YaoiCon was fun! Also, news for November.

Hello all!

YaoiCon was a lot of fun. The big news, for those of you who haven’t heard already (presumably from someone who updates more than once a month) is that DMP (DMI, whatever they’re calling themselves this month) is taking over (read: probably bought) the convention. In order for them to keep a closer eye on it, they may be moving the con to Anaheim next year. I spoke to someone on constaff who said it was “as definite as can be without being official”.

I am… not a happy camper about this. A big part of the reason that I continue to go, despite the cross-continental trip, is that I have a lot of friends in the San Francisco area, and I take the excuse to stay a few days extra and visit them. At the same time, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Before I found out that this was a thing, I thought to myself that the con has lost a little bit of its magic for me, and unless something major and positive changed for me, I would stop after my tenth visit (YaoiCon 2013, for anyone who cares). DMP’s intervention might be a positive thing. Color me pessimistic, but more than willing to be wrong.

That said, Café Verführen was wonderful, as always, and I will have my annual review and addition to their storyline up… soon, I hope. This may take a little while, because I’m trying to avoid touching the current site database as much as possible.

I’m doing a reboot.

When I started 1000Gears I had a more complicated vision for it, more of an archive and less of a blog. I wanted it to be more of a shared space (I built it largely as a refuge from the Great LiveJournal Ban-A-Thon of 2007). The software I chose was easy to work with, but not really the best choice for that. The site was also a learning experience in web design, and there are a lot of mistakes I need to correct.

So, in that light, I’ve been rebuilding the site to use software called Drupal, with a new, (I hope) easier-to-navigate design and a stronger emphasis on the fiction. I hope to bring new features in, too. Drupal is powerful.

The Return of Café Verführen

After a one-year hiatus, Café Verführen is returning to YaoiCon! I’ve reviewed their events before, and they’re always one of my favorite parts of the con. Their website has gone through a gorgeous update, and I’m sure their service has some new surprises waiting for us.

I’ve already made my reservations, so I’ll post a link to their RSVP page in case anyone is interested.

The World Keeps Changing Under My Feet

Hi everyone (anyone?).

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I keep putting off the next update “just a little longer”. I’m sorry. I suck, I know. It’s been a disorienting year. Back when I had the YaoiCon Anthology to write for, I remember always having something to write about. By the time I got home from the convention I’d have a story already forming. I’d finish it by the time Anne actually announced the opening of submissions, start another one, and then dive in under the wire with that. The last time I posted, I was working on another Tybalt story, but I haven’t touched it in months.

Those of you who stay in touch should get on my case over this.

The world keeps changing under my feet. I moved (again), this time in-town. My day job continues to keep me from writing. I bought a nice condo, probably a few hundred square feet too big for a single guy, and I started grad school. I’ve been trying to do (or farm out) a serious, code-level site redesign, but everyone I talk to keeps falling out of contact. Part of me considers tearing the whole thing down and redoing it in Drupal. We’ll see.

I’ll try to tell you some catch-up stories just to get my momentum back.

Would you like to Super-Size that recovery?

Full disclosure: I am a McDonald’s shareholder.

About a month ago, on April 19, McDonald’s held its first-ever nationwide hiring day. They planned to hire 50,000 people on that one day, but they were so pleased with the turnout that they wound up hiring 62,000 instead. At first glance, this sounds fantastic. 62,000 people is a population roughly equal to the number of people on Chevron’s entire payroll. It’s an army, in a very nearly literal sense. Not counting contractors, it’s a collection of people larger than the number of US troops left in Iraq.

This is great news for the economy, right? Even if McDonald’s is not exactly a prestigious employer, honest work is honest work, and surely this is a sign that the economy of the past few years is getting back on its feet.

Well… not exactly.

First, consider the sheer number of applicants for those 62,000 positions. McDonald’s is not releasing specific numbers, but they admit that over a million people applied. A million Americans applied to work for McDonald’s, and McDonald’s got to cherry-pick the top 6% for their liking. Florida had over 100,000 applications for 4,337 positions – one location here in Tampa reported getting over 2,200 applications for just five jobs. This doesn’t mean that it was easier to get into Princeton, Brown, or Yale than to McDonald’s, as some comments suggested, only that they had a larger pool of applicants competing for each position; because McDonald’s was hiring mostly for low-skill sorts of jobs, there are vastly more people qualified to do them.

Still, a million Americans tried to get jobs at McDonald’s, and 940,000 of them didn’t make the cut.

Second, while McDonald’s is (again) not releasing specifics, many of those 62,000 positions are part-time. Most of those shiny new McJobs will reduce the official unemployment numbers, but how many of them will make it out of underemployment? The latest U6 numbers – the number of unemployed plus the number of people who would like more work but can’t get it – hovers near 17%. A back-calculation for the Great Depression suggests U6 numbers of 37.6%, so 17% isn’t exactly apocalyptic, but these are unpleasant times indeed.

Now consider this: in April, the United States economy added 244,000 private-sector jobs. Unemployment went up, because there of various cutbacks in government employees, but we added 244,000 private-sector jobs. The stock market rallied and pundits called it a clear sign that America was getting back to work. Take a look at that number, though, and then take a look back at the 62,000 jobs we’ve just discussed.

One in four of the new jobs in our “economic recovery” is literally at McDonalds.

Would you like fries with that?

Comments under temporary moderation

Hi all,

As tiny as this little corner of the Internet is, I’ve been getting a couple hundred spam messages a day lately. Until it blows over I’ve turned on some moderation features on the website. If you’ve replied to me before, you should have no trouble posting, but if this is your first time, expect it to sit in the moderation queue for a little bit while I catch up.

Sorry for the inconvenience!