I’d like to get personal for a moment. This may come across as self-indulgent, but the way I see it, it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want with it.
I’ve tried to keep the details of this between me and a few other people for a while now, but since I’m trying to make a clean start here I feel like I should put it out in the open. Some of this you may be familiar with the basics – I just realized while I was writing this that it’s been one year since I first wrote on this topic (and about half a year since the follow-up), which is also around the point where everything started to go to hell. I’ve certainly touched upon it before, but now that some time has passed I’d like to delve into the details. Bear with me.
As many of you know, I was in a relationship with a woman who went by Audrey Huang. She was unlike anyone I’ve ever been with, and I was ready to marry her. I was going through the steps to bring her over here so we could be together. It was a slow process, but I was working my way through it.
And then, one day, she was gone. There was one terse message telling me that she was strong enough without me, and that was it. I never heard from her again. One day we had a future, the next day it was vapor.
It’s funny what something like this will do to you. For the first few weeks after she cut me off, I was fine with it. I moved on with my life just like normal. But something was missing. Those people who go on about how it hurts less with time? It’s a lie. Little by little, day by day, it crept back. By the following month, I was losing sleep over it. Some days I was angry, and I’d rage at Audrey and myself and anyone else that I thought was responsible. Other days, I’d see something that reminded me of Audrey and I’d just break out into tears, sometimes for hours.
What you have to realize is that while I was unemployed, I felt terrible most days. Audrey was really the one ray of sunshine I had. She was such a sunny, positive person, and I felt infinitely better any day she contacted me, even if she had nothing in particular to say. When she stopped talking, that light went out. I never realized how much I depended on that.
It was stupid to put that much weight in her. I acknowledge this freely. Really, I don’t know if it would have worked out if I’d stayed over there longer. There were certainly things I didn’t care for – she could be clingy, and she was actually rather secretive. I don’t know if she could have or would have come back with me. Maybe it was destined to be a fling. But what haunts me is that I’ll never know. What haunts me is the image of her crying the last time I saw her, when I promised her that we’d be together again. More than anything, what haunts me is how abruptly it ended.
So I’ve spent the last two months trying to find her, and there’s not much I haven’t tried in pursuit of that goal. I reached out to her friends and family, but either they didn’t know anything or wouldn’t tell me. I started reaching out to anyone I thought might have some connection to her – people who worked for the same companies, people who came from her hometown or who were there presently (she had spoken about going back there). When that didn’t work, I went to QQ and started posting everything I knew about her in the hopes that someone I hadn’t thought of might have seen her. I dug through old pictures and emails (opening a few wounds in the process) for any information I might have missed. I paid for international calls to her number and the numbers of several people who might have known her. I searched for people with similar names, finding dozens of others and feeling my heart leap every single time. In a moment of desperation, I even sent a letter to her last workplace in the vain hopes that someone there might have something to tell me.
Every effort failed. After two months, I’ve tried everything I can imagine, save a few options that would be going much too far. She’s gone.
Except…she’s not gone. I keep close tabs on the traffic that leads here – the subscription spam has made it difficult to track my legit traffic, so I watch this thing carefully. Shortly after Audrey cut me off, I started getting views through a VPN – the kind of thing used by people in the PRC to get around government censorship. Ever since then, I’ve been receiving regular hits from that same person at least once a month, sometimes more. Now, I don’t have definitive proof that those hits are from Audrey, but no one else from that part of the world has ever taken any interest in what I write. Audrey did. I can’t help but feel that she’s been watching me this whole time (Incidentally, I hope that whomever is watching will consider contacting me, if only to clear things up).
So that’s the situation I’m in, the one I’ve been dodging around for half a year. Everyone tells me I should move on, and I agree. I have no illusions about us ever being together again, and I’m seeing other women. But the thing is, I can’t move on – at least, not entirely – until I hear from her again, even if it’s just one more time. Until then, I can’t be entirely free.
Anyway, thanks for putting up with my crap again. It’s just the kind of thing you have to deal with when you read my commentary. I’ve been taking my time with the novel due to recent life changes, but I should be back with relevant posts within the next few days.
Image courtesty of 云画流年.
As I mentioned previously, I am receiving regular hits through a VPN used by people in the PRC to evade censorship. These hits have kept coming every two or three weeks, and I believe that they are all from the same person. Whomever this is, I would really like to hear from you. Please, please contact me at smileyhunter AT hotmail DOT com. It’s absolutely okay, I assure you.
