The '72 Valiant: Why to not write self-inserts · 11:55pm Jul 26th, 2017
So today I got to do an alignment on a '72 Valiant.
It sucked.
This car isn't too modded--it's got custom wheels, dual exhaust with cherry bomb mufflers, and probably some stuff on the engine, although I don't know what. I never opened the hood.
I'm not going to bore you with alignment specs; just know that they're to the tenth of a degree or hundredth of a degree . . . and this car was out by whole degrees. Partly because it was lowered some, to get that nice look.
So I jacked it up, adjusted the caster and camber, then lowered it down, rechecked, lifted it back up, made more adjustments, and so on. Six times.
I also had to set the toe three times before it was done. Some play in the gearbox and idler arm.
That's kind of to be expected on an old girl like this. And I'll admit, I was a bit salty during the process, but it got done in three hours or so, and when I was done, it drove really well.
It wasn't significantly different than how it had driven before the alignment, for what that's worth. Although it won't wear tires now.
I'm going to say right now that I hate working on classic cars. I also hate working on lifted trucks.
See, the thing is a lot of them aren't really all that nice. They just look nice. Like putting makeup on a pig.
When I used to work in the big city, we'd get early 80s land yachts in all the time. Caprices, Olds 98s, that kind of thing. And they'd have big, fancy wheels on them and little skinny rubber band tires. Each one of those wheels and tires cost more than my Caravan.
There would be the kind of stereo in them that works great at rattling the bolts on the car loose, and as often as not they'd have sparkly paint with a few layers of clearcoat, enough so that the car looked almost wet.
And then I'd get underneath it, and the frame's got rust holes, the brakes are worn down to nearly nothing, and the front end's so loose just seeing it flop around made me wonder how much I'd been risking my life driving it into the shop.
Of course, the customer thought it was the greatest car ever, because it looked nice, and it hadn't broken in half yet.
Now that I live in the country, it's lifted trucks. As with the cars, as often as not the lift kit and installation is questionable at best. People spend money to make their vehicles taller, and to put wider, more aggressive tires on it, and then they don't have any more money, so the poor truck's still got the factory ball joints trying to hold all that extra weight and leverage in place. Brake hose brackets either get modified or discarded entirely. Driveline angles . . . well, who's got time to think about that? It's obviously my fault that the truck keeps needing U-joints in the rear axle because I had the misfortune to put one in it once and now I'm stuck warrantying them out. Never mind that Mr. Customer installed the lift blocks in the rear axle backwards. Or had a few too many beers one night and came up with this abomination:
Source
(I'll grant that it's probably one of a kind.)
Torsion bar trucks--you want a lift on the cheap? Just crank those bad boys up all the way, and you'll get the front of the truck up. You can get it up far enough that I'll never get it in alignment, not without lowering your truck back down. Or if you want to lower your torsion bar truck, unwind those babies all the way. Same results with the alignment.
If you can't find the right body lift, hockey pucks work, and might even be DOT approved (protip: they aren't).
Want to lower your car cheaply? Cut the coil springs. That does the trick. Try not to cut so much out of them that they can fall out of the strut, though. Trust me, I've seen that.
[Funny little aside: I once did a pre-buy inspection on a Jetta that had been lowered that way. When I lifted the wheels off the ground, the springs rattled around loose in the struts. Told the guy not to buy the car.
Two weeks later, he was back with that car, complaining that it made clunking noises from the front. I told him--again--that it needed new springs, and he wasn't too happy with how much that was going to cost. I wanted to tell him that I'd told him not to buy the car and it wasn't my fault he hadn't listened.]
The biggest problem with modified cars or antique cars is that generally the owner thinks that they're the greatest thing ever. They think that because it has some sort of collectible value, I'd really want to work on it. Some of them even think that I should pay them for the privilege of touching such a fine automobile.
They don't think about the fact that I might not have the right tools for the car. I own very few standard tools, because I generally work on cars that were built this century, not last.
They don't think about the fact that this thing has been modified time and time again in the past, and odds are they don't know how or why. That's for us to discover . . . like when we were working on an old Dodge Coronet that had the ignition module fail. We ordered a new one, waited two days for it to arrive, and when it got there, it was wrong. Turns out, one of the previous owners had installed the ignition system from a newer Dodge on it. Can't blame the customer; how could he have known? He wasn't a gearhead, he was just a guy who had enough money to buy a fancy-looking car from someone else.
