss you, looking forward to more chapters of your latest story.

Excuse me but I'm GAY! I fell for a MAN, not some guy who had a snip and tuck job.

I took up smoking tobacco when they made me quit smoking weed. I was 21. Let's see: sex is scary with new diseases. What's next? you stick it in and it explodes? The country is either at war or posturing for more war and the democrats are doing everything they can to self destruct. The economy has passed recession, hell in a handbasket and is now hanging in there at basket-case. Gas is going up so fast that only digital displays can keep up. Everything gives you cancer. Stress is at an all time high... And you want us to quit smoking? WTF???

The Free Stuff: Anti-virus Software AVG Anti-virus: the most popular free-ware anti-virus Avast anti-virus: another freeware A-V choice Anti-Spyware Software Ad Aware Spy Bot Cleanup/tune-up utilities ccleaner cleans up temp and junk files, scans registry for known bugs <More later>

Windows XP is a wonder. It has thousands of files and a registry that turns mere mortals into jelly should they attempt to play with it. As fancy as it is, Xp users can run into a lot of headaches. Viruses, worms and spyware (Oh my. ) are a sad fact of intenet life and anyone that has suffered their wrath won't soon forget it. A feature of XP that many people either forget about or have never hear of is called Safe Mode. When you boot the system hit the F8 key and windows will load with a minimal set of drivers and allow you to unscrew whatever is screwed up. Tthe things that makes safe mode so appealing for diagnostics is that very few processes are loaded into memory and to interfere with things like virus/spware detection and removal or defragging the hard drive. Safe Mode comes in several variations. First is Safe Mode with Networking which would give you web access if networking is actually working. The next layer of Safe Mode has no networking turned on and is 100% isolated so that you can clean up whatever mess you have on your hands without exposing a flakey PC to the wild, wild web. Last is Safe Mode with only a command line. Thar be dragons here so if you don't know what you are doing, leave this one alone. You don't have to do anything very fancy to a windows box to create a software conflict, a condition where two or more programs are competing for the same resources. Windows is supposed to guard against this problem but it does happen. Usually systems that develop this problem have been used for a while, have lots of programs loaded. The system begins to slow down, lock-up for no apparent reason or have start-up or shut-down hang-ups (system boots or shuts down very slowly). Another friend to windows users is the Windows Task Manager or the little box you get when you hit control-alt-delete. When you have symptoms like unexpected lockups and startup/shutdown hangups, take a careful look at Windows Task Manager. You will be able to see how much memory and CPU time that all of the various programs (processes) that running on your computer actually use. If either CPU or memory usage VERY LARGE compaired to outher programs, that may well be your problem. Try killing it and see how your system behaves with out it. Another sign of trouble under Task Manager is too many processes are running at once. This could mean that spyware is loading up and running Don't worry. In windows, there is usually a dozen programs to do most anything. If you have to throw one out for behaving badly, chances are you can find another one that is better and will play nice with your operating system and other programs. OK- Here's a menu for a pretty good diagnostic session. If you do this about once a month, you'll save yourself a lot of greif. Reboot system, hit F8 while system is loading and come up in SAFE mode Run your anti-virus program Run your anti-spyware program Run CCcleaner [free utility that eliminates temporary and junk files) Run a registry checkup program to clean up and optimize your registry. Empty your Trash folder. Run defrag on your primary (usually C:) drive partition. Reboot your system to standard Windows. In my next entry I will list some programs and links to both free and commercial software + the pros and cons of freeware vs commercial software.

Ask me at 7am on the first few days of spring dst and i'll probably hurt you or break something.

Who else would you date? Complete strangers? And dating- what's a date? Two friends go to Barnes&Nobles, spend too much money, eat at Zoe's Diner and go home and watch DVDs until 2am. Was that a date or an ordinary weekend in the city?

My OS preference is based on the role that the machine is playing. As a client, Win XP is the most stable and bug free windows distribution that I have used. As a high performance workstation, a fast Intel CPU, lots of hard drive and RAM and one of several Linux variants. Mandrake is my favorite but Ubanutu has a lot going for it. As a web/email server for a box that is going to deliver network services, Linux is the gold standard. I've used Mandrake, Red Hat and a couple of distros. On one server I had an uptime of over four years. The only reason I shut it down was to add RAM and hard drive space. Another one was pushing 2 years when I had to shut it down for the Y2K network upgrade/cutover when I readdressed that subnet.

Colin beat me to the punch.