I’m going to stick this to the main page for a while. Thanks to everyone for dealing with my quirks.
Hello everyone. I’m sure that you’ve noticed that the post count has declined here, owing to the work on my novel and a few other personal reasons. I am glad that, in spite of this, I have a few people still reading what I have to say. I’m especially glad to see that I’ve been getting new followers, more and more over the past few months and a sizable number over the past few days alone. That’s just fantastic. However, there is a cynical part of me that feels the need to say something to the dozens of people who’ve subscribed recently and the dozens who are soon to come:
I will not follow your blog because you followed mine. And while we’re at it, I also won’t “like,” share, or link to your posts because you “liked,” shared, or linked to mine. I don’t operate that way.
I hope you weren’t expecting anything for this.
The reason for this is very simple: I am probably not interested in the contents of your blog. Sorry, but it’s true. And let’s be honest, if you’re doing this “Sub4Sub” nonsense, then you’re not interested in what I have to say either. Yes, you’re being very sneaky in accordance with whatever dodgy guide you read, but there are subtle clues – like getting a like on a thousand-word post ten seconds after it went up. Or getting more followers in a day than I got unique hits. Little things like that suggest that maybe some of my “fans” aren’t actually reading what I write.
I would like to think that people come here because they want to know more about my work or find my opinions interesting. It’s a naive view, I know. Given that every jackass has a blog or two these days, and given that the big websites are becoming increasingly consolidated and increasingly dominant, I can’t fault the little guys for using tactics to try and get ahead. But here’s the secret, people - this tactic doesn’t work. Even if I did follow your blog, I’d never read it. You wouldn’t actually be growing in popularity.
Maybe some of you view this whole Internet thing differently than I do, so allow me to lay out my philosophy. This site is not an arcade game, and the hit counter is not my score. I am not simply trying to make that number go higher. I don’t want more hits, I want more readers, and while the former is theoretically a metric for the latter, it’s getting pretty hard to tell. Due to all this gamesmanship, I’m not what those numbers even mean anymore.
There’s actually a really interesting psychological angle to all this, but I really don’t have the expertise to go into it in detail. Suffice it to say that there are many people who have attached their self-worth (and in some cases, their finances) to numbers, and nothing I say or do is going to stop them from inflating those numbers. I would just like it if these people would not pull me into their number-boosting schemes because, again, I don’t operate that way. Fact is, I actually use that reader. It only contains about five sites, but I don’t plan on adding any more, and I’m certainly not going to add yours just because you pretend to like me.
So that’s the bottom line. If you actually have some interest in what I post here, then I am more than happy to accept your comments and your subscriptions. If you don’t have any interest, then please let me be.
You know, every time I do one of these things I swear it’s going to be the last. It’s a silly idea, making fun of search strings. I hit “Publish” and make a vow to myself that I’ll never do it again. That usually lasts about a day, at which point I spot another absurd query and realize immediately that I’m going to be breaking that vow.
Anyway, here’s the latest installment. This one’s the last, I swear.
writing outlines of sharks
Okay, the whole “what kingdom are sharks in” thing? Doesn’t surprise me any more. What gets me are threads like this one, which appear to be composed of a phrase with the word “shark” crammed into the middle in a way that makes little sense. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a human would write – more like the product of one of those procedural programs that are meant to emulate speech. Honestly, tell me this doesn’t sound like a non sequitur spam email subject line.
are sharks in beijing
Well, Beijing is inland, so I’m going to say no.
advice to create dystopia
Pththththth.
So I was reading this speech China Mieville gave at some writer’s conference about the future of publishing. His big scheme for improving literature involved turning indie writers into salaried employees (of the government, I guess) which speaks a lot to how “serious” the serious writing community is.
Anyway, right in the middle of this rambling, overwritten speech was a thinly veiled jab at those Hunger Games-reading plebes who think they can write. Suddenly, it hit me. The reason no one else is writing about dystopian literature? Because the entire “literary fiction” community considers the subgenre beneath them. Maybe at their next conference, they can have a seance for George Orwell and tell him how they’re all better than him.
Anyway, I’m still not doing the article unless someone asks me.
write in a narrative mode what it is like to be bitten by a shark
I’m about 90% sure that this person was trying to cheat on his/her homework. Look, I get the temptation – you get an assignment that you aren’t too keen on, that you think you can’t do, and the Internet is right there…
You might try to get a handle on search engine syntax before you try that. I know people have spent the last decade and a half complaining that keywords are too difficult, but it’s really pretty damn intuitive (especially for the allegedly “tech-savvy” youth).
how does brooks’ book differ from your own concept of american culture
Look! Someone else trying to cheat on an assignment. One, you’re not talking to HAL9000 here, it’s a machine blindly executing pre-programmed commands. And two, you really don’t want to steal anything I’ve written about David Brooks. That post you found may be the first I’ve written about Brooks that wasn’t 20% obscene suggestions.
