naked lady

D&D character sketch go! We're trying out the fancy new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and Ricky's taking the Dungeon Mastering helm to chart a course into dice-infested waters. I, of course, am taking this opportunity to play a hot chick who transforms into toothy things like wolves, winged turtles, and velociraptors. When the transhumanist revolution comes, this shall be my ultimate destiny.

That wolf on the bottom is thinking about a double chocolate baconator. He's been thinking about it allll day.

Dungeons & Dragons. What a great idea. I'll pour one out on the curb for you, Mr. Gygax. You did good work.

who radishes the radishmen?

I had a thought today as I was putting on my shoes in the living room. The thought was: "If a doberman jumped at me out of that doorway right now, I would now be prepared to kick it in the mouth." This thought immediately went to a man reviewing security footage of my living room in this scenario and wondering "man, I wonder how that kid was prepared to kick that doberman in the teeth. That's some reflexes, that is."

I am always prepared. Unfortunately, the things I'm prepared for (fuck you grammar) never happen.

ten fifteens thrown to the halfwinds

The rocks were cold and wet; his feet slipped treacherously. Already there was a lightning-fork of blood running from just below his knee, and he knew his shins would be swollen soon, bruised by the uneven vertical stones. But he was higher than he had been a moment before, and though he couldn't see the top of the slope through the downpour, he knew it lay somewhere above, and on it, the lighthouse. To reach it was the only option now; to climb down these rocks would be even more difficult than the trip up had been. Somewhere below, the tide was rising, a slow and steady pursuer to his climb. The boy raised his bloody knuckles and reached for the next rain-slick rock.

Seventeen homeless men in seventeen cities reach simultaneously for seventeen stray dogs, offering their hands as if to say, "it's all right, we're both still here aren't we?" Fifteen of them are bitten.

There is a mote of gold in everything she says, if you can find it. Like the princesses who spoke in diamonds and frogs, she creates matter from words, and in parsing and panning we can become the tiniest bit richer.

The truck can still find you.
Look the part and get the man.
Shopping carts are no safety.
Six pence for a tie.

Look the part and get the man.
Lurk the unders; man the drains.
Six pence for a tie.
But the filth can cling on the inside.

Lurk the unders; man the drains.
Hold your bag of seeds close, and save it.
But the filth can cling on the inside.
Breathe it out when the cities are ashes.

Hold your bag of seeds close, and save it.
Shopping carts are no safety
Breathe it out when the cities are ashes,
The truck can still find you.

*snark taco sauces, this is the end*

Thirty-five stories above, Howard clapped the top back onto the mayonnaise. He didn't see the shadowy thing grinning behind the refrigerator door. If he had, he would never have seen anything else.

I draw a thing, then I write a thing. Who knows.

When Captain Ferrier first invited us on the cruise I thought it would serve as nothing more than a lark, a flippant getaway to the skies aboard the most modern of airship luxuries. I was unaware at the time of the workings of such crafts, and thought them merely another item on the daunting list of things that would never be relevant to my own life, and therefore never worthy of serious research. Leave the baking to the bakers, the shoemaking to the cobblers, and the workings of highly inflammable airborne dirigibles to the obscenely rich, I thought.
However, when Melinda and I boarded the craft in person, I knew there was something here beyond mere goggle-sporting hobbery. There was a majesty to the swelling canvas balloon above; a regal air described even in the rudder fins on either side of the humming turbines on the rear of the ship, ready to carve the sky and cut wisping trails through the clouds. It was a commanding craft; I had never seen anything so grand.
But beneath the magnificent blimp there was an element that struck me as out-of-place. The entire "crew" of the ship seemed to consist of one squat, unpleasant mechanical man who, presumably due to his lack of a visible mouth, never said a word to myself, Melinda, or the captain during the entirety of our voyage. It clunked about on oversized mechanical feet, performing tasks which I, as an admitted aeronautical novice, can only assume were vital to the maintenance of our flight. At one point as we drifted above the Melbingian Sea, the automaton actually approached me, looking distressed, and would not leave until I gave it my pocket watch. The creature stared at the watch for no less than two full minutes before handing it back to me silently and clanking onward about its duties. I suspect I shall never know the meaning of this behavior, and it troubles me somewhat.
Perhaps when I have returned to the university I shall read up on these matters. Airships and mechanical men. I cannot name the curiosity this voyage has awoken in me, but somehow it feels truer than any previous pursuit I have undertaken.

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.

he doesn't even need a suit.

For the past two days I've come home from work and not been productive, so today I promised it wouldn't happen again. And so I give you the result of approximately 200 minutes of work, and exactly zero minutes of rational thought.

Enjoy.

The truth is, I just wanted an excuse to meow into my computer microphone.

pots and pants and blowsifh

In space, as it turns out, popsicles don't taste as good.

The boy was afraid to leave his house. Without clean socks, it couldn't be done. He wasn't about to put on the dirty, crusty ones, and walking barefoot was out of the question. And so he starved.

Kangaroo pouches are not warm and fuzzy. They are external incarnations of the womb. They are sticky and amniotic. You'll never look at Kanga the same.

If confronted with all the cardboard we have consumed in our lives, we could produce extremely functional shelters, sprawling and leaning in a corrugated shanty town. If confronted with all the plastic we have consumed, we could waterproof it.

If confronted with all the dogs we have ever seen, we would be buried in dogs.

What did chickens look like before we domesticated them? Were they bigger? Are they a species new to the world and created by humanity, like Dachshunds and Furby™s?

When she made him the scarf, she had been afraid he wouldn't like it. Or that he would say his proper thank yous and give her a hug, then leave it in an unceremonious heap in the back of the closet. She wasn't sure if men wore scarves, or at least, if he did. She still knitted it though, and every hour she worked she held him in her mind. The scarf she gave him was warm and wooly, and full of life.

A single toaster strudel, left unattended, is capable of burning down your entire block.

like a street urchin but pointy

I have cans of soup but no bowls.

Fishcoat was a mustachio'd gentleman of the upper class who was never seen out and about without nine flavors of monocle, all of which were bitter and horrid. He liked to lick at least one around 4 pm, as an afternoon tide-me-over sort of snack between luncheon and supper. He never wore the same suit of clothes twice, and had never once been late for an appointment. Such was the world of Fishcoat. I am going to tell you how he died.

It happened the day the lollipop girl appeared on the doorstep. Fishcoat, who was enjoying his daily operatic in the bathtub, was most perturbed at the interrupting chime of the doorbell, which cut short his warbling rendition of the Barber of Seville. Fishcoat stood, his sudsy fat rolls bouncing soapily out of the tub and into a towel. He made his way down the stairs and opened the door.

A tiny waif confronted him, wielding a bushel of crystallized sugar-pops on a bushel of wrapped paper sticks. "BUY A LOLLIPOP!" she enthused. Fishcoat gasped. He did not know how one deals with children, especially when one is clad in a towel. He slammed the door in abject terror, and ran back to his suite. He opened the window, and peered down below. The tot was still present, still waiting patiently at the door. He withdrew his bulbous head, and assured himself that the lollipopper would inevitably disappear.

Five minutes passed. Fishcoat had clothed himself in a new suit, regained his composure, and poured himself a flagon of tequila. Such was life. But as he steeled himself for the impending floodtide of alcohol, he was snatched up in the hooks of a sudden and irresistable urge to go have a gander once again out the window. He looked. The lollipop girl was gone. No sweet candy vendor stood on his doorstep. Fishcoat smiled, closed the window, and blissfully quaffed his pint of pick-me-up, which immediately knocked him into unconsciousness.

In the terrifyingly pristine corridors of his upper-class mind, Fishcoat drifted. Behind his senses he heard a rumbling with a backbone of mariachi cornet. His mind flopped tequilishly around to confront this intruder. Juaxtango, he cactus loa of the wastes, loomed into his vision, his ectoplasmic tango shutting down all possibility of resistance. Fishcoat's will jellied. Juaxtango bellowed a psionic roar of maraca that carried one simple demand: BUY A FUCKING LOLLIPOP!

Fishcoat awoke with a wide-eyed howl, his pristine mustachios curled perplexingly upward. He leapt to his feet, grabbed his overstuffed wallet, and bowled down the stairs, flutting money unceremoniously in his path. The door, painted and bevelled in the most urbane style, was shattered by the barreling corpulent missile of Fishcoat's bulk. Unimpeded, the fat man ran on.

He ran as only a man recently confronted by a sombrero'd mexican tequila spirit can run, careening forth in search of the tiny fundraising lollipop vendor. Three blocks down the road, after trampling a bulldog and traumatizing its aged master forever, he found the wee tyke. Foaming and wild-eyed, he demanded a candy.

"one dollar and fifty cents!" she exclaimed, holding up one of the tasties to Fishcoat's flaring, fur-lined nose. The heaving rotundus snatched the offered sweet, and dug through its wallet for a bill of such small denomination. Having found none, he threw a hundred at the girl and bowed graciously before sticking the lollipop in his mouth and descending in a torrent of bottom-first fat rolls onto the curb.

The sweetness was overwhelming. Fishcoat closed his eyes and Juaxtango appeared behind them, cackling and backed up by a quartet of sombrero'd mexican towel boys sporting mustachios every bit as impressive as Fishcoat's. They handed the drunk and sugared fat man a mouth harp, and faded blissfully into the tequila-lollipop sunset of Mariachi Voodoo Hell.

a manly scrubdown

I have taken a shower, and am now clean. This alone is a rare enough event to be newsworthy, but tonight it is not the top story. On the shower rack, nestled in with the Head and Shoulders (which I forever associate with the movie Evolution) I found a marvel of modern marketing that I'm still struggling to fully get: Axe "Snake Peel" Shower Gel. I went to the Axe website to try to get a picture of this manfully bottled scrubble, but then gave up on the mission when confronted with a loading bar that informed me that my "mojo" was loading. But here's their product description:

Feeling more than a little dirty? Axe Snake Peel Shower Scrub with desert minerals + cactus oil deep cleