Alone and Unobserved

I know none of my readers are particularly excited by the prospect of my adding ads to the site, even if they’re just unobtrusive Google text ads. And I haven’t even 100% decided to do it. But the fact that I cannot log into my AdSense account—an account I created who knows how many years ago, and whose username and password I long ago forgot—is currently driving me to the edge of frothing, homicidal rage. And Google’s “help” pages are, as usual, worse than unhelpful.

Google consistently maintains that the following contradictory positions are true:

• My main Google account has no AdSense accounts associated with it.
• My main Google email (the one that’s part of my main Google account) cannot be used to set up a new AdSense account, because it is already associated with an AdSense account.

At this point my eyes are already bulging with rage, and I remember why I gave up on ever using AdSense in the first place. But, because I am a sense-challenged, pain-loving fool, I visit Google’s Help Center (motto: “Where Your Will To Live Goes To Die”) to see what can be done to recover my account.

Well, according to a labyrinthine series of help articles, the following must be done!

• If I no longer remember my “login,” I should check the original email I got from AdSense with that information in it. (The original email has no such information in it. The original email has NO useful information in it. Maybe because, back in the day, when I “submitted my application” [i.e., clicked on a button in Blogger] they had a functional account recovery process. Or a different, non-functional one.)
• Failing the above, I should submit a recovery request with several pieces of information I could only get IF I HAD ACCESS TO MY ACCOUNT. Which, I’m not sure if you’ve caught on to this yet, I DO NOT.
• Failing the above “Failing the above”: I should submit an application for a new account (remembering to lie when it asks if I have an existing account) and let them find out my deception—no really, this is from the official account recovery email I got—and then ask them to close my old account, approve the new one, and merge them together.
• Oh, but I can’t just have them close the account and open a new one with the same email, because that email is… already taken. But not usable. And also not associated with any AdSense accounts. Except it is.

So after trying to perform this last-ditch, “lie to us, and then apologize” smoking-earth account recovery maneuver several times, each time generating THE EXACT SAME EMAIL that sends me to the EXACT SAME FUCKING WEBPAGE with the EXACT SAME GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING USELESS OPTIONS I’VE ALREADY TRIED SIX TIMES:

I am done. I will no longer be trying to access, recover, use, or otherwise acknowledge the existence of my alleged AdSense account or Google’s goddamn dickshit horsebuggering AdSense program in general.

And there was much rejoicing.

I’m trying out a CAPTCHA on the comment form to try and cut down on the rate of spam I’m getting. If it doesn’t work I’ll turn it off. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s really been a deluge.

A note: if your comment ever fails to appear on the site—or if the CAPTCHA malfunctions and you can’t leave a comment at all!—the best thing to do is email me at sean@aloneandunobserved.com and ask me to look into it.

Sorry I’m not blogging very much right now. Partly it’s because I suck, but partly it’s because I’m spending so much time writing other things! Unfortunately they’re things I’m hoping to submit to publishers and magazines, so I can’t really show them to you right now (depending on the market, posting a story to my website can count as having ‘previously published’ it, which makes it much less attractive to editors). Don’t worry, though—once I’ve piled up enough rejection slips I’ll probably end up posting them here anyway.

A few days ago my friend John Remy over at Mind on Fire posted on Twitter about a zombie erotica/romance flash-fiction anthology that was soliciting submissions, and I sat right down and reeled off an 800-word short-short story involving zombies and inappropriate sexual contact. I was drunk at the time. Sadly, I was also drunk when I sent it off to the editors, and I’ve been afraid to look at it since for fear of realizing exactly how embarrassed I should be.

A couple days ago Amanda Palmer posted a Twitter update linking to this flash fiction contest for fans who wanted to follow in Neil Gaiman’s footsteps and write stories about Amanda Palmer’s unfortunate end. The deadline was yesterday; yes, I should’ve told all of you about it earlier, and I only didn’t because I’m a terrible, hateful person who wants my readers to be unhappy and unfulfilled. (And also maybe I was afraid you’d write a better story than I did.) I worked a couple days on it, and was pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

Right now I’m in the process of expanding/rewriting my short story “The Strangers” with the idea of submitting it to a magazine or contest in the near future. Anyone who wants to read (and comment on) the current draft, write me an email and I’ll send you a copy. Positive comments are always welcome, but what I’m specifically looking for are constructive critiques, whether specific or general.

