Icy Rants

[tywinter]

I Lied

Not, like, on purpose.

Everyone everywhere always says, "Don't do a thing for the other people, do it for yourself" and everyone always responds, "Fuck off, this is AMERICA, and other people are all that exists."

Then eventually you realize that doing a thing for other people just isn't sustainable. Like, your body stops. Your fingers stop. Your brain stops. Some people manage to do that other thing for other people for a while, and make a lot of money at it, and then their body stops and they start doing other things (probably the things they actually WANTED to do) but their devoted fans go "NO! STOP! WE HATE THAT NEW THING!" and they then just keep doing the first thing forever, crying into their pillows every night.

What's my point? I don't like short stories. I'm not gonna write them. They're just not where my heart lives. Blogs aren't even really where my heart lives, though running my mouth off is. A bit. I don't mind rambling on and on and on about nothing for a while, especially as a kind of warm-up for the big game. The big novel! The greatest story ever tooooold!

So, I guess I'll get to writing that thing now. Thanks for reading, you. You ghost, you. You invisible flurry of nitrogen and oxygen, you.

[tywinter]

Getting Paid to Write

A while ago, when I was just a tot, I thought I could get paid to write. Easy, right?

My first semester at college I signed up for journalism, ‘cause that seemed like the fastest way to get paid for writing. But alas, journalism bored me. Just the facts. Snooze. Snore. I changed my major. (If only I knew that journalism was gonna get real fictional a decade or two later. Drats.)

But my sights weren’t really set on writing just anything. I wanted to write a book. A novel! The novel! The most amazing novel ever written! But then I learned that this was everyone’s dream, and agents’ doors were mostly closed. Especially to young upstarts with no published works.

Slowly I learned to lower my expectations. Novel? No. Short stories? Na. Webcomics? Fat chance. Getting a friend to read something I wrote? Depended on the friend and the length. Largely no.

Over the years, the writer’s crucible sufficiently burned away all of my desire. Silent voices of cruel indifference cast me into the wilds, never to return. The end of a story never even begun.

But readers! Take note! I am writing. Right here, right now. It’s these words that you’re reading. I wrote them. Imagine that!

So yes, I have returned. Returned to the fortress walls with all of the other plebeians begging for scraps from the tower guards. Millions of voices, all crying into an abyss. It seems more hopeless than ever. Stricter rules, corporatization, social media, angry mobs, death of the author… Honestly it sounds like I should just go back into the desert and hide in a cave somewhere.

But anyone who craves the craft will eventually tell you. You can’t.

So, what are my first steps? Is it this blog? God, no. This blog exists in a pocket dimension within a greater void at the center of an inky, black nothing. This blog is just a means to an end. A way for me to get my fingers moving again.

Rather, my first steps are submitting terrible short stories to overly critical judges in online contests. I’ve already submitted a few. Didn’t win. Short stories are hardly where my heart lives, but it’s in the roadmap to paid writing: write short stories, get into some magazines, make writing friends, maybe get a blog reader or two, write some longer bits of prose, submit to more magazines, find some popular niche to write books in, find an agent, publish some novels, get a few dozen more readers, drastically shift my style, lose my agent, laugh into the sunset because my devoted fans will follow me to the ends of the earth no matter what I write, cry as they don’t, give up and become a hairdresser.

It’s a fairly flawless plan, an I’m pretty sure I can get paid at least a few bucks out of it.

[tywinter]

BJs Pizza Fail

It's so hard to adequately describe how BJ's has betrayed me. And no, you didn't read that wrong. I'm not talking about some man named BJ. I am talking about the restaurant.

This journey began in my impressionable 20s. If you're 20 and think you're not impressionable, holy shit, are you in for a surprise. Like, they say that the first 18 months are the most important. Or the first five years. Or your teenage years. But my twenties were a trial by fire that I did not survive. A crucible where every part of me was burned away. I'm still talking about in therapy to this day.

