Elin's Journal

Your temporary sales tax permit application process sucks donkey dicks.

Seriously, I have to give them MORE information than I had to give the Texas State Comptroller, and we LIVE here. It's more information than I have ever had to give to get a California temporary sales tax ID. Their forms are ridiculously detailed and need to know completely unimportant things, like where our business records for our corporation are stored. Why do they need to know that? WHY?! Are they going to audit us? They need all the personal information of both partners, and how big a percentage we both own. Quite bluntly, they ask a bunch of invasive questions that seem completely unnecessary considering we want a TEMPORARY tax number for a THREE DAY CONVENTION. A convention by the way, which won't assign us a table until we have a temp tax id number for Pennsylvania. I can kind of see why so many conventions are held in California now- it's easier to get things set up for out-of-towners!

The online form was also incredibly opaque regarding transient tax permits for corporations. It kept giving me pop-up messages about how we didn't qualify for such things, which almost made me put my head through the computer monitor. It was pretty infuriating. I swear, I have never had more trouble applying for a temporary tax ID number before in ANY OTHER STATE. Pennsylvania's tax board can blow me. And joy, I will have to file sales taxes every year in Pennsylvania now until the end of time! I wonder if that will affect our mail order sales to PA, since at the moment, we don't have to charge sales tax for mail order going there. I hope we don't have to deal with that nonsense, it's ridiculous to have to permanently pay sales taxes in a state we're not even located in. I mean, it's not like I will be using their roads or schools or state aid programs or anything.

And here I thought incorporating would give us LESS crap to deal with. Apparently, it does, but only in Texas and California...

Boy, I have never been happier to be based in Texas than I am now. Our tax processes seem like a cakewalk here! Everything is so helpful and clearly laid out! The forms are so short! It's fantastic! And hey, you can't beat a complete lack of a state income tax. (We have sales taxes and that's it.)

We once again have air, and we once again have hot water. The regular (read: not the weekend 311-douche) maintenance guy came by today after willworks went in and put in another work order. He yammered on his cel phone about Mexican restaurants and who was dating whom the entire time he was here, but he made the air conditioner work, and made the standing water under it go away. Then, of course, after three weeks of nothing, he turned on our hot water taps and lo, warm to hot water came out. It's a September miracle.

Now, we have a manga due in four days, tons of mail order to get out and books of our own to work on. I will probably not be online much in the next few days.

Also, I would like to smack any manga translator who deems it necessary to type out an entire script with THE CAPSLOCK KEY PRESSED. Just because comic lettering appears to be all capital letters doesn't mean it actually is. I have to go through and adjust the "I's" in everything, because the rule is that only personal pronoun "I's" should be serif (read: capitalized); the others are supposed to be non-serif. I have to change every freaking letter "I" in the script by hand, since our version of Word is too old to understand capitalization for the find-and-replace function. Rrraaargh! Elin smash!

Joe and jameshanrahan came by last night with Joe's air compressor, and they blew out all the hoses on the AC unit. None were clogged- but the drainage pipe was. So, we threw some Drano down it and got it clear. However, now the AC unit leaks water from the filter area instead.

It has moved beyond our ability to fix at this point. We've seen neither hide nor hair of the surly maintenance guy, and won't till Monday, since he made some kind of grumbling remark about not being back at work until then. Joy. He's a choice piece of work, too, since he looks like (as willworks put it), one of those 311-fan douchbag frat boys, down to the tribal sun tattoo on his ankle and his expensive flip flops. He won't listen to anyone in the house, and even threw the dirty air filter under the stairs in our breezeway once he left the apartment. (I guess walking the twenty feet to the dumpster would have cut into his precious pot-smoking time or something...) I took pictures of everything with the digital camera, including the dirty air filter sitting in the breezeway. I can and will show these photos to the management in the office, because I am that pissed off at the new maintenance guy. (The old guys were kind of bumbling, but they did get things fixed and they were at least friendly and listened to what the problem was.)

None too pleased about the new apartment management, who keeps insisting they are spending a ton of money to "renovate" this place. We haven't had hot water for three weeks now. (It used to be lukewarm, now that they have put in the new boilers, it's ice cold. How does that work?!) I shall have words with them on Monday about how I am not going to continue to pay a monthly water bill to them if they aren't going to provide hot water. I also need to find out the name of the new management company, because I need to cut them an email about the shitty service the maintenance guy is giving and the lack of hot water. It's actually illegal in San Antonio to rent apartments to people without providing hot water. There's some kind of slum lord law that covers it.