I love writing and creating and such, but it would be nice if any of my passions was something that made shitloads of money instead of a pittance (if they earn anything at all). I’m not particularly interested in being rich, but it would be nice to have the same kind of passion and drive for my paying job as I have for my hobbies.

2009 was a pretty hard year for me. I lost a lot of the motivation and drive to create I’d been feeling, and my desire to write and blog dried up. (Check out November—only one post in the entire month, and that was on November 30.) But it was also a great time. I made several comics, started teaching myself to draw, and read my first Vonnegut novel (The Sirens of Titan—still not sure what I thought of it).

Anyway, enough blathering. This is the same meme I did in 2007 and 2008, with a slight variation. Happy New Year!

The rules for the meme: Take the first line from the first post of every month for the last year, and post them together as a kind of cross-section of what you were blogging about during the year. Remember to link to all the posts you are excerpting. I’ve added some stats for each month to kind of get an idea of how much, and what, I was posting all year.

06 January 2009: Child of Mormonism

. . . as I started leafing through the mission papers and letters and notebooks and journals I was sucked right in. I didn’t really keep a journal when I was a teenager, so my mission writings are a fascinating glimpse at a young me who was very earnest, desperately conflicted and working very hard to reassure himself that GOD EXISTED AND THE CHURCH WAS TRUE DAMMIT. Besides my doubts and shaky faith, my mission was incredibly stressful and almost proved too much for me emotionally, and the journal entries provide a picture of a young man continually on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Stats for January 2009:
11 posts, 1 flashfic, 70 comments

06 February 2009: Flashfic Friday!

It’s time for the new and improved Flashfic Friday, where I post something short and sweet (and, knowing me, probably gory and disturbing) every Friday, and you let me know what you think.

Stats for February 2009:
12 posts, 2 flashfic, 1 essay, 1 comic, 3 recipes, 48 comments

03 March 2009: Music Dump

I was watching Neil Gaiman perform “Creepy Doll” on YouTube with Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm and I realized that I only had six Jonathan Coulton songs in my iTunes. I know! Crazy, right?

Stats for March 2009:
6 posts, 32 comments

01 April 2009: Trying Out the Flock Browser

Trying out Flock, the “Social Web Browser.” So far it just seems loud and busy. But it claims to be able to post to my blog, so we’ll see. Maybe I’ll keep it around.

Stats for April 2009:
6 posts, 20 comments

03 May 2009: My Muse Is Flown

One of the first things that goes when I’m stressed, overtired or out of sorts is my creativity. Not only can I no longer write, I no long even feel the urge to, which is such a bizarre loss that it always catches me completely unprepared. Even worse, I become utterly uncreative and inflexible in my day-to-day life as well, which means I find it harder simply to deal with things. You might not realize how much creativity you use in making mundane decisions, but believe me, you’d miss it if it were gone.

Stats for May 2009:
8 posts, 20 comments

03 June 2009: Wrong Number

Her: Hi, is Amanda there? I’m [name], and I’m calling on behalf of… the fact that I’m getting induced tomorrow.

Stats for June 2009:
12 posts, 42 comments

07 July 2009: Tuesday Morning Aggravation – UPDATED!

Confused patron: Can I have the address to Nashville?

Stats for July 2009:
12 posts, 91 comments

01 August 2009: Bit Off More Than She Could Chew, Maybe

Today, a woman walked up to the reference desk and asked me for a zucchini bread recipe—any zucchini bread recipe… except she didn’t want it to “make too much.”

Stats for August 2009:
7 posts, 10 recipes, 20 comments

01 September 2009: Try Staples. It’s right down the street.

Patron: “Do you have a manila envelope?”

Stats for September 2009:
10 posts, 3 comics, 44 comments

05 October 2009: My god! It’s full of stars!

So, this is my last semester with The Library Science Program That Will Not Be Named. And—besides finishing 36 hours of coursework—in order to finish the program, students are required to submit to a Right of Passage known as the Capstone Experience.

Stats for October 2009:
7 posts, 1 flashfic, 4 comics, 38 comments

30 November 2009: Say what?

Me: WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION.

