Happy Monday!
If hearing Happy Monday! makes you want to gouge your eyes out (or mine) then I have the post for you, created with one sole purpose in mind: to get you through your work week. And, sure, it has very little to do with working…but that’s the fun of it, right? There are some steps we have to through, though, to prepare you.
Step One: Practice your Alt+Tab.
This is absolutely critical. How quickly can you switch to another window if your boss walks by? If your answer is not fast enough, then practice, practice, practice!
(True Story: I wrote my first full-length story thanks to Alt+Tab. And the payroll still got done.)
Step Two: Practice muting your speakers.
When pressed for time, a loud, hacking cough will cover that extra precious second it takes for you to lower the volume on your computer. If you put a lot of effort into it and make your cough sound really phlegmy, chances are your boss will stay far away for the rest of the day. Follow up with one of those disgusting, snot-sucking nose inhalations (lemonade always helps with this), make sure to wad up a ton of Kleenex and leave it all over your desk, and you’ll have Alone Time all week.
Option #1: Visit hulu.com
They don’t just have great commercials – they are freaking loaded with TV shows (old and recent) and movies. Want to re-watch episodes of Firefly or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Check out Warehouse 13? See why Glee is causing such a fuss? Watch the episode of The Office that you missed? It’s all there, and more. Shows that you are watching now, and that you watched a long time ago…like, say He-Man.
Then there are the movies. If you have a couple of hours to kill, try Last of the Mohicans. If you’re depressed and feeling like your life is crap, try the British film All or Nothing, and see how much more life could suck (Seriously, seriously depressing. I was bawling, not because I was so sad, but because I was so miserable watching it.) If you’re in the mood for zombies, they’ve got blood and guts and zombie babies in the Dawn of the Dead remake (which has one of my favorite opening credit sequences, and an ending that I hate with a fierce and unyielding passion).
Option #2: Free reads
I know not everyone can stream a video during work hours, and that’s why free stories and books are so, so nice. Even if you get caught with your window open, it probably isn’t immediately obvious that you are dicking around instead of working. Text is rather innocuous, and if you save the files under benign names like projections10-08.doc instead of burning-hot-lurve-XXXXX.doc, you can probably even have it showing on your taskbar without drawing too much suspicion on yourself.
I know what you’re thinking: Meljean, those free reads are on people’s websites! That’s not innocuous! My boss is going to see the browser and know I’m dicking around!
I know, I know. So, here’s what you do. Go to the website. Copy the story text and paste it into your Word document (or your e-mail program, and e-mail it to yourself with a boring subject like: RE: Janitorial Services). Close the website really, really fast. (Or plan ahead, and e-mail it to yourself the night before.)
NOTE: That doesn’t mean you should e-mail the story to your friend, distribute it, put your name on it and say that you wrote it, and so on. We’re sticking it to The Man, not the author.
So, free reads. Where to go?
Ilona’s site. Jill’s site. Patrice’s site. Nalini’s site (scroll down to the Free Stories section). I don’t have any, because I used to spend all of my extra time writing *hackingcough* Wonder Woman fanfiction *hackingcough*.
Kresley Cole’s first entry into her popular Immortals After Dark series, “The Warlord Wants Forever,” just went online as a free download (PDF) here.
Love science fiction and fantasy? Tor.com has a ton of free short stories here.
At Free Online Novels, Jennifer L. Armstrong keeps an enormous list of romance links, science fiction, and more.
And, of course, there’s the Gutenberg Project.
Phew.
Okay, so that will probably get you started. What’s your favorite not-really-working-but-I’m-pretending-to link? Your favorite free read? Do you know of a book that’s available free online that everyone should be trying out? The show or movie that we should all be ignoring our duties in favor of watching? Post a link in the comments (and, just to be on the safe side, please make sure that they are available by permission of the copyright owner).
Some of these comments might go to moderation, but I’ll keep an eye on it throughout the day. If you post and it doesn’t show up, don’t worry – it’ll be up soon.