Anyway, off to HEB to buy more Lysol and mold/mildew killer. Hooray, chemicals.

Our air conditioner is broken and pouring water out of it at a merry clip. The carpet in the hallway and the living room is wet wet wet. Mold is already starting, hooray.

The maintenance man came and changed the filter, then told us to turn it back on. I did, and more water came out. Obviously, not fixed. He's been called again, but I somehow doubt we'll see this fixed until Monday. Yay.

Do not let the cute, innocent Indy face in the icon fool you! My cats are all evil.

Today is already sucking and it is 100% the fault of our cats. Batty is in a snit about being low cat on the totem pole now (this is a status that changes often, between him and Indy; Bandito is somehow now the default top cat at all times...), so he whizzed in the entrance of the hallway that leads to the back of the apartment. (Batty lives in the back with scheduled visits to the rest of the apartment, and Indy has the front end and never ventures into the back, which is Batty's territory.) There was a Mexican stand-off last night between Indy and Batty, with Batty as the aggressor, so I should have known there would be territory battles today in the form of surreptitious peeing. I woke up and immediately started cleaning the hallway entrance. Leaving the stuff to sit and work in (the various carpet cleaning cleansers), I decided to eat breakfast and let Batty have his out-and-about time, since I could monitor him. Well, Mr. Blacksie-Pants waltzes into the front entryway of the apartment, where we have some boxes of comics that need to go into storage, and proceeds to sneak into a corner next to them WHERE HE PEES AGAIN! AUGH! I catch him mid-squat and chase him away, so I can grab him and drag him into "his" bathroom where his personal catbox is. (We have two bathrooms, the back one is his, the front one belongs to Indy and Bandito.) Of course, he flees! And knocks a ton of crap over! And this scares fat, lazy Indy, who spindashes ACROSS MY TOES, CLAWS OUT. He rips giant gashes in the tops of two of my toes! Thus, Loving Patient Cat Mommy turns into cursing, yelling Terrifying Human Monster, so all cats go apeshit and flee for the hills. Indy gets put on the couch, Bandito hides under a chair, and Batty, the cause of all this drama, gets grabbed and unceremoniously stuffed into his bathroom, also known as Cat Jail.

Ignoring my foot, I run to clean up the pee in the entryway (fortunately, on a tile floor this time). Lucky for me, the comic box the pee got on is almost empty and only had dinged comics in it anyway, so the whole thing gets hucked into the dumpster. Meanwhile, my foot is bleeding like a stuck pig, so I run to Batty's bathroom (which is also my bathroom) to clean it up. Batty, who has been in Cat Jail alone for all of three minutes by this point, immediately sidles up to me and starts mau-ing about how he's lonely, so lonely and so sad to have been put into Cat Jail and won't I please let him out? He gets choice words from me about how he is being punished and how he's a pissy jerk. I survey the foot damage and it's choice. One scratch is fairly deep and bleeding profusely, one is shallow and mostly just stinging. But both, both are vertical along the tops of my toes, and I have a hell of a time applying Dora the Explorer Band-Aids (don't judge me!) so they will stay on and stop the prodigious flow of blood. Now Boots and Diego are staring up at me cheerfully from my Neosporin-covered toes. Once the toes are tended to, I go back to cleaning up cat pee, and scoop out Batty's catbox for good measure. Meanwhile, Batty rolls in the tub like he is being oppressed, and in a way he is, because he's going to be in Cat Jail for a good while.

Finally, I washed up and had my half-made breakfast. I have tons of errands to do today and this toe thing is going to make shoes a fun proposition. (I'll probably have to wear flip-flops.)

I'm starting to think I might have to permanently separate my cats, because I am tired of the constant dominance drama and Indy and Batty will *not* back down from each other and get along. I don't know what caused this endless hatred between them, either, they used to get along. I'm also sick to death of cleaning up cat pee. I don't know what kind of a solution I can come up with though, because Batty is bonded with me, Indy is bonded with PD and Bandito is bonded with willworks. When I am out of town or not around, Batty is unhappy. He's a sensitive, high strung, nervous cat, and also kind of prickly in the personality department, so I can't imagine giving him away to someone else. He'd be miserable and whoever ended up with him probably wouldn't have the patience to deal with him.

