Category Archives: Essays

This is a very boring name for me writing about the stuff that’s on my mind. I strive to make the essays more interesting than the word “essays” and this description.

Essays

Banner Tweaking

Here’s a quick comparison between drafts of my GenCon 2014 banners. On the left, the banner I thought was the final one. On the right, the one that we used after I let the design “bake” in my brain a bit.

GenCon 2014 Banner, designed by Howard, using cover art from Privateer Press, Carter Reid, Julie Dillon, and his own hand.
GenCon 2014 Banner designed by Howard. Art by Howard, Julie Dillon, Carter Reid, and artists at Privateer Press
HowardBanner-5x7-2014-WEB
GenCon 2014 Banner designed by Howard. Art by Howard, Julie Dillon, Carter Reid, and artists at Privateer Press

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you see  the difference? The big change was swapping XDM and SHADOWS BENEATH. For branding purposes, the original layout made it look like SHADOWS BENEATH was a Schlock cover. With XDM running interference, though, SHADOWS BENEATH gets to be its own thing.

I also changed the text effect on my name. The wavy effect was cool, but on a fabric banner it will make people thing the banner is hanging badly. The slight arch with the forward lean (the one on the left) will look much better, especially since people will be looking up at that spot.

This project killed an entire day, and that final tweak was made during three hours I could have spent writing. But I needed to make the tweak, and I didn’t know what exactly it was until I started nudging things around.

Essays, Journal

Write It, or Live It?

Aside

I found the following gem while searching through my old Live Journal posts. Excerpted, it’s almost profound:

My life would seem more interesting to everyone else if I could strike some sort of balance between writing about it and living it, but more and more I’m finding that, when time permits, I prefer to allow my life to seem completely uninteresting to the rest of the world, and absolutely, fascinatingly packed with all the big and little things that make it wonderful for me and a few first-hand observers.

–Howard Tayler

Essays, Journal

Thoughts on Aughts

16 Comments

There’s an old man who comes to the gym in the mornings. He has a walker with an oxygen bottle, and bears visible scars from open heart surgery and a pacemaker implant. Monday morning I loosened up in the hot tub, and the two of us talked.

I learned that he had his first surgery in early December of 1999. I was reminded of my bout with myocarditis that same month, and how, as I lay in the Intensive Care Unit at UVRMC, the rooms around me were full of what I have come to call “gray people.” Their skin was literally deathly pale, and I assumed that the majority of them were going to die there.

I asked where this man had gone for treatment back in ’99, and he told me he was at UVRMC, and spent most of December in the Intensive Care Unit.

One of those gray people not only survived, but did so for a full decade at current count.

The last decade has been huge for me. I started a new job, rose to prominence, and then quit to do the same thing again. I created Schlock Mercenary, and Sandra and I had two more kids.

All of this in a decade.

I don’t know what my elderly friend at the gym has done with the ten years the doctors, God, and/or the Fates gave back to him, but I’m sure they are precious.

Whine about the “aughts” if you must, but as we begin the second decade of the twenty-first century, know that at least two of us are really thankful for the last ten years.

Essays

$250,000 per Job? Only a little bit too expensive.

86 Comments

If you’ve been following the news, there are lots of people screaming about how incredibly expensive the stimulus package was, and how it didn’t create enough jobs for the money spent.

I’m not a fan of stimulus, nor big government, but I do know how to do math like a capitalist. An employee costs a lot more than just salary, and I haven’t seen much reporting in this vein.

Let’s say you’ve been given stimulus money to hire somebody. GREAT! Do you start writing them paychecks immediately? No. You find work for them to do. Let’s go on to say that the employee is (as many of them are reported to have been) a construction worker. How much is it going to cost to put that person to work? Well… you have to have land on which they can put a building, materials to put up the building with, and tools for them to use. Some of this you might already have, but with stimulus money you’re going to go buy MORE of it so you can grow your business and (here’s another form of the word) STIMULATE the economy as a result.

Pulling numbers out of my butt: if twenty guys can build a subdivision of 40 homes in a year, and the homes cost $120,000 each to build, you’ve spent just short of five million dollars creating 20 jobs, at a cost of $240,000 per job.

You also created forty homes (in a depressed real-estate market that is saturated with defaults, foreclosures, and short sales, but I digress…)

Also, somebody out there sold you a whole mess of lumber, nails, concrete, PVC, etc.

Sure, if all we wanted to do was feed people tax money we could do it much more efficiently by just dumping the entire stimulus package into the existing welfare system. But that doesn’t stimulate the economy, and it provides incentives for the wrong sort of behavior.

Again, let me say that I’m not a fan of the stimulus package, not as implemented, and not in principle. But the math I use as a good capitalist who wants to be able to create jobs tells me that the critics of the stimulus package are being very loudly dishonest in their criticism.

(Note: If you gave me $240,000 and told me to create as many jobs as I could, I would hire a writer, two line-artists, and a colorist and create graphic novels out the wazoo. If the books sold well, I’d be able to keep my employees. If not, well… they worked for a year, and we all had a good time with taxpayer money. DO NOT SEND ME TAX DOLLARS IT WILL ONLY END IN TEARS.)