During those dark ages, BJs was a beacon. I lived across the street from one, but it wasn't the sort of place you frequented. I was broke. Real, actual broke. Can barely pay my rent or afford groceries broke. If it was a special occasion, we weren't going to BJs, we were splitting an appetizer at Denny's. The combo with the mozzarella sticks and the onion rings.

I don't remember when I first and finally went to BJs, but I do remember one thing. The personal deep dish pizza. I honestly don't think I'd ever experienced anything so fucking good. The deep dark cesspool of my life that gripped at my limbs, always threatening to pull me under could almost be forgotten when that fluffy, buttery crust melted in my mouth.

BJs became a destination. I carried this with me for decades. When I eventually landed in the godforsaken country otherwise known as the Inland Northwest, there were no BJs. Whenever my husband and I travelled, the first thing we did was look for a BJs (then a PF Changs, then a Cheesecake Factory--if one of those three were not in the area, that place was not worth visiting).

I tell you all of this so that you understand the utter betrayal I felt on November 1, 2025 when we sidled into a booth at BJs and were told giddily, "We've changed the pizza recipe!"

...

I looked online to find out why the hell they would dare. The answer: "We found that customers have complained that our dough is inconsistent across locations." -- This is untrue. I know. I have travelled the country (or at least the west coast) and sampled the deep dish Pepperoni Extreme at each and every one of them. They were remarkably the same.

Further investigations claimed that they also "improved" the sauce and are only using mozzarella now instead of a cheese blend. There was also something about cup and char pepperoni. The marketing was very excited about all of this. I was anxious.

When the pizza finally came, I took a bite. Here is my assessment:

Pepperoni: This didn't seem any different. If anything, I think there was just less pepperoni. I think there were always the little cup and char bits, but there was also these little strips and maybe also regular pepperonis too? But that's what made it "extreme." Now it just seemed ordinary. Which, you know, whatever. I didn't go there to get wrecked by pepperoni anyway. No real complaints here.

Cheese: When they said there were moving mozzarella only, I think that meant that they were still buying the cheese blend and picking out the other cheese types and only giving you what was left, because the cheese was non existent. It's possible they even just forgot the cheese, because I couldn't find any.

Sauce: This might have been the worst change of all. I'm no expert when it comes to tomato sauce, but I know what sauce straight out of the can tastes like, and that's called Mall Pizza. Their original sauce definitely had herbs and spices and whatever to make it top tier. Now? It tasted like tomatoes. Not even tomato sauce. Just, like, wet tomato juice. Like they opened a can of V8 and poured it on top. A soggy bruschetta.

Dough: This is the most amazing part. Because this is the only thing people were "complaining" about in the first place. And astonishingly... the dough was absolutely the same. No differences. Same as it ever was. This was the supposed catalyst for change, and yet it was the thing that (still) didn't change.

So in the end, I had a few slices of my tried and true deep dish dough, but it was covered in tomato juice, no cheese, and a couple pieces of pepperonis.

NOT A PIZZA.

Listen. Maybe you're really into the BBQ chicken pizza or the Bacon Ranch. And maybe those are still fine. Obviously the dough is still top notch. But I'm a pepperoni purist. I cling to my childhood favorites like a psycho who spiritually died in her twenties and is too afraid to move forward in life, and if you can't deliver on that staple, you have failed at pizza.

In the end, I fear that this is just another nail in the coffin of late stage capitalism. No doubt many of my posts will end this way. The more I am let down by the world around me, the more I turn to GPT to ask, "Is this a public company?" And the answer is almost always, "Sure is!"

Clearly, BJs did not change their recipe because people were complaining about inconsistency. That's illogical on its face. They did it to save money. Less cheese. Cheaper sauce. Fewer meats. It hurts my soul. The cesspool of life still lingers. I can smell its fetid waters. And this particular beacon has been snuffed out in the name of fiduciary responsibility.