They're sometimes upset that we don't stock parts for their car. Like, I should have the oil filter for a '63 F-100 sitting on my shelf just in case one happens by. Sorry, dude, I've got to order it. I also don't stock the right weight of oil for your 'classic,' either. And you're going to be paying retail for that oil, as well. You're not getting a cheap oil change on that truck, because any oil we don't get in bulk costs a lot more.
And most of them don't see the flaws in their antique, either. They're used to the fact that the brakes barely work, or that you've got to jump start it every time (heaven forbid they spend money on a battery, when they could instead be making a down payment on a new subwoofer with that $100).
Most of us frequently wear rose-colored glasses. If you asked, most people are better than average drivers. They're smarter than your average bear. And their classic car . . . top of the line.
It's rare to find someone who admits that they're a terrible driver, or that their car is a pile. [I'll freely admit that my cars are piles, but what do you expect for a couple hundred dollars?]
And here's where we get to the second part of the blog title.
Most of us, while we might be willing to admit our faults to ourselves, don't really want to present them on a public forum. So when we want to write a self-insert, we cheat a little bit. Our protagonists get a little bit more attractive, a little bit more muscular; they turn into more interesting people. Because most of us aren't really the most interesting man in the world.
Source
(Except this guy)
And before long, we've carried it too far. We have a protagonist who is a triple black-belt in karate, grandmaster in chess, guitar virtuoso, and former underwear model. His only fault is that he's a little too compassionate, and so amazing in the bedroom that he tires the mares out every time. The story becomes what Rarity once called " a self-aggrandizing masturbatory fantasy." And nobody wants to read that.
If you're going to do a self-insert, you have to make the main character (you) believable. Oh, sure, you can cheat a little bit. You can get those blue eyes you always wanted, maybe add a little bit of muscle tone, that kind of thing. No harm in that. But you've also got to bring the flaws along with it. If you've got crippling agoraphobia, your self-insert had better have it, too. If you don't even know what agoraphobia is, than your self-insert ought not know as well.
Now, this subject came up at the WWWW panel. And I gave similar advice during the panel. As I recall, it went something like this:
Random person: "What are your views on self-insert fics?"
Me: "Don't." <puts the microphone back down>
We did give some further advice, and then someone in the audience also added that most real people are boring, and nobody wants to read a story with a boring protagonist.
I hadn't thought much more about it until this afternoon, when I was under this dumb Valiant and making it go up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and so on. And I'd been thinking earlier in the day, when a customer brought in a typical redneck pickup truck with a Klansman starter kit inside and I was thinking about how I really need to get around to that blog post about tribalism I've been hinting at for something like three years now, and then I started to think about color-based discrimination and how stupid that would be for the ponies to do, and then I started to wonder if I had any unintentional color bias in ponies and it's weird how my mind works, because it was only then that I realized I write a lot of stories about boring ponies.
No, it's true. Let's be perfectly honest here. I've got two stories starring a unicorn plumber. I've got a story starring a heather farmer. There's the one about the farm equipment repair pony. A mercury miner. A cab driver. And the story that got inducted into the Royal Canterlot Library is about a tax collector.
So I guess the moral is you can write a story with a boring protagonist. Whether it be you, or a kind of boring background pony living out her everyday life in the magical, wonderful land of Equestria.
Sick car bro
Thinking about it, writting a self-insert may be an interesting challenge, being able to be truly fair (if not objective) about yourself is a though line to keep. It require being aware of your flaws and qualities. And predicting your own actions in an hypothetical setting is also interesting. So it migth be a good excercise in knowing yourself.
Although the biggest challenge would be on the character's development, obviously the fictional you would diverge from the true you and would not grow up the same way.
And yet we've all read The Hobbit, you can't get a protagonist who's more boring. It's all about what you tell and how you tell it.
Don't we all.
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...
How precisely is Bilbo Baggins the most boring protagonist ever?
And heres me thinking that changing the supression capacitor on the distributor was getting fancy.
We did 35 miles back from the coast with a dead alternator, at night, with just a RadioShack 9 volt baton torch as a headlight so the dregs of the battery could run the spark. 8 miles and two valleys from home. Managed to phone a freind of the family to come pick us up. I ended folded up in the truck.
A custom rig Id really like to see is one with 4 backhoe arms, and a hydraulic motor with wheel attatched on the end of each. Now thats off road suspension?
