September was a bad month for my blood pressure. Every time I looked at the political or economic news, my rage boiled over again.

I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a couple of weeks now, but every time I tried, it turned into a fifteen page rant. So I’ll try to summarize:

1) Why was I so happy when the Democrats won Congress last year? Not only are we still in Iraq, but the number of troops has INCREASED, and it now seem likely that Cheney will start bombing Iran.

I know, I know. The Democrats only have a slim majority, and the Republicans are on a pace to TRIPLE the all-time record for filibusters, so there’s a limit to their effectiveness. But that doesn’t explain why half the Democrats voted to betray their own supporters and condemn MoveOn over a fucking newspaper ad.

Never mind that the ad was right and Gen. Petraeus willingly became a political operative and spouted the (false) party line that everything is peachy in Iraq. (Keith Olbermann has something to say about that.) Habeas corpus gets filibustered out of existence, yet THIS gets passed?

No wonder the Democratically-controlled Congress is twice as popular with Republicans as Democrats.

2) So the fed rate was low for such a long time that it — combined with lax lending standards — caused a housing bubble that’s now collapsing and dragging the economy down with it. Bernanke’s solution? Lower the fed rate again!

Pay no attention to the resulting collapse of the dollar — Wall Street needs a short-term boost! Puff up that bubble just a little more!

I’m not just angry about Helicopter Ben’s decision on a macro-economic level. This affects my personal finances, too. My online savings accounts just dropped their rates by half a percentage point, which will cost me a couple hundred dollars this year. And the devalued dollar means my printing bill at Canadian-based Transcontinental will be that much higher.

That cost will be passed along in a higher cover price for the new Narbonic. That’s called “inflation,” kiddies.

Ah well. At least my gold will retain its value. I just wish I’d bought more of it a couple of years ago.

I was pretty good about regularly updating the blog for a couple of weeks there, wasn’t I? So much for that. I was far too busy drinking whiskey and playing Oblivion working on Narbonic, vol. 5 to pay attention to this place.

To make it up to you, here are some writery linky things:

• I sympathize with Christopher Moore’s feelings on turning 50, which are probably more common than he thinks. It’s the stuff midlife crises are made of, after all. Even at 32, I freak out about the doors that have slammed shut or will soon, and about the “life list” stuff I may never do. Of course, Moore has a successful writing career and a cult following, which is more than most people ever achieve, so he shouldn’t feel THAT bad (and I’m sure he doesn’t).
• Jane Espenson’s blog is making me consider trying to break into TV again. Did you know that these days producers like to hire new writers based on original pilots instead of specs of existing shows? Original pilots like the first screenplay I ever wrote, way back in college? Or that they also like to hire writers who have worked for a while outside the industry and can bring that knowledge into a writing room? Somebody may need to stop me from moving to LA. No, seriously. I’m not kidding. An intervention may be required at some point.
• And finally some more apocalyptic research:
  

  Arctic vault takes shape for world food crops

  LONGYEARBYEN, Svalbard (Reuters) – In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world’s crop seeds in case of disaster.

  Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah’s Ark of the plant kingdom.

It’s heartening to discover that other publishers are adopting the Barklage Comic Distribution Plan, bypassing the direct market and other mainstream distribution outlets in favor of website and convention sales directly to the customer. Of course, I never got news coverage for doing so, but you know… they’re known in the industry and I’m not.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about comic book distribution lately. The direct market is ever more hostile to indie, non-superhero books. Amazon takes 55% of every sale, then asks you to ship them two books at a time, which even at USPS media mail rates wipes out the narrow profit you might have had above printing costs, so that’s out.

As one of my previously-mentioned dozen-or-so creative project ideas, I had recently started to gauge interest in a “CDBaby for comics” site, with orders fulfilled either by me for a fee or by the creators/publishers for only the cost of the transaction. Seemed like a service that I might use if someone else created it.

Then I found out about Amazon’s new CreateSpace print-on-demand service, which blew away that idea.

CreateSpace is more or less built for B&W graphic novels and RPG books (although there are a couple of good indie RPG distribution sites already). The pricing scheme simply doesn’t work for prose novels or color comics. But for B&W comics… let me put it this way: if this had been around four years ago, Shaenon probably would have bypassed me and used CreateSpace for Narbonic. Her share per book would only be slightly less than what she’s getting now.

Actually, the pricing isn’t much better than the previous kings of online POD, CafePress. The formula for finding the break-even point at CreateSpace is .02p + 3.15 = .7n, where p = the number of pages, versus .03p + 7 = n for CafePress. If you plug in the stats for a test case or two, you’ll find that you’ll only save a buck or less per copy at CreateSpace.