Actually, I’m really hoping that this wasn’t for an assignment, because that would mean that someone out there was assigning David Brooks as reading material. That means that someone is wasting a lot of money (besides Yale, I mean).
wu zetian sex story
And finally, my personal favorite. This one came in well after midnight local time, from a server inside the United States. Someone was up late searching for this. Now, I’m not saying that person was looking for historical pornography. I’m sure there was a perfectly innocent explanation for it. Just give me a day or two to figure it out.
This guy? Not my cup of tea.
That’s a very blunt title, I know. Usually, I’m a little more subtle when I discuss issues that smack of politics, but today is different, because…well, I hate David Brooks. He irritates me more than any other pundit by a very wide margin.
You’re probably going to hear a lot about David Brooks over the next few days, all because of a bizarre stunt he pulled over at the New York Times. You see, Brooks somehow managed to land a gig teaching a course at Yale on humility, which attracted no small amount of mockery. And today, we saw the fruits of his very serious endeavor when he cribbed off one of his students for his NYT column. Among the sparkling insights: Young people these days are uncertain over their chances of success and don’t trust the system. Truly, knowledge that only comes from an Ivy League education.
Now, I’m not alone in hating David Brooks, and there are many fine reasons to dislike the man. Maybe you hated it when he butchered behavioral science to give a faux-intellectual veneer to his self-insert ridden trainwreck of a novel. Perhaps you resent his continuing attempts to drag disgraced bigot Charles Murray back into the limelight. It could be that you’ve read any of his numerous columns arguing that the working poor haven’t “sacrificed” enough and find the concept somehow distasteful. All fine reasons to despise Brooks.
My reason is, admittedly, smaller than these, but much more personal. I hate David Brooks because he presumes to know everything about me based solely on where I was born. And I hate him for building his career around that.
Brooks was a nobody until he started writing about popular culture and those salt-of-the-earth types. That’s what propelled him to fabulous success and considerable wealth. He started honing his schtick in his book Bobos in Paradise, published the year I started high school in Pratt, Kansas. Over the next few years, he published a series of popular columns and articles about these happy, simply folk that Brooks understood so well. Yeah, it turned out that those columns and articles were mostly false. But does it really matter? As Kevin Drum argued back when that exposé came out – we all know that it’s true, so why sweat the details?
I’d like to thank Drum (whom, at one point, I respected) for confirming why it is that I hate Brooks – but also for reminding me that I should save some of my contempt for the system that elevates this nonsense.
Last month, I wrote a short piece of fiction for a WP writing challenge concerning three friends in a small town. While the dialogue was wholly fictional, the personalities were very real. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, but I never did because I didn’t think anyone would care. Who would want to read a bunch of stories about people in the Midwest? As it turns out, a lot of people do – they just don’t want to read those accounts coming from people who actually lived there. They prefer to get their true-to-life accounts from a guy whose closest small town Heartland experience was Chicago.
You know what, though? I understand it. A year ago, I wrote a post about the then-recent rash of fabricated “true stories.” We’d all wondered how it was that a Westerner could describe the life of a gay Syrian better than an actual gay Syrian. But it made perfect sense – a person raised his whole life in the West is going to understand what the Western press wants to hear. What Brooks did was no different. His audience was (and is) composed mostly of elites, and Brooks – an elite himself – knows what they’re expecting to hear. If you grow up inundated with a certain perspective on a group or a place, you’ll tend to keep believing it – the fantasy becomes more real than reality.
As a result of all this, I will acknowledge freely that any efforts I may take to correct this are futile. No one wants to hear from me about my actual experiences with actual people, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. But I still feel that I have to at least try. The people I grew up with were complex individuals with complex problems. They didn’t deserve to be rendered into broad cultural stereotypes so that Brooks’s audience could indulge in some contemporary noble savages myth. And as long as this fabulist continues to profit off his bullshit while honest, hard-working journalists and photographers are laid off by the score, I’m not gonna shut my mouth. I can’t.
