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.

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

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.

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?

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!

Salon.com has a pretty good collection of ways to donate, and it’s a good idea to stick with reputable charities. Scams crop up after every disaster, and some of them, like United Way, just stick around forever. For some reason this is not common knowledge, but United Way has a pretty horrible history of corruption, greed and questionable competence. United Way just takes a percentage off the top before distributing funds to its member charities; they add exactly nothing but overhead (and occasional corruption) to the equation. Cut out the middleman.

Personally, I really love seeing the different grassroots funding drives. For example, Dreamwidth and LiveJournal have various fan-related Help Japan communities, where people are auctioning off their talents and services (the dreamwidth community is open until Sunday and Livejournal’s is open until the 26th), and YaoiCon has their own auction of goodies, open until the 20th as well.

My favorite, though, comes from SomethingAwful. Someone made an idiot of himself, and after he failed his chance to redeem himself, one of the Goons decided that he had to donate $10 to the Red Cross or be banned (temporarily) from the board as punishment. After a little discussion, another Goon pledged another $10 if the rulebreaker had to choose between matching the donation or being banned forever. Wonderfully horrible people that they are, the Goons dogpiled onto this idea, kicking off a massive fundraiser for Japan. The poor guy now has to match all of the donations or be banned forever. If he does match, he gets all the perks and upgrades the forums have to offer, and major kudos.

So far the Goons have raised over $15000.

I think he’s getting banned.

And then sometimes, after I’m done waiting, I get something back that’s so exactly right that I’m not sure anymore how I could have expected anything else.

That’s what it was like working with Milli of Lemon Kiss, on the last illustration in the Elves series.

She finished this on New Year’s Eve, about the same time that Andy finished his, and I’ve thought about it but don’t know what else to say. Isn’t it nice when things just… work?

Finding artists is only a little bit easier. I have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with handing a story to an artist for illustration. On the one hand, I like to give them a lot of creative liberty, just for the chance to see my work through someone else’s eyes, but I can’t help sometimes but feel a little anxiety, wondering if it will come through just right.

I got very lucky with my friend Andrew Skelton (“Andy the Octopus“, as he’s dubbed himself). He’s been a good friend of mine for over a decade now, and I bounced quite a few drafts off of him, tuning as I went, so it was only natural that I offered him one version to illustrate.

He’s done a great job of setting the scene…

I find it a little bit hard to write about this, a little bit like I might have a hard time talking about Disney’s Backstage Magic tour, or maybe Dining with an Imagineer. On the one hand, as a stubbornly persistent return visitor, I take a certain thrill in knowing the little, less-than-obvious preparations that go into bringing the Café together. On the other, I wonder if a curious newcomer might return next year, knowing that it doesn’t all suddenly crystallize, and for that find it somehow a little less magical.

I did bring along a new friend I met this year, the very pretty Miss Molly mentioned at the page footers for a while now, and she was sufficiently impressed that she says she’d like to visit, if the “leasing issues” get sorted out in time for next year. I’ll send her an invitation to post her thoughts below. Beyond that, though, I’ve thought about it a bit, and just to avoid spoiling things, I think I’m going to avoid telling too much. Let’s just say that I’m still enchanted by what an amazing, beautiful little bit of fan-craft the Café is. Sometimes the most wonderful things are the most fragile, and if the Café comes to an end, I’ll understand…

… but I can’t say I wouldn’t be deeply saddened.

On a happier note, even if we couldn’t actually see the ongoing story play out, it does continue.

1. “Bob” is still working, much to my delight. Unfortunately, he was walking around the con with a large piece of metal sticking out of his chest. I asked him about it, and he claims that he got stabbed in a recent fight with one of the dishwashers, but I am not entirely sure he did not get in Matta’s way once too often (I mean this with all due affection, of course – I like Matta!). At the actual Café Verführen panel, he showed no sign of injury. I suppose he must be a very fast healer, or simply too tough to let something like that slow him down. He’s a demon of a worker, and Café Verführen is lucky to have him.
2. Sebastian was released from quarantine and is back to his usual antics.
3. Jacob is his usual snarkily considerate self as well. I believe he is also still rooming with Nishi, and also still a little confused over how he got himself into that predicament… not that he minds. Much.
4. I’ve been outed! Ryusei and Jacob told everyone about these reviews and introduced me to the small crowd. The attention is a highly novel thing to me, and I admit to being surprised, but I must say it’s nice to be appreciated.
5. The Café never likes to send their guests home empty-handed, and I appear to be building a collection of not-moist-towelettes.

It’s better-randomized, though, and more “cloud”-like. Sometimes its output takes a little finessing, but I’m a little bit fascinated with the way it seems to condense stories into important flashes of impression. Given First and Last and Always, for example, it almost seems to take a life of its own.

What do you think? For those writers out in the audience, does Wordle make anything interesting for you?