Phil Elmore's Blog, page 36

Technocracy: A Safe Room For Your Castle

My WND Technocracy column this week is about creating a safe room for your home.  This is as simple as reinforcing the door to your bathroom, in some cases (and making sure you have a cell phone and a shotgun locked in there.)

Burglars, rapists, drug addicts and, yes, violent gangs of roving “Occupy” protesters represent a very real danger to the sanctity of [your] castle.

If you think home invasions are the stuff of unrealistic paranoia, you’re not paying attention.  It happens all the time, and good people are injured, raped, and murdered after society’s predators show up at their front steps.

Read the full column here at WND.

One Of Your Clients Is Nuts

Over the years I’ve done a lot of freelance work.  As anyone who has been in the business — any business — for any length of time can tell you, there is a good chance that at least one of your clients is crazy.

Service businesses like writing, voice acting, and editing are, in many ways, carnival acts.  As a self-employed or freelance provider of services to the public, you’re part hustler, part dancing bear, and always working.  The plates never stop spinning.  The effort you’re willing to expend to get paid and further your solvency by a day, a week, or a year is always foremost in your mind.  This is the price paid to be master of your fate.

Over the years I’ve developed many excellent repeat customers.  I’ve also had my share of horror stories.  Unreasonable clients are as common as unreasonable people.  Society is full of those who want something for little or nothing, who don’t care how their problems affect you, and who will steal from you or make unreasonable demands.  If you work long enough, eventually one of these people will become one of your clients.

You are obligated to fulfill your contracts and to live up to your word, in business and in life — but you are under no obligation to let people rip you off or treat you like garbage.  I have a policy:  The point at which a client becomes unreasonable or abusive is the point at which I tell that client, “Go fuck yourself.”

This sounds harsh and the use of profanity alone will cause some people to accuse you of being unprofessional.  The reality is that the moment a business relationship becomes an abusive struggle for profit or control, initiated by the client, it has ceased to be a professional interaction.  It is now a mugging, and you, the service provider, are the man with a gun in his face or a knife to his throat.

Simple theft is easy enough to understand.  Very early in my freelance writing career, I got ripped off — and badly.  I completed a lengthy writing assignment for a client and did not insist on at least half of the money up front.  When it came time to pay, the client simply started ignoring me.  To make matters worse, this was a PayPal job for someone overseas.  My invoices and e-mails were never returned.  I was out my time AND my fee, with no way to pursue a client across the ocean.

This was an important learning experience: It taught me the value of getting paid up front, in full or by half.  I conduct all my freelance business (save for speculative projects conducted voluntarily) on that basis to this day.  It was still painful to pay that “stupid tax” when I was starting out.

Policies like these work well until you encounter — and you will — a crazy person.  Many unreasonable clients are, in fact, just plain nuts, and this won’t always be obvious at the outset.  Some will demand a refund on the basis that they simply didn’t prefer what you sent them, even though you’ve spent the time and effort in a good faith effort to deliver the job.  Others want bizarre concessions or discounts so deep they make it impossible for you to complete the work.  Still others want you to sign non-disclosure and non-compete agreements so strict you’d be better off buried alive in a cardboard box for five years.

The worst of the crazies are convinced you’re trying to screw them.  If anything goes wrong, if there are any deviations from the completely routine, or if you ask anything of them, they will immediately start freaking out.  You’ll know you’re in trouble when they start telling you elaborate sob stories of all the other people who’ve ripped them off in the past.  That’s when you’ll realize you’re dealing with someone whose exhaustive list of problems, whose tales of abuse at the hands of others, all have a common denominator: the client himself.

You will eventually run afoul of such a customer, who may sue, threaten to sue, or simply be content to trash you online (at which point you must weigh the cost of filing suit yourself — most of the time, it simply isn’t worth what you’ll pay your attorney). You cannot and will not be able to please everyone.  You owe it to yourself to stand up for YOU.  If that means telling a client to eff off after you’ve made every reasonable attempt to accommodate him or her, then that’s how it’s got to be.