And maybe that’s a good thing. To be honest, a lot of my creative endeavors were born from my antagonism from David Brooks. There was the aforementioned character study, of course. There’s this photojournal of Lawrence, Kansas that I shot in 2008 in response to one of his columns. For that matter, I might argue that the entire Illinois Trilogy was born from a desire to more accurately reflect what life is like in those places. Maybe I should be thanking Brooks.
…Nope, still hate him.
And this rounds out another 30 days of completely irrelevant search strings. I think I’m going to have to rename this blog something like “Blog Maintained By A Writer From Kansas” because that’s the only way we’re going to avoid confusion.
Anyway, here we go:
stamps of sharks
Nope, sorry. Maybe try “shark stamps” next time. Oh, and for the record, you don’t have to click on every single link all the way down the results. I promise, you are allowed to look at the description, say “Hmm, this hit on page three to a post about Han Dynasty imperial seals maybe isn’t what I’m looking for” and skip it.
“I don’t think this site’s about sharks at all!”
shark idioms
The name of this blog is an idiom. I explained this five months ago when I started getting hits from very confused, very literal-minded people looking for information about sharks. And now, I’ve actually drawn a hit from someone looking for idioms about sharks – someone who missed that post and therefore left unsatisfied, despite this being the one shark-related search that could actually be answered here. It’s kinda funny if you think about it.
shark in unity game engine unannounced play on google
What?
What?
…Moving on.
lidian shark
“Lidian” is a variant on the Greek name Lydia, which originally referred to an ancient kingdom in Asia Minor, later part of the Roman Empire. It’s been the name of a few literary characters, most notably in the stageplay The Lovers’ Progress (where it was actually the name of a male character). Slightly more relevant to this site, Li Dian was the name of a prominent general in the Later Han Dynasty, as well as the pinyin input for “lithium battery.”
I learned all this while trying to find out what the hell this person was looking for, because it certainly wasn’t the post he found. If someone has any idea what this might mean, please tell me – I am legitimately curious.
Fun fact: I chose the name “Lidia” for my Chinese-American character because it easily transliterates into Mandarin. This is why certain Anglicized names (such as “Lily” or “Hannah”) are more common among Chinese immigrants.
nerd archetype description
This post is another one that has received an awful lot of traffic since I wrote it. I’m not entirely sure why, and no one ever sticks around to comment or ask any questions. Is the nerd archetype really a significant notion these days? Is a concept that’s been thoroughly ingrained into pop culture over the last 50 years really subject to so much discussion? Am I on the cutting edge, or is this merely another quirk of the Internet that I’ve only now noticed?
*Sigh* The things I miss out on because no one ever wants to chat.
nicholas joll
And finally, a serious entry. Nicholas Joll commented here a few times, defending the fourth book in the series. As it turns out, Joll is the editor of a book on philosophy in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Check it out if you’re interested in sci-fi literature.
First things first, there’s a new Mammoth Life video out. Check it out, and check out their page for a free download:
Now, as long as we’re talking about bridge building, I’d like to make a request. I’ve been receiving periodic views from someone I think is in the PRC. Since the main WordPress site is blocked over there, the hits are coming through anonymous servers, so I can’t be sure. Point is, I’d actually like to talk to whomever is expending that kind of effort to get here. I wouldn’t want you to risk compromising a VPN by posting openly, so if you’re willing to talk, please contact me directly at smileyhunter AT hotmail DOT com. Thanks.
I don’t like Twitter.
There are a lot of reasons for that – the interface, the culture, the bots and scammers that run the thing – but they’re not really relevant. There’s one aspect in particular that I hate, but I also find very amusing – Twitter makes otherwise reasonable people act like absolute idiots. Maybe it’s the brevity that encourages these thoughtless expressions – I don’t know. What I do know is that, while Twitter has continued to force its way into our culture, these acts of idiocy have not become less common. Quite the contrary in fact.
Of course, the big story in Twitter-fueled stupidity was the Oscar night nastiness from the Onion, in which whomever was running the account decided it would be funny to call a grade-schooler a particularly vile name. This is not what inspired this post, though it speaks to the same point I’ll be making at the bottom of this post. This one concerns something posted a few weeks ago, which quietly sank beneath the waves until this week.
The organization in question is Progress Kentucky, a super PAC targeting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. They’ve spent most of their efforts on highlighting McConnell’s defense of job outsourcing. Nothing unusual there – it is probably McConnell’s Achilles heel. Then one of them wrote this:
This woman has the ear of @mcconnellpress — she’s his #wife.May explain why your job moved to #China! (LINK REMOVED)
— Progress Kentucky (@ProgressKy) February 14, 2013
That link (which I deleted because I’m not sending them any hits) goes to an article from 2007 alleging that then-Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (who was born in the ROC) was racist against Americans. It was then posted with the claim that McConnell’s wife explains why “your job moved to China.”