It doesn't matter how boring your protagonist is, if they're believable. If their reactions to unbelievable situations are believable. In fact, the boring protagonist is probably better because they're so believable.
As you pointed out, "self-inserts" tend to have the problem of being the "newer, better, faster, stronger you" and not the boring old average joe You. But when you put your actual self in there, there's some potential for a story lurking somewhere in one of the corners, if only you can dig it out...
Yes, Bilbo Baggins is a boring protagonist.
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That would be hilarious to see.
Also, the NSA is after you; you just leaked the design concept behind their next generation military all terrain assault vehicle. RUN!
That Camry is a fine example of machinery, and I salute that man. I'd drive it.
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He's a short, middle aged country gent, who's given up the fancies of youth and settled into the quiet life of sipping tea and smelling flowers. Bilbo Baggins' picture is in Every Dictionary, Ever, Combined right next to the definition of "boring. adj. common place; lacking any interesting facets or features. hum-drum."
What made the story was what happened to him, not Bilbo himself.
And the movies were better; the books had far to much "oh, they walked and walked some more, then slept, walked some more. Oh and they ate this, that, and their mothers' favorite cookie" to be all that great for me.
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Funny. I thought what made the story was the character's unique reactions and character arc, and how different a reluctant adventurer was from your standard hero who jumps at the call to adventure. But no, I guess you're right, Bilbo is the worst part of The Hobbit and the only thing interesting about it is the adventure, in which case we both wasted our time reading The Hobbit and there were literally a billion stock standard sword and sorcery novellas on that same shelf we could have picked up for the same price and more tits.
Also, why are you suddenly trying to debate the superiority of the movies? This is about character, not your lack of patience for stories that want to take time.
My uncle has... interesting taste in cars. The highest price he's willing to pay seems to be on the low end of four digits, though what he saves there he loses in maintenance. Especially since he insists on having four or five old junkers at any given time. I suppose narratively speaking, there's a lesson about not using more characters than you have to in there.
Nobody would want to read a story about a physics professor who can't effectively manage his time, and dirnks too much.
I love your boring pony stories.
My car is slightly better then a pile, but its getting there.
I once owned a 92/3 olds lincoln continental mark 3 or 4. Bought off some mexicans, it had been sitting in a field for who knows how long. Popped a new battery and replaced the fuel line, the rubber had deteriorated and drove it. They had put bigger tires on the back. There where a lot of issues but I loved that old boat.
I love beaters, there so much fun.
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I actually found an old patent application for a 6 legged backhoe walker from the late 90s, but it was allowed to lapse a year later. Likely they didnt have the computational density available back then to handle it.
As for self inserts. My GM keeps nerfing my characters cos Im not allowed to use my stats. Hes known me for at least 25 years and knows just how far out I can go if Im allowed to.
Quick hint. dense wavelength division multiplex double slit interferometer optical quantum logic gates, taken from V92 dialup specs and PAL TV. Or at least thats what I wanted to use in my hydraulic humanoid robot design back in the 90s. Failing that, 1000 68000 CPUs
People are interesting, and life is interesting... Even economics is interesting. If a writer can't put together a story without propping it up with graphic sex, wanton violence, social injustice, or child abuse, then that says something about the writer.
What I'm saying is, I love your stories about boring ponies.
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It was pretty nice. Not as fancy as some I'd have the misfortune to work on; on the other hand, it was clean, and not all hacked up.
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It's not a terrible idea, and it can be done well. Most people don't, though; most people 'improve' themselves to the point of parody.
On this site, the typical story starts more or less with the present and works its way forward from there, so while it's almost absolutely certain that your real life won't turn out like your fantasy one, you don't have to force your character to do the same things that's you've done.
I don't know that he was exactly boring. He was a hobbit on a mission, and he did what he had to do.
Yeah, if someone comes in with a shitty modified car (lifted or lowered, etc), and they need work on the modified bits, I tell them to take it elsewhere. Fortunately we don't get too many of those. We have a guy with a couple 'classic' cars, but they're stock, and he's a cool dude. A '70-something Fury and an '80-something El Camino. There's another guy with a '60s Falcon, or Fairlane, someshit like that, we kept changing the generator. I said one more time, and next time it's getting an alternator, but that was 2 years ago and it's been fine since. We have a crazy old pervert with a '75ish Jeep CJ that he bought new and never plated, it's been a snowplow on his property forever. He's one of those people that think he owns a goldmine on wheels, but it's a pile, it's been outdoors for 40 years! I'll tell you though, it was amusing to be the first person to ever change the spark plugs on it. It's literally all original, it even has the AMC-branded spark plug wires, still.