This is simply the cost of doing business, particularly in an age where you can work for and with people around the world for years and never talk to them in person.  A very wise man, Coach Scott Sonnon, once told me, “You’ll need to grow a thick skin if you want to play with the grown-ups.”  His point was that business, and especially business online, requires a steel backbone and an iron will.  No one is going to look out for you, or your business concerns, if you don’t do it first.

 

Technocracy: Spying Devices In Your Home

My WND Technocracy column this week is about the possibility that someone could be using a variety of technological devices to spy on and otherwise monitor you at home or while out and about.

Home invaders, identity thieves and sexual predators don’t care how boring your life is.

If this sounds crazy, please believe that it is actually a possibility.  It happens more often than you might think.  I know of more than one incident personally.

Read the full column here in WND.

Stop Doing Business with Fiverr.com

After successfully completing nearly 900 gigs for clients around the world, I’ve recently been forced to terminate my business relationship with Fiverr.com, a website I joined originally in order to write an article about its service for WND.  This was unfortunate because I developed several repeat customers through Fiverr.  It is more so because Fiverr has stolen about 200 dollars of cleared, earned funds from me.

The week of 14 May, I attempted to withdraw over a hundred dollars of accumulated funds from my account, only to be told that withdrawals had been “temporarily” suspended for site maintenance.  In the next few days, the situation remained unchanged… until my cleared funds simply disappeared from my account.  I sent daily customer service requests to Fiverr for the next week, each time being told that the “technical team” was working on the problem and that I simply needed to be patient.

Eventually, Fiverr’s customer support personnel started ignoring my requests.  I was asked to provide screen shots — and never heard from them again.  I sent more requests and nothing was done.  I was forced to suspend all of my active jobs, cancel any gigs in progress, and resign myself to losing the money that had simply disappeared from my balance.

For the most part, the transition went smoothly.  One irate client accused me of lying when I tried to explain what had happened, and why about a hundred dollars of the client’s money was being held captive by Fiverr’s revenue system.  More importantly, however, anyone who works with or purchases services from Fiverr has no guarantee that a problem exactly like this one won’t reoccur.  That’s why I was forced to cut my losses and leave the site after so profitable a relationship, after all — I could no longer expect actually to be paid for my work.

I urge anyone who is doing business with Fiverr to leave the site.   Your time and your work are worth more than five dollars.

 

Technocracy: Leftists Support Child Molesters

My WND Technocracy column this week is a foll0w-up to my previous column.  Yes, I said it: Leftists support child molesters.

Never was this trend more obvious than in the comments on last week’s Technocracy, which quickly became a forum for pedophile sympathizers.

It sounds harsh, but look at the comments on last week’s Technocracy and you’ll see that it’s true.  The comment sections of most WND articles are overrun with left-wing propagandists working diligently from their basements to smear conservatives.  The fact that they also sympathize with child molesters should not surprise anyone.

Read the full column here in WND.

How old is Mack Bolan?

It’s a fact that the protagonists of long-lived action fiction eventually reach an age where it seems improbable, if not impossible, that they could continue doing what they do without ending their latest book in traction — or a nursing home.  Recently, a poster writing as “Wraith270″ at the MackBolan.com discussion forum offered this analysis, which borders on brilliant.  I am reposting it here with my edits:

The first book was released in 1969 and it states that Mack is 30 years old. That was 43 years ago as of today (May 6th 2012). That would make him 73 years old! Pretty spry for an old guy.

The same question of age has come up about Batman and other characters. The simple answer is Comic Book Time. The website TV Tropes even cites the Executioner series to explain Mack’s apparent lack of aging.

Their assessment is that iconic serialized characters exist outside of time and, while decades pass for us, age doesn’t affect these characters. Sure, Bolan may have fought in Vietnam, fought the Mafia through the 1970s, then fought against the KGB until the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Now he’s been hunting down Al-Qaeda and other terrorists for the past ten years and still hasn’t aged. This really seems to be the best fit for the character, like he’s dialed in a suitable age around his mid forties and has just stayed there for the last 30 or so years.

