Foul Mood on a Perfect Night
I had a plan for this October. Throw up a rant. Finish an important project. See Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Throw up another rant. Get a Halloween costume ready. Throw up a Spectacular Halloween Rant, then head off to my cousin's to enjoy my favorite holiday.
That didn't happen, so prepare for whining, guilt tripping, and other such things which you probably
won't enjoy reading about.
OK, that's not entirely true. The important project I DID get done before the deadline. I went a lot of nights without sleep pulling that off too. Still, I did NOTHING on Halloween, which really really really bums me out. I can live without Christmas, and I can live without my birthday, but Halloween is the one day of the year I ALWAYS spend hanging out with friends. Whine whine scare away readers whine.
OK, I have that out of my system I think. Moving along. Remember how I openned up the last rant with a little tirade about how much my job sucked? Eight hours after I posted that, I was fired. I wish I could say it was because one of the managers saw said rant, but it was far more arbitrary. As I believe I mentioned, I was called in on a day I shouldn't have been there, and developing a MAJOR flu after a few hours of wearing nothing but a regulation short sleeved shirt and pants while working outside in the freezing rain then having people sneeze on me. Since I was getting rather delerious, and didn't want to be handling people's food in such a state, I asked to knock off a couple hours early, got a nod, got a ride, passed out for 24 hours, then through up a rant. Went in the next day to hear "You left us high and dry on Saturday, so as far as I'm concerned, you don't work here." Later I found out that the manager in question has a long history of taking the more hard-working employees hired by other managers, scheduling them in to work when they can't with no forewarning at all, agreeing to let them leave early, and firing them for it. So he's a crazy moron that I don't want to work under, and I get the satisfaction of turning down the offer to come back from the much more sane head manager. There's just one little problem.
I am now BROKE. The only reason I was working at that wretched job was that I desperately need the money. It's pretty hard for me to do all the work I do at RPGamer without some form of income (it's rather difficult to answer questions like "Is game X worth buying?" when I can't afford it... not the mention the system it's on). The primary cause of the various instances when I don't throw a rant up for months is that I can't afford to do anything worth ranting ABOUT in those months. More important than anything else though, while this website is hosted for free by the wonderfully generous Alanna, I have to pay about $50 a month for the net access I need to update it, amongst other things. So, considering that I get absolutely no compensation, monitary or otherwise, from my work at RPGamer, or from this page, (with of course that fantastically notable donation of a GBA from Cyrael a while back) and my entire family is so low on cash that I honestly expect to get absolutely nothing for Christmas, AND while the town I live in is really a beautiful area, it contains nothing but the idle rich, small family owned businesses, and people who commute out to a city every day, there is no job market here. Any source of income I might find would be a short-lived under the table deal with a shady character.
Faced with such a bleak reality, I've been looking around at what others in my position are doing. Most are begging. While I know that would be extremely effective (not too long ago, I saw some random website whose maintainers got sick of paying their own bills take it down until their readers coughed up over $10,000 and it actually worked), outright begging goes against my principals. Turning down gifts does too though, so if you FEEL like giving me a few grand out of pity, I'm not going to stop you.
Other people in need of money sell stuff on their pages. All I could possibly sell though would be, say, a book of Slime World comics, which I'm not going to do because A- there aren't quite enough of them, and B- I consider those cheesy things so devoid of value that nobody would ever pay for a collection of them. I could also sell more general merchandise, but, well, I tried that already and it didn't work. Wow. Looking at how much Cafe Press prices have bloated up, I can kinda see why.
The next couple of ideas are a tad more appealing. My evil twin, whose straights on occassion seem even more dire than my own, came up with a rather clever idea. Throw something at him, he reviews it. While I won't be doing that (not because I'm scared of terrorism or anything stupid like that, I've just had one too many things lost forever in the mail to trust it much), I would be up to the next best thing. Throw me enough money to do something along with a note on how to do it, and I will, assuming it's legal and non-life threatening. Want to hear my thoughts on the new Lord of the Rings movie? Throw 10 bucks at me and I'll see it ASAP. Want me to compare Resident Evil with Silent Hill? Throw me $25, and I'll do my darnest to track the thing down. Want me to hike around some ancient druidic ruins? Believe it or not, I don't live too far from some, so I could probably have a little adventure there for $50 or so. Or have I already ranted about that? Anyway, you get the idea.
Then there's the concept from the long essay someone made me read. The principal is this. If everyone reading this page sent me a dollar every time I threw up a new rant, it would let me fend off the jackals, and give me the insentive to post regular updates with the most amusing content I could come up with, so as to keep it coming in. While I can't quite properly gauge how many people regularly read this site unless I get back to updating on some sort of fixed schedule, I know it's enough to meet my needs if you all really did it. This concept is actually kinda cool if you only do it for the rants you like. You'd get to make me your own personal jester, bending over backwards to amuse the heck out of you for just one grubby little dollar. Actually, since Paypal takes out 30 cents each transaction, I'd be making you laugh for less than the price of a fast food burger. You can't beat THAT kind of price... well, except by not paying I suppose.
Anyway, there's the concept for you. There's a paypal link in my little sidebar here, towards the bottom. If you honestly dig the concept of paying me to post better rants, or just feel ultra-generous, feel free to make use of it. Otherwise, ignore it. Either way, I doubt I'll mention it again. Oh, and if someone does throw some money at it, drop me a line so I know I set the account up correctly. Don't personally have much experience with Paypal.
Oh, and on a final fiscal note, I finally gave in to the impulse to start up my own anime/RPG/etc. convention. Feedback so far has been terrific, and the few people who have given me some tips on getting it off the ground have been most helpful. If I can raise most of the start-up costs before the end of the year, I'll totally commit myself to getting this thing moving in time to be a reality this summer, so check it out if you're interested.
There were a few REAL issues I wanted to address in this rant, but it'd be rather mean of me to bury amusing content under all this stuff, so I'll save it all for next time. Heck, I'm not even forcing a new scary pic to sit under this, so if you read all the way down here expecting a pot of gold at the end of the whinebow, well, think about what you just read.
and now...
here it comes...
back by popular demand...
or something like that...