I surf message boards way, way more than I should when I am at work. Quite possibly more than is healthy.
Surfing totally tones the body, dude. It’s way healthy.
I stumbled across http://www.archive.org/ when looking for the original Zorro story, which was at least back then completely out of print.
I haven’t browsed the site extensively but it seems to contain a lot of free / opensource texts, audio and video files.
Oh yeah. And for any Zorro fans out there, the original story can be found here: http://www.archive.org/details/markzorro. I have to admit, I liked it a lot better than any of the series or movies they made in (semi) recent times about that character. As a matter of fact, Zorro is even said to have started the whole Superhero-double-identity-crisis thing that we see so often now.
OH! Thank you! What a fantastic link.
“As a matter of fact, Zorro is even said to have started the whole Superhero-double-identity-crisis thing that we see so often now.”
Word. Who needs a Gray Ghost when they’ve got Zorro?
I defintely needed this, I walked to the car in a fog saying to self “postive thoughts, postive thoughts”. This surely woke me up and made me smile, they are all the things unfortunately that I do. And I mostly go between blogs and “sigh” facebook. Now I have some freereads to go check out, thanks for a happy monday
I hope it helps! I’m really lucky now that I can just crawl from bed to my desk and start writing (and it pretty much happens just like that), but, man, I remember those days. I liked the people I worked with, but sometimes Monday mornings just felt like a soul-sucking exercise (until I got to work and started Alt+Tabbing and writing.)
Also? The Kresley Cole novella is A-MAY-ZING. If you have not read it, you must.
Ditto.
Brilliant post. Not that I would never do things like that. But I found this very interesting in theory.
Oh, of course! No one would really do this. It’s just a fun, dorky post.
I often do ebooks in pdf format because lots of stuff I handle legitimately is also in PDF. It’s not a big give-away I’m messing around and it’s mostly text so it’s easy to hide.
But this has me thinking of the TNT website. One of my new favorite shows is called Leverage and it’s on TNT. When you’re watching episodes or videos online, there is a button in the upper right hand corner that says “Boss coming? Dramatic Pause!” And when you click it the video immediately stops and a graph pops up. So you’ve been working the whole time! I think it’s great.
Andrea, I LOVE that Dramatic Pause, lol! Oh, man — everyone, you should head on over and check it out. That’s just utterly perfect.
THIS is ingenious!
Wow, you’re lucky! My work computers wont display the Leverage videos off TNT properly. So instead, I do Watch Instantly on Netflix. For some reason, my work blocks Hulu, but not Netflix or YouTube.
Also, thanks for all these tips! I have a Mac at home, so I’m not overwhelming good at PC typing shortcuts
OMG, I laughed SO hard at this, because I DO IT any time I can get away with it! LOLOL! And, yeah, I wrote my second novel at work, many years ago when I had an office to myself. Those were the days, sigh…
My favorite pretend-I’m-working-but-I’m-really-reading-fanfic-instead site:
http://thehexfiles.net/index.php
All Harry/Draco, all the time. Yeah, I’m all about that action *g*
My other favorite not-really-working websites: Twitter. Facebook. Yahoo (for news). Various blogs I frequent. The usual suspects, in other words.
Wow, it sounds like I have all kinds of time to goof off, but I really don’t. Used to; not so much anymore, sad to say. They keep me busy. But I try!
And I do have free stories on my website, if anyone’s interested. Gay romance, y’all
http://www.allyblue.com/stories.html
[/shameless self-promotion]
And here, folks, you have the perfect and inoffensive way to promote yourself on another blog: it’s been requested and is relevant.
Thank you, Ally!
Thank YOU for letting me shameless all over your blog!
Meanwhile, I’m collecting an awful lot of links to add to my pretend-I’m-working list, so THANKS, guys!
Gotta check out that thing that pops up the graph for you. Genius, is what that is.
