Jerrod Balzer

A degu passed away today :(

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/degu-passed-today/

Well, I had a bit of a rough day yesterday. I tried to help carry a broken TV outside, and succeeded, but then everything went out on me going back inside. In the process, I hit my head on a wall pretty hard and my neck has been killing me since.

Then I had a nasty seizure at about 7pm and was in bed since.

I woke and went to the degus to greet them, and Willow was by the wheel, unmoving. Tara, always her pal, was hovering over her and looking at me as if to say, “She won’t get up!”

It was most definitely old age, as they turned 9 a few months ago. I bragged about it HERE.

I reached in to pick her up and it hadn’t been that long since she’d passed – she wasn’t very stiff. Still, it looked like she’d been sleeping so I hope she was comfortable. I wrapped her up carefully and put her in the garage freezer until we can bury her, then returned to give the remaining three girls some attention.

They were sniffing on my hand that held their sister and they groomed on my fingers a bit, their way of bonding, as well as climbing around on my arms (well, Tara and Cordy did, while Buffy ate some hay that I gave them). I started to leave, but then Cordy went to the hole leading down to where Willow had been and began to chirp for her sister. My heart was breaking so I stuck around a little longer to play with them some more. Eventually they went to do their own thing.

R.I.P. Willow.

Here’s the most recent picture of her. She’s in front, always wanting the most affection:

Don’t slap my face unless you kiss me.

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/slap-face-kiss-me/

The Grand Grimoire now available!

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/grand-grimoire-available/

Yes, that’s right. THE Grand Grimoire!

Countless tales revolve around pacts with the Devil, which sound lucrative but always end badly for the person involved. Well, now is your chance to be that person! At the risk of your pathetic soul, you can reach out and touch someone from deep down below.

Or maybe not.

Released for entertainment purposes only (DON’T TRY IT AT HOME… OR ANYWHERE ELSE!), here is The Grand Grimoire. Special care was put into making it an accurate edition. However, the person who put it together is Bubba E. Beelz of the Blasphemous Bible series, so expect his mischievous humor laced throughout.

Now available on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo!

Coming Soon: The Night Prophets by Paul F. Olson

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/coming-soon-night-prophets-paul-f-olson/

Originally published in 1989, Paul F. Olson’s novel The Night Prophets is being resurrected as an e-book in an expanded “Ultimate Edition” through KHP Publishers, Inc. Restoring all the material that was cut and altered for the first publication, this is the author’s preferred edition of the novel, which details a dark journey into the evil that lies at the heart of an international religious movement. With a brand new introduction by the author, “Taking Communion With the Night Prophets,” and a special note from editor K.H. Koehler, this is a book no horror fan will want to miss.

The year was 1989. George Bush Sr. was in the White House. Tiananmen Square, Ted Bundy and the Berlin Wall were in the news. The Little Mermaid was in theaters. Madonna, Prince, Duran Duran and Phil Collins were atop the charts. And in suburban Chicago, the worldwide religious movement known as Universal Ministries was carefully tending its flock – the thousands of young people drawn to the church’s bustling headquarters by a message of hope and change. But were they there to spread the gospel or become sacrificial lambs?

Curt Potter came to Universal Ministries looking for the truth, but what he and his friends found was something far different – a worldwide movement built on lies, a place where the shadows come alive at night and salvation means going to war against an evil more terrible than his darkest nightmares.

Weather Channel uses tasteless logo

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/weather-channel-tasteless-logo/

I’ve already posted on Facebook and Twitter, so this will show up in those places again. I don’t care, it needs to be spread around. I’ve been in tornadoes, I live in the Midwest, and even if I didn’t, I have enough common sense to know this is wrong.

Thanks to my friend Adam J. Whitlatch for pointing this out:

Especially the week following an F5 tornado disaster in Moore, OK, couldn’t somebody over at the Weather Channel have thought the blood splatter might have been a tad tasteless and offensive prior to airing?

Nice.

By the way, if you don’t want the Weather Channel app freezing up your system, I’ve just welcomed back the WeatherBug found HERE.

Be sure to spread this around.

Unfortunate casualties of WAM!

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/unfortunate-casualties-wam/

Recently, WAM! or Women, Action, and the Media launched a fierce boycott against Facebook to end gender-based hate speech, specifically pages, etc, that encourage domestic violence and rape “jokes.”

This is a great cause and I applaud it. As advertisers began to flee, Facebook cracked down and cleaned house, but I think they did it so quickly that it ended up being a sloppy job.

And their were casualties.

Take, for instance, the book page for Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton, with illustrations by Greg Chapman. Because it depicted images of violence against women (a witch being burned at the stake), the page was taken down without any explanation save for “Bullying” and they were all three banned from Facebook for 12 hours.

Isn’t that something? A book about violence against women in history gets punished thanks to the actions of a group that is against violence toward women.

Read Rocky’s blog about it HERE. At the time of his writing it, they were still in the dark on why but wow! The truth of it is wilder than the fact of it happening.

That useless feeling.

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/useless-feeling/

I called my mother up and apologized for being an asshole. She laughed. I guess I wasn’t being that bad, but I was stressed earlier and I was unsure how it appeared. It’s one of the worst things about being disabled: feeling like a 300 lb sack of potatoes, watching your 70-year-old mother mow the lawn. It hurts is all, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Posted a Webby game!

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/posted-webby-game/

I created a free arcade site for KHP over HERE so we, and everyone else, could enjoy flash games without all the pop-up crap that other places have, and it looks like I put a game up a little while back on Ambien!

I didn’t mess it up or anything, and it’s a fun game. The description is a bit humorous, though.

CHECK IT OUT

2 million marched against Monsanto? Really?

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/2-million-marched-monsato-really/

I love the story of how Castro had a small group of men to take over Cuba with, but he convinced the U.S. media that he had many thousands of soldiers ready to go, so it’s essentially what brought him to power. The numbers don’t have to be there to make a big splash. Just say so in the news.

All the news are currently saying that two million people marched in protests against Monsanto. Cool beans! But look at the actual article words:

The `March Against Monsanto’ movement began just a few months ago, when Canal created a Facebook page on Feb. 28 calling for a rally against the company’s practices.

“If I had gotten 3,000 people to join me, I would have considered that a success,” she said Saturday. Instead, she said two million responded to her message.

Two million responses on Facebook, not actual people marching in protests around the world, as the media would have you believe. After all, they all seem to open up with:

Organizers say two million people marched in protest against seed giant Monsanto in hundreds of rallies across the U.S. and in over 50 other countries on Saturday.

Now look at this to see what I mean: CLICK TO READ THIS.

Yeah, that would suck to have cannons going off to panic a crowd like that, but I’m talking about a particular part of the article here:

About 4,000 people had RSVP’d for the event on Facebook, she said, but because of heavy rain, attendance was closer to 1,000.

So only a quarter of the Facebook responses actually showed up to march, and to be honest, I doubt rain had much to do with it. We all know how much easier it is to click on something with gusto, as opposed to going out and contributing.

To those who did go out there, cool! I’m not downing the event. I’m merely pointing out how the media is blowing the numbers out of proportion.

“Studies” Illustrated

From http://jerrodbalzer.com/studies-illustrated/

This is an excellent example of how people can use “studies” to influence people, whether it’s for some new miracle cure, the poisons of last year’s miracle cure, or anything that a “statistic” or “poll” can be found cited to push an agenda.

READ IT HERE

And before you get all pissed off at the content, look at the last few paragraphs of the article to fully understand its meaning.