Aaron Frale's Blog, page 4
August 8, 2024
5 Insensitive Summer Vacation Plans
Why let climate change deniers have all the fun? Since scientists are predicting a whopping 24 inches (60 cm) of sea level rise in the next 10-20 years it’s time to book that beach front vacation before there’s no beach! If you can’t beat them, might as well join them. It’s also possible that if you try any of these you’ll end up in prison or worse! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Polar Bear Wrestling – Why not settle down for some summer fun and wrestle polar bears? We’ve all seen the pictures of emaciated polar bears from their shrinking artic habitat, why not take advantage of them while they are weak and prove your manhood at the same time by wrestling them into submission! Worried about PETA or some namby pamby environmental organization ruining the fun? Not to worry! The sea ice in the artic is so melted you can do it in international waters where all you have to worry about are drug lords (which face it, they’ll probably start placing bets on your polar bear fights).Amazon Rain Forest Deforestation – Why let big business and industry have all the fun cutting down swathes of the Amazon rain forest when you can do it yourself! Pretty much anyone with a chainsaw and a dream can clear cut any part of the Amazon they want. If you really want to spice up that vacation just grease the palm of a few Brazilians politicians and you can burn down the whole dang forest!Narwhal Ice Fishing – With glaciers melting and sea ice disappearing, this might be your last chance to catch a narwhal. Imagine the stories you’ll tell with that critter mounted on your wall and its ferocious horn that almost impaled you. Sure, the holes you drilled in the ice will only accelerate the melting of the glaciers but who needs them anyway? You live in a state completely protected against climate change, Florida. Everyone knows that politicians in Florida are way above all this climate change nonsense.Malaria Parties – With climate change threating to push tropical diseases further north, get all your anti vaxxer friends together and contract Malaria. Then you can prove to the world that half baked medical advice from an online personality who describes themselves as a Health and Fitness coach will cure any disease, baldness, grow your penis by inches (and the libido to match), get giant muscles by sitting on the couch, and produce natural pheromones that will make you irresistible to the opposite sex. I mean what he says must be true. He has sex like 50 times a day according to his TikTok, and is like the buffest dude you’ve ever seen. Never mind that he lives in a mansion and probably works out 8 hours a day for a day job. He takes an herbal supplement from Nature’s Cornucopia of Bounty and Wellness fifteen times daily. And you know the herb is legit because he is in no way connected to Nature’s Cornucopia of Bounty and Wellness, unless of course you unravel the legal tangle of shell companies, and find out that the $245 a week supplement is just basil.Beach Sand Parties – You can help affluent members of society keep their heads firmly in the sand by building mounds of dirt to protect their expensive beach front properties against sea level rise. Luckily this can be a vacation you do every summer as those sand seawalls will need to be rebuilt. You’ll be helping people that don’t want to pay for climate change initiatives to pay for it in more catastrophic ways. This is a win-win for anyone who loves sand and their heads inside it!
Making bills and earnin’ like a baller with l33tskillz4va’s crypto fast cash is not what happens in this book!
But there are killer trees and bloody arena battles. What more could you want? Except sex. That happens too.
It also resolves plot points like certain characters stuck in a painting and what’s Petra’s mom doin’ at that volcano, yo!
I mean I guess there’s stuff like personal character growth and human connection and all that warm, squishy stuff.
But did I mention sex that happens in this book, and magic, swords, battle axes, battles, and plenty limbs being chopped off?
Oh yeah, it’s all in the third Misfits of Carnt!
Author Swaps
The following authors are kindly sharing my books with their readers. Show them some love and click on their links.
When Captain Zeke Travers and the crew of the Friendly Card face off against an ancient cosmic horror, they’ll need brains, brawn, and some serious bending of the laws of physics to survive.
Would you like to see your book here? Hit me up on Story Origin.
July 31, 2024
Goodbye Kindle Unlimited for Now
Before we start, check out this sale of Sci Fi and Fantasy books.
For those of you who are on Kindle Unlimited, I’m going to pull all my books out of it and publish them to a wider platform (ie all of them). I promise to let you know when they will leave so you have a chance to download them before they go. The beauty of downloading them before they go is that you can read them whenever you want past the date of their departure, just don’t delete them till you are done reading them.
For me, the switch is pretty easy to quantify. For the past year, I’ve had half my books in KU and the other half in wide distribution. More people have purchased the books on both Amazon and the other platforms, then have purchased/read them through KU. The benefit for you as a reader is once I leave KU, I can do more sales, offer books for free more often, and generally have more control over the pricing of my book.
You can change the pricing of your book in Amazon, offer it for free, etc. but they don’t make it easy, I could go into details but I don’t imagine it will be of much interest, so suffice to say, as my books leave KU, I’ll let you know the day it will happen. For those waiting for them to appear on other platforms, they will appear on the other stores shortly after they disappear from KU.
I’m also going to unpublish a slew of short stories that I have on Amazon. They are all located in various book collections so they won’t disappear. I’ll let you know as they leave in case you are a collector and want to have them all. The only difference between the short stories and the ones on the collection is I may have written a few author comments on the story.
Here is the first round of things leaving KU and when it’s going to happen:
Leaving KU 8/31/24.
An innocent girl with a mysterious father finds herself a fugitive on the galaxy’s most wanted list.
Considered too fragile, Kal is forbidden to join the raising of the Et’Tal’s home and feels as if she has shamed her family. Her lithe stature links her to her absent father. He left the village to fight in the Teristaque Wars and never returned.
She meets Sarge, a strange star species called Human, who seems to know the secret of the patch from her father’s uniform. Before she can get clarity, a fierce Teristaque death squad descends on her village, murders everyone in it, and takes Kal prisoner.
Kal wants more than just answers. She wants revenge.
Leaving KU 9/1/24.
The number one space pirate in the galaxy discovers she is the only one who can save it from utter decimation.
After stealing the most advanced Teristaque ship, Kal and her crew are pursued by an armada across the galaxy. Despite burning through space in the fastest vessel in the quadrant, there are too many factions after her to avoid them all.
Another spacecraft gets the drop on her. It’s Makiuarnek, the man who slaughtered her village, and he wants a truce.
There is evil brewing on her homeworld of Nigramoto, and the petty squabbles of the interstellar regimes are about to become inconsequential, and Kal is at the heart of it all.
She will either save all life in the galaxy or destroy it.
Leaving KU 9/6/24.
I ate thy brains ere I killed thee…
Shakespeare’s classic tale of hubris, paranoia, and betrayal is reimagined against the darkly comedic backdrop of the post-apocalypse…
…And zombies.
