JovailJman - Motorcycles

Because adventure bikes are awesome for road trips.

Riding is such a very fun and entertaining activity. You see so many places, traffic is no problem, and it is free. Bikes are very different compared to cars, so lets talk about that.

The way you control a bike, (motorbike) is very different compared to a car. The common bike will have the rear brakes at the right foot, while the front brakes are on the right handle along with the start switch, kill switch and accelerator. The gears are at the left foot while the indicators, hooter, switch for the brights and clutch are all on the left handle. To turn, most think that you just turn the handle bars and it will turn, but since a bike has 2 wheels, you cannot just turn safely. You have to lean into the turn, wherein the force is what turns you way more then what you do with the wheel. Once you start learning to ride, counter steering is a very effective thing that you just seem to do after riding it for a bit, despite the concept being really strange.

Some of the pros for using a bike over the general car, is that the fuel consumption is about half or less that of cars. This saves so much on fuel, but just like a car, all bikes will have different consumption rates, with bigger engines it is more likely the fuel consumption will be high, but how you drive factors as well. You can slip through traffic when it is going slow, (Which is a dream, believe me), but doing this does tend to aggravate some drivers, as they cannot do it and feel you shouldn't either, but what they do not realize is that if all the bikes did not slip through, then the traffic jam will be just a little bit worse. When going in the middle of 2 lanes, it is called split laneing, and is something almost no beginner does when still learning all the components to riding safely.

There are some cons though as well, the riding gear being one of them. To ride safely, you must legally wear a helmet, but it is recommended that you wear way more than that. You should wear a jacket that has padding around the elbows and back, gloves with padding around the bottom of the palms, pants that are padded around the knees and boots made from leather that goes past your ankle. There are other things that you can wear to increase your protection as well which is advisable as all the protection is for another con, and that is safety. Since bikes are so open, if you have an accident, there are no airbags to cushion your impact, and there is no shell to stop you from sliding on the road, so if you crash with no protection, you can kiss your posterior goodbye in most cases. Rain is another problem. You get very, very wet...  and riding is horrible, your back tire can slip out very easily, and since the bike is so light, braking can cause the tires to slip as well, due to the low traction.

Now you also have different types of bikes for different purposes:
 Superbikes - These are the bikes that are go really fast, and have the most aerodynamic shape.
Cruisers - These are for the longer travels and are made for comfort and a bit for looks. (this includes Harley Davidsons)
GS - Tthese are semi-off road bikes for trips to go camping out in the middle of nowhere, but have really comfortable seats for the journey. They usually have very flat seats and are often used for delivery of goods.
There are, of course, many more styles and types of bike, all of which have their own unique challenges to riding, and uses that make them all unique and interesting.

Anyways, do you have any biking stories that you would like to share, or would you like to hear any of mine, please let us know down in the comments or on Facebook/Twitter, as we here at TCSA love to hear from you. Do you have any biking buddies, or have friends that are thinking of learning how to bike, please share this with them, as I am sure they would find something of interest. Also, if you would like to see more posts like this as they come out? If so, then please consider liking us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left. Thank you for taking the time to read today's post, and I hope you have/had a really awesome day. I shall write again overmorrow.

Ride safe mates.

OddballGreg - Editing And Feedback

Sometimes I find it funny how I get away using vaguely relevant images for some of these headers. Teehee

Writing is rather important in the world. Information needs to be recorded, messages need to be sent, stories need to be written and blog posts need to be published. (Usually at about 11PM...) As a result, it should come as no surprise that editing and feeback from other people is a fairly important part of the process.

Writing. Editing. Words! Thoughts. Speech. I dunno. Can I yell out more random words and pretend it's worth reading? Probably not, ah well. Fun part of being one's own editor is deciding that writing apparent gibberish is funny and worth leaving in a blog post, though my apparent lack of sleep may have something to do with the thought process behind that.

In any case, tonight at about 7pm while I was begging my exhausted brain for something to blog about, inspiration came in the form of my good friend Angela Pellobello, AKA ChesireSorrows, asking me if I would be kind enough to read through something she had wrote and provide her with feedback. Considering how her sudden arrival was a blessing to my brain like crutches are to the crippled, I was more than happy to oblige. (though I probably would have obliged anyways.)

So how is this in any way relevant? Well, it got me thinking about how important editing and feedback is to writers of any method or format. My girlfriend writes reports about environmental conditions which have to be read through, errors identified and then it gets sent back to be fixed so that the client is happy with the professional result. (Irony: I misspelled professional wrong the first time I wrote that sentence.) I write blog posts bi-daily and ask the readers for feedback and opinions in every single one, and have yet to not listen to a request. (By the way, if you're wondering where the Zombie Apocalypse article is, wait for Halloween.) I also used to edit every single post that JovialJman wrote before sending it out, and would meticulously help him by explaining his errors over Skype. (when we weren't laughing like schoolboys.), and my friend Angela on the very odd occasion asks for my input on her writing adventures, which is always a fun thing to do.

As it turns out, writing is not the easiest thing. For one, feedback is EXTREMELY important, even more so than simple editing, for one reason. You can't write for other people, if other people don't tell you if it's good or not. As my Grade 12 English teachers put it after a certain creative writing essay didn't quite reach the usually scratch, there is such a thing as "self-indulgent writing", which is to say, your writing is subjectively good, rather than objectively good. (Ie: "I like it", instead of, "They should like it").

While there's nothing wrong with self-indulgent writing, it's not very good writing something only you understand when other people are supposed to understand it. That's sort of like speaking French to English pre-schoolers because you think it sounds cool. It might to you, but the pre-schoolers think you're a jackass. As such, having someone around to help give you the outside perspective on what you write is a rather integral part of the process if you hope to write anything that is in any way actually worth being read by someone. It's happened once to me where I've written a short story, only to be told that it made no sense... Namely in Grade 12... By my English teachers. As it turned out when I read it a week later, having been so meticulous in my planning, I'd become very familiar with the concepts of the story, to the point that I was writing references to things that weren't actually in the story.

Not to say vague, unexplained references can't be fun plot devices, but when you're writing a 450 word story and you leave so many hooks open that the best guess people can make is that some Russians in a snowy place found a dead family in some snow but the child survived, you've made a mistake... or several. Especially when your planning was filled with theatrical references and idea's and a list of symbolic sentences to use. Lesson learnt.

In any case, as with most things in life, being able to make something relateable to people other than yourself is a rather important thing to know how to do when your business involves writing articles every couple days. I find the most effective way to avoid writing subjectively is to ask yourself three questions. 

Is it a commonly understood concept? 

If not, can it be googled? 

Would I understand what I was saying if I was five?

Simply put, it needs to be changed or explained better if you can't say yes to 2 out of 3. I will point out that those rules are somewhat focused on online writing though. For book/story writing, I would suggest aiming for a 2 out of 2 score, otherwise, change or explain better. Again, as always, moderation applies. If you're writing the manual to rocket science, you are not going to write the manual to Grade 1 maths. Consideration of target audience, among other things, is also an important part of writing. In terms of TCSA, this blog is designed to be a fun, entertainingly informative place where you find out some interesting new things, preferably while having a laugh or two. As such, JovialJman and myself attempt to make the articles as easy to understand and relatable as we can for whoever may be reading. (Though our rather free-form choice of topic does make that slightly impossible to achieve, but "the glory is in the effort" I tend to say.)

In any case, I shall wrap up this article by saying simply, that without you guys chipping in and piping up, TCSA can't know if we're doing right or not. Things like making the background colour less bright so that you don't go blind and trying to be less serious (not always possible, sorry), are things that have been asked of us, as well as a couple topics which have been suggested as well. We enjoy the interaction with you guys, and appreciate it when you like our Facebook page or share the articles, since it tells us that we're doing something right for you guys, which is kind've the point. (Not as well as actually being told what exactly was liked about the article, but you take can get. Heehee)

In any case, that's all I can really say on the importance of editing and feedback. If you have any feedback, feel free to give it to us down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter as we love to hear from you guys. (Heehee) Of course, do be sure to share this post with any writer type friends of yours, as they may find it an interesting read or have something to say on the subject themselves. And if you yourself enjoyed the post and would like to read more like it, then do be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us via Twitter using the associated button on the bar to the left so that you can get all the latest posts, as they're published. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy reading my friends.