Another form of Comic Book Time that I’ve come across asserts that each issue covers about a week of the character’s life. Given 12 comic book issues a year, that means a comic book character would only age 12 weeks instead of 52. If we do some quick math, 52/12 = 4.33, so if we take Mack’s 43 years of real time and divide by 4.33, we get 9.93 years.  If we start with the originally cited age of 30, then he’s just about to turn 40.

That Comic Book Time formula has also been simplified to say that comic book characters (and other serials) age at 1/4 the rate of real time. So, 43 x .25= 10.75. Where does that leave us? Mack is just about to turn 41.

Finally, the formula that I’ve been using is to say that each book in the Executioner series covers about a week of time. As of now there are 403 Executioners and 150 SuperBolan books. Bear with me here. 553(books) x 7(days) = 3871/365 (days in a year) =10.6, leaving us again about 10 years from the start of the series.

So given any of these formulas, coupled with a suspension of the normal laws of space-time to account for Mack Bolan’s status as an adventure character, and with a starting age of 30 years old, Mack Bolan is in his early forties.

I Narrated (Loudly and Breathlessly) This Children’s Book

The children’s book, Have You Spotted the White Squirrel, was one of those things I wasn’t sure how to take when it was sent to me.  I read the whole thing and was kind of charmed by it.  I think I forgot that the author said I would receive credit for narrating the audio book.

Simon Vector, by JAK Holding

Mike Resnick, the five-time Hugo award winner, hinted at Simon Vector’s pulp roots when he wrote, “Prison planets, evil geniuses, nameless horrors, and a plucky female protagonist — what more could any grown-up boy ask for?”  Ian Douglas, the popular military scifi writer, offered more insight; he called the book “darker and more violent than Aliens, as gritty and as noire as Bladerunner, and spiced with the blood and graphic gore of the zombie apocalypse.”  Jonathan Mayberry said it was “highly recommended,” calling the eponymous character “a dark hero for even darker times.”

All of these descriptions are apt.  Envisioned as a dark Flash Gordon, with horror overtones and the subtext of a procedural actioner, Simon Vector is many novels at once — thriller, survival horror, and adventure tale.  While it’s difficult to be many things to many people, this book manages it, provided you’re not averse to violence or easily disgusted by monsters.  The monsters of Simon Vector, confined and then run amok in the prison Alpha Draconis, run the gamut from human to alien… and something queasy in between.

In some ways it reads like one of Steve Perry’s “Aliens” or S.D. Perry’s “Resident Evil” novelizations; the plot could easily be that of a survival-horror video game.  In other ways, Simon Vector reads like pulp, clearly influenced by any of several action and military scifi authors.  This is not, however, a superficial book.  There is real depth here, and the “Entrypoint” novellas announced by League Entertainment promise to offer even more insight into the lives of some of the lesser characters.  Simon Vector is a novel that BEGS to be the first of a series.  It is ruthless, it is fast-paced, and it is frank in its depictions of an ugly world.

If there is a lingering question in the readers’ mind at the end of this novel, it is a question the author(s) MEAN for you to ask:  What IS Simon Vector?  The book hints at darker deeds to come, leaves the reader wanting more, and is one hell of a menacing, battery-operated tram ride from breakneck start to self-destruct-countdown finish.

“Simon Vector” novel is free for 5 days!

The IP development firm with which I work, League Entertainment, has released SIMON VECTOR, the coolest science fiction action-combat-horror-thriller about space prison, cyborgs, and alien menaces that you will read all year.  I can say without reservation that this is an excellent book and well worth your time.  Pick up your free Kindle version at Amazon before 11:59 pm, Monday, 14 May, while you can!

SIMON VECTOR will also feature four novellas, featuring characters from the novel.  It’s a chance to get to know better some of the heroes and villains of Simon’s world.  Keep your eye on the Simon Vector Novel Website for the release of the novellas.

Technocracy: Monstrous Predators Want Your Kids

My WND Technocracy column this week is about keeping your children safe from predators, both online and in real life.

[T]he ruling of New York’s highest court will encourage and embolden [child molesters], who may well act out their desires with real victims after indulging their sick habits in secret.

Read the full column here in WND.