And you know, there's nothing wrong with boring characters, it's the story that needs to be good. Hell, you can write about the most interesting man in the world, and if the story is crap, he won't be all that interesting.
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I had a similar trip in a tow truck with a failed alternator once. As the voltage fell, electrical equipment quit one thing after another. I just barely made it back to the shop and got the car dropped that I was towing.
There are kits to put treads in place of your wheels. At least you can get them in the US.
I also once saw a picture of an S-10 mounted on bulldozer chassis. Not street legal, but probably quite off-road capable.
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Totally agree. It can be done well, but the author has to be honest about themselves. Most aren't.
Also, these days it's a pretty dangerous game, since self-inserts in general tend to turn readers off.
You can have a boring protagonist.
You just have to make sure at least one of the other three story elements be interesting.
Protagonist - Setting - Story
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I would too, to be perfectly honest.
But I'd be super salty if it showed up at the shop and I had to fix it. Because you know that nearly everything on that vehicle is questionable at best.
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Four digits? I only ever paid that much for a vehicle once, and that was a potato chip truck. My typical vehicle is in the mid three-digit range, and I've also gotten a few for two-digit prices.
I save a lot on maintenance by not doing it. I tend to be pretty good at knowing the line between things you need to be safe, and things that are a good idea on most cars, but this particular car had one wheel in the junkyard when I bought it.
I had to thin my fleet, sadly. The township complained.
You're right about too many characters. I've had literal conversations with my insurance agent that went like this: "I need to change the policy on my S-10."
"Which one?"
"The 88."
"Which 88? You've got three 88 S-10s."
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Oh, for an example of stories that were mostly one element.
Plot - Character - Setting
Setting. -> Alice in Wonderland. Gulliver's Travels.
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Sure, they would. I'm not sure what 'dirnks' is, although that sounds fun
Seriously, though, there are so many fun things he could do. Witness pony physics and suddenly drink a lot more, find out that they don't have alcohol in Equestria and teach the ponies how to ferment things . . . he could lecture Twilight on physics, or Twilight and the professor could lecture everypony else on physics. Possibly while drunk.
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My current daily driver is much less of a pile than you'd think, considering that it only cost $200. It makes some funny clunking noises from the rear a lot, but I looked underneath and nothing important seems to be falling off, so it's probably good.
Especially since you can do all sorts of fun crazy stuff with them and if it breaks them, oh well.
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I wish like hell we could do that, but most of these people are friends of the manager, so he encourages them to bring their piles to us. And then makes me fix them.
Still, I can't complain too much about the ones I've gotten this week, because he is currently working on the branch tube and back cover plate thingy on a 6.0 diesel that came in half-disassembled. The customer got it taken apart down to the HP oil pump before figuring out that they were over their heads, and towed it to us. Could be that's why he's in a grumpy mood this week.
We've got a guy like that, too. A couple of years ago, we had to put a starter on his Wagoneer and we did it on the alignment rack because there was no way I was going to risk lifting the wheels off the ground. We had to back it on, because we couldn't take the plow off and the front axle was sitting on its stops since the springs were completely shot.
I agree! I think I've found my niche, writing about the Joe everypony.
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Heck, a movie that did that really well was the original 12 Angry Men. All but one scene was in the exact same room.
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God I havent seen a radshack products in soo long. Now it's just phones and phone accessories. And a couple of hobbyist things.
If it has a GVWR (or GCWR) of less than 20,000lbs, or isn't a piece of industrial equipment, I don't work on it.
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Phphht. Size queen.
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What made the Hobbit so great isn't Bilbo, at least not the Bilbo form the first introduction. What made the story so great is how Bilbo was changed by what he lived. 'cause yes, at the beginning, he's boring. He does nothing but stay there and be confortable and not standing out. And he is proud of it. Being thrown out of his elements make him funny, seeing him grow ino a hero make him inspiring and awesome. But as it stands, he was boring when it all started.
I did not like the style much back then, a bit too tedious at times for me (and I'm pretty sure half of that problem came from the french translation), but I still think it is a good exemple of what a good story is.
