I finally completed chapter 3 over the weekend, and I’ve made it past 9,200 words. Chapter 4 should be fun, as I introduce two more major characters, one of which is Dante, whose combination of technical brilliance, short attention span, and utter lack of tact make him a joy to write. Looking ahead, I think chapter 5 will consist of universal backstory, and chapter 6 will get back to the plot and another con.

I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing, which has pointed out a grammatical flaw in my prose. Not a fatal flaw, I think, but one which is now painfully obvious, having to do with complex sentence structures that really should be split into two. Otherwise, though, I find myself disagreeing with much of what Mr. King has to say, especially about not planning your plot beforehand…

If you couldn’t already tell by the new photos on the left, I attended a protest outside of Republican HQ in Tucson yesterday in support of the RNC demonstrators in New York.
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My first 29th birthday is less than two weeks away, so you’re running out of time to shower me with gifts in a transparent attempt to win my affection. My Amazon wishlist is up to date, as always. I would also accept a Salon.com subscription or this “An Adventurer is Me!” t-shirt (Medium) as tribute to my greatness and/or advancing decrepitude.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time last night playing Kingdom of Loathing, a free, deeply sarcastic, web-based RPG currently in open beta testing.

The game is brillianty rendered in stick figure art. The character classes include Seal Clubber, Pastamancer, and Accordion Thief. You battle Possessed Cans of Tomatoes or Ninja Snowmen with equipment such as Pasta Spoons and Meatloaf Hats. And the ability to make cocktails is important to your success.

Who needs Everquest when you can play Kingdom of Loathing? The only downside is, you’re limited to 40 turns per day, presumably to keep bandwidth to a manageable level.

Found via BoingBoing.

I picked up Flight, Volume One last week after Shaenon Garrity raved about it on her message board. It’s an anthology of sequential art short stories revolving around the theme of flight.

The tone ranges from light-hearted children’s animation style to suicidally depressed. The stories themselves aren’t consistent in quality, which is always the case in antholgies. Some of the stories don’t even seem to have anything to do with flight, such as Derek Kirk Kim’s contribution. But the art is uniformly beautiful, even as it varies wildly in style.

There’s no doubting the talent involved in the book’s creation. The aforementioned Derek Kirk Kim won an Ignatz, a Harvey, and an Eisner for “Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition” for his book Same Difference and Other Stories. (He also, I might add, contributed a pinup to Narbonic, vol. 1, published by yours truly, before he became rich and famous.) Vera Brosgol, who was Shaenon’s co-conspirator on the Narbonic spinoff L’il Mell, added a piece about a teenage girl who grows wings overnight.

The book is gorgeous and definitely worth a look. You can find it at better comic stores or at a discount on Amazon.com.

University of New South Wales in Australia has scientific evidence that grumpy people are smarter.

(Or are smarter people just always grumpy? It’s difficult to suss out the cause and effect.)

Link found via BoingBoing.

Here I am linking to another blog entry for the second consecutive post, but this time it’s to a blog I’ve never heard of by Paul Rosenberg. I came across this entry via dKos which, like Marshall’s post from yesterday, is another Grand Unified Theory, this time linking the Swift Boat guys and other Vietnam vets to — of all things — the French Revolution. It’s fascinating and well-written and you really should go read it.

(More in the extended section.)
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I usually shy away from simply linking to other blog entries, especially blogs like Talking Points Memo, where Josh Marshall puts out consistently good work on a daily basis. I figure if you’re interested in politics, you’re probably already reading him, so a link would be redundant.

But I’m making an exception today, because Marshall just hit one out of the park. He managed to link the Swift Boats guys to the selling and handling of the Iraq War to the treatment of McCain in 2000 to pretty much Bush’s entire history, all under a single banner of The Moral Cowardice of George W. Bush.

Says it all, really.

I’m staring with sheer incomprehension at my own stats page. The good news is that the daily visitor count keeps going up, almost topping 100 yesterday. (Which may be peanuts for other sites, but isn’t bad for my little ol’ blog.) What’s odd is I seem to get more visitors on days I don’t update the blog, as if people come here only after I’ve shut up.

Then there’s the fact that blueshift.php has slightly more total views this month than the homepage. The Blueshift section never gets updated! Who keeps going there? If it’s webcrawlers, then why does the Fiction page get 1/20 of the view count?

Weird, weird, weird.

They Might Be Giants is touring in support of their new album, The Spine, and they stopped in Tucson last night. As far as I know, this is their first local show in the five years I’ve been here, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a packed venue with a line out the door. There were some unfortunate kids outside singing amusing adlibbed songs about how they’d driven up from Nogales only to discover the show was sold-out, pleading for extra tickets.

(More in the extended section…)
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