turkey goes bad surprisingly quickly

Someday I actually need to learn Photoshop. But not tonight.

At least I'm not reading webcomics.

New things

First off... I added Stuff to the top of the page, and to the borders as well. Please tell me if they aren't working or if it all looks horrible, so I can change it to be more browser-compatible. Obviously I only see the internet through a wide-screen Firefox lens.

Secondly, I edited together a new A Different Spin promo. It looks like this:

again the text and picture are unrelated both to my life and to each other

He assumed he would need all fifteen of them eventually. There were social dinners, rain storms, and possible mining ventures in his predictable future, to name merely a few of the more probable scenarios in which a man might find himself wanting a very specific hat. One could never be too prepared. Plus, they were on sale.

it was his only friend

I've been waking up most mornings and writing. It feels nice to have a creative flow going, a forced, set time for world creation. Like D&D, but without having to have friends around.

The vaguelyamazing.com domain is expiring, and we don't especially want to re-up it. So we won't. Which means all my image hosting will go down the tube, and I'll need to go back and fix all the links that will break on the old bloggums. The Flash token you see above is hosted on FileDen, which is an ulcerous skank of a website, with popups, advertisements, click-through promotions, and other horrors of the plebeian web. They're the only file dump I found that allows direct linking though, and it's free. I guess beggars can't be choosers, and I'm glad there are services like that.

World of Warcraft. It still has me. I still love spending hours cuddled up with it, projecting consciousness into the little glowy screen as my sweaty wrists erode the paint around the keyboard and the cookies in my stomach bolster their fortifications of gut tubbery. An elegant mess indeed.

SAVORY CHEESES!

friends are for censoring

There are wasps, sometimes, that climb into my room on some grand mission of insect exploration. The screen on my window doesn't quite cover the whole area, and apparently there's a wasp nest somewhere outside on the wall of the apartment.

None of said wasps have expressed any kind of hostility yet; mostly they've just died quietly behind one of the other window panes or in the long-ago-forgotten and slightly-less-long-ago-encrusted soup bowl on the back of my desk. I think it will take at least five more of these intrepid little fools before I call any kind of maintenance people to Deal With It.

There is an online dating site catering specifically to World of Warcraft players. I, being both a World of Warcraft player and an internet sex fiend, decided to investigate. What I found was more of a networking site, a facebook kind of thing with its own friend networks and message boards and the like, where people leave almost-suave messages on the walls of everything with a vagina within 200 miles of their den. But that's typical internet. The thing that strikes me is that this is an online community dedicated to people who live in an online community. Recursive nerddom. But it goes even further. There is a guild in World of Warcraft (on Lightninghoof, a word whose uttering awakens an Ancient Wrath in Tim Ellis) dedicated to people who network on the site. So. A true supplicant in the church of e-poon spends time on World of Warcraft, sets aside time within his WoW time to go play specifically on the realm of the dating site, and spends time on the dating site discussing the time spent on the realm dedicated to the dating site. Goddamn I hope these people are having amazing WoW sex for all their efforts.

The site is called Datecraft if you want to see it for yourself.

And now, the end-of-post semi-creativity, courtesy of Sally Slade's endless patience in putting up with me: This worked a lot better when I was frantically stream of consciousness typing and with the unexpected google image search at the end. Reading it in this form sort of has the punchline spoiled.

But I trust you all to use your imaginations.

The rain in spain is spiky like cocaine

Being wet is nice.

There are lakes and pools and rainstorms and all of them instantly make me feel elevated and loosely immortal. They're also a great way to get exercise without sweating all over yourself...

Dungeons and Dragons is still the greatest possible use of time in the world: Cooperative storytelling and going into a world with your friends that you are creating together is the definition of "team-building exercise". Maybe I could take that show on the road... "Dear Corporate Overlords: bring your cubicled minion bonnies out for a few hours of escapism and shared hallucination. You don't need True Strike to know it'll be a guaranteed hit!" If only I could turn the storytelling skills of D&D into actual, publishable trash.

This is the protagonist of a fine little bit of nonsense Mike, Ricky, and I wrote this morning while making crepes.

...his initials are FAG... that really is too bad.

to clarify: every so often Mooch gets an email from someone with a name, request, and email address that is clearly nonsense and scammery. Every time such events transpire, there will be one of these posts. They will never be relevant. But reading the first one first will make more sense.



Hesitantly, but with infinite patience and the hope for a better tomorrow, Fernando Alvero Gomez picked up the phone. Ever since Kofi Mbambaa disappeared, Fernando had been assaulted by a neverending stream of desperate men trying to wire their questionable third-world finances through his telephone and email. But perhaps this would not be such a call, he thought. Perhaps it would be a friendly socialite, or a long-lost love.

It wasn't. All the bright hopes and uncertainties vanished with the first pathetic whine from the voice from the other end of the telephone.

"The account owner is late Fernando, I am heard you are the one to contact."

Fernando gritted his teeth. "Is this a solicitation call, my dear and grammaticaly destitute friend? Perhaps a need for some kind of money transfer?"

"My reaching for an American is underway, an unknown player who the account owner can claim as next of kin. J10million unclaimed is an amount no reasonable man could pass up, and if an American like you will just respond to my fabulous offer."

There was complete silence from Fernando's end of the line. The solicitor took it for consideration; it was not. It was the silence of unfathomable rage, drilled from depths of the human soul that no man previous had dared to glimpse, let alone attempt to harness. Fernando Alvero Gomez, in that moment, tapped such depths and found himself the stronger for it.

The solicitor, a shockingly Anglican-named man called Peter Henry, was still wet behind the ears when it came to dealing with dangerous men on the telephone; his preferred medium was e-mail. It would be his undoing, as well as, ultimately, the undoing of all life on earth. He had no inkling of the repercussions of his actions, and so drove on undeferred.

"J10 million unclaimed!" he announced again. "I am seeking for your cooperation and understanding to enable us claim the fund from the bank. Once the money is moved any lucrative business in your country. So as to enable me decides on what to do next."

Peter Henry heard a crunch through the telephone. He thought it sounded like cereal. A more informed person might have recognized it for what it was: the screeching peel of telephone handset plastic crushed in a fist of rage, splintered and shuddering through the telecommunicative wires it once protected.

Halfway across the world in a tiny apartment in Paraguay, the fire alarm went off. Fernando Alvero Gomez stood steaming, his very clothes cooked off of his flesh by the heat of his foolishly-wakened wrath, cackling in the insipid shower of the apartment's automatic sprinkler system.

Fernando's briefcase was not a heavy thing, easily lifted onto the bed and opened with three simple, practiced twists on three complex, intricate latches. Inside, the laptop sprung to life. "Good morning Mister Gomez," the cheery AI intoned through the pouring sprinkler system, "would you like to end it all?"

Fernando nodded, took a breath, and prepared himself for the void. He input the line of code, looked to the sky, and went to make a cup of lemonade while he waited for the missiles to fall. There would be no more telesolicitations. Not a god-damned one.

smarmy nightlings

It’s been a bad night. The kind of night when the howling psychopathy is calling, when the calling blacklingness wants me. Giggling and tapping at the windows, it is asking me to come play with it. It tells me things will always be different out on the mad road; that we can have everything we need from everyone who doesn’t need it as much. Kill and take, it says: slash the walls, burn the bills, and sow the kind of terrorific seeds that chill through the minds of everyone who hears. Never look back, never face consequences; if you have no pattern or motive you cannot be beaten, and if you're going to be alone in the world anyway, why bother? In a world of cooperative people, the individual willing to be the unspeakable cheat comes out on top.

Emo emo emo. Yeesh. No... I’m still good, I still don’t want that. But it’s there, and every so often when life gets tiresome, it comes out to say its leering, tongue-waggling hello. I suppose it’s better than its predecessor, horrific depression. Maybe. Why would I post this? Jesus I need something to do. I'm chewing a dollar bill. That could probably give a man unpleasant diseases. I should be working on any number of things; tomorrow I will be more productive and call more colleges and offices and such. I only got one confirmed show today, and it's a small daytime gig up in the midst of nowhereland, Maine. Things need to pick up. But I truly believe that they will. I just need to find some more money in the meantime. And more importantly, I need to make games, run through the woods, make music and art, and generally remember all the reasons that life is worth celebrating.

It's just been one of those nights.