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After he had Gandalf more or less bullying him into getting out of his comfort zone, mind you.
I think an arguably strong example of a boring protagonist people want to read about is (Dent) Arthur Dent. In a universe of two-headed presidents and genocidal bureaucrats, we follow a man who mostly wants nothing to do with anything, and gets dragged along by the other characters more than actually driving the plot forward himself. Despite that, I love him, and THHGTTG is one of my favorite stories of all time.
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You and I must not be reading the same comment, because I can't find anyone mentioning that Bilbo is the worst part of The Hobbit. What I took away from Midknight's comment, is that Bilbo is a mundane character whose presence doesn't detract from the story at all, and that a boring character in no way translates to a bad or boring story. I would even argue that the fact that he's a hobbit who mainly concerns himself with everyday things serves as an asset, because he becomes a vehicle by which the audience is thrust into this fantastical world, much like he himself is.
I do agree that seeing Bilbo grow and react to the plot was interesting, and that in itself should reveal the folly of thinking that "nobody wants to read a story with a boring protagonist." Because there's not much opportunity to see whether a character's clever, or manipulative, or brave when they're sitting down alone to have their daily afternoon tea, but if you provide the right stimuli, if you dig down deep enough, you can force their more interesting character traits up to the surface. Bilbo is a passive character. Most of The Hobbit happened to him, not the other way around, and his interesting bits had to be dragged out of him.
I think that it's perfectly fair to say that a character is boring, if most of the time they are boring, but they become interesting when their hair is on fire. The Hobbit was Bilbo with his hair on fire.
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Fine. I'm bad at this. Maybe I just think 'boring' is a dumb word to apply to a protagonist that people enjoy. Maybe I'm shit at literary analysis. Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut.
I'm sorry for being wrong.
I like the Silver Spanner stories.
I have no idea why, but one of the guys at work was messing with another and told him that I was that in the past and its stuck. Even with me telling him he was BS'ing him, he still believes it for some damned reason.
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Well, literary analysis is subjective isn't it? Menaing you can't be wrong. From your point of view, Bilbo with is hair on fire is the character and he is not boring. From our point of view, Bilbo without is hair on fire is the character and he is boring till he get is hair on fire. Both statement are true.
We were just looking at thing from a different angle.
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Apologies. I tend to get very easily hot-headed, and flaws or not, one of the few things I'll rarely tolerate someone saying about a story or character I love is that they were boring. To me, that statement means that the character had utterly nothing to offer, was superfluous and could have been replaced by anything else, and dragged the rest of the story down. Mostly because, that's usually how that word is used when describing characters.
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Call it what you want. I'm a mobile equipment repair tech that specialises in medium/heavy heavy-duty diesel (you read that correctly), industrial/agricultural equipment, demilitarized military surplus vehicles/equipment, and heavy transport repair. I'm also fairly well acquainted with steam engine repair, both traction and stationary. Actually, I think I'm the only one in the company that can work on steam equipment...
Am I a size queen? You can bet your bit and bridle. Can I afford to be? Well, given that my service vehicle has an oil change due every month (25,000mi intervals. And that's a solid number), I make 20 dollars per hour and 38 cents per mile, on top of holding a senior tech position at the age of 23? I'd say the answer is; yes. Yes, I can. Why? Because I'm just that good.
Now, with everything abovementioned out there, I will state this; I am no better than any other mechanic. I just know a buggy load of things about a vast array of machines. Yet, I learn something new every single day. Does this make me more knowledgeable? Yes. Does it make me better? No. However, it does irritate my peers when I attempt to imbue that knowledge upon them. Seriously, I don't try to tell folks how to do the job, nor give advice on it, all because they don't want it. Ask me for information? I'll give it if I've got it. But I'm going to sound like a "how to:" manual.
To wrap up this jolly jaunt down diatribe drive: I'm a damn good mechanic with a penchant for literary consumption. I'm still learning and will keep learning until I die.
Signed, your resident roving rust bucket.
Wrought Iron.
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Perhaps this is in part an issue of semantics. I can corroborate that in my experience, the word "boring" seems be used more often in the same context as you described. In this particular case, it may be necessary to separate descriptions of a character in terms of their personality from descriptions in terms of their function as a component of the text. There are almost certainly words for this in the study of literature, but I don't know what they are.
To be more precise, Bilbo Baggins as a fictional person is boring; Bilbo Baggins as a character being experienced by an audience is not.