Best free reads source: Project Gutenberg. 30,000 free, public domain books, and over 100,000 volumes through their affiliates. Everything from ALICE IN WONDERLAND to THE KAMASUTRA OF VATSYAYANA. Delicious.
http://www.gutenberg.org/
Hi, Lisa!
I love, love the Gutenberg Project. Not just fiction, but all of their lovely, lovely nonfiction that can be so helpful in research.
I haven’t heard of this…sounds cool!
With Hulu there is no need for cable or Netflix. The amount of times I watched SNL skits on there is too many times to count.
Oh, god, yes — hulu was my go-to place when SNL was cracking last year during the election, and whenever I miss a good Digital Short or skit. I hate to say it, but it’s much, much better than sitting through the entire show, when chances are that only one or two skits will be worth it.
I like Baen’s free library. Has some good sci-fi stories on it for free that you’ve probably either picked up or thought about picking up for abou $7.99 at the bookstore. Completely legal
http://www.baen.com/library/
Agh, yes! lol — when I was scouring my brain for links, I was trying to remember which publisher it was that had those free reads … and there it is. Thank you!
Aha! Almost forgot! Eharelquin.com has weekly online reads *short stories* (they put a chapter up like every monday or every two days or something) and have a few full short stories archived. If you want more of the total list, search Mills and Boon online reads or library or something, and it brings up more of their archived stuff.
Hilarious. Of course I nearly chocked on a mouthful of water at the snot sucking noise.
Luckily my monitor does not face my door so I have no need for alt-tab, but I do read e-books when its slow. A bunch of text looks like a bunch of text in an Adobe document. I’ve also typed the odd blog post for a friend. Ahem. This is just between us right?
Free reads? I like all of the m/m shorts at Matthew Haldemann Time’s site. MHT Short Stories
Totally just between us.
Um…don’t tell my editor I’m commenting instead of working, ‘kay?
You’re working! You’re building your “platform”!
(hope that HTML takes….)
I just surf messageboards and blogs. Lately I’ve been twittering, not that I’m any where near interesting enough for it. LOL
Oh, I’m a huge fan of Twittering. I’m all lonely here at my little desk, but with Twitter I can share my exciting home life with everyone. Like when I change the toilet paper roll, it’s like: Whoo hoo! Rock on!
…okay, maybe not.
Martha Wells has one of my favorites, ‘The Element of Fire’ up on her site, along with some great shorts.
=A
http://www.ardath-rekha.com/archive/browse.php?type=categories&catid=5
Apprentice by Ardath Rekha – a really awesome but unpublished SFRish book. It’s fan fiction based on Pitch Black and manages the amazing feat of turning Riddick into a romantic hero. I don’t normally like psychotic killers as heroes, but she has such a good explanation for him being that way that I didn’t mind. You have to register for access, unfortunately.
“Summary: Four and a half years after the crash of the Hunter-Gratzner, now-18-year-old Jack is released from the juvenile facility she’s lived in for four years. Due to her refusal to help the authorities capture Riddick, they’ve done their best to ensure that her future will be as bleak as possible, until Riddick himself returns to rescue her. But the forces arrayed against them, determined to recapture Riddick at any cost, are enormous…”
I read about some authoress who did a whole bunch of novelly work, at work, on a spreadsheet.
…Which is a really cool idea, if you crank numerals. Unfortunatelyalas, I do web development, so I’d have to write the whole damned thing in between html tags.
I’ve tried it. It’s a pain in the butootsky. So I’m a big fan of alt-tab, and one you didn’t mention: Windows-M (minimize all). It looks a little weird, but it gets the job done.
heh… ahhhh… alt tab is of the win
Alt+tab has been my good friend for years now. I am at the front desk where I work, so no video for me – however, I do posess one of those nifty 3M privacy filters that make it so unless they are directly behind you, they can’t see your screen.
As for other fun places to go while at work, for those who like the Baen Free Library, check out http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/
They have an index of the Baen Library CDs that have been issued with various hardcover books, and there are many many books not available in the Free Library. Best of all, it has an OK from Baen – sharing the ebooks is why they issued the CDs.