Stats for November 2009:
1 post, 3 comments

05 December 2009: The REAL Reason I’m Single

I can’t imagine being in a relationship because I do everything by myself. Almost literally everything. I sleep by myself, shop by myself, go to movies by myself, go out to eat by myself, watch TV by myself, crack jokes by myself (some of which make it on Twitter/Facebook, but not all), cook by myself, etc., etc. It’s not that I mind doing stuff with other people; it’s simply not part of my routine. And frankly, deviating from my routine annoys me. Hear that, friends? Quit asking me to do things with you. It cuts into my Farscape-watching time, goddammit.

Stats for December 2009:
5 posts (including this one), 1 recipe, 15 comments

I don’t know if any of you noticed, but all the category pages in the menu at the top of the site except for About Me have been broken for who knows how long. Well, I finally fixed them, and I even added several recipes to my cookbook that have been languishing elsewhere.

Now I just need to go around and tweak the margins and padding to fix some spacing issues, and everything will be PERFECT. Until my next housekeeping mood strikes.

I’ve been wretchedly bad at updating this blog lately. We’re coming to the end of the semester, and the amount of final projects I’m putting off is poisoning everything I do. Whether I’m reading a book or soaking in the tub or helping library patrons at work or watching TV or getting drunk at a party, there’s that niggling little itch in the back of my mind that says, “You should be doing homework! Stop having fun and work on your assignments!” It’s really cramping my style.

One of the first things that goes when I’m stressed, overtired or out of sorts is my creativity. Not only can I no longer write, I no long even feel the urge to, which is such a bizarre loss that it always catches me completely unprepared. Even worse, I become utterly uncreative and inflexible in my day-to-day life as well, which means I find it harder simply to deal with things. You might not realize how much creativity you use in making mundane decisions, but believe me, you’d miss it if it were gone. Suddenly my mind can only recognize a single way of doing things. In my head, every problem only has one solution, every interaction only one acceptable path to success, which makes dealing with library patrons—who are endlessly creative in thinking up ways to baffle and bemuse me when I’m at my best—almost impossible.

Well, hopefully the end of the semester will herald a brief period of peace, tranquility and (fingers crossed) creativity, before the summer term arrives to crush all my dreams again.

In the meantime, go have fun reading the archives of Mis/adventures in Bookland, where Suffering Silently blogs about dealing with bookstore customers in a small-town bookshop in Canada. I could swear some of her customers also visit my library.

Things have changed a bit around Alone and Unobserved.

First: As you can see if you are viewing this at aloneandunobserved.com on a regular computer, Alone and Unobserved has a new theme. I was tired of wrestling with the Sandbox theme, which was crippled in several respects and—I am convinced—was coded by drunk insane people. (Sorry to the Sandbox dev team, but… yeah.)

Second: If you view this blog on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll notice yet another theme, this one optimized for viewing on one of those devices.

Third: Because of the change in themes, comments are now showing up where they are supposed to. So if you commented on my recent ten-minute fiction piece, your comment should now be visible! Yayz!

Fourth: Google has verified my ownership of this blog and I now have a blog-specific email address, sean@aloneandunobserved.com, which you can always find on the About Me page. You can use it to send me feedback, but please do not sell it to spammers.

Fifth, and finally: I’m going to try and start writing more, and to motivate me in that direction I am resurrecting the Flash Fiction of the Week feature. Expect the next installment this Friday.

Er, that is all for now.

If you are reading this then you’ve successfully found your way to the new home of Alone and Unobserved. Looks a lot like the old home, doesn’t it? Changes in the theme and layout may be forthcoming over the next little while, but to start out with I just wanted to get everything the way it used to be, and work from there.

I promise I’ll post something worth reading after the long weekend is over. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

I’ve hosted this blog on WordPress.com for less than a year, but already I’ve decided to move again, this time to a self-hosted WordPress blog.

What this means to you:

Not much. The site may be down for a few days. Make sure your bookmarks and links point to http://aloneandunobserved.com/ and once the site is back up you should be fine.

See you on the flip side!

malki http://xrl.us/becqjm: Most people have no idea how Twitter could possibly be useful, in any conceivable world, ever. Also get off their lawn
about 11 hours ago from twitterrific

Some people are clueless and cranky about new technology. Some are eager early adopters. And some are eager and clueless.

