Affiliate Marketing Secrets

The 3 problems with scifi
First is it’s widespread acceptance. It’s in every action movie, mostly in comic book form, the product of Star Wars, adventure fantasy. Things explode, people are shot, some special effects happen, but it’s all just mishmash with no unifying picture beyond what looks cool. It’s Firefly, toying around with the western, lacking the messiness of slavery. It’s Heinlein’s powered suit, fighting capital E, evil, with none of the philosophy to think about between action scenes. It’s Dr Who farce, without the biting wit of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide.
It’s not just the movies, it’s the dull little cul de sacs like Steampunk, which just seems like endless variations on Dickens and Verne, without the social commentary of Dickens or the inventions of Verne. It is zombie stories. There was a time when it seemed like the English produced a never ending stream of possible apocalypses, Triffids, droughts, plagues, drownings, meteors, and even the death of grass, endless apocalypses and post-apocalypses. At least there was some variation, rather than the same undead eating machines ever since Matheson decided to play about with reinventing the vampire. It’s the endless masturbation of alternative history novels which are never anything new as much as just another version of the happened. When it was Piper, Leiber or Anderson the ideas were still somewhat fresh, but there isn’t much new to say about alternative worlds or time travel, that wasn’t said in the pages of Astounding. You get a few novel takes on the subjects, sort of a post-modernist version of scifi when SM Stirling gives his rebuttal to the “great man theory” of classics like Connecticut Yankee, just as Max Brooks’ World War Z experimented with the apocalypse novel recast as social history, but neither is really new scifi, as much as clever ways to offer the same ideas up anew.
Secondly, it’s the the teen market. Now I’m not saying all teen scifi is bad, I’m not sure where scifi would be today without the Heinlein juveniles or novels such as Palmer’s Emergence, but where much of the older scfi might be easily read by teens, today’s teen market seems to only want teenagers. The big paydays involved with teen movies and books seem to be sapping some of the better talent. Paolo Bacigalup’s Wind Up Girl and Cory Doctrow’s Makers seemed to promise some new ideas, but they retreat back into children’s books, content to write for an uncritical audience. Much of the rest of the teen writers seem content to just recycle old ideas, which leads to the endless dystopian novels and teen power fantasies. Worlds the only people who can do things are teen girls in love. The Chrysalids ad infintum.
Last, and most dangerous is the flipside of my first complaint. Just as the acceptance of scifi has led to it’s use in action movies, the acceptance of scfi has siphoned off the best of the newer scfi writers into the mainstream. The genre has always hemorrhaged some of the best. Orwell’s 1984 isn’t shelved in the ghetto, Vonnegut one day was sitting with Sturgeon and the next day with Phillip Roth, Margaret Atwood may have never been nominated for Hugo, but she should have been acknowledged as the sister to Ursula Le Guin. Haruki Murakami might be so unlike Tolkien that it’s spawned it’s own label of magical realism, but it’s fantasy. The number of such books on the “regular fiction” shelves seems to grow. More and more the distinction, the isolation that made the sub culture we knew as scifi possible is gone( to crib William Gibson) and with that escape from the genre ghetto, we have lost the conventions of the ghetto, the customs of the tribe that make scifi so special to us, the focus on the technology and it’s ramifications, rather than just the low brow explosions, or the intricacies of philosophy made flesh.
Then there are the days where I dismiss rage & depression and remember the words of a great man “Sure 90% of scifi is crap, but 90% of everything is crap.”

