***MAJOR SPOILERS***

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As long time readers of this blog will attest to, I try to avoid politics. I am not a political blog, and venturing into that blog space could be a dangerous thing for a neophyte. One subject has popped up that effects everyone involved in the race for President is money.

Whatever happened to the idea that any one could become President? When have you ever heard of someone who didn’t have huge backing to begin with, or had amassed their own fortune, of making a serious run for the White House? It takes an obscene amount of money to become President, and you have to wonder why anyone would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get a job that only pays $500,000 a year?

You don’t think all that money doesn’t come with favors attached to it? Yes, candidates do raise money from common people also, but the big donors who help them out all expect something in return. It happens with both parties, neither is clean, and it has become the nature of the beast. Course, like anything, that doesn’t make it right.

At the heart of it all is the mere fact it now takes ludicrous amounts of money to run a campaign. In data collected through January, Clinton and Obama have both raised over $100 million in funds, and McCain is back at $53 million. This isn’t to mention the people who already dropped out, like Mitt Romney, who had raised $105 million by the time he dropped out.

The point?  No matter how much people say it’s about issues, it isn’t.  It’s about who can use their campaign funds to woo the most voters in what really does amount to a popularity contest, with the winner being in favor-debt to fat cats.  It’s been this way for years, for both parties, so I don’t feel I am showing favoritism to either party, I have an instant distrust of ANYONE who runs for President… I’m very, very equal in my distrust.

While playing Call of Duty 4 last night, I had a conversation that made me actually question humanity.

Sitting in the lobby, waiting for the next round to start, we got notified the next map we’d be playing on would be “Bloc” – a set of decaying apartment buildings in post-nuclear accident Chernobyl. This isn’t a huge fan-favorite map, but it did generate the following conversation.

Male player: Ugh, I hate this map! Everyone vote to veto it.

Me: I agree… although I was surprised the other night when I found the pool building! I never even knew it existed!

Male player: The what?

Me: It’s in the back corner, there’s a whole other building with a pool. I never knew it was there.

Female player: pfft It’s not a pool.

Me: Uh, yes it is.

Female player: There’s no water in it, so it’s not a pool.

Me: …

Male player: If it doesn’t have water in it, it’s not a pool?

Female player: Right.

At this point the game started, on a different map as we had vetoed “Bloc”. The girl was on the other team, but the other guy was on my team so we could talk to one another.

Me: Was she serious?

Male player: She sure sounded like it.

Me: What do you do when you call someone and want them to build you a pool, but it’s not a pool until it has water in it?

Male player: Hi! I’d like you to build me a large cement hole in the ground, shaped like a tub, and water proofed in case I want to put water in it someday.

Me: -gets shot by an opponent as I am choking from laughing so hard-

I played a couple of rounds with the girl, and considering her general attitude, yeah, she wasn’t joking, and she had many opinions on a great many subjects… all of them of equal intelligence.

Do you ever wish you could slap a sticker on some people’s foreheads that say “Do Not Breed”?

I’ve hinted before to my writing career of the 1990′s, but have never gone in to great detail about it. So… why not now?

In the early 1990′s I was running a lot of ads in Toy Shop magazine to advertise our mail order toy service. The publication was put out by Krause Publications, the leading publisher of collectible magazines. At one point they decided to do a toy price guide, and since I had a good relationship with them, they asked if I would look over what they had so far. Well… after I tore it apart and basically rebuilt it, they thanked me, and I thought that was the end of it.

Somehow people talked about what I had done, and it got back to Wizard magazine, a monthly magazine about comic books and related products. One of their writers, Brian Cunningham, called me one day to talk about his toy column and look over his price guide. Again… I tore it apart. It was a mess and it had to be rebuilt. After that, I consulted for Brian a few more times, but nothing major.

In late January 1992 I was prepping to go to Toy Fair for the first time, the annual sales conference for all the toy manufacturers. I get a call from Brian, but there was something different about it in his tone. We chit chatted for a few minutes and then he told me he had been promoted inside of Wizard and he was looking for someone to take over his toy column and wanted to know if I would be interested. I said sure as I had wanted to be a writer since I was 4-years old. He said great… and I needed to cover the Toy Fair.

That was a trial by fire like you wouldn’t believe and would be a small novel to explain everything that happened there.

A few months later another editor at Wizard called me and asked if I wanted to write for their retailer magazine, Entertainment Retailing. It would be a monthly column entitled “Toy & Game Chest”, and I would alternate discussing how to retail toys and role-playing games. I took it, but it only lasted 6-months as the magazine failed, but I still had my Wizard gig.

When some internal politics happened, that I won’t go in to, I left Wizard after a year and a half in quite a huff of anger. I figured my writing “career” was over, and just shrugged, prepared to go on with my life. I called an editor I had become friends with, who also had left Wizard, to tell him what happened. He told me he needed to make a phone call, but he would get back to me soonish.

The next day a man I didn’t know, Ian Feller, called me from a fairly new magazine named Combo. It seemed he had just lost his toy writer and he had heard from the friend I had called that I was available. Apparently when he lost his writer, he had told our mutual friend “Man, I really wish we could land Sean Aune, but we’ll never be able to get him away from Wizard.”

… heh.