Because she’s Chinese.
Those of you who’ve been following this blog probably realize why this particular comment might have raised my dander. Certainly, it’s hard to overlook the degree to which casual racism against Asians has become mainstreamed in our political culture. But in this case, the racism is really incidental. The interesting part is the response. Progress Kentucky eventually apologized and deleted that comment, but they spent the first day dissembling and coming up with excuses. Here was their first attempt, from spokesman Curtis Morrison:
It’s not an official statement. It’s a Tweet. And we will remove it if it’s wrong . . . I follow Ashley Judd on Twitter and she removed a Tweet the other day, she Tweeted to you Phillip. People make mistakes in Tweets. It happens. Inferring that Elaine Chao is not a U.S. citizen was not our intention.
And there it is, the ol’ “It’s just the Internet” dodge. I can’t believe people are still trying this.
Look, guys, that defense never works. Yes, I understand, it’s “just” Twitter, and you don’t think anyone should care. But that comment that you don’t think was important still appeared under your logo and website. It was attached to your name and as bizarre as this may seem to you, people tend to assume that your organization stands by anything released under its name. It doesn’t matter that it’s merely Twitter – it’s your Twitter.
Who is this defense meant to placate, anyway? You think someone who heard about your little remark and felt it may have been a touch racist is just going to forget that feeling because “[i]t’s not an official statement”? Yes, reading that reminded me of bigotry I’ve actually seen first-hand, but wait – it’s not an official statement. I guess I’ll just have to forget it.
Truth is, I can buy this as a momentary lapse in judgment. That’s the problem. There was a time when momentary lapses in judgment faded in the cold light of reason. Now they go on Twitter. I feel that most people just haven’t learned how to deal with rapid communication. Just because you can dump your thoughts on the Internet whenever you want, doesn’t mean you should. What started as the most fleeting of impulses becomes a permanent part of the public record, and all because we can’t quite shake this “It’s just the Internet” mindset.
The Internet has a very long memory, and I think we should all think twice before we tell it something we may regret.
Image by Image Editor (CC BY 2.0)
A month ago, I wrote a post on “citizen journalism” or, as its known to those who don’t horribly pad their resumes, blogging. The whole thing was rather overlong – I think I could safely summarize it with the old adage “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Well, something happened this week that I think merits further exploration of this concept. It involves Chuck Hagel and a bizarre rumor that somehow got passed off as news.
For those of you who haven’t heard anything about this very stupid story, we’ll go back to the start. Two weeks ago, Ben Shapiro, Editor-at-Large of Breitbart News (whatever you say, Ben) announced that according to his sources, Chuck Hagel had received funding from a group called “Friends of Hamas.” This allegation spread rapidly through the conservative press – as such things tend to do – and by the following week, it could safely be considered national news.
There’s only one problem with this barnburner of a story: “Friends of Hamas” doesn’t seem to exist. You’d think someone would have checked on that.
Needless to say, Shapiro has been the subject of some mockery over the past week, but in between jabs many commentators wondered how the hell Shapiro even picked up on this thing. Well, as of Tuesday, we may have figured it out. Daily News reporter Dan Friedman alleged that he had inadvertently started the story while talking to a Republican aide. According to Friedman, he had joked with the aide about Hagel giving speeches to a number of obviously fake organizations, “Friends of Hamas” being among them. It’s unclear what happened after that – apparently, the joke bounced around the office for a while and someone spilled to Shapiro.
As dumb as this kind of thing is, it happens sometimes. A reporter (well, “reporter”) runs with a story that turns out later to be false. Part of professionalism is taking one’s failures well. Needless to say, Shapiro did not take it well. He’s already put up two posts covering his ass and trying to shift the blame onto Friedman. His only real defense is that he phrased the article in such a way that he never actually claimed that this organization exists. To quote the “editor”:
The story as reported is correct. Whether the information I was given by the source is correct I am not sure.
For the record, here’s the lede from his article:
On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.”
There’s a name for this kind of dissembling – “plausible deniability.” If that’s vague, try “spreading rumors.”
What we’re seeing here is the latest battle in the long, losing war to save journalistic professionalism. I won’t lament the death of journalism – there are enough people doing that already. I’d like to focus on why this is happening.