[tywinter]

No Go

I’m on a lifelong quest to get all the technological things in order. I’m also on a quest to get the real-life things in order, but I have some small semblance of hope that the real stuff won’t take quite as long. Like, already right now my closet has shirts where the shirts go, and when I go to the grocery store, there are apples in the produce aisle, and when I want to get a latte, I know which places will always get it right, and which places only hit the mark 50% of the time.

Real life things have a certain realness to them, since they exist and whatnot, so changing them would be hard. Saying, “Let’s put the apples next to the diapers” would take time and money, so no one’s ever gonna try that out just to see what would happen. Nor would businesses lock the doors and hand out keys, trusting that customers would always remember to bring the right key to the right place when they want their pumpkin spiced latte.

Weirdly, digital spaces don’t seem to work this way. Menu items move all the time, from the top to the bottom, into nested menus, or hidden behind three links, one of which is “settings” when there are two “settings” options available (one for your personal info and one for, like, colors.)

Conversely, if you want to log in at all, sometimes that takes an hour. And sometimes, you just don’t get to do it at all. Ever. Hope you didn’t like that account.

This happened to me just today. On Instagram. I tried to log in to one of my accounts and supposedly forgot my password. But we’ll never know if that was the case, as when I tried to reset my password, I still couldn’t log in. To make sure I wasn’t mistyping anything, I tried again and literally copy/pasted my password into the “new password” field, the “confirm password” field, and then after it said “success: password changed,” I pasted the same thing into the login field.

Sorry, this is the wrong password. Fuck off.

Then I tried to find some support and OH MY GOD META FIRED ALL THEIR SUPPORT STAFF, (also their coders I’m guessing, and their UI design people obviously) and I’m sitting there, remembering the dead internet theory, and I’m suddenly filled with terror that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even human (which we’ve all suspected since the beginning) and I immediately rush to delete all of my other instagram accounts and my facebook pages because holy shit, this feels like some kind of code-blight infecting our digital souls and we gotta jump ship before we all get cursed like those dudes in POTC!

So, yeah. Getting my life in order. It’s fun.

[tywinter]

Tu Voz

I remember back in college, when I was taking Intermediate Spanish for the second time (‘cause I dropped it in High School), I had to watch movies in the language lab. So I watched Little Mermaid, and about the only thing I understood was Ursula saying, “Tu Voz.”

Anyway, this is a post about voice.

Not singing voices, though I could write about that. I don’t know much about how to sing, but I know a lot about how not to sing. Just about as much as I know about how not to learn Spanish. But we can talk about that another time.

Right now, I’m talking about voice in writing. Because, like, it’s hard. At least hard to do well (like singing and speaking a second language). We’re all born with this voice in our heads, and we spit out these sick tracks called “books” and “stories” when we’re young, and we think we’re fucking hilarious, only to realized decades later that we weren’t.

So then we hear things like, “show don’t tell” and are told to add “sensory descriptions” and told to drop all the extra words, like like, and so we do, but then our prose is brittle and dry and boring, and we write a whole-ass book and hate it because it has passages like:

The walls were old and smelled of timber and there were hot torches on the wall and the rugs felt like rugs too. Sir Sirrington, who smelled like the hot dogs, walked down the hall. He opened a creaky door and there was a woman inside. This was Lady Ladington. She wore a blue dress and smelled like a rainy day in March. She smiled and said, “Yo.”

And, like, holy shit, you wonder why you ever wanted to be a writer in the first place! So you take off another decade to get some therapy and take up a new hobby like not getting mad headshots as Widow in Overwatch before you come back and think, “I need some kind of voice in my stories or I’ll die of boredom! But how do I maintain consistency? And interest (for both myself and the reader)? And avoid expositioning too much?”

Then you start a blog and write in that instead, because it’s easier, and you don’t have to worry about some agent saying, “Fuck off, you turd bucket, no one will ever publish this slop!”