Sorry- no word from Billy. I know a lot of people won't like this but here goes: I use Norton Internet Security. Why? Because it has everything I need in one bundle: firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, email filtering. I update it every year and not having to worry about this firewall, that anti-virus and those spyware killers is worth $30. Downside: NIS is a resource hog especially when it is scanning the system but if you are running a fast system with enough memory, it won't be so bad. Just scedule it to run when you are at work or asleep.

Billy- I endorse the reccomendations so far. As for Limeware, just say no. If there is a more secure alternative, that's the one you want to go with. Limeware and its dofus cousin Kazaa are notorious back doors into your system. PM me if you've got any specific questions. Good luck pal, James

Graeme: you rock bro. Reading your stories is like boxing blindfolded; you never see the punches coming.

Excellent. The author is getting better with every story.

I have written a lot about 10-15 year olds but the material is autobiographical and the sex is very tame and age appropriate. The drugs and violence are not but F-it that's where I lived and is a major part of the story. In other material that I write the protagonist are 16+. My most current project the protagonist is in his early twenties.

No one is above a few typos. Goodness knows that I'm not. I think that in free online fiction that most people are fairly reasonable in this regard. There are too many people who are willing to edit orl proof-read manuscripts. There's no excuse for posting a manuscript that's in very bad shape.

Climate change is very real and it has been going on in cycles since the planet formed. Three Orbital cycles that affect climate: Orbital Eccentricity: 100,000 year Cycle Orbital Tilt: 42,000 year cycle Orbital Wobble: 25,800 year cycle Orbital Eccentricity: the earth's orbit around the sun forms an ellipse. Every 100,000 years or so the ellipse "flops" into a pattern that changes solar exposure. This trend is working is way to a peak this century. Orbital Tilt: The tilt of the equator varies between 21.6 to 24.5 degrees. This cycle is right in the middle. Orbital Wobble: The earths axis of rotation "wobbles" in a circular pattern over the period of the cycle which is approaching maximum. Catastrophic climate change Over the course of the planets geological record, it is apparent that there have been a number of catastrophic events that have caused either short or long term variations in the climate. These events are: Comet Impacts Asteroid Impacts Super-Volcanic Eruption/Out-gassing Comet Impacts: have taken place with regularity over geological time. One theory of the origin of our atmosphere is that water and gases locked up in comets seeded our atmosphere. Other theories are that comets delived the seeds of life to our planet in the very distant past. While they have had beneficial side effects in the past, comets are unbelievably destructive. Comets are gas and ice and have a nasty tendency to explode when heated by the atmosphere creating a huge fireball airburst of thousands of megatons of energy: enough energy to completely destroy a continent and wreak the climate for decades in a condition not unlike nuclear winter. Are you ready for the good part? This has happened several times in our planets history: most recently the Tunguska comet impact of 1908. Asteroid Impacts: the bad news of comet impacts is even worse for asteroids: they are solid and survive the atmosphere. They strike the surface and vaporize rock/soil and hurl molten material for hundreds of miles in all directions. The fireball itself is very much like a huge nuclear explosion which puts tremendous amounts of super-heated ash and dust into the upper atmosphere. This causes a decades long "nuclear winter" which changes the entire ecosystems. It is believed that this is what caused the mass extinctions that ended the Permian and Cretacous eras (AKA KT extinction). Super-Volcanic Eruption/Out-gassing: from time to time there have been extremely massive volcanic eruptions and periods of volcanic hyper-activity that have been so violent and have released so much CO2 and SO4 that they have simply poisioned massive land areas. I'm not describing the eruption of a Mount St. Helens or even a Krakatau, which both influenced the global climate, but entire regions erupting at once. One of the great extinction events of the past was thought to have been caused when hundreds of volcanoes, rifts and magma flows formed Siberia.

If hard science can prove the cause of homosexuality, then it takes the venom out of social conservatives and religious nuts that believe that it is a choice we make because of our sinful nature1. ______________________________________________________ 1- According to State Rep. Sally Kerns of Oklahoma

Love Japanese cars and trucks, hate anime/magna. I just don't get it. There are too many cultural references that fly right by me and the voiceovers are so bad you would think they were being done by rabid Ewoks on crack. I'm not turning japanese anytime soon. I would probably claw my eyes out or chew off a limb to escape if forced to watch a full length feature.

On American cars 3/8th, 1/2 and 9/16th will get you far. Never underestimate the usefulness of deep sockets! If you go to Sears or a hardware store, you can find some pretty cool socket organizers. My favorite are metal tracks with bit heads that fit 3/8ths and 1/2" inch sockets. You just plug in your sockets in order and you won't lose them.