The Teristaque Chronicles Short Story Collection
Leaving KU at varied times. I’m not going to announce when these are leaving individually since you can read each one in Kal’s Fate and Kal’s Quandary. I first started Kal’s story as a couple of short stories, then it grew to a universe, then an entire trilogy, and I even thought of a few things I can do post events of the main story arc, and left a little opening for myself to write more.
My plan when they leave Kindle Unlimited is to put their cover art in Kal’s Fate and Kal’s Quandary ebook versions. Maybe one day if I can afford it, I’ll republish the paperback and hardback too with the alternate art inside as well. All the covers are stock images that I bought and slapped words on it. I’m really not that good at design, but I can pick a cool image.
I’ll also give away them for free as I remove them from KU so you don’t have to use a KU download to get them. Also, I’m going to stagger the free days because I’ve always been curious if that helps series book sales and juices that amazon algorithm. I usually only ever give away the first in series for free, so we’ll see what happens when all of them are free at one point or another.
Free Days:
Part II: Kal’s Truth: 8/6/24-8/10/24
Part III: Hayden’s Mistake: 8/11/24-8/15/24
Part IV: Kal’s Revenge: 8/16/24-8/20/24
Part V: Makiuarnek’s Ascension: 8/21/24-8/25/24
Part VI: Grannork’s Burden: 9/1/24-9/5/24
Part VII: Hayden’s Dilemma: 9/6/24-9/10/24
Part VIII: Sarge’s Secret: 9/11/24-9/15/24
Part IX: Kal’s Father: 9/16/24-9/20/24
Leaving KU 9/1/24. This is a short story that’s included in my first ever short story collection Cowboys and Drones. Don’t get too excited. I really screwed up with the title because while the collection does have cowboys and drones, they don’t appear in the same story. However, since I was the first to think of the name maybe I’ll write a proper Cowboy and Drone story one day.
Either way, this is the second part of a four-part story from the collection about time travel and cowboys and if you want it, it will be free until Friday.
Cowboys and DronesLeaving KU 9/21/24. This is the short story collection that started it all. Back when I fancied myself a screen writer, but didn’t have any luck selling screenplays, I wrote a novel called Time Agency. I submitted the unpublished novel to publishers, and one of the big ones put it on their “to take a closer look” list. Since I had nothing better to do while I was waiting for their answer, I challenged myself to write and publish one short story every month for a year.
This collection is the fruits of my labor during the challenge. To be honest, it’s okay. It’s never been edited by a professional, and I am profoundly bad at spelling and grammar. So, I thank my lucky stars that my books sell well enough to support hiring an editor. Scott, if you’re reading this thank you. I’m also pretty sure I lost the manuscript and all the stories in it after several moves and several computers later. But it’s still there if you enjoy my writing enough to see where it began. While Time Agency was the first book I ever wrote, this was my first toe in the water of self-publishing.
I also got very lucky with my cover art for this one. Rudy Lovato, a local New Mexican artist, taught with me at a 2-year college. I mentioned my story project, and they wanted to do the cover art. So, the cover art is actually Rudy’s depiction of two characters in the 4-part time travel story. I’d share their website if I knew what it was. There’s a lot of Rudy Lovatos in Albuquerque, but if you’re reading this, drop me a line with what you’re currently working on, and I’ll share it.
Book Swaps
The following authors told their readers about my books, so I am telling you about theirs. Click on the links and show them some love.
A budding sorcerer, an ex-cat, and a fake duke take on a series of murderous, ghostly attacks on a retired ocean liner–what could possibly go wrong?
Get Sorcerers, Spirits, and Ships here.
As torn petals of a rose fall, a hero must rise in a race against destiny.
On a world where ancient magic and technology exist, the skeletons of the past never stay buried for long. Melinda Scott should know. She just found a big one.
Gna’ is sent to the Underworld to negotiate the release of Frigga’s son, Baldur. Gna’ must fight a sorceress, fend off an attack from hellhounds, solve riddles, and face Hela’s army of undead in her attempt to secure Baldur’s freedom.
Get Clash of the Goddesses Here.
Want to see your book here? Hit me up on Story Origin.
July 17, 2024
The Gladiator Journalist and Other Murderous Flora is Out!
The Gladiator Journalist and Other Murderous Flora is finally available in paperback, hardcover, and audiobook! The talented Rebecca Woods is back to narrate the audiobook for this third installment of the series, and this book is the best one yet.
Now that we’ve finally gotten here, I think I can finally reveal to you my grand design for the series. I wanted to hold off revealing this information so I don’t spoil the first two books. So, if you haven’t read them yet then close out of your browser, and start reading because I will be talking events from the first two books (promise not to spoil the third).
The idea for the series came to me way back when I was writing my dissertation defense back in Albuquerque probably around 2009 or so. I forget the day but I remember being in a large brown chair in my living room with a dog on my shoulder (he was a black Schnauzer Lhasa Apso mix who liked to sleep on the back of the chair with his head resting on the shoulder). I was in an MFA writing program and I had to pass this test to get permission to move on to the dissertation part of my degree.
Since it was a creative writing program, a lot of it was about my process and so forth, easy stuff to write for a writer, but then I got to this question where I had to write down 5 story ideas. I forget the other 4 (though I’m sure they are lurking somewhere on my hard drive, as I don’t delete anything), but there was this one that stuck with me for a long time.
The original idea I wrote in the defense was something about portals opening up all over the world and orcs flooding through. I even painted a scene where a bunch of people in a SCA mock battle saw the orcs and pulled off their foam ready for a fight. Sound familiar? Yep, without knowing, I gave my future self the plot of Orcs in Portland without even knowing it.
Fast forward to years later, when I lived in the Twin Cities, we were watching The Shannara Chronicles. It was your typical hot fantasy people swords and sorcery series. One thing that struck me about the series was the fact that it was our world, but far in the future after the apocalypse to where Earth had become a fantasy world. I was watching The 100 at the time which had a similar theme.
I read a couple of the Shannara books as a kid and don’t remember the world being ours in the future, but I was also a kid. It may have just been lost on me. I do remember other series or books though that created a fantasy world out of are own. Even the Wheel of Time kinda does that. It’s not Earth per say, but you get the sense that before the breaking of the world, it was a pretty advanced society, and the Wheel of Time TV show has flying cars in the pre breaking of the world scene.
The point is that there is a lot of fantasy out there that is set in our world, but after some calamity that had turned it into a fantasy world. After watching The Shannara Chronicles and seeing things from our world being the ancient land that people forgot, I really wanted to tell a story about the calamity that broke the world rather than the world that came after. Fast forward to the summer I lived in Oregon, and I had an idea for a three-year-old in a barbarian’s body, and I finally had a story to act as my inciting incident for the calamity story).
