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the online home of nathaniel payne

A Ficly book? It has happened!July 15

Via Kevin Lawver’s wonderful Tumblr, I came across this yesterday.

What is it? Nothing more than a collection of somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 stories written on Ficly.com. I’ve talked about Ficly a lot in the past. It’s a fantastic site, not just because you can create and share short pieces of fiction there, but also because of the excellent community of writers that has sprung up around the site. They are creative, gracious, clever, and kind, and I really wish I had more time to spend there these days.

The book itself appears to be a $3 PDF ebook, with all of the proceeds benefiting the site proper, presumably through things like server and hosting costs, bandwidth, Ferrari’s, and office supplies. You know, the usual. I know Kevin and his expensive tastes for the finer things in life. And I don’t know Jason Garber at all, but he strikes me

It will someday be a playhouseJune 24

My wife got it in her head a couple of weeks back to do some major backyard landscaping renovations. The centerpiece of the work would include converting our old shed into a proper playhouse for the kids.

I loved the idea. I mean, who wouldn’t? We’re not using the shed for anything more than storing some old junk. And it wouldn’t take much work; just clean out the crap, tear down some boards, put up new ones, cut some overgrowth outside, new door, etc. Not a whole lot! It’ll be easy.

Okay, I never actually fooled myself into thinking it would be easy, but I didn’t think it would be a terribly complicated effort. And honestly, it isn’t. But it’s so far been a fairly interesting experience, as I will share with you now.

I started clearing out the shed by removing loose boards and bits of wood and junk that had been stored in the rafters by previous owners of the property. Then I cleared out our miscellaneous yardwork materials and began the work of removing interior walls. Fairly simple.

Every time I was finished working in the shed, I would blow my nose, and this dark crud would come out. It was kind of weird, and I suppose I should have paid more attention to it, but I figured it was just loose detritus floating around getting caught in my nose. Disgusting, sure, but not truly harmful. I started wearing a dust mask as I worked, and that took care of that particular problem.

That’s when I discovered — much to my surprise

Social DisconnectionJune 11

You never really understand just how dependent (read: addicted) you are to something until you are forced to be cut off from said “thing” for an extended period of time.

Case in point: for the past two weeks, my workplace has blocked social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This has likely been done in an effort to increase productivity, not amongst the regular workforce, but rather for the ~50 college-age interns we have working for us this summer in various functional capacities around the company. I say this because the same thing occurred last year at roughly this time, and the block was removed once all the kids went back to school. But honestly, for all I know, this is now a permanent change, and the fall will see nothing lifted but a slight drain on the network as the interns vacate the premises in an orderly fashion. I don’t work in that part of IT, so I really can’t say one way or another.

Sure, I have access to those sites on my phone, but it’s slow and cumbersome to use a phone to surf the web. So I don’t do that very often, and when I do, it’s only for a couple of minutes. More importantly, it’s been interesting to see how my addiction to social networking sites has affected me now that everything has been blocked.

Twitter has simply disappeared from my radar completely. I don’t check it, I don’t post to it, and even when I have unblocked access to the internet at home, I don’t bother to even load up the site. It has

TimeJune 3

Man, where has the time gone? In the period since my last blog post back in February, I have experienced the following (not necessarily in this order):

• We learned recently that my father has been diagnosed with cancer. I suppose this probably warrants more than just a bullet point on a list, but I’m trying to put things into perspective.  He’s been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which we’re told is highly-treatable, and oftentimes, very curable. We’re hoping for the best. Which is why this is merely a bullet point. I don’t give it any further significance, because the cancer is neither significant enough to warrant more introspection, nor is it worthy of the additional attention. Sure, dad deserves more. But the cancer doesn’t. I mean, c’mon – it’s cancer. It’s lame and annoying and it just needs to go away. For what it’s worth, dad starts chemo next week.
• My daughter has started walking. Walking. Seriously. I am simultaneously excited and horrified at the prospect of having another toddler shuffling awkwardly through the house, but seriously. She was just born. This is not right.
• I started training for — and subsequently stopped training for — a 5K. My brother and his wife are planning on running our hometown 4th of July 5K.  When they first mentioned it, some of us thought it would be great if we all started training and ran the 5K together as a family.  We would get fit and healthy, and do it

My gratuitous Ficly wish listFebruary 22

Now that I’ve published fifty Ficly stories, I’m a self-described, federally-licensed Ficly Veteran™ and as such, demand more, newer, and better features out of the online micro-publishing platform. After all, what else am I paying my $29.95 monthly subscription rate for, if not exceptional service?

So I’ve assembled an official List of Things™ (rendered on equally-official Ficly Mayoral Candidate™ letterhead) that could really use some improvement on Ficly.

Before I get started, I must profess that I absolutely realize that Ficly is created, managed, and maintained by only a ragtag outfit of rebel monkeys who do it purely as a fun and interesting side-project/diversion/portfolio-fodder. I don’t expect them to cater to my will–or, indeed,  even acknowledge that I wrote anything of the sort at all. However, as the newly-christened Ficly Gubernatorial Clabberwonky™ I fully expect all of my requested changes and updates to be implemented within a week. That should definitely suffice.

Things that are broken
These being things that were implemented (or at least partially implemented) but in one way or another do not completely function the way they were intended or designed.

Inspirations – In the old Ficlets site, we had built-in inspirations. Some were images pulled from Flickr which we co