Video game company UbiSoft making sexist games? For reals?

Tragically, yes. Only the game about baby care is called Imagine: Babyz, with a hip, with-it "Z" on the end so it can be extreme, no doubt.

I call bullshit on this today. Girls love video games, and they do not need "girly" games to enjoy them. When I worked at the video game store, I tried and tried to get sexist parents and grandparents to buy games girls would actually enjoy, like Mario games (Party, Sports, Cart, etc), Legend of Zelda, Kingdom Hearts, The Sims, Pokemon, Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, Katamari Damacy and Final Fantasy. Invariably, they'd gravitate to anything with Disney Princesses, Hello Kitty or Bratz on the box. And nine times out of ten, those girls came back in later to trade in those games for the games I mentioned. Teenage girls constantly bought horror/survival games, dance games and first person shooters, when given the ability to make their own choices. There is no one type of girl gamer, and to make these craptastic "educational" games for girls is pathetic, like those are the only things girls want to do.

Bad form, UbiSoft, bad form.

Link ganked from trecomics, because she is awesome.

So, we get a spam phone call at bullshit-o-clock in the morning, some goober asking us if we want to accept credit cards for our business. I inform him we already do accept credit cards, and that we have our phone number registered on the National Do-Not-Call list (because we do). He stammers and informs me that because he's calling for a business, that doesn't apply to him.

Um, NO.

I filed a report on them. We've never done any business with First Data Processing, so they don't even qualify for an exemption based on a previous business relationship.

EDIT: Another one just called, and after giving me a spiel about how they are providing financial and business services to businesses like mine, told me they aren't selling anything when I informed him of the Do-Not-Call status. So, I guess they are providing those services for free? Somehow, I doubt it. They're reported, too!

Click the cut tag for the picture worth 1000 words, though it's not quite safe for work if you work somewhere conservative.
( Read more... )

This is the cover to Heroes For Hire #13.

Marvel claims the rating of the book is appropriate for 12-year-olds.

I call bullshit.

Now, as we all know, I publish pornographic comics. Not just tease comics or pinup comics or sexy comics- hardcore pornography. Poles & holes, money shots, manga-style spurting penii, cartoon boobies bouncing, etc. I am not ashamed of the adult comics my company publishes. This is because I try to be a responsible editor and I believe there should be adult comics out there with consensual sex, women enjoying themselves and not being treated as mere objects, couples in love who can't keep their hands off each other, and the radical idea that sex, in all its forms, should be fun and pleasant and positive. This means it's often difficult to find artists who understand these concepts, and we often have to reject stuff with very nice art that contains things like rape, snuff, extreme violence, and the like.

I looked at this cover for Heroes For Hire and realized that 1) it looks like it belongs on the cover of a porn comic, like Milk and 2) it's a cover I wouldn't even run on Milk, because the women are all obviously in an abused position. That was my initial reaction.

My second reaction was something along the lines of "holy shit, is that Misty Knight?!"

And then I got really mad. Misty Knight was one of those characters that you just sort of encountered in comics when you grew up in the 1970's. She was a butt-kicking powerful black woman, like Pam Grier in Coffy, and she was really cool. Her friend, Colleen Wing, was also a butt-kicking strong woman, though not as cool as Misty, of course. As I recall, Misty and Colleen don't really even have any kind of superpowers, they just kick ass.

So, now even the women without superpowers have to be made powerless and weak? Is that how it is, Marvel? I'm still pissed off that they made Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, a rape survivor. (Because you know, women can't be actualized into doing anything unless they're raped first- hell, before I have to undertake any major task, I have to wander down to the local pool hall in a micro-mini-skirt, in the hopes I'll get raped-into-actualization. Getting the taxes done this year was a nightmare...) I'm still mad they made Storm into some kind of Stepford wife for Black Panther. (Hello, she was worshiped as a goddess in Africa, lead the X-Men and the Morlocks and generally kicked ass, and now she's just a background character for Black Panther?) This is a trend I've been sick of for years, and this cover is just the newest showcase for this kind of crap.

And yeah, that appears to be jizz on the Black Cat's boobs on that cover. The cover aimed at twelve-year-olds. Nicely done, Marvel. We're not allowed to show jizz or genitals on the covers of our porn comics according to Diamond, but Marvel can put a money shot on the cover of a superhero book? Excuse me?!