That’s why at the end of Orcs in Portland, I have an event so big, there is no going back to the real world. Earth is irrevocably altered in the events of the book. There is a trope in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer series, where even though the whole school is almost eaten by monsters, life continues like nothing happened. I wanted to see what happens when life can’t continue like normal. There is no next school year.
I wanted the Misfits of Carnt series to be the point of no return, the calamity that breaks the world, and the story of the world that is forged afterwards. In the third book, that world is starting to take shape, our world is dismantled, and a new one starts to rise.
It’s also way behind schedule. I had a fan ask me how many more books there will be in the series, and they said something to the effect of please don’t say there will be 14 because I will hit you. I responded with I don’t know, maybe 7. Unfortunately, I have even less of an answer to that question after writing the third book.
The kinda cliffhanger ending (it’s really a scene during the credits ending that let’s the reader know there is more story to tell) for the third book was supposed to be the ending of Orcs in Portland. However, there was some story elements and character development that I had to get through to get there.
What that means is that there will be a book 4 in Misfits of Carnt, and more, but I won’t drag it out unnecessarily. The story will end when its ready to end. For now, please enjoy the third book in the series which is truly the best one yet.
Also, for those of you who really like Jenny, she’s gonna get her own book series about her rise to power as a Moon Mage. I realized, looking back at my Three-Year-Old is a Barbarian that I made a big mistake in having two chapters about Jenny. At the time, I just wanted to give her a little backstory, let the reader know that she was a victim too, and not a cartoon villain.
However, those two chapters really slowed down the pacing of the book, and I’ll probably leave them out of future editions. They won’t be gone forever though. My plan is to use them as the first two chapters of a book series completely about Jenny. As for when that will happen, I don’t know. I do this part time during my free time and since I don’t have unlimited time to just write books all day maybe you can help me decide what to write next:
Thank you for being here, and I hope you enjoy reading The Gladiator Journalist and Other Murderous Flora as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Making bills and earnin’ like a baller with l33tskillz4va’s crypto fast cash is not what happens in this book!
But there are killer trees and bloody arena battles. What more could you want? Except sex. That happens too.
It also resolves plot points like certain characters stuck in a painting and what’s Petra’s mom doin’ at that volcano, yo!
I mean I guess there’s stuff like personal character growth and human connection and all that warm, squishy stuff.
But did I mention sex that happens in this book, and magic, swords, battle axes, battles, and plenty limbs being chopped off?
Oh yeah, it’s all in the third Misfits of Carnt!
July 10, 2024
Chapter 1
The Beginning of the End
Marv’s Tree Emporium, Early June
Marv wasn’t prepared for a tree to have sprouted in his shop, but it was there as if by magic. The sapling reminded him of a birch or aspen with a white trunk and vibrant green leaves, but the smell was all wrong. The tree had a phosphorus scent, like a freshly opened pack of fireworks.
It wasn’t odd that a new tree had appeared. In the hundred or so acres where he grew and supplied the Portland-area with trees for front lawns, business parking lots, new construction, and a healthy Christmas hustle every year, he always had trees sprouting where they weren’t supposed to.
If a new sprout appeared outside the orderly rows where he grew a wide variety of stock, he would try to replant it in the appropriate row. He could already tell that this tree wasn’t going to transplant well because of the way it had appeared in the first place. At six pm, when he had closed the shop earlier that evening, there was no tree in the building.
A couple of hours later, he had wandered the path from his house, which sat hidden on the property, to the store so he could order some supplies. Marv made a point to have no computers or televisions in his home. He didn’t like screens, and smartphones even less. Regular trips to Powell’s provided all the entertainment he needed. Whenever he wanted to use a computer, or any device with connectivity, he had to hike the path to his store.
The building was a big brown structure and visible from the US-26 highway, which had been strangely busy for the time of night. Marv supposed all the cars flooding out from the Portland area must be on their way to the ocean or something. Traffic always seemed to be worse in the summer. Though it was a strange time of night for a road trip.
The store’s interior was only four rooms. The largest one was the merchandise floor where he had fertilizer, insecticides, lady bugs, anything a person would need for taking care of their trees, plus some camping gear he got at an auction a while back that never seemed to sell. The two small rooms were restrooms and the fourth was his office behind the cash register, where he would watch Netflix when no one was in the store.
His lack of screens at his own home wasn’t because he hated TV. It was more that he knew he would do nothing but binge his favorite shows. At least during business hours, customers and tasks would interrupt him and prevent him from wasting the entire day.
He had planned to just place a couple orders from his suppliers and then be back at the house before his husband knew he was gone. However, the moment he walked into the sales floor and saw a tree sticking up through the concrete in the middle of the gardening tools aisle, he knew it was going to be a long night.
The concrete looked like the tree had burst out, resembling sidewalks in old neighborhoods where the roots had reclaimed some of the land. The building was on a slab foundation, so it would have taken considerable force for it to erupt through like it had. The tree itself was also odd in the sense that it was at least one to three years old.
The grain of the bark and the leaves were also mismatched. The leaves were robust, much like a maple tree, but the bark was white with black knots in the wood. It was fascinating to behold. He was pretty sure that it was a new type of tree. Not only would he be the discoverer of it, but he was well-equipped to sell it.
“Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you. You’re going to make me lots of money,” Marv said, as he touched the tree. His half smile turned into a grimace. The bark was very sticky, and when he attempted to pull his hand away, it wouldn’t budge. The branches of the sapling bent toward him.
A tendril of wood wrapped around his arm and coiled toward his chest. Marv screamed, but he knew that it was a futile effort. His partner was exercising on that damned bike, and the headphones would drown out any chance of hearing him. Not that the sound would even carry all the way back to his house.
He struggled to free himself as the tree took hold of his other limbs and the leaves twisted around his head. Once the first branch was above his heart, it thrust into his chest. He cried out in pain just before the leaves muffled his scream.
July 2, 2024
Filmmakers, Your Jobs Are Safe (For Now)
When I fancied myself a screenwriter, I think my favorite script that I ever wrote was called One Hour Conspiracy, and I was lucky to have my friend Jason make an animated short of the first ten minutes of the script. He even put in a little joke for me. At the very end there is a reference to the saxophone player in the movie the Lost Boys.
For reasons that I cannot possibly comprehend, I find the sax player scene in the movie exceptionally funny. That man playing the sax in the Lost Boys sums up the entire decade of the 80s from overly hulking He-Man physiques to a sense of egregiousness that only the 80s can provide. From the overinflated rock ballads to epic love songs that equate romance to eagles and mountains, there was something in that scene that was so entirely 80s that I can’t help but laugh every time I think of it.
