Flight Recordings

I don't know if any of you appreciate the singular enormity of this event, but I just ordered a secondhand-but-good-condition copy of Melissa Etheridge's "Unplugged and More" offa the Internet. I have been looking for this excruciatingly rare import CD for, literally, years, on account of the fact that it contains the only extant 100% legal copy of the Springsteen / Etheridge "Thunder Road" duet, which is kind of like the musical equivalent of ambrosia cut with crack cocaine and wrapped in bacon.

I just thought you all would like to know this.

Missing Person in Japantown

I normally don't jump on propagating these things, especially when they're not actually relevant to my own geographic region of choice, but today, I'm all, like, what the heck, I'll pitch a link. This sounds like a worrisome situation.

EDIT: Sounds like they found the guy. All clear, folks.

Thanks to you guys, Alzheimer's research now has $2,500 it did not have before. Go you!

Okay, there's like twenty-two THOUSAND people dead in Myanmar. TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND. And another, like, forty-one thousand homeless. Just so we establish a sense of perspective here.

However.

"Mass Effect" for PC requiring validation every ten days? Guys, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I do want to buy your game. I very much want to buy your game. I am one of the people you are counting on for your sales. But this just plain makes the act of owning your game impractical and annoying enough that it just is not going to happen. I'm not being righteously indignant or anything, here. As a home dialup user, I have to restrict all modern gaming to portable laptops anyway -- even one-time authentication is a tortuous overnight process if I can't drag my gaming rig to a hotspot. The prospect of a game that I legally own expiring and becoming unplayable EVERY LESS-THAN-TWO-WEEKS, FOR MY ENTIRE PERIOD OF OWNERSHIP unless I remember to constantly maintain it is just untenable.

Sorry, guys. You lost me. Shame; like I said, I really wanted this one.

Nevertheless, still counting my blessings. See Paragraph 1.

I found some jewelry for ya.

Award'd.

Awesome-tacular.

EDIT: Now, witness the wonder that is our trophy! Shaenon gives you the goods. Also, to get a tiny piece of our greatness for yourself for only three, count them, three small ones, you may purchase the award-winning minicomic itself here. It's pretty much "Cowardly Lion" as found on the site, although it will probably not electrocute you as much if you decide to read it in the bath. So there's that.

From kajafoglio, in re: Skin Horse...

"As an intrepid, and often apparently unmentionable co-writer myself, I am ashamed to have failed to mention The Brilliant Shaenon's Garrity's equally brilliant co-writer Jeffrey Wells. Thanks for the great strip, both of you!"

Do you see that? Do you freakin' see that?

Dag.

I mean, there's this whole long paragraph I could be writing here about how much the works of Studio Foglio have inspired me throughout my writing career; about how yes, I realize this comes about one percent from my own merit and ninety-nine percent from me clinging to the coat-tails of the increasingly indescribable Shaenon Garrity; about how I'd never have dreamed, ten years ago, that things would come to this point, and gosh, this Internet is a funny old thing, eh?

I'm not really up to that right now, so I will instead merely repeat myself:

Dag.

* * *
Vincent: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?
Julius:  Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
Vincent: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
         Are strange to ours, with their own history:
         Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
* * *

A Slurry Tale, being an account of two Hired Men, a Pugilist, and a Moorish Lord (and his Lady); and the curious and sundry ways their tales do spin together.

Project is still in its infancy, but man oh man, if this thing gets off the ground and they actually assemble a complete script...

For Eric " demiurgent " Burns, whether he likes it or not...

( Read more... )

Okay, I had this whole long erudite post planned about how certain patterns of notes will always, always floor me, about how I can be going along listening to an otherwise unremarkable song and suddenly the songwriter elects to throw in a few specific sequenced intervals and I am reduced to orgasmically banging on my desk, saying "YES YES YES." Unfortunately, it was rambly and incoherent and really didn't make a lot of sense, so I scrapped the idea. What you get, instead, is a single concrete example:

Okay. Find a copy of Savatage's "Desiree", the acoustic piano version. It is, unfortunately, only available on the German import version of The Wake of Magellan, not the domestic one. Probably you new-fangled kids with your Napster and your iTunes and your illegal file-sharing sites will have an easier time of this than poor, largely wheelchair- CD-bound me.

Did that? Okay, listen up to 1:10 or so when Zak Stevens first hits the lyric that goes something like "Scars are the wounds that we all show".

You hear that?

YES YES YES.

Look, I realize Savatage is just about the limp-wristed-est quasi-metal available for public consumption. (In hindsight, their subsequent mutation into the unapologetically Feel-Good Christmasy Trans-Siberian Orchestra seems pretty much inevitable.) The elaborate stories accompanying each album fall squarely on the "hokey" side of the fence and some of their rhymes are downright ridiculous. I can feel the spectral presence of David St. Hubbins and Jack "Jables" Black snickering at me for the insufficient rockitude of my rock of choice.

Guys? Leave me alone. This is a guilty pleasure of mine. Besides, being painfully earnest about excruciatingly lame topics is, for me, the entire point of heavy metal. And by this rubric, Savatage succeeds mightily.

Okay. That's all. Actual content next post.

NOTED MAD SCIENCE LAB TEAMS UP WITH SECRET GOVERNMENT AGENCY AND WELL-KNOWN FANTASY AUTHOR TO HELP FIGHT ALZHEIMER'S!