The 3 problems with scifi
First is it’s widespread acceptance. It’s in every action movie, mostly in comic book form, the product of Star Wars, adventure fantasy. Things explode, people are shot, some special effects happen, but it’s all just mishmash with no unifying picture beyond what looks cool. It’s Firefly, toying around with the western, lacking the messiness of slavery. It’s Heinlein’s powered suit, fighting capital E, evil, with none of the philosophy to think about between action scenes. It’s Dr Who farce, without the biting wit of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide.
It’s not just the movies, it’s the dull little cul de sacs like Steampunk, which just seems like endless variations on Dickens and Verne, without the social commentary of Dickens or the inventions of Verne. It is zombie stories. There was a time when it seemed like the English produced a never ending stream of possible apocalypses, Triffids, droughts, plagues, drownings, meteors, and even the death of grass, endless apocalypses and post-apocalypses. At least there was some variation, rather than the same undead eating machines ever since Matheson decided to play about with reinventing the vampire. It’s the endless masturbation of alternative history novels which are never anything new as much as just another version of the happened. When it was Piper, Leiber or Anderson the ideas were still somewhat fresh, but there isn’t much new to say about alternative worlds or time travel, that wasn’t said in the pages of Astounding. You get a few novel takes on the subjects, sort of a post-modernist version of scifi when SM Stirling gives his rebuttal to the “great man theory” of classics like Connecticut Yankee, just as Max Brooks’ World War Z experimented with the apocalypse novel recast as social history, but neither is really new scifi, as much as clever ways to offer the same ideas up anew.
Secondly, it’s the the teen market. Now I’m not saying all teen scifi is bad, I’m not sure where scifi would be today without the Heinlein juveniles or novels such as Palmer’s Emergence, but where much of the older scfi might be easily read by teens, today’s teen market seems to only want teenagers. The big paydays involved with teen movies and books seem to be sapping some of the better talent. Paolo Bacigalup’s Wind Up Girl and Cory Doctrow’s Makers seemed to promise some new ideas, but they retreat back into children’s books, content to write for an uncritical audience. Much of the rest of the teen writers seem content to just recycle old ideas, which leads to the endless dystopian novels and teen power fantasies. Worlds the only people who can do things are teen girls in love. The Chrysalids ad infintum.
Last, and most dangerous is the flipside of my first complaint. Just as the acceptance of scifi has led to it’s use in action movies, the acceptance of scfi has siphoned off the best of the newer scfi writers into the mainstream. The genre has always hemorrhaged some of the best. Orwell’s 1984 isn’t shelved in the ghetto, Vonnegut one day was sitting with Sturgeon and the next day with Phillip Roth, Margaret Atwood may have never been nominated for Hugo, but she should have been acknowledged as the sister to Ursula Le Guin. Haruki Murakami might be so unlike Tolkien that it’s spawned it’s own label of magical realism, but it’s fantasy. The number of such books on the “regular fiction” shelves seems to grow. More and more the distinction, the isolation that made the sub culture we knew as scifi possible is gone( to crib William Gibson) and with that escape from the genre ghetto, we have lost the conventions of the ghetto, the customs of the tribe that make scifi so special to us, the focus on the technology and it’s ramifications, rather than just the low brow explosions, or the intricacies of philosophy made flesh.
Then there are the days where I dismiss rage & depression and remember the words of a great man “Sure 90% of scifi is crap, but 90% of everything is crap.”

I’ve been actively searching for full-time work for about 2 years. I work in a very niche field, but have been fortunate to be holding contract work the last two years. I’ve been around the job searching block more than once, but yet again I am looking for more ways to better get my resume to the front of the pile, or even speed up the usually terribly slow hiring process.
My question is.. If I apply for a position online (via online job app or email), is it wrong if I contact the company’s human resources or recruiter employees by phone after creeping up their contact info from the company website, LinkedIn, or other websites where their work phones/emails may be located? Would simply like to call to make a very forward attempt to say “I really want this job” and generally inquire about the position and timeframe for hiring.
I tried calling human resource employees in the past, but had no luck. In fact, I usually was never able to get in touch with them, only getting voicemails, and never getting a callback. When I would bug a front desk to speak with a recruiter, they usually got angry and said they wouldn’t be able to help me….. Is it a good or bad move to call these people after I put in a job application? Would there be a better person to call or email? (Like someone from the specific department I am applying for)

The calls come through to my cell phone. It’s been MORE than the allotted one month wait time, it’s not from any company I’ve previously done business with and it’s not charities or politically affiliated organizations? I keep filing complaints w/the FCC but nothing. What can I do?

I wrote a book earlier this year call ‘In a City Named Joy’ and it is available on Amazon.com. I wanted to know if this was a good summary or not. I would also appreciate it if you could suggest a way to improve it.
When Amy Harris, Morgan Anderson, and Brittany Edwards move to a small hill next to a city named Joy, they find that things may not be as normal as they expect. The women are shocked when the people in the city aren’t as nice as they would have considered for a city with such a name. Brittany stops a man from destroying a super market and Morgan tries to help a man cure his five year old sister. Amy seems to have just been taken along for the ride.In the middle of all of this a
scientist is trying to make himself famous by creating an invention to kill the people on death row.
When this is tried out on a young woman named Grace, who has an unusual habit of killing people with their worst fears, things go wrong. Amy, Morgan, and Brittany end up having to save the city with the help of two men that they met in the city and the Immortal who insists on helping even though Immortals tend to think highly of themselves because they can’t die.

No one, no matter what political party they affiliate with, can argue that the shooting last Friday was an extremely tragic incident. I see a lot of people now using what happened as an excuse to ban guns though. Some of these people say if there are no guns then people will not die, simple as that right? They also claim that if something bad happens then all they have to do is call the police and the cops will be there in a few minutes therefore sparing the victim from any harm. This is NOT the case. A few years ago in a city near where I live, a family was brutally murdered. Someone ended up calling the cops and they did get there. But the cops didn’t go into the house where the people inside were being raped and murdered as they sat there. So cops do not solve every problem. The only thing that could have protected that family was them defending themselves. Yes crimes do happen, but we need guns to protect ourselves from them. So why do some people keep saying that we don’t and the government will be able to protect us? There are many cases that prove otherwise so I really just want to know why people think that. Thanks guys