Ashley McGee
Bio
Austin, TX | GrimDark, Fantasy, Horror, Western, and nonfiction | Amazon affiliate and Vocal Ambassador | Tips and hearts appreciated! | Want to see more from me? Consider dropping me a pledge! | RIP Jason David Frank!
Stories (31/0)
A Man Of Vision You Say?
This was originally published on my blog, Dark Corners Blog, March 27, 2021. I don’t think there are very many people who understand the depth of the debt the literary world owes to Larry McMurtry, who died at the age of 84 this last Thursday, March 25, 2021. I wrote on Facebook that there will be a lot of people only too happy to co-opt his body of work without understanding the context of his stories and adaptations for the sake of some ideal, without realizing that they will play directly into McMurtry’s hands, and that the irony would not have been lost on him. There will be a lot of people who will make claims about his body of work that he would quickly have refuted, and those will be the people who have never read past the first chapter of Lonesome Dove, if they actually read it all.
By Ashley McGee3 years ago in Humans
Lloyd Alexander's Grim Legendary Fantasy
It was very in vogue among my childhood friends to become enraptured with the mythical world of Narnia, with all its golden good and brooding evil. My friends among the Swordplay UTSA alumnus Facebook group feel that my own bad experience with Narnia came from starting the Chronicles of Narnia in the wrong place. We read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe first in fourth grade instead of a more logical starting place, perhaps The Horse And His Boy. I followed along with my class until the girl (I don't even know the kids' names) went through the wardrobe and met the sniveling fawn, Mr. Tumnus, and then I closed the book, dropped it on my desk, folded my arms, and accepted my Unsatisfactory marks in reading for the period.
By Ashley McGee3 years ago in Geeks
Throwing Seven Different Kinds of Smoke
SRE stands for "pulled in many directions" --Co-Worker About six months ago, the business that I work for transitioned our tier 2 support team into a full-scale site reliability engineering team. Up until that point, there was no real liason between Support, Engineering and DevOps to resolve issues of site reliability, and our DevOps team was fully investing their time in infrastructure maintenance, monitoring, and automation of routine maintenance tasks.
By Ashley McGee3 years ago in Journal
Practice Makes Permanent 2
"I'd like to assure you that this is not done by strange fellows with long hair who live in attics and wear berets. It is done by extremely disciplined human beings who are trying to allow you as people...to see through their eyes the visual beauty of this world." -- Vincent Price
By Ashley McGee3 years ago in Motivation
Practice Makes Permanent 1
At the time of this--a less-than-auspicious, but somehow poignant--writing, I am 36 years old. I've had the pleasure of learning a lot of things. I learned Spanish in high school. Or at least enough Spanish to get on at work. I learned Japanese in college. Or at least enough Japanese to impress my friends. I have been writing since I was 14, and in high school and college I picked up sketching, though it was very much just play and my skills needed help. I have a number of drawings that I don't hate, at least. I practiced digital photography, special effects, and makeup for a bit while my friend waited for grad school. I have a BA in English, but I began teaching myself to design websites and program for web development when I was 34. I went from freelance writing and running electric scooters to being a Site Reliability Engineer for an ecommerce platform, all within 2 years (oversimplified).
By Ashley McGee3 years ago in Motivation
A Journey of Joy
Edit: I would like to amend my piece with a disclaimer. When I wrote this piece, the documentary Happy Accidents: Betrayal and Greed had not yet aired. I based my entire article off of the content generated by the Kowalskis and from my own research. Due to the nature of the stranglehold on information regarding Bob Ross and his legacy, some of my information may be inaccurate. The reason I'm not pulling or editing this piece is to show my journalistic integrity. I believed what I wrote at the time of its publication. As you read this, please understand that some of this information is publicly facing content belonging to Bob Ross Inc. I do not endorse, favor, or promote a single entity other than the entity that was painter, celebrity, public figure, and role model Bob Ross. The use of his name and likeness is and has always been protected by Bob Ross Inc. It is not my job to judge the validity of anything they have published and I'm not in a position to invalidate anything that I've seen or read. Please be sure to do your own research and make your own judgements in this matter.
By Ashley McGee3 years ago in Motivation