Either way, we were watching the Lost Boys one day, and I couldn’t stop laughing about the sax player. I had tears in my eyes when somehow that moment explained the 80s to me, and everyone else started laughing because I was so out of control. If I had known my spouse back then, she would have called it a Mad Eye Moody moment. I had this brief moment in time where I wanted to upload a picture of me as Mad Eye Moody my friend photoshopped onto my IMDB profile because I thought it would be funny if someone coming to my page saw that.
One more story before I get back to AI, the night after writing this, I had a dream where I was at this party, and a bunch of old men were playing an iconic 80s love song with a sax riff that I’m sure you’d recognize once you heard it. The song was so vivid in my dream that I spent a good deal of time looking for it on the internet. Once I found it, I was shocked how that song had played with perfect fidelity in my dreams, if there is a sax riff that could describe the 80s it’s George Michael’s Careless Whispers. Now I just need a cover where the sax player from the Lost Boys or a good look alike of him is playing that song, comic gold!
But anyways, I digress, what I wanted to say is I got lucky that a friend of mine wanted to make an animated short out of my script. And it captured my wacky and weird sense of humor perfectly (though I will admit, Jason added a lot of great bits like the girlfriend holding a claw hand). While the plot of One Hour Conspiracy is so outdated (a secret agent tries to get a 35mm film developed in one hour and gets killed sending our hapless clerk on the adventure), it will never see the big screen.
But that sort of comedy has never left me, and a couple years ago, I wrote a similar script that I called Bite Squad, for a working title. It’s basically about vampires that use a food delivery app to get invited into people’s homes. Since they can’t enter a home without an invitation, they find out if they deliver for a food delivery service like Bite Squad, people just let them into their homes. Easy vamp pickings.
I figured that if AI was going to make a movie, then it would need an actual movie script and not just text from a book. I dusted off some of my earlier screen writing passion and fed it the first scene of my movie script with the working title of Bite Squad with some carefully worded direction of what I wanted to happen.
The scene is pretty simple in setup. An old school Interview with a Vampire type vampire is feeding off a food delivery driver. During which, the vamp has a conversation about the guy’s job, and hatches his entire plan to work for the delivery service to find victims. I attempted to get some parameters like horror comedy, and other mood descriptions and here’s what it made.
While it did a fairly good jobs summarizing the script (movie producers, there’s a contact page on my website), the video was over all lackluster, and not exactly what I was hoping for: in goes movie script out comes Pixar quality movie.
Realizing that while the technology may work for generic background imagery for that corporate PowerPoint or canned footage for a pharmaceutical ad, or just because you need people swimming with dolphins in the background, AI movie making has a long way to go before all the future Walt Disney’s of the world build their film empire from their basements.
But I figured that before my free trial ran out, I wanted to try one last thing. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I write a lot of humor lists. So, I wanted to see if at the very least it could just create background video for a post about using fantasy tropes to make office life more interesting and another one in the same vein of humor but about meetings more specifically.
The results weren’t bad, but I wouldn’t say great either, but I’ll let you judge for yourself:
Office Life More Exciting with Fantasy
Exciting Meetings Using Fantasy
Let’s just say that I’ll stick to writing for the foreseeable future (I’m still waiting on that call from Netflix or Pluto TV. I’m not picky).
Thanks for reading my series about my adventures in AI filmmaking. If you enjoy what I do, and want to support it, the best way is purchasing a copy of any one of my books in any format you enjoy. I recommend the Misfits of Carnt series. The narrator of the audiobook version is a human, and did an amazing job.
If you are already a proud owner of one of my books, and love it, consider leaving a review or telling a friend, both are easy to do, and help in a big way.
Thank you for being here.
Making bills and earnin’ like a baller with l33tskillz4va’s crypto fast cash is not what happens in this book!
But there are killer trees and bloody arena battles. What more could you want? Except sex. That happens too.
It also resolves plot points like certain characters stuck in a painting and what’s Petra’s mom doin’ at that volcano, yo!
I mean I guess there’s stuff like personal character growth and human connection and all that warm, squishy stuff.
But did I mention sex that happens in this book, and magic, swords, battle axes, battles, and plenty limbs being chopped off?
Oh yeah, it’s all in the third Misfits of Carnt!
June 25, 2024
Some Dystopia with Your Coffee?
Okay, so my attempt to make a sci fi comedy wasn’t so successful, which was a shame because before I started writing novels, I fancied myself a screenwriter. And while I was lucky enough in life to not only have my words appear on the big screen in a movie theater to a packed, laughing audience, (thank you all the people of Albuquerque who made that happen), it wasn’t remotely close to a day job.
In fact, once my comedy theater troupe all started going their separate ways, I needed to find an outlet for my writing, and it was clear that even though I had written somewhere upwards of nine or so screenplays at that point, none of them were going to pay my bills. I also realized that in order to make a good movie, one that wins film festivals and launches careers, you need to be good at everything.
I was really only good at one thing, writing. I always played a very small part in all the plays. I directed a play once, and had to call in some friends to fix it when I got stuck, and all the technical side of film wasn’t my specialty. I could write and make people laugh when I do. I knew that because of 20 some-odd sketch shows that I did.
I needed something that I was responsible for the success or failure of the project, so I switched to novels. Even though all my formal education was in screenwriting and playwriting (I got an MFA in Dramatic Writing from UNM), I went out and wrote novels. And if you read the first novel I ever wrote, Time Agency, and compare it to The Gladiator Journalist and Other Murderous Flora. You’ll see that I’ve learned a lot about the craft of novel making along the way.
But there is still a special place in my heart for film, thus why I really wanted this AI to work. From the Time Burrito experiment, I already knew that it wasn’t quite what I was envisioning, actors saying the lines in a setting that more or less resembles the University of New Mexico campus. Instead, I got narration with stock footage.
Perhaps I needed to lower my expectations of the technology and maybe just make an audiobook with stock footage, but people gleefully hugging each other with vivid descriptions of death wasn’t going to cut it. Since the AI seemed to be pretty good at making an eerie and forlorn mood, perhaps if I choose one of my darker stories, it would do a better job.
I picked Atmospheric Pressure for my next attempt because it’s set in the bleak future where air is no longer breathable and people live in cities connected by skyways. This whole story was inspired when I worked in downtown Minneapolis for a while. You can travel the entire area without stepping outside, and it becomes a maze. However, I quickly adjusted and would be able to navigate by walking through endless corridors and navigating landmarks such as Erberts and Gerberts or Taco John’s. I could find anything in downtown, but couldn’t tell you the crossroads.
Naturally, a dystopian, authoritarian style government was the best setting for this story, and the oppressed worker class was the natural choice of main character. I gave directions for a dark, quiet, dystopian, forlorn, lacking a sense of hope, despair, and so forth kind of prompt so it’d get the tone just right and minimize the amount of hugging and glee while people die. I knew it wasn’t going to be a movie in the traditional sense, but at this point, all I was looking for was making a neat way to tell an audiobook.
Here’s what happened:
Atmospheric Pressure Attempt 1
Okay, I’ll have to admit, this one wasn’t all that bad, and probably the best of the whole series. It screwed with little things, like the emphasis on credit rating which is more set dressing than an actual mystery. Also, a lot of the outdoor shots were impossible given the plot. I described the atmosphere in the book as so toxic, it burns your skin. The bodies left outside are nothing but bones in a few weeks from the toxicity. All those outdoor shots of a person without a full body suit won’t work, but not bad at all. At least it got the mood right.
Emboldened by my first attempt, and hoping that maybe I could create an Audiobook+ version of the book with this technology, I made a video with the text about what happens when Olson steps into the teacher’s office.
Atmospheric Pressure Attempt 2
Okay, this one just went off the rails. I could forgive a lot of the small stuff like for example the decayed structures were overgrown with plant life when I describe the outdoors as looking more like the landscape of Mars where there isn’t a single thing growing, but the biggest faux pas the computer made was when Olson said “I have your cat,” the original had a video of a creepy little girl in a cat mask holding a housecat.
I regret that I couldn’t get that version back, as with this one I kept trying to shape the video by asking it to make edits to get it more on brand with the story. Unfortunately, I was never able to get creepy cat girl back, or even shape it to a video like the first one. Oh yeah, and that giant blank screen for the second half. I really don’t know what was going on with that, but I have a theory.
My guess is when Duncan tears the head off a stuffed cat to reveal an illegal tool hidden inside was too violent for AI, and triggered a content restriction. While the particular website I used didn’t say there were any such restrictions, I did encounter that on a lot of sites I used. For example, I typed, make me a sword fight in a medieval city into one of them, and the AI said it couldn’t do that because of the restrictions. I even tried adding, like what you’d see in a Disney cartoon or a PG rated movie, and it didn’t want to budge.
My guess is when the story got to the part about Duncan’s suicide, I triggered content protections and after that, it didn’t want to put anything there, even after I tried to put some abandoned buildings or people in gas masks which I know it could do because it did it in the first one. With the second video being a failure, I decided Audiobook+ versions of my book were not going to happen.
Also, what was up with more of those people in a pharmaceutical commercial? Tired of a flaky scalp? Try Scalpra! Warning could cause explosions, failures in nuclear power plants, and world ending tsunamis. Don’t take Scalpra if you are allergic to the apocalypse and enjoy living life. 9 out of 10 patients experience minor side effects such as waking up with organs on the outside of their bodies and uncontrollable stigmata. Illegal in 49 of the 50 states. May cause skin itching.
Despite my first two attempts at becoming an AI filmmaker, I wasn’t done yet. I still had tricks up my sleeve and dare I say, these ones just may work.
Making bills and earnin’ like a baller with l33tskillz4va’s crypto fast cash is not what happens in this book!
But there are killer trees and bloody arena battles. What more could you want? Except sex. That happens too.
It also resolves plot points like certain characters stuck in a painting and what’s Petra’s mom doin’ at that volcano, yo!
I mean I guess there’s stuff like personal character growth and human connection and all that warm, squishy stuff.
But did I mention sex that happens in this book, and magic, swords, battle axes, battles, and plenty limbs being chopped off?
Oh yeah, it’s all in the third Misfits of Carnt!
June 18, 2024
Time Burrito Makes it to the Big Screen
Okay, I’m finally here to tell you about my journey as an AI filmmaker. Before I start, let me give you a long-winded diatribe about technology… just kidding. Let me tell you about my experience in filmmaking first. Movies and TVs were my first passion. When I was in college, I was blessed to be in a community that was willing to put on live theater performances, so I got to work on my comedy chops in the best possible format, in front of a live audience.
For anyone who has even the inkling to write comedy, I suggest live performance. There is no better indicator that you were doing your job than with audience laughter, and I had sketches with zero laughs and ones where people were laughing so hard they were quoting it to each other outside the show.
From that comedy theater experience, I co-wrote Hamlet: The Vampire Slayer, a movie we filmed for the price of water bottles, soda, and chip variety packs from Costco. It was so low budget that we filmed in black and white, so we would have to worry about lighting rather than for any artistic purposes. An online reviewer did a review, and it got a bit of a cult following (so much so that a person reached out to me a couple years ago and begged me for a copy of it).
During that time, I wrote a couple shorts that were made into movies, including a very silly one where I was making fun of this movie that I saw at a film festival where the guy had a way too long credit sequence that was literally his own name for everything. While I wouldn’t say I was a good filmmaker, I do have experience in them.
When I turned to AI for movie making, I knew a little bit about all the work that goes into them. Text to screen is mind blowing to me, and I was very excited to get started. There are about a zillion text-to-film websites out there, so I went with one that had the best reviews, and more importantly a free trial.
My first prompt was “make me a film based on this text” and then cut n’ paste the first chapter of Time Burrito, at least up to the point where Pete is clutching the dead physics professor in his hand debating on whether he should rush into a burning building to save Clara.
Below are the results. Also, I don’t make enough money to upgrade to the version where I can embed videos with this mail program, but if you want embedded videos, you can always read this on my website).
There are several funny fumbles in the video. The first being that Time Burrito is a Sci Fi Comedy, and the video was very serious for a book with a cat on a flying space burrito on the cover. Here’s the breakdown of just how far off the mark it was:
.11: Pete, as described in the book prediabetic, hefty half Mexican male, also a food truck vendor and not a student, so I don’t know who this Hitler Youth guy is, but certainly not Pete.
.32: This is pretty dark and moody for a man who was trundling across campus to what should be comical tuba music.
.52: I love the campy stock footage of college friends while it describes a man “shirt ablaze, hands bloody”. I really should be using this to write dark poetry with incongruous campy feel-good videos.
1:19: It’s like someone took the script of Unsolved Mysteries and combined it with a promo video for a college campus
1:30: Dead professor at his feet with snacks and drinks! Oh boy!
1:57: Jar-a-me-lo? I think the AI needs to brush up on some Spanish lessons.
Okay, so it’s a first attempt, and it wouldn’t be too bad if the story was about an unsolved mystery about the murder of a physics professor, and the local Burrito vendor who witnessed it. Perhaps, I needed a little prompt engineering to identify the main character as Mexican, and tone of the piece being a Sci Fi comedy.
I gave it the instructions, and the bot said, “I’m sorry but Spanish is not yet available on this platform.” Oh dear… okay, so maybe I’ll settle for an Aryan Youth Pete who looks more like a future contestant on the Bachelor than a Homer Simpson like Burrito vendor. At the very least, maybe I could get something comedic in tone even if it wasn’t a movie like a film studio would produce (still waiting on my offer, Netflix, come on, you know people will watch it! Burrito time travel!).
I typed in some more directions and here are the results.
.06: Jaunty British narrator doesn’t exactly scream New Mexico, but I’ll take it over Unsolved Mysteries narrator of darkness and despair.
.26: I enjoyed how the AI picked a video of a building collapsing for the jaunty comic version and not the doom filled forlorn one.
:38: “Bruised tailbone and bruised ego” to a guy who looks like he should be on a pharmaceutical commercial. Tired of flaky scalp? Finally, be the person your meant to be with Scalpra. Warning discontinue using Scalpra if you bleed from the eye, ears, nose, mouth, and anus. May cause dry mouth, dizziness. diarrhea, vomiting, speaking in tongues, head spinning 360 degrees, hissing at priests and levitating from the bed. Don’t use if your allergic to Scalpra even though how would you know because you never used it before, so wouldn’t it be pretty clear to stop using it if you develop an allergic reaction. “What are these hives? Ah. never mind! More Scalpra please!”
1:17: Probably my favorite moment of the whole video. The narrator giving a vivid description about how the professor died, while all the people hug each other and bounce with glee. A scenario that would truly make anyone’s blood run cold.
1:59: What the hell was that? The safety feature card like you’d find in an Airplane except for college?
2:02: Finally, some Science Fiction footage… sigh,
Right, so my attempt to turn Time Burrito into a movie wasn’t exactly a resounding success, but tune in next time because I’m going to try something a little bit dark because I know it can do creepy.
June 11, 2024
Generative AI Filmmaking
Wowee, my last post on the topic of AI really took a serious turn. I promise to be way sillier in this post. I mean, I had this whole plan where I’d talk about some of the issues facing artists and AI, then I would go into my incredibly silly attempt to make one of my books into a movie using AI and then I went off the deep end with long haul truckers, and the Great Depression. If I could have only woven a murderous fish into that one… but no regrets, right?
So, if you haven’t guessed it. I’m here to chronicle my filmmaking experience with AI. I understand the concerns about AI. Machine learning is an existential threat to anyone who wants to make creative works for a living. I’m not talking about Stephen King, I’m sure if AI wrote a hit book tomorrow, and suddenly the market is flooded with AI books, he’ll be doing okay. Established writers just need to release a book because they already have an audience who likes and reads their stuff.
I’m talking about the unknown writers like me, who literally have to work hard for every book sale, and sustain themselves with jobs that don’t involve writing books, and have to compete for reader attention with the 400 other books published that month. AI will crush us like a bug when it can write a hit novel. While AI is not there yet in the novel writing department, it’s there with cool spaceships.
I bring that up because despite AI existentially threatening my passion to write stories that people enjoy reading, I am very excited about a form of generative AI that thankfully for people in that profession is not quite there yet, and sad for me because I so want it to be. That is AI of generative filmmaking.
Yes, I know it’s a contradiction for me to have concerns about the AI who can write a novel, but welcome the movie making bot. Humans are full of contradictions, part of being in the flesh suit. One of the reasons why I’m excited about AI filmmaking is when an unartistic person like myself is brimming with stories to tell and can generate a Pixar quality movie from my basement, I’ll be first in line to start making them.
I know that’s the same threat for filmmakers that writers face, but I need to face the reality that I don’t think my books will ever make it to the big screen or even Netflix or Pluto TV for that matter. For a book to become a movie or television show, it requires luck with better odds than winning the lottery several times in a row.
I think it’s a little too simplistic to believe that if I write a good story that’s popular enough, movie and television deals follow. Think about all the really good books you’ve read. Then think of the ones you like with outta control review count on Amazon. We can use reviews as a measure of popularity. Then think about all those books that have movie or TV deals. There’s probably more that you’ve read without the TV show or movie than you’ve read with a show.
Now think about all the books that you’ve read where if you found out there was a TV show coming, you’d say, “Yeah, I’d watch that.” AI filmmaking will make that possible, and I believe that it will do for filmmakers what the internet did for self-publishing for better or worse.
Don’t get me wrong, there are industries that will suffer when people can make Pixar level movies in their basement (Pixar being one of them), but they are the established name brands, and people will see their movies because they made them, have the big stars attached to it, etc. Self-publishing hadn’t destroyed the major publishers, just like generative AI won’t be displacing Disney anytime soon.
However, it will help storytellers like myself craft in a medium that traditionally takes a lot of people to make it go right. Think of any movie that you really like, in order for that movie to be so good, you need a good script (because to be frank, you can’t make a good movie out of bad writing, MST3k’s long standing popularity is proof of that). Even if you have the best script ever, you need good actors. Once again, watch some MST3k for some truly horrific performances.
You also need good animators or set decorators. A person who knows how to frame a shot, lighting, and all sorts of people to make even just an episode of television. If any one of those people isn’t doing their job well, we are taken out of the story. It’s amazing anyone’s book is made into a movie or TV show at all. In order for a studio to make a project they really need to believe in that story, not just have some good reviews on Amazon.
Thus why there are so many good books that were never made into film. Now, imagine the world where you can watch any book you’ve read, or better yet share that story with that friend who doesn’t read much at all. It can get pretty lonely as a Wheel of Time fanatic when it took 21 years for that TV show to come out when you can finally start showing people what you loved about that series (or shake your fists about why they cut what you love about the series from the show).
The point I’m trying to make is that filmmaking with generative AI could at the very least put filmmaking in the hands of the story tellers and fans, and not purely in control of the handful of film companies out there like self-publishing did for novels. I’m sure you don’t have to think too hard to recall movies or TV shows that took a beloved series that seemed to disregard the story for the sake of profit, or big budget movies who didn’t seem to have a storyteller among the crew.
But yes, I do recognize that I can’t pick and choose AI, that if I accept generative AI filmmaking, by proxy, I have to accept the existence that a bot is going to write a really good book one day, and it will be made into a movie. Which I am here to definitely say that AI in the filmmaking space, just like the writing hit novel space, is not there yet. Filmmakers, your jobs are safe, and I’m open to movie deals, contact me.
But seriously, I did try to make a movie with generative AI and here’s what happened… on the next post… cliffhanger… da da dum-dum-dum dum!!!!!!
Making bills and earnin’ like a baller with l33tskillz4va’s crypto fast cash is not what happens in this book!
But there are killer trees and bloody arena battles. What more could you want? Except sex. That happens too.
It also resolves plot points like certain characters stuck in a painting and what’s Petra’s mom doin’ at that volcano, yo!
I mean I guess there’s stuff like personal character growth and human connection and all that warm, squishy stuff.
But did I mention sex that happens in this book, and magic, swords, battle axes, battles, and plenty limbs being chopped off?
June 4, 2024
The Minimum Standard of Living
Lots of the science fiction of my childhood has now become reality. I remember when the idea of a computer that could speak with you was only in the movies and TV shows. I saw the movie in the theater when the time traveling Scotty from Star Trek picked up a mouse and said, “hello computer” and referred to the keyboard as quaint. I watched the scene from the first Alien movie where the captain speaks to “mother” and uses a DOS command prompt like interface.
Now, I regularly ask Alexa for the temperature, the time, and sometimes for measurements of the sun (the last part mainly to satisfy my son’s curiosity). Unlike me, my son has grown up in a world where AI is at his fingertips. When he is my age, what will make the Alexa in my home seem like the clunky command prompt driven computer from the movie Alien?
While AI has made leaps and bounds from the early days from the clunky chatbots that were like versions of “mother” except they couldn’t pass the Turing test, it still had some ways to go. I know for a lot of creators, AI is a mixed bag. I can also see why visual artists are the most at threat with generative AI.
When it comes to creating pictures, it’s really good. It’s not perfect and has produced some pretty horrifying images like people with too many teeth, or motivational posters with HR Giger imagery, but there are also a lot of AI created art that looks really good, and even downright stunning in some cases.
For someone like myself with zero artistic ability and cannot create a stick figure without it looking bad, there is a part of me that is excited by the idea that I can click a button, and get a cool looking spaceship. As a writer, who writes fictitious stories, there is another part of me who is horrified.
Generative AI threatens the livelihood of artists who through years of hard work, can draw cool spaceships, and sell those spaceships as cover art for sci fi novels, game art, and all the other ways a person makes a living selling their cool spaceship drawings. In addition, the AI used all sorts of art created by humans in order to draw that spaceship, and even though the humans artwork was used to train the AI, their work is largely uncompensated.
The criticisms of AI are that the people who had a job doing something creative won’t have one, and their work that was used to train the AI to do their job was also uncompensated. Conversely, we now have custom artwork available to everyone at the click of a button. I think the real question now is not whether we can roll back the clock and make generative AI disappear, but what to do about it now that it’s here.
We could compensate the artists whose work was used to train the AI, but that would very quickly put the AI manufacturers out of business. The datasets to train AI are so vast that any amount of money that wouldn’t feel like a slap in the face to the artist would be more than the data is worth. And perhaps, that’s the goal, making training AI so difficult because you have to pay or get permission for everything fed into the machine, that we eliminate its use.
However, I personally don’t know if stifling technology is the way to go. Sure, it may help some folks in the short term who are losing business to AI or help future would be artists have a career in art, because let’s face it, an artist hitting the scene today has the odds stacked against them. However, is the pain because we are losing artists? Or is it because we as a society don’t have a good system in place for people who are displaced by technology?
If we are worried that people will stop drawing because AI is in the game, I don’t know if that will happen. Most of us buy mass produced clothing, yet there are still some people that sew their own. There are archery stores, yet at the last renaissance festival I saw a guy hand fletching arrows and selling them. The point is that there is a market for handcrafted, human made items, and perhaps the purveyor of cool spaceships will need to time lapse themselves drawing the piece to prove it was “human made”.
Leaving the artist/AI debate alone for a moment, do we really have a good social structure in place for people whose career becomes obsolete by technology? Let’s take the self-driving car for instance. While it’s a more complicated piece of AI then one that generates cool spaceships, its consequences of failure are more than just spooky pictures, and if it becomes widespread, its implications are more than just out of work artists.
Take the long-haul trucking industry as an example. While people may not step into a taxi cab with no driver (or take a lot of convincing to get in that vehicle), a business owner, who wants to ship goods from a warehouse in Ohio to their store in Washington, may not care if a human transports the goods so long as they are intact and on time. The widespread use of self-driving vehicles is the end of long-haul trucking as we know it.
When a business owner decides how to ship their goods from Point A to Point B, they are going to go with the cheapest option. A truck without a human at the wheel (assuming the technology works, is safe, etc.), will be the cheapest option. Not only that but it will be the quickest, the AI trucks won’t need sleep or breaks. We may even see fuel improvements like electric vehicles with photovoltaic paint that charges during the day so it can run the batteries all night.
Human truck drivers just can’t compete when AI is ready to hit the road. But the decimation of jobs doesn’t end there. Think about all the hotels, truck stops, and businesses that litter the American freeway. Drive down any interstate in the US, and you’ll see a slew of businesses that are all aimed at the person passing through town.
Sure, there are road trips, vacations, and holiday weekends that sustain these businesses, but the long-haul trucker is the stable regular customer that truck stops can rely on during the lean times when it’s not a big holiday weekend, or there aren’t a whole lot of travel plans. Take away the truckers, and hotels, fast food, travel stops, and lots of highway businesses go away. Sure, there are already truckers who sleep in their trucks, buy groceries for their haul, and minimize their expenses, but eliminate even a fraction of a customer base in an industry where margins are thin, and it will start to disappear.
So that’s why I ask again, is the problem AI, or how people are treated if they don’t have a job? Would it be so bad if society took care of someone who just enjoys creating art but can’t make any money off it? What about the long-haul trucker who can’t compete with AI trucks, or the hotel workers or fast-food employees that are out of jobs, when people can just hop in their car, program their destination, and take a nap for the ride?
While I understand that no one likes a freeloader, how irritating is it to do all the work while your coworker plays a game on their phone, and both of you collect the same paycheck by the end of the week? But what if we didn’t consider a person out of a job as a freeloader, but as another human being who deserves a certain minimum standard of living? What if instead of giving everyone the same paycheck regardless of effort, we guarantee there is a standard of living everyone should have, and they have to work if they want anything more?
In my book, The Robin Hood of Couches, I tease out this idea, where each human is given 10 foot by 10 foot accommodations (with basics like a bed, phone, etc.), a free clothing and grocery store, free city transportation, healthcare, online education, and internet, and that’s it. So, if the artist wants to live in a 10 foot by 10 foot cube and make art, they aren’t going to starve, live in a tent, or any of the other tragic circumstances not having a job can lead to.
However, I don’t throw out capitalism entirely. Because money still exists, it just goes to people who work, and if they work hard, they can get a three-bedroom house, take vacations, shop at stores that aren’t free, and use their money to buy cars. There still is labor for retail, and coffee shops that staff via gig economy apps, except these people aren’t forced to work to survive, they’re doing it for getting that big screen TV, or new gaming system, or whatever they want that money can buy. Basically, I propose a minimum standard of living, and let people work for whatever they want beyond that.
While my system in the book may not work and isn’t perfect, it is a different way for us to think about unemployment, and I do think that we need to rethink as a society that work equals your ability to survive. Typically, in the past, new technology meant new jobs. Think about the horse and carriage drivers in the merry ol’ days of yore. The car came around and decimated their industry. Not only did the carriage drivers lose their jobs, all the people hired to maintain the horses also had trouble finding work because stable mucking was on a decline.
Sure, there are some horse and carriage drivers still around for tourists in New York, but most people take rideshares, taxis, or subways to get to where they are going. Cars eliminated the horse and carriage industry, and all the people who supported it. However, the vehicle created taxi drivers, auto mechanics, and other jobs. The point is that we never really had to think about unemployed people all that much as a society because there were always jobs when technology made them go away.
However, with AI, I don’t know if that’s true. Sure, there are new jobs like Prompt Engineer that didn’t exist before AI became ubiquitous, but the new jobs are often highly specialized and really only a benefit to the highly skilled people who can do them. However, for all the truck drivers, customer service reps, and jobs that don’t require a high level of mastery to enter the profession, there is a good chance AI will eliminate their job, and it will never come back. What’s worse is that there probably won’t be jobs for those people and no alternative as AI starts taking over industries like it could for long haul trucking and already doing for graphic designers and artists.
We’ve had to deal with jobpocalypses like the Great Depression where there were less jobs than people who could work them, but there was a path forward, a route to there’s enough jobs for everyone and low unemployment. However, the better AI gets at doing what humans do, the more jobs, and industries will be like the horse and carriage driver of today, something that we do for amusement rather than work. I can see a drive a big rig theme park. And the less likely we will have suitable replacement jobs (ie a person switching from mucking stables to doing oil changes).
The real question is not whether we are going to stop AI from taking jobs (even if we did require companies to pay for art they used in training, they will switch their model to public domain art and volunteers), but what are we going to do with all the people who lose them to AI?
I think the question that should guide our thinking about what to do in the tide of AI rests in what we do with someone who is unemployed. Is there a minimum standard of living that all humans should have by virtue of being born? While I don’t think that I have the answers because I’m just a writer postulating what ifs, I do think it’s an important question we’ve ignored for too long, and AI is making it all the more pressing that we answer that question and have policies in place to ensure that minimum standard of living regardless of person’s individual circumstance.
Gets down from my horse.
May 11, 2024
5 DIY Weekend Projects
Before I start, click here for a chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card! Also, check out these free Sci Fi and Fantasy books.
My wife loves HGTV. In every show, the cast transforms a house in the course of a half an hour. Since I’m a man that is not afraid to take action (via SCV’s in Starcraft II), I will roll up my sleeves and write about five home improvement projects someone else (I’m playing Starcraft II) can do on the weekend.
1. Paint – While easy in theory, the actual process involves about three hundred various steps, which have about twenty different grades of tools. I always thought painting involves a brush and paint. Aside from moving the furniture and placing paper on the floor, there are about three different types of chemicals to clean the wall, fifteen different putty knives to seal the holes, five hundred varieties of sandpaper to smooth the wall and that’s all before the primer.
For the uninformed person like myself, choosing the right tool for the job usually involves calling my wife (to find the variety of tool), then calling my wife’s father (to find the grade). I always thought sandpaper was merely sandpaper. Of course the process is repeated when I forget the scraper, “The 2 inch, 5 inch, 7 inch?” Lucky for you, because you’ve read this column, you’ll know to call someone to paint the walls for you. You’ll have saved a lot of trips to the hardware store and have more time to stare at the tools confused about what to do next.
2. Laminate Floors – Most laminate floors (look like wood, made from discarded Go-bots) snap into place with a simple click. Unlike paint, the laminate floor has the alluring quality of seeming simple. Don’t believe it! It’s a trick! They do not snap into place so easily. The simple solution is paint a picture of Tony Danza, Che Guevara, and Judy Blume on the pieces of flooring. The frustration of “easy snap” pieces will be diffused by giggling when Judy wears Che’s hat (That’s not her hat! Hee! Hee! Ho!).
3. Cabinet Refitting – Why look at those cabinets made for Donna Reed in the fifties? New cabinets are simple. Replace the cabinet door! This project not only involves paint but also power tools. Most humor writers will warn of the limb thirsty drill in the hands of an amateur. I think power tools are actually very safe to use. Most people are fairly aware of how not to drill a hole in their palms (unless they are practicing for stigmata).
What they don’t realize is the humor potential of overpowered drills. Fun tricks are a simple matter of setting up the scene. Simply place ketchup behind the cabinet door, drill, and scream. Tricks like these usually work better with fake body parts. You’ll get extra bonus points if the doctor in the emergency ward actually considers reattaching the thumb.
4. Pet Doors – Unrestricted access to the outside is like tearing down the Berlin Wall of the pet world. Installing a pet door may seem a little scary with the giant hole to the backyard. However, making the hole is fairly simple and is achieved with various methods. The easiest is buy lots of booze, bowling balls, and invite the local touring Punk Speed Metal band to sleep at your house. The downside is you won’t be able to choose the location of your pet door. Another option is antagonize your Civil War Cannonade Reenactor Neighbor. However, for those “hands-on” types, use a chainsaw. Wait till your children are home by themselves for extra laughs.
5. Doors – Replacing doors is pretty easy. Remembering the keys is the hard part. Explaining to your wife why the children ate each other while she was gone for the weekend is even harder. She won’t be impressed by your ability to survive in the backyard via the neighbor’s fruit tree. On the upside, you will be attuning with nature and you’ll finally be able to run freely with the wolves.
Certain death? Conspiracy that goes to the top? Robbery gone wrong? All in a day’s work…
F hired me to do a straightforward job, but there was a slight snag in the operation when what I stole was stolen from me. Three goons showed up at my door to not so politely tell me that I have 24 hours to deliver F’s goods or my body will never be recovered.
The real tragedy is that I haven’t had my morning coffee…
Those punks better watch their back. Nothing comes between me and my coffee.
Check out The Theft today!