Not all of the above are in the same universe, mind you. To come quickly to the point: for the bargain price of $25.00, you may own your own piece of "Narbonic" or "Skin Horse" history, in the form of the original artwork for a daily strip (with some exceptions due to our own reservations and, y'know, the fact that people have already bought some and stuff.) What you do with it after that is up to you; you may make disparaging comments about Tip in the margins, use it as a reference drawing for your complicated Yourself-On-Helen self-insertion slash fiction, or -- heaven forfend -- frame it. THAT IS NOT THE IMPORTANT PART. The important part is that the money you exchange for said strip goes to the Alzheimer's Research Trust for the "Match It For Pratchett" challenge, where we all get together and try to meet or beat the half-million pounds donated by Terry Pratchett towards Alzheimer's-curing research.

Folks, if you are part of the English-speaking geek world and actually need an introduction as to who Terry Pratchett is, I'm going to ask you to surrender your membership cards right now. Speaking more personally, Pratchett is one of my biggest inspirations; he's utterly smegging brilliant in most everything he does and yet, AND YET, his prose is earthy and approachable enough to give hope to foolish young writers such as myself. "I could do something like that!" we say, and though we are WRONG, sometimes our attempts come out pretty neat. His legendary collaboration with nerd superstar Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, was one of the foundations of my personal decision to take up prose-writing. (Do not, however, let the dubious results dissuade you from this cause.)

So. If you, like me, love Pratchett and hate Alzheimer's, and you want in on a piece of their head-to-head rumble, please go here for more information, do whatever research you deem fit, and then e-mail the crap out of Shaenon and offer her lots of money. You'll get awesome art and warm charitable fuzzies in return.

That is all.

* * *

It was a long night.

* * *

( The Mightiest Hero in all Wisconsin, Part 1... )

Happy 98th birthday, Gordon P. Wister Jr., a.k.a. Joey Stink-Eye Smiles, King of the Hoboes, wherever you are.*

* Scientists agree: Neptune, probably.

The greatest thing to ever happen in any webcomic anywhere is getting its own release. I am so there.

Obsessively correcting grammatical errors in songs.

The Moody Blues, "Gemini Dream": "We're on the road like you knew we would BE."

REO Speedwagon, "Time For Me To Fly": "Enough of the jealousy and INTOLERANCE."

Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald": "The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times, ONCE for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald."

Look, I know it doesn't scan properly my way. Just humor me.

AFTER RESEARCH: #2's "intoleration" is actually a correct, if underused, noun form! Sorry, REO Speedwagon. You may leave now while I continue to lecture Gordon Lightfoot and The Moody Blues. Please do not sue me.

Mass Effect is comin' out for the PC! In, like, May!

...which means that I have to start plotting out my character as of now. For, um, two whole run-throughs. This is the way I roll, people. Total CRPG control freak.

...one also hopes my laptop -- the only computer at chez Wells powerful enough to run Mass Effect -- is back in working order by then. Le sigh. Here's a tip to all of you: if you ever have the urge to cut the power to your system while Windows Vista is busy configuring periodic system updates, DO NOT ACT ON THIS URGE BECAUSE OMG IT WILL DESTROY YOUR HARD DRIVE TO THE POINT THAT IT APPARENTLY HAS TO BE ENTIRELY REPLACED. Li'l public service message from me to you.

Actual prose writing has been slim, as my brief flurries of creativity have been pretty much exclusively devoted to Skin Horse, a thing I hope y'all are enjoying. We'll get back to actually writing stuff soon. For reals.

And, finally, this winter can officially suck it. Memo to the weather: knock it the fzck off with the snow already kthxs.

In retrospect, I can see that it may have been my hubris what brought me low.

I'm no stranger to B-Grade cinema. I've been watching "Mystery Science Theater 3000" for about fifteen years now. I've laughed my way through some of the most questionable films Hollywood has ever had to offer. I go so far as to go out of my way to select things to watch based on their cheese factor alone.

I thought I was hard. I thought I was strong. I thought I was... well, invulnerable.

In retrospect, it may have been my hubris what brought me low. But in the end, the only real answer that there is, the only answer that there can be...

...is that I was brought low by the 1989 Rusty Lemorande / Albert Pyun adaptation of "Journey to the Center of the Earth".

I am shaken and punch-drunk. I will be useless for the remainder of the evening. In my overwhelming pride, I have meddled with a power greater than my understanding.

Good night. And may angels watch you all.

Courtesy of jonathan_towne, we have a new Mundementia One fanfiction! What this means is that the people who read my stuff are actually doing more with the universe than I am at the moment. This is humiliating in no small way. The story isn't honestly dead, really!

Anyway, read it! Read it!

There are some days that require T'Pau's "Heart and Soul" to be blasted in my ears via my headphones.

This is one of those days.

Okay, week three's done with! Next week, we finally escape the National Zoo and Tip's protracted therapy session with Leo the Cowardly Lion, and move on to AN ENTIRELY NEW AND EXCITING SETTING, to wit, the interior of a Volvo en route to New Jersey. What other webcomic can serve you such glamorous locales? The answer? NO WEBCOMIC IN THE WORLD.

By the by, thanks to everyone for the overwhelmingly positive response you've given "Skin Horse" thus far. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to, y'know, keep writing it, as opposed to curling up in a fetal position on the bathroom floor hating myself, though I cannot promise I will not do both.

In other -- and slightly more distressing -- news, a search for the term "Skin Horse" on Google now ranks us second only to the IMDB entries for the 2003 film. We seem to have surpassed any and all pages actually directly concerning Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit, and there is something quite topsy-turvy about this.