David Pogue, a tech writer for the NY Times, seems to fall under the third category. If you visit his Twitter profile, @davidpogue [now @Pogue], he seems like a fairly normal Twitterer. But yesterday, he wrote a blog post about Twitter that was probably well-intentioned, but which ended up being so wrong-headed and just plain misinformed that readers are left puzzled and underwhelmed by the very service he ends up tentatively recommending. It’s no surprise when many of his commenters thank him for steering them away from such a useless, time-wasting service. “I’ve been skeptical of Twitter from the get-go,” many of them say, in effect. “I’ve held out against it this long, and after your post I’ll never use it.”

So let’s ignore Pogue’s post as a nice try that unfortunately failed, and move on to the main questions.

What is Twitter?

Twitter began as a way of a) using text messages to post updates (or “twitters,” “tweets” or “micro-blogs”) to a website, where other people could read them and b) of receiving, also via text message, updates from friends and acquaintances. A year or so ago, Twitter made its API public, which meant that outsiders were able to design third-party applications that could live on computer desktops, in browsers or on mobile phones, which could be used to update a person’s Twitter feed and read other people’s tweets. I use a service called Ping.fm to post updates not just to Twitter but to all my social networks, and an iPhone app called TwitterFon to read my Twitter feeds and carry on conversations. (My Twitter feed.)

Why is Twitter special?

Twitter makes it possible to send the same text message (or text-message-sized blurb) out to ten, a hundred or a thousand people. This sounds like spam, but it’s not, for the simple reason that Twitter is opt-in. People who want to hear from you will follow your tweets. People who don’t, won’t. That’s one strength of Twitter as a communication tool over simple text messages or emails: more people tend to have your cell number or email address than you typically want to hear from. Not so with Twitter: any time you tire of hearing from a particular person, just tell Twitter to stop texting you their updates, or unfollow the person altogether.

Why should you Twitter?

The main reason I personally Twitter is because Twitter is FUN. But everyone has a different reason for Twittering. Some use it to keep abreast of what their friends or favorite celebrities are doing, minute by minute. Some like to engage in conversations using @replies. Some use Twitter’s search feature, at search.twitter.com, to follow trending topics in the Twitterverse. Some join Twitter to promote themselves, their product, their company, their ideas or their website. Each of these uses leads to a different style of Twittering.

Twittering is different from a more immersive social network such as Facebook in that communication and information sharing is the key. Do you like broadcasting your ideas across the web? Are you prone to pithy witticisms? Do you want a larger network on which to complain about or praise the companies you patronize and the company you keep? Do you have a website to promote or a web-based business to market for? Twitter is excellent tool for all of these purposes.

What should you Twitter about?

Pogue makes it sound like you should never Twitter about what you are doing right now, but that’s not true. Throw away the rules. Anything that can be condensed into 140 characters is fair game. Twitter about

• Your struggles with chemotherapy.
• Your newest blog post.
• Your kid’s bowel movements.
• Your new Super Friends shirt.
• A new marketing promotion for your business.
• YOUR VICE-PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE/RUNNING MATE.

And here are a few suggestions:

• Don’t protect your updates.
  Twitter allows you to “protect your updates,” which blocks people from seeing your Twitter feed unless you give them permission. I’m sorry to say it, but this defeats the purpose: Twitter is about an open conversation. Protecting your updates keeps the conversation small, tight and closed. It cuts you off from the larger network. I strongly advise against it.
• Follow-backs are nice, but not required.
  Don’t listen to people who say you have to follow everyone back who follows you. It’s nice if you do that, but let’s face it: some people are just boring. And some people are spammers. Neither kind needs/deserves to be followed back. Also, if you are famous and are followed by thousands of people, a follow-back can be nice, and it makes your followers feel good about themselves—but it is in no way required. Especially now that Twitter and the various 3rd-party apps can display @replies from anywhere in the Twitterverse, instead of just from your pool of followers.
• Strike a balance.
  If you don’t follow anyone, you are missing out on the real Twitter experience. If you follow too many more people than follow you, you look like a spammer. Everyone hates a spammer.

Special suggestions for those who want to use Twitter for promotion/marketing/feedback/etc.:

• No one likes a spammer. The best way to use Twitter for self-promotion is by integrating yourself into the community.
• Post interesting, useful updates.
• Reply to followers, and engage others in dialogue instead of simply blasting your own info all the time.
• Use your network with care, following only those who really look like they are interested in your product/company/particular brand of self-promotion, and sticking as closely as possible to your immediate network as you expand your reach.

I repeat: NO ONE LIKES A SPAMMER.