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That, I can agree.
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Easy there. I'm just being my usual snarkastic self. :) Your comment was practically begging me to crack a joke.
My sister-in-law's brother actually does the same sort of thing, I think with tractor-trailers that break down on the road. He probably wouldn't waste his time on someone's sedan, either. He'd rather play WoW.
...your name isn't Bill, is it? O_O
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Nope. I'll give you a clue: I help engines go, betwixt the piston and the throw. When your time has come, I'm what must be dug.
Now, I hope you've guessed my name
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If you teamed up with Cast Iron, would that make your team, Crucible Steel?
Even though I'm not a mechanic, I do work in a parts store. So I know exactly what you mean about having to do warranties because someone bought the wrong part. Or they didn't spend the money on a crucial engine component in favor of some cosmetic piece. And those who have a fit when we have to order rare parts from New York or Missouri (I'm in Houston.) Even having to order from Dallas is unthinkable to some. Don't even get me started on how many replacement u-joints, tie rod ends, and ball joints I sell to rednecks who buy the cheap ones then go hauling ass through a field at 60mph.
Yeah I hate the lift kits people think are soooo cool.
And low profile tires and the jumbo rims should be outlawed in my opinion.
That said, I confess that I still have my first car. Granted it's parked in a fence row on the family farm right now, but when finances allow , it will be restored. NOT modified, restored. And to let you know, my mechanical baby is a 1969 Pontiac LeMans 2 door.
4614040 QUESTIONABLY AMAZING, PERHAPS.
Although, yes, I would love to see the sheer amount of duck tape, zip ties, cross threads, close enough's, spot welds and prayers holding that thing together.
I really like your mechanic blog posts, true slice of life.
That said, I love boring characters. Boring characters can grow a lot, since they start very humble. What constitutes 'boring' is also very subjective, with Silver Spanner and her co-workers being a good example. Boring characters can work well in dark adventure stories - put them through hell and see what comes out the other side. If your boring character stays boring during that (and alive, despite of it), it's definitively not the character's fault but the writer's. :b
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Maybe? I'm not entirely sure.
I'm surprised you didn't lure out TNAB with a blog title talking about both self inserts *and* Valiants.
...I don't remember that episode.
Blog posts like this make me wish we could ggive a thumbs up or down to them like we do stories. Some folks on this site are terrible authors for stories, but fantastic bloggers. Their blogs make following them worthwhile.
Then... There's work like yours. Best of both worlds, and it all ultimately ties together. Featured blogs should be a thing and this right here should be one of them. If this site had a function like that it wpuld be entirely within reason to also have it populate a list of that blogger's most popular stories.
Has anyone else considered this? Maybe we shpuld all message the mods. It'd be a bitch to set up initially, (maybe, I don't do web design...) but I feel like it'd add some fantastic value to the site.
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I wonder sometimes . . . in one of King's novels, there was the statement "It is the story, not he who tells it." (I don't know if that's original to King or if that's a quote from somewhere.) And it seems like good wisdom, but perhaps it is not.
I think that there are stories that lend themselves more to telling than others . . . but maybe the other stories just need a better storyteller. I think we've all seen Hollywood manage to ruin a good story. And when I was talking to my parents a couple nights ago, they mentioned that they'd just seen a play that was inspired by Studs Terkel, who is famous for telling the stories of joe (and jill) everyman. Which, I'll admit, is something I love doing as well.
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Now it's not even all that--I think that they're turning all the Radio Shack stores into Sprint stores.
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I only do cars and light-duty trucks.
I feel inadequate now.
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I think that's a really good example. Well, from what I remember of the books--it's been a good 20 years since I read 'em. In fact, it is a really good example of a protagonist completely out of his element; Arthur had no idea that there were alien races for example.
Now that I'm thinking of British novelists, that's kind of a common theme in some of Gaiman's books, as well (I'm thinking Neverwhere andStardust primarily). Also elements of that in many of King's stories.
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I'm not always good at expressing myself as well as I mean to, and I sometimes get kinda impassioned when people disagree with my opinions . . . plus, I've got a degree in English (I think) and that sucks all the fun out of reading for pleasure. Took me nearly 20 years to get back into poetry after my Senior Seminar professor basically hit me in the kneecaps until I'd sort of comply with her opinions of Wallace Stevens.