The difference is the service behind it. With CreateSpace, you get to list your book on Amazon.com — customers can wish-list your item, order it with free shipping, stumble upon it while browsing, etc. That’s a huge advantage. And on top of that, there is no risk or hassle of paying up front for a printer or fulfilling your own orders.

What’s more, indie publishers like Oni have been publishing in smaller sizes to save on printing costs, but since CreateSpace charges the same price for every size, you can go full size without worry.

Assuming CreateSpace’s print quality and customer service are decent, I may never pay to publish another comic after Narbonic vols. 5 and 6. Even if I take another crack at self-publishing, I may just go with Amazon’s print on demand.

A couple of items stored here for my own purposes:

• If I ever think about buying a house again, I’ll probably want to use this nifty renting vs. buying calculator from the NY Times.
• A Pennsylvania man discovered he could burn salt water by exposing it to radio frequencies. It may have use as a new source of energy, but (as the article notes) only if the energy returned is substantially higher than the energy spent on generating the radio frequency:
  

  Dr. Roy said the salt water isn’t burning per se, despite appearances. The radio frequency actually weakens bonds holding together the constituents of salt water — sodium chloride, hydrogen and oxygen — and releases the hydrogen, which, once ignited, burns continuously when exposed to the RF energy field. Mr. Kanzius said an independent source measured the flame’s temperature, which exceeds 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, reflecting an enormous energy output.

I may be 32, but apparently my sense of humor is still 12, because this made me laugh til I cried. (EDIT: I’ve been informed this isn’t funny without the setup. It’s a Dutch song from a Belgian children’s show. The subtitles are not a translation, but what he seems to be saying phonetically in English, as transcribed by British smartasses.)

In one of the weird cosmic coincidences that convinced us to start dating in the first place, Kristie and I share the same birthday: today, September 10. I turned 32, she turned 29.

I took the day off from work, so at the moment I’m doing some bleary-eyed blogging while she is off teaching the day’s class at Pima, which she could not get out of doing. She’ll be back early this afternoon.

Kunstler’s The Long Emergency gave me an interest in sustainable civic design and life in a world without cheap energy, not only because it might happen but also because it might make a good setting for a story. (I told you I’ve been bouncing between a dozen ideas lately…)

So this item on Fermentarium grabbed my attention. The fact that it’s couched from a drinker’s point of view makes it even better. Also, as a former resident of the Denver/Boulder area, I’m shocked to find something as progressive as Bradburn Village in suburban Westminster, CO.

It’s all about so-called “new urbanism,” neighborhoods designed to be walkable and gathering-oriented — making it easier to stumble home drunk from a party without having to worry about designated drivers.

More below the fold…

Read the rest of this entry »

Labor Day is over. Back to work, wage-slaves. But have some reading material for your breaks:

• If you’ve been paying attention or read The Daily Howler for a few years, you probably know all of this. But it’s nice of Vanity Fair to put together this examination of the smearing of Al Gore as a lying hypocrite by the so-called liberal media, especially the NY Times but including just about every major outlet, starting in the 2000 election. And the media wonders why blogs are so popular…
• Awww… The Wire just wrapped its final episode. As Andre “Bubbles” Royo’s fake newspaper says, “HBO SERIES WRAPS PRODUCTION: Fifth season concludes in Baltimore; Emmy voters will be given one last shot to get it right.”

This SNL skit is kind of a sad but accurate commentary on today’s America. Granted, it’s harder to blame the debtor when tragedy strikes or when the things they can’t afford include food or (modest) rent, but with the housing/credit implosion, this is ever more representative of the middle and upper-middle class.

At the moment, I have about a dozen vague ideas for my next spare-time creative project, and I’m stumbling from one to another until one strikes my fancy. One of these ideas is to, as a writing experiment, remake Plan 9 From Outer Space into something that doesn’t suck.

After all, at its core, the movie is about aliens who try to conquer the Earth by raising an army of zombies — you’d think that could be a seed for a decent action-horror flick. Besides, Hollywood always remakes the movies that were good to begin with. Why not take a crack at an awful one?

The finished script would go directly into a drawer upon completion, since the original is not public domain, but at least I would see if I could do it.

Anyway, I’ve just been rewatching the original on my laptop, and I discovered my DVD program has the ability to play the movie at different speeds with sound intact: 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, etc.

Here’s something weird: Plan 9 is actually a better movie at 1.5x. At that speed, Tor Johnson doesn’t painfully stumble over his lines, he just sounds like he has an accent. Everyone else delivers lines at an Aaron Sorkin clip. People no longer wander aimlessly from scene to scene, they walk with a purpose. The zombies move like they could actually catch someone. The terrible production values aren’t on screen long enough to be dwelled upon.

Such knowledge wouldn’t have helped Ed Wood much, though. With an even further reduced running time, he would have had to pad out the film with even more stock footage…