There was actually a time when journalists checked their sources and didn’t write sensationalistic accounts based on unconfirmed rumors. At least, I’m told that this was once true, because it certainly hasn’t been the case in my lifetime. I feel like I’ve been watching the news media slide into trivia for the entire span of my existence. Let’s put it this way – even if journalists didn’t always put journalistic ethics into practice, there was never any doubt that those ethics existed. Not anymore.
Part of this is that most “new media journalists” are not journalists in any real sense of the word. Almost all of them are pundits, first and foremost. Their goal is not to report the news, but to package the news in a way that reinforces the narrative of their respective sides. Their job is to agitate, not inform, and in that regard they’re every bit as useless as the professional pundits. Ultimately, what they’re doing is the political equivalent of cold reading – throw a hundred darts blindly, take credit for the two or three that hit near the bullseye, hope no one notices the holes in the wall.
But I don’t want to heap too much blame on the bloggers – again, it’s been done. There’s a more fundamental flaw, and that lies in the greater media environment. Media professionals have been complaining about about the destructive influence of blogs for over a decade, and yet none of them have bothered to look inward. In recent years, the profit motive has eclipsed the original intent of the press by a wide margin. Media outlets have become cheaper and more sensational in an attempt to boost their margins, which has in turn made the news worse. Why else would they put pundits on the air? A pundit doesn’t educate, but he’s cheaper than a local news office and draws in better numbers. If we didn’t have these folks chattering on the television every night, maybe we wouldn’t have so many “new media journalists” trying to do the same thing on the Internet.
It comes down to this: A lot of people are ready to give up on digital journalism. I think that’s rash. I’ve long held that art can thrive on the Internet, even if there are more than a few cards stacked against it. Journalism is no different. For all the jokes I’ve made here and elsewhere, I absolutely believe that digital journalism is a real, albeit rare beast. There’s nothing particular to using a computer that renders a person unable to follow professional guidelines. The path to legitimizing online journalism is a long and very silly one, and we may never find it, but it exists.
Normally, I try to put some space between these search engine posts – let three months pass between each so that I have a lot to choose from. But it seems that in the past few weeks, I got some special ones. Guess that’s what happens when you’re not minding the store. So here’s a special “While I Was Away” edition of Figure Out What This Person Was Looking For.
current events sharks
Yeah, still. I’m going to actually start writing about sharks since my SEO is so awesome.
fetish for sharks
. . . On second thought, I think I’ll stick with writing. I really don’t want to know what kind of searches you might get if you write about animals on the Internet.
richard garfield asian women
Sometimes, you regret things you write. This thread led to this post, which receives hits on a semi-regular basis. It was an important post on a topic that was not easy for me. A few months later, the woman who was the topic of that post had not only broken off our engagement, but had completely cut off all contact. To this day, I haven’t heard a single word from her.
So thanks, Internet. I enjoy nothing more than allowing you to cram your dirty fingers into my wounds so that you can live out some borderline racist fantasy. It’s positively charming.
beyond foodstuffs
This person was either seeking information on breatharianism or else this is the name of an avant garde bakery. Either way, it’s nice to know that I’m not the only person who uses the somewhat antiquated term “foodstuffs.” In a search, however, you might want to try “food” first.
ben jameson, a writer
Ben Jameson is not a writer of any description. Ben Jameson’s life story was written by Sara Mills and edited by Lidia Zhang.
Oh, wait – you were talking about an actual person. Well, then don’t come here. I deal in fiction.
i think ill steal it douglas adams
You know what? I’m going to answer this seriously, because I was re-reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy recently so I know where it’s from. The line you’re remembering was spoken by Zaphod Beeblebrox in Chapter 4 of the first book. The full line is, “That is so amazingly amazing I think I’d like to steal it.”
By the way, pet peeve: I’ve noticed a lot of lists of quotation attribute lines spoken by characters created by Adams to Adams himself. If you’re going to work with fiction, you have to separate it from the writer. It was Ford Prefect who said “Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so,” not Adams and no, I don’t care that Prefect doesn’t really exist.
organic writing
Wait, this is a real thing? I didn’t just make it up? You learn something every day.
(writing process updated)
And finally, there’s . . . this. It may look ordinary, but these sorts of queries are the one that puzzle me the most. What, exactly, was this poor soul hoping to find? There’s really not enough context information to figure it out. Was it a specific site? A quote? A book? Unless he shows up again and finds this post, I’m never going to know. And that’s going to bother me.
For about ten minutes. Maybe twelve.
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