See, this is why I don't tend to give analysis of stories myself.
On the plus side, I can hope that whenever she thinks of me, she thinks of horse manure and horse sweat.
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That's amusingly weird.
I sometimes tell people that I used to be an insurance salesman, and they don't believe me, even though it's true.
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All I can come up with is "Rod Hole." Which, and no offense is that is actually your name, sounds kinda like a porn star.
4614302
Oh, man, I feel for you guys, I really do. Not only do you have to deal with the customer who's an idiot, you've also got to deal with the professional mechanics who are idiots.
There were two angry old men who used to work at our local NAPA store, and I loved them because not only could they get me the part I needed somehow (they once sent their driver to buy a die at a hardware store to give to us, because they didn't have one in stock and I needed it right now), but they'd also get me the right part when I said I needed that coolant fitting that goes on the back of a 5.7L. I provided no other information and got the right part.
And I'll say this, too: as a shop, a good parts person is worth his weight in gold. Someone who knows how to use every resource at hand--not just the computer, but matching things up when it comes down to it.
Heck, they let me go through their stock of tie rods looking for a specific castle nut, because it was missing from the part they sent us and the nearest replacement was three hours away.
4614362
I don't know about outlawed, but certainly it would be nice if there was some sort of way to prevent them from being improperly installed by idiots.
Of course, when we're talking about idiot users, I'm sure every IT guy ever is nodding his head. Hell, my IT buddies make fun of me all the time when I tell them what I just did to my computer. And I thought one of them was going to cry when I tried to fix my HTC Evo . . . I just started tearing into it on his kitchen table, with parts rolling away every now and then, and I had to find a picture on Google Images to figure out where some plastic bit that fell out went.
No, the phone didn't work right after I was done. But it wasn't any worse than it had been when I started.
And then a week later, I dropped it, and it started working normally again.
I also have my first car, a 1977 Olds Delta 88 Royale. I also have intentions of restoring it one of these days.
4614463
I saw a creature like that in a junkyard once. IIRC, it was an Olds Cutlass on full-size Blazer chassis. The two were joined with square steel sticks welded in wherever the creator thought was strong. I looked at it and thought it was a complete deathtrap, and then I walked up to the office and asked if it was for sale. Sadly, it was not.
4614691
Thank you!
It's funny; I could have been doing these for years, but I figured that most people wouldn't like them, especially since I was usually griping about people being dumb and their cars being piles of s
t. Turns out that I was wrong. 
I agree--I've got a soft spot in my heart for the everypony, and I also really like different kinds of tech and skills (mostly watching people who know how to do it, not trying to do it myself--watching two master mechanics try to put together a barbecue grille is a study in comedy).
And I think you're right about it being the skill of the writer. Just a couple of days ago, my parents went to see a play that was inspired by Studs Terkel's work. If you don't know who that is, he was a journalist/writer who interviewed the everymen of the world (and in fact, I wrote one story which was directly inspired by him), and damned if he didn't make it interesting.
I guess a lot of us fall into the trap of thinking that big-budget Hollywood style movies are the only real form of entertainment, while in reality there is so much interesting stuff out there and we just have to open our eyes and see it.
And I think I'm rambling and getting slightly off-topic here.
4616366
I totally agree with you--there are a few people I follow who write the best blogs ever. Some of them haven't written a single story, but their blog posts make it all worthwhile.
I think it might be wiser to have a separate category, if for no other reason than this is primarily designed as a fanfiction site and not a blog site. Actually, do blog sites have features (like Wordpress)? But some way of sorting through the blogs would be nice, and perhaps some way to see the ones that are popular or featured for whatever reason.
I think that they way the system is set up, though, it's highly dependent on an author's followers. A story could be a breakaway success even if an author hasn't got too many followers; enough people might see it in the new stories column and be interested in it, or it could just get lucky and go up during a slack time. I feel that maybe with blogs there would be too much traffic to mirror the fiction side of things . . . but maybe not. I don't know; I don't have the metrics on that.
I would think that at the very least, making it so that you could fave and track blog posts would be a fairly easy feature to implement. As far as I can tell from the URLs, the only difference is that a story is .../story/12345/the-title-of-the-story, and a blog is .../blog/12345/the-title-of-the-blog. To me, that suggests that you could just copy some of the coding to also work in a different folder . . . having said that, I'm the kind of guy that tries to fix computers by banging them against a hard surface. . . .