This is the thing that really bugs me- I saw it at Image, I saw it with the Bad Girl books, now I'm seeing it at Marvel. If they want to do porn comics, they should come right out and do them. This softcore stuff is bullshit, and to my eyes, somehow worse than actually coming right out and doing a full-on adults only title.

Anyway, I have honest porn comics to work on to turn in to the printers, so that's enough ranting outta me.

Oh and PS, I have not spent money on a Marvel comic for years now. I refuse to give them money for anything, since I don't believe in supporting their content or their business decisions. I might only be one person refusing to give them money anymore, but I just can't bring myself to pay for comics I won't enjoy.

Today's battles were as follows:

--Elin versus the Rent: I won this battle and the rent shall be paid. Yay!

--Elin versus the Allergens: Benadryl helped me win this battle. Yay again!

--Elin versus the New Postage Pricing System: nobody wins this battle, except perhaps the post office. The new system reads like stereo instructions, much like the Beetlejuice Handbook For the Recently Deceased. I shake my fist in its general direction! And now lighter packages will somehow work out to have a higher postal percentage increases than heavier packages?! Buh-what?!

--Elin versus the Horrible Hallway of Cat Pee: nobody wins this battle either! Boo! Batty and Indy have decided the hallway that separates the front and back of the apartment is Ground Zero for weekly cat pee territory battles. I am constantly cleaning this one corner of the hallway nearest the door, and they continue to pee there. I have tried EVERY single cat pee "odor eliminator" and "enzyme remover" on the market, including all the ones that claim that they will make cats never pee there again (lies). I have tried every single carpet cleaner. I am currently trying a solution of white vinegar and baking soda that was on How Clean is Your House?, my new favorite show on BBC America. (The ladies on the show used it on a house that had something like six cats in it, and it supposedly worked.) The cats don't pee anywhere else in the house (well, except their assigned cat boxes), just this one corner of the back hallway. It's driving me nuts! (And yes, all three of the boys are fixed. Batty and Indy just really despise each other.) It really sucks because I don't want to live in a house of cat pee smell like a Crazy Cat Lady. (It's been unusually humid lately due to all the rain, so it makes the smell stronger. Ick, I know.) If anyone knows any actual stuff or tricks that really will remove cat pee odors down to the carpet padding, by all means, let me know.

We're still working on comics and the like. The usual grind. It's kind of sad, I am finding it harder and harder to get excited about comics lately, which is not a very happy-making thought. I probably need a vacation or something.

I have a lot going on right now. Three manga deadlines, one of which is coming up fast. Four books at the printers, which must ship Monday. Two more books that need to go into production asap. An adult site that never seems like it will be finished, because every time it looks like it's done, we find something else we need to fix before we can go live. (Plus, the worries about how we will need to do weekly updates, and while two of us here are good with schedules, one of us does not understand the concept of "time" or "deadlines".) Our online forum is being retarded again, and I can't post to it 98% of the time because the server (which we increased the bandwidth for) is overloaded by spam bots and Google spiders. Bills are coming due and the rent is becoming a worry, since this is a short month. Other business stuff is going on behind the scenes that might mean new opportunities for us (if we can work like dogs, hell for leather, twenty-four-seven) that I can't talk about yet, because it's not a done deal, but it does mean extra work right now and extra worry to try to get it. And on top of all of this, the end of our lease is coming up, and I don't know yet if we will have to move house or not. All of this fun during my period! Whee!

Yesterday, I ended up getting very little done, sadly. The whole period-making-me-sick thing had kicked in, and I literally could not concentrate for half the day. It really makes me angry when I can't get work done because of my stupid uterus. It looks and feels like weakness, and anyone who knows me will know that I despise being weak. I still managed to get auctions done, answer some email, sort some mail, process orders, do some paperwork, work on the adult site, go to the PMB, and get another box of junk sorted and tossed out of the apartment. The day before, I got two boxes and one 33-gallon trash bag of stuff thrown away. This apartment collects useless paper like other places collect dust, I swear. And with the whole up-in-the-air nature of the lease, I feel like I should be ready, just in case, which means more auctions and trips to Half Price Books. (Even though what they offer is ridiculously low, it's better than throwing stuff away.)

Today I have to go give the printer some more money, again, and then deal with more stuff around here. And that damn adult site had better go live today, because it's really starting to irk me that something that was promised to launch in January is not yet done at the end of February.