So, I spent the next two years at Combo until it sadly went under. And I really was sad about that as Ian was a dream to work for, and I am still in contact with him to this day. (Check his company out if you ever need a press release done)

As the Combo chapter of my life came to a close, I again felt my “career” was over. I had picked up some miscellaneous freelance work during my time at Combo for magazines like Star Wars Galaxy Collector, Comic Buyer’s Guide, and some stuff under ghost names due to legal peculiarities, (I love my “ghost name”, but, alas, I can never share it) but nothing long lasting.

That’s when I got a call from someone who had left Combo shortly before the end, and he wanted to know if I’d like to join Beckett’s on their new publication, Hot Toys. I absolutely despised the name of the magazine, but it was a writing job, so who was I to argue? I got my first ever cover story out of the job, but I really disliked some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that was going on. And when we got a new editor around issue #7, well… let’s just say she and I did not see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. I left the magazine over “creative differences”, and was proven right when the magazine didn’t even make it to issue #10.

So, here I was again. It was 1996, I had pulled off five years of writing, and I didn’t want to leave the field, but there was no place to go. The Internet was gaining in popularity, and I knew that with the creation of eBay, price guides weren’t even worth the paper they were printed on. You could go on the net and find out all the toy info you wanted within minutes of it happening, I knew there really wasn’t going to be a place in the writing world for me anymore, so I just didn’t even bother looking around.

Over the eleven years that followed, I did miss it, and I especially missed having a couple hundred bucks a month to blow on frivolous things like movies. That’s what led me to looking around in July of 2007 for writing work online, and… well, we all know how that’s ended up.

I do miss being in print publications though. There’s something to be said for holding a tangible copy of your work, printed on high gloss paper. And no thrill matches standing in a book store and seeing a magazine on the racks with the story you wrote on the cover.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the blogging, and it certainly pays better than print did, but there’s something so transient about it. At any moment one of the blogs I work for could close down, hit delete, and it’ll be like my work never existed. Yes, magazines only stay on the racks for one month, but you also know that tucked away in a box, back in a dusty corner of someone’s attic, there’s a magazine with the line “By Sean P. Aune” in it.

Who buys this… er… “stuff”? Obviously someone buys it, I just want to know who!

The Handy Switch is the latest offering from my favorite huckster, Billy Mays. The idea is you plug the receiver into the wall socket, plug the lamp into the receiver, and when you throw the switch, the light goes on from up to 60 feet away.

Okay, not a bad idea, but someone got the bright idea to make the switch look like a normal sized wall switch. The theory is you can use the adhesive to stick it to the wall and no one will know the difference. Well, the problem is that in the TV ad you can clearly sticks out from the wall a good inch or more. They try not to focus the camera on it, but you catch it.

The part that kills me is seeing the people walk around holding the huge thing in their hand, smiling as they happily throw the switch while standing 2 feet away from the lamp. You know it would be impossible to lean over and turn it on! I especially love the woman in the TV ad that uses it to turn off the lamp on her nightstand. She’s stuck the stupid thing to the TOP of her nightstand and uses it to turn off the lamp… RIGHT NEXT TO IT!

If you like this thing, fine, more power to you, but seriously, who watches TV late at night and goes, “I have to have the fake light switch!” Ugh.

Jo pointed this post out in her post this weekend, and boy am I excited for WordPress 2.5 now!

It appears they are finally taking into consideration that those of us who had to install WP by hand may be getting a bit tired of installing every update they release in the same manner.  Speaking as someone who has been doing it for a few years… yes… I am VERY tired of doing it every few months!  So, it appears they are finally adding an automated update system for those of us who, for whatever reason, aren’t able to use things like Fantastico or some other one-click system.

There’s also going to be updates to the layout of the admin section, which I just got the old one working the way I wanted, of course.

March 10th is D-Day, and you should definitely run by Blog Herald and check out what the changes are that are coming up.

The last post, Sometimes Bad Taste Doesn’t Even Cover It, is no longer password protected. I accidentally typed in the “post slug” in to the “post password” box. It has been removed now.

Sometimes you come across things on the web that make you wonder what someone was thinking, and then other times it just makes my jaw drop, and I star in awe. I got this image from a friend’s shared RSS feeds, and long story short, it seems to have originated here. (I’m a stickler for going back to the original)

If you click to enlarge, you will see it says “Terrorism-related deaths since 2001: 11,337 Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000″

…

I really could care less because you are comparing apples to oranges… and, oh yeah, you’re morons. And what kills me is that the above linked blog, Copyranter, points out that an anti-smoking group in Dubai did the exact same visual trick. Are these people idiots? I don’t care how anti-smoking you are, this is just insanely poor taste. You are comparing people killed in violent, cataclysmic ways that they had no control over, had their loved ones crushed by the senseless forms of their deaths, to people voluntarily lighting up a cigarette…

Here, let me help you with some future campaigns.

“Holocaust-related deaths since 2001: 0 Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000″ (you can use actual photos of the gas chambers and make the assertion the smoke is from cigarettes!)

“Black Death-related deaths since 2001: 0 Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000″ (show drawings of dead bodies in the streets of London… ALL SMOKERS!)

“Kool-Aid-related deaths since 2001: 0 Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000″ (Pictures of Jones Town… of course)

It’s silly and irresponsible in both cases that it has been done, and if you think evoking imagery of one of the most tragic days in the history of the United States as a way to get people to quit smoking, you need help. Some people say that if an ad gets you to feel strong emotions it must mean it worked, but in this case I would say, “No, it just made me think you are a bunch of idiots that should never be allowed near another advertising account.”