Alternate Reality
Saturday March 14, 2020 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Editorial | Leave Comments
I don't know about you but life feels surreal right now.
Pretty much everything is cancelled. My daughters opera slated for next month is cancelled. All the schools here are online only until further notice.
No sports, of any kind, except . . . except Virtual Sports. Could this spark something new? All those out of work sports reporters need something to do.
I'm listening to Karl Schroeder's newest book, Stealing Worlds. People can disappear in the LARP game worlds, into the alternate economy of Notchcoin and blockchains. The people who build the games also program the surveillance networks. It's s Deep State thriller that deals with a lot of virtual and mixed reality stuff. Combined with what is happening across the world right now it has really got me feeling like we are in the first stages of Schroeder's world.
My imagination has been working overtime, and I can see a world where virtual sports really take off, online worlds thrive. Why? Because you can do it in the comfort of your fortress at home. I wonder about the implications of social distancing. If this virus threat continues for months and months it could have a lasting impact on how we live for years to come. If I had the money I would be investing in online ventures and delivery services.
I hope you are doing well. Keep washing your hands.
Media Need to STOP Feeding the Coronavirus Fears
Friday February 28, 2020 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Editorial | Leave Comments
It has gotten completely out of hand. My wife visited the doctor yesterday and they were surprised when she didn't ask them about the coronavirus; apparently everyone else had. Media, especially television "news" outlets have been feeding the frenzy using words like "Deadly" coronavirus. It is the second LEAST deadly of all the major virus's that have been going around for the last decade. It IS very contagious. But is has proven to be a fairly weak virus in comparison to others. Even the normal flu virus that we get shots for every year, (you get your flu shot right?) has nearly twice as much killing potential and yet we don't have the media screaming about that. Good news came out today that the Israelis are a few weeks away from having a vaccine. They had been working on one for years. Good timing? Providence? Who knows. But the fear mongering has got to stop. My local TV station played this last night: Context matters
Read MoreCoronavirus Fears are Out of Control
Monday February 24, 2020 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Editorial | Leave Comments
The media has created a fear of the Coronavirus (covid-19) that is out of proportion worldwide. All the talk of pandemic and global fears causing the DOW to drop more than a thousand points today, all on emotion. According to medical sources, this season's flu has a mortality rate of around 3%. The mortality rate of the Coronavirus is between 1-2%. https://www.globalresearch.ca/flu-bigger-concern-wuhan-virus-grabs-headlines/5701932 Why aren't we freaking out about the flu? It's crazy. There hasn't been a single case in the United States resulting in death. Most of the deaths, and all but one so far have been in China, have been as a result of people already being in poor health when they contracted it. The World Health Organization declined to declare the outbreak a pandemic today, as well. Let's not let fear get the better of us.
Read MoreHow do You do Social Media?
Monday August 19, 2019 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Blogging | Leave Comments
[caption id="attachment_media-521" align="alignnone" width="1880"] Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com[/caption]
During my MFA course we talked about how to present yourself to the world. Marketing yourself is pretty much expected these days. The problem for a lot of writers is that they tend to be introverts by nature, and having to put themselves out there in the public eye can produce a lot of anxiety. Especially doing live events, like conventions and sitting on panels or books signings. But even beyond that there seems to be an expectation by the industry to have a presence on social media.
There are so many now, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Patreon, Twitch, Flickr, Tumblr, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress and so many more. I found a link that discussed 165 different platforms for 2019. Holy crap.
Obviously, we don’t have time to do everything, and still have time to write. I could have stopped with the first half of that last sentence. We don’t have time for 165 different platforms even if we did nothing else.
Just keeping up this blog takes up quite a bit of my time when I could be writing more for my current work in progress. So, for me I spend most of my energy on three, WordPress, Twitter and Facebook. I have accounts for LinkedIn, and LiveJournal, Flickr, Tumblr, Patreon, Instagram, and YouTube, but I rarely use them, other than to peruse the content of others.
Are my three the best three? I have no idea. My kids tell me that nobody uses Facebook anymore. I have to laugh at that because it is still the largest with over 2.4 BILLION users. That is almost unbelievable. What my kids mean is young people rarely use Facebook now. My youngest spends a lot of time on Reddit, which I can barely stand, but he loves it.
Young people are always moving onto the hot new thing. Which, I have to admit, I have no idea what that might be. I try to stay up on current events, but pop culture moves fast at times, and I have no doubt that at some point it will leave me behind.
I know there is a fine line between selling too hard and not doing any. I think the real trick is to simply be you. I know that I don’t like following people that all they talk about is their latest book, with character discussion or snippets of their novel. If I don’t see some real personality in there, at least occasionally, then I don’t want to be your friend on there. In fact, we aren’t making any sort of connection, because all I am to you is a person to buy your book.
So, what are your favorites? If you are a writer or an artist do you actively market yourself? How do you go about it?
5 Things I Hate About Writing
Friday June 28, 2019 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Blogging | Leave Comments
First of all, our school systems do a poor job of teaching English. It basically makes people hate studying the language and how to write it better. Grammar? Bleh. How do you get past this? People still write, but it seems like most of those people do so because they can’t stop themselves. I wonder how many more people would be writing if they weren’t made to hate it in High School. When I decided to take it seriously, I had a lot of education to undertake. It spurred me to get a Master’s degree, simply to fill in the gaping potholes in my skillset. I still ended up taking an undergraduate class in grammar. I enjoyed it actually. No really.
Throwback Thursday: A Life of Consequence
Thursday June 27, 2019 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Blogging | Leave Comments
This gem dates back to Dec 30, 2011. Please to enjoy.

Watching Television, errr, Small Screen/Streaming
Monday June 24, 2019 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Blogging | Leave Comments
[caption id="attachment_1408" align="alignleft" width="331"] The Rook[/caption]
We recently watched Gentleman Jack on HBO. The writing and acting were brilliant. Before that it was Games of Thrones and Star Trek Discovery, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Stranger Things. All of these were wonderful. We love Counterpart on Stars and it looks like there is going to be another good show on Stars, besides Outlander, The Rook. It looks very interesting.
I tried Orange is the New Black and Handmaid’s Tale, but they don’t really do much for me. My wife didn’t even bother with them.
We tried Man in the High Castle, but accidently started on season two and it made no sense, so much so that we didn’t want to watch season one. It deviates widely from the book, but almost every adaption of Phillip Dick has taken a broad approach to his work.
This might be an unpopular opinion but Good Omens was meh. I read the book and it was much better. Something isn’t translating well for us.
We started Ozark, but only made it a little over halfway through season one.
Better Call Saul was okay, but we didn’t get very far with that either.
For the most part, other than Counterpart we seem to drift away from the darker shows. Counterpart is intriguing because of the deep character development. I just found out they cancelled season three. Of course they did. Most of the shows I like get cancelled.
We loved Discovery of Witches, but we also loved the books. They have done a good job translating it to small screen.
Big Little Lies looks interesting but we haven’t watched a single episode. I’ve heard that Peaky Blinders is good, but haven’t watched that either. Black Mirror remains on my list, but we haven’t started it yet and I think there are five seasons now.
One of the great developments in the last decade has been the growth of book to series instead of movie. Good books translate so much better to small screen because we don’t have to lose huge parts of it. It’s a dream to have one of my series picked up for an adaptation. Of course, I have to write it first.
So, what do you watch? What are you looking forward to? What were your favorites?