But I’m really excited about the new one so I hope you all will check it out as much as you’re able. It’s not terribly dark but more comfy, imo. That’s the way personal sites should be, anyway.

I’ll build on it more over the weekend, but this will probably be the last one I leave on this one. I hope you’ll join me in mah new crib!

Personally, I’ll stick with my old favorite because I doubt Killers can top it:

Or even Mr. and Mrs. Smith (except they’re assassins), where they fool each other.

That said, the new Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz movie looks fun, but it also doesn’t rip off the others because there’s no apparent deception. In fact, it looks pretty fresh with an agent who’s lost his marbles attaching himself to an innocent (I know, same plot as The Matador [except Brosnan is an assassin] but this still feels a lot different than that).

I love these kinds of movies, though, so I’ll probably end up watching them both when they’re on blu-ray. I’m just less enthused about Killers than I am Knight and Day, judging by the trailers.

But first off, please accept my sincere apologies. While there was one point to the crash where an error message came up saying, “Hacker?” I think it was something I did.

Since I was on Skype with S.D. discussing opening a new store at the time, he was there when it happened. I was upgrading it to the latest version, which involved getting into the server and messing with files there. Something went wrong and it was most likely user error on my part. It was also my first day of being on depakote, so I probably shouldn’t have been screwing with anything too complicated.

Going from memory, this is approximately how our Skype conversation went down:

JB: Got the upgrade done, and all seems okay.

SD: Great!

JB: Wait, where’d the news feed go?

SD: Hm, I can’t embed YouTube videos anymore.

JB: I bet the mods that allow that stuff didn’t take well to the upgrade. Wait, there’s a bunch of gibberish at the top of the screen now.

SD: I see that? I wonder what it is.

JB: I’ll uninstall those mods to see if it goes away… nope, now there’s more.

SD: Could it be something with the theme? Maybe we should try another.

JB: Yeah, I’ll switch to the basic theme for now… Nope still there. And I can’t switch back to any other themes now! What the hell?

SD: Man, that’s weird. Can’t we re-install?

JB: I’m worried we’d lose all the posts. I can’t seem to get back-up working.

SD: Damn.

JB: Shitty SMF.

SD: They’ve been giving us problems since day one. There was another software to use, wasn’t there? Maybe we should us that, instead.

JB: Good idea! I only went with SMF cuz I love the Twisted Sister song of the same name… Hey, I have an idea! Since we just created the site for the new store we’re getting ready for, let’s start the new forum there. It would make more sense to have it in a store so all the customers and companies can hang there.

SD: But the store isn’t ready yet.

JB: True, but we could have the forum going and work on the store from there. Everybody knows we do things ass-backwards, anyway.

SD: I agree. Let’s do it.

JB: And I can try to copy/paste as many cool posts from the old and bring them to the new, so a lot of that hard work isn’t lost. We could let the users do it, too, if they want. Then kill the old one after that.

SD: Sure, if they want to do that. It’s a good option.

JB: Wait, it’s not there anymore. Now there’s just a bunch of error crap all over the screen. I think it’s crashed and burned.

SD: Oh shit. Well, I’ll let people know. They’ll be asking what happened.

JB: Just blame me. I’m sure I did something wrong.

SD: And what’s funny is you were able to get a message on the news feed saying, “We’re upgrading. Let us know if anything goes apeshit.”

JB: Ha! Well, I think it did. Just tell everyone I burned it to the ground.

So there you have it. The paranoid part of me is concerned that people will thing it was done on purpose just to move it to the store’s site. Not true. I put a lot of hard work into that site, as well as all the users. There were great posts there that I (and I’m sure others) would dread trying to recreate. So it was far from intentional. But with the new one, I’ve already done an upgrade and it went perfectly. It’s a much easier program to work with, so I don’t think we’ll have a repeat. And it’s like SD said to me, “It’s the Internet where shit like this can happen at anytime, unfortunately. Everyone knows we work hard to keep the entertainment level as high as we can, and we’d never want to fuck that up on purpose.”

The store-in-progress is The Merchant’s Keep and we already have a lot of stores preparing to work with us. It will sell all genres on a consignment basis, and we’ll take a smaller cut than most (if not all) other stores. We figure stores get too greedy and therefore cut the throats of small presses, who are having enough trouble keeping afloat in today’s market.

If you’d like to watch the store being built, CLICK HERE. We’ll announce when it’s ready. Right now, we’re currently getting the Skullvines books up there while we wait on other companies’ products to arrive. Once it’s live, we intend to kill the bookstore at the Skullvines site – it will go back to descriptions of our titles with links to buy at the store. There’s really no sense in running two bookstores, selling identical products, when they come from the same place.

Oh! And CLICK HERE to go to the new forum. I believe the bugs are worked out, but let us know if you find any. This one is also more compatible with various browsers, where the old one wasn’t.

We appreciate your understanding and patience. We’ll try to make everything as smooth as possible, and in the end, we believe it will have improved things. We’re expanding, after all, and just in time for the 3rd anniversary of Skullvines Press!

Other than that, I’ve had two spells since 3pm so I’m not doing much but listening to metal and playing the free demos I downloaded on the PS3 for Motorstorm and it’s sequel. Hot damn, I love those games! The sequel is new and pretty expensive, but the first is cheaper. If I get enough birthday money next month and can stay atop bills, I’m baggin’ that sucker. Then maybe the sequel will be down in price by Christmas. When recovering from this crap, it’s really nice to just sit and bash into other vehicles (and the occasional boulder). It helps my focus and lets loose some frustration, lol.

Robin’s doing good and being very supportive. Sherlock Holmes came in from Netflix the other day so we’re about to watch that… on second thought, Ithink I neeed to lie down.

Woohoo! And I’m extremely proud to be included with such great talent. Here’s the full table of contents:

Jerrod Balzer – A Show of Rage

Steve Vernon – Border Crossing

Hunter Lambright – Things Worse Than Ghosts

Daniel I. Russell – Rainchild and the Trickster

Rick Hautala – Screaming Head

Steve Rasnic Tem – Sleeping Ute

Lisa Morton – St. Thomas of El Paso

Harry Shannon – The Reckoning

Martel Sardina – The Turtle’s Only Friend

Michael Knost – Thinning the Herd

Maurice Broaddus – Trails End

Steven Shrewsbury – Boston Corbet:: Castro Gunfighter

Matthew Pizzolato – Windigo

We’ve been together ten years, and married for seven of them. And I wouldn’t trade ‘em for anything.

We got ourselves Dollhouse Season One on Blu-ray (thanks to a heads up on Whedonesque when it was Amazon’s deal of the day) so we’ll be enjoying that all day, then have supper at a great new Chinese place that opened in Keokuk. She’s excited so it sounds like a plan to me!

First, Rhonda Wilson reviewed my new novella, Zombie Bastard, on Monster Librarian. CLICK HERE to read it!

And it’s available at Horror Mall from Novello Publishers. CLICK HERE to order it!

Next up on Horror World, Dan Reilly reviews Dark Jesters, an anthology from Novello Publishers that has my story, “Wolf Plugs.” CLICK HERE to read it!

And it’s also available through Horror Mall. CLICK HERE to buy it!

And while you’re on the Horror World page, you’ll see that Ron Dickie reviewed K.H. Koehler’s Black Jack Derringer. It’s right below the Dark Jesters review.

Black Jack Derringer is available through Skullvines Press, and you can CLICK HERE to pick it up!

So now you know what to buy. Go get ‘em! =P

]]> http://jerrodbalzer.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/reviews-coming-in/feed/ 1 Jerrod Balzer Zombie Bastard Dark Jesters Black Jack Derringer http://jerrodbalzer.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/visioncon-2010-pics/ http://jerrodbalzer.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/visioncon-2010-pics/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:38:13 +0000 Jerrod Balzer http://jerrodbalzer.wordpress.com/?p=602 ]]> Okay, here’s some pics from last weekends Visioncon. We want to thank everyone who came out for making it such a blast, and the staff was top notch. Dave, the head honcho, did a fantastic job once again, and we look forward to next year!

S.D. Hintz and Cullen Bunn

Mark McLaughlin, Jerrod Balzer, S.D. Hintz, Russ Dickerson, & Cullen Bunn

Wrath James White and S.D. Hintz

Wrath James White and Jerrod Balzer

Roy C. Booth and Jerrod Balzer

Shane Moore (right) with his personal security guard, Josh

Help! Mark McLaughlin is in danger!

Jerrod Balzer and his meat stick

Brian Keene has a strange effect on Jerrod Balzer

Brian Keene and S.D. Hintz urinating on Jerrod's book

And there’s more elsewhere, for sure. Hope to see more of you next time!

I’ll get into other details later, but I wanted to mention how much fun Wrath’s Muay Thai fighting demonstration was. I have some pictures here of him with Mike Oliveri as his punching bag:

Here’s Wrath looking at me like I’m next:

Once the demonstration began, he starting knocking poor Mike all over the place:

To give Mike a break, Wrath then started picking random people out of the audience to maul:

And then back to Mike:

All kidding aside, Wrath was fantastic. He was very informative about Muay Thai – I learned a lot! I could see why he makes such a great trainer. And when the audience had questions, his offered detailed answers.

I’m thrilled to have attended his demonstration, and to see Wrath in action. Great job Wrath!