Linda’s come over, all the way from the other side of the country. Which is really cool. And conversations are getting really weird. We were talking Flight from Hell and we got to incubi and succubi. Linda: Do you remember how incubi and succubi used to be so rare in fiction? And now they’re all over the place. Me: I swear to God I didn’t know Amanda had a series called Incubus before submitting to the Big World Network.

I can’t wrap my tongue around ‘African-American’. I usually end up with ‘Afro-American’, which is apparently somehow more remarked upon as a mistake than ‘black’. So I think I’ll stick with ‘black’. If you insist on my saying ‘African-American’, I will make you call me ‘Eastern-European Caucasian’. Because if I suffer, so should you – it’s more politically correct that way. I’m generally against removing random terms from a language just because somebody might find them bad.

Many years ago, I ran into this fan-subtitled version of the Bleach anime. The subs were good – until the second half of episode 41, where they were hijacked by someone out to troll, who replaced perfectly good lines with gangsta „You owe me money, bitch!” and sex-related themes. In other words, this nice, clean anime about loyalty and friendship and fighting for what’s right turned into its complete opposite under my terrified eyes, thanks to the insane ideas of whoever was in charge of the subtitles.

Marriage in the Christian world is a pretty clear thing: you go to a priest and there’s a ceremony. Ritual things are said and done – and at the end, you’re married. The secular marriage us Westerners have is pretty much the same: you go to someone, declare your intent and then, through the power invested in the ritual by tradition and common convention, you’re married. In old Japan, things were… different?

I learned computer science for four years in high school. One of the teachers didn’t know what arrays were for at one point, but if we had had somebody who was any good at programming, or teaching, or preferably both, I really wish they’d shown us this: Sorting algorithms. All sorts of sorting algorithms. Done visually! With added sound! I have never felt more tempted to run off and learn how they’re done and how quick each of them is in my life.

It’s what I need after last night. It’s not that I went to bed at 2 AM after playing around with tanks in one of the most memory-greedy games on my computer (I suspect with every update it leaves stuff it doesn’t need anymore lying about). It’s not that I looked at all the courses I’ve abandoned on Coursera and got a headache. No. It’s the fact that I had a nightmare.

I had this crazy, complicated dream last night. Of which I can barely remember anything, which is a problem since I can remember the plot was awesome and the settings were so perfect they could make Hollywood cry. I’m talking about huge buildings with their walls crumbling off and their metal structures rusting in the sun. About vines taking over depopulated neighborhoods, growing impossibly green against reddish rubble, against metallic glints of bared pillars.

Just a short announcement: my novel, „Flight from Hell” will be launched on the 4th of August on the Big World Network. Keep an eye out for Roxana Kiril 😉 The genre(s): Horror/Supernatural. Rating: 18+. Apparently I can’t write stuff for a general audience even if I try. Not that I was particularly trying to. The first episode (chapter) will be available for free. After that, reading is subscription-based, but the subscription is barely $3.

I was cheerfully typing a blog post about my novel being launched in less than two months, when my laptop did that thing where the screen turns blue and you just know you’ve been BSOD-ed. I restarted. And this is the error message that appeared: „Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown”. Well, I never would have guessed. Ok, well, I’ll bite, I’ll click on the ‘View problem details’ button. Because thus far I’ve had a clear description of exactly what I saw, surely the details will either clarify or throw so much gibberish at me that I’ll understand it’s a Computer Thing, Don’t Ask.

You’ve probably heard it: in order to attain true success in a given field, you need to spend roughly 10,000 hours practicing in that given field. If you’ve googled it, like I have, you will know that the principle comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s book „Outliers: The Story of Success”. This article isn’t about that book as a whole. It’s about the Rule as a meme. Here’s what I think: the 10,000 hour rule is wrong for the same reason why a million monkeys with keyboards will not definitely produce Shakespeare within a dozen years.