Fandex:

Punkie: Thanks, Ryan! I hope your sanity gets better, but if not, we'll always have Waterloo!

Punkie: The Dragon now sits next to our fireplace in our new house (which I think is fitting). She's quite a treasure, and a lot of people ask me where we got her. As my description says, my good friend Brad got her, and although I don't know where, I found these links where you can get one:

Punkie: [Note: I wrote to CDNOW's customer service because their weekly newsletter began to address me as "Dear Jennifer," instead of Grig. I thought this was amusing, but I never thought much about it until a co-worker saw my mail over my shoulder, and said that I should change that, if anything for security reasons. I think my security of having him read over my e-mail is worse, but who's to say. Anyway, I sent them a quick note to the only address I could find in this newsletter that my name was not Jennifer, but Grig, and I got back this over-reacting, gushing response. I know it's a form letter, but it was even more amusing, and I thought I'd share it with ya'll. It reminds me of that Monty Python Sketch where the restaurant over-reacts to a customer complaining about a dirty fork, and ends with several suicides and a crazed cook attacking them with a meat cleaver.]

[Note2: They still never changed my name, but I found out why this happened. My friend Jeni sent me some CD's over a year ago, and they put her name on my e-mail address.]

Punkie: [Note: The address came back as "no such mail", so this is to that guy if he reads this page]

According to that argument, if the Almighty is the father of both man and animal, then we are brothers, as the Native Americans believed. I still say we are no different, no matter what book anywhere says. I have nothing against Christianity, I just don't take a lot of their biblical archetypes as true fact.

Punkie: I am sorry to hear is was a worse disatser than I reported, because I tried to be kind, I really did. Running a con is hard, but man... considering what I was promised, and then what happened was a bit dissappointing. I am just glad I didn't get screwed further. I have never seen merchants that mad since the disasterous Event Horizon (1500 promised, 163 showed - including staff).

But life is too short to hate people. When you hate people, rarely do they care, and then you are left doing all the work.

Punkie: You present a special case. I had ideas for you, but as a parent myself, I know how annoying it is to get "suggestions" like your parenting is sub-par or something. I only have one child, so I don't know how hard it is to deal with two children of the terrible twos at the same time. I know it has had to be done in the past without leashes. But maybe that's why those mothers never left home :).

Since I have written that essay, I have had some people come up to me with their opinions. One was a girl who was put on a leash when she was two, but blamed that on attention deficit (which she blamed on everything, including why she couldn't hold a job at 22, but that's another story). She told me it had no ill effect on her, and her parents and her get along fine. She said she was so roudy as a two-year old that a leash was the only answer.

I also heard from someone else who had two girls that said the "wrist" leashes was what he used, and that it was the only way to keep his girls from getting separated in a crowd (he still holds their hand, but the leash is an added safeguard). But his children are several years apart, so he has only dealt with it one at a time.

The major point of my essay, though, was focusing on a deeper layer of problems I have seen with parents: lack of responsibility. You keep a dog on a leash because if it doesn't follow well-disciplined commands, it could get into trouble. But that's a dog. A dog does not have (to my knowledge) cognitive thought beyond its basic needs, and never will. I got a dog last year (for the first time), and I wouldn't dream of having him unleashed. But kids are different. Their intellect goes beyond the canine limits even before they learn to walk. But I see some parents who have kids for no good reason, dealing with them like a mistake they have to live with. A majority of the kids on leashes have these kinds of parents, irresponsible and dealing with issues on the extreme level instead of a more reasonable level.

I didn't grow up in a child-proof house. Neither did my friends. Some of them did get their heads bumped on coffee tables, shocked by outlets, and get bitten by animals. They turned out fine. Sometimes, you have to learn about reality the hard way. You can tell a child over and over again that the stove is hot, but until you get burned, you never really know (like how adults are with "Wet Paint" signs). Some children you can say no to drugs until you are blue in the face, and then one day find out that junior did smoke pot in college due to some complex nature of dealing with a girlfriend and student pressures at the time.

I am not against baby pens, putting up bumper guards, baby gates, outlet covers, and so on. I just don't believe they should be used IN PLACE of actual care. Leashes are the same way. There will always be special cases, like autism, or in your case, one person with two toddlers. I agree you can't just leave them in a stroller (what fun is that?). I am glad you let your children explore, and you wish to keep them safe. I guess my issue with the other parents is those that put their children on a leash just so they don't have to interact with them.

Thanks for your letter!

Punkie: I didn't have problems with security, really. Only the rude registration people, but to be fair, they were as much in the dark as us guests, so even though they shouldn't have been rude, I am sure that it would have been hard to deal with everything. I did get an official apology from Imaginecon, but I wonder if they will have an Imaginecon 2, and if they do, will the invite me back, and if they do, will I go? We shall see.

Punkie: The tally for Crunchland is now 4:4. They think I have been 4 users and I think they have written to complain from 4 various e-mail addresses to state that they "know it's really me." According to some people at Crunchland, they think I am Alan Corvus, Dean Clean, Titan, or K-mart Dollie. Apparently the thought that other people hate them is too much, it has to be me every time. I had lunch with Alan, who now works in my company (we bought his out last year), and he said that they even harassed his sister who tried to post. Dean's in some sort of military-related job, and is pretty cool. We discussed ways to gain revenge on the people who though I was him (or he was me), but we decided against it. Titan or K-mart never replied.

I just can't believe these guys. I used to be upset at them, but now it's just getting silly. I look at the board from time to time, and study how they are devouring themselves. Most of the mature members ditched long ago, and now it's just two types of people: the pathetic powermongers and those that will be victims to them.

I miss Captain Crunch. No wonder he gave it all up.

Punkie: Thanks! Yeah, beta testing can be arduous, especially when dealing with Mac users. They are not used to crashes, and when AOL Betas crashed, it was fairly upsetting. At least many Windows users would say, "Oh, it crashed with a GPF in the S3.DLL, which I think is my video card," but with Mac people, all they get is some sort of generic "Error 11" and a picture of a cute little bomb. I am not sure if that is good that Windows users are used to crashes so much they are more familiar with their machine or Mac users who hardly crash at all!

I recall however, for Amigas, you'd get something called a "Guru Meditation Error," which was both vague and cryptic.

Punkie: I am not sure. He was a known cocaine user, so he may be dead by now. I got beat up a lot in school, but I was different back then. I heard one of the guys who beat me up a lot ended up getting a football scholarship and blew it when he got busted with drug possession. He was last seen stocking shelves at the local supermarket. Another was seen a few years ago pumping gas in Winchester. Most of the kids who picked on me grew out of it when they got girlfriends in high school, and ended up getting better lives. I know one of them is some bigwig officer who sells bank loans, and another in a captain in the Navy. So they didn't all end up like that.

You story is kind of interesting because this bully ended up meeting a bigger bully, and got beat up so bad, he became retarded. I wonder what karma plays there?

Punkie: I am not sure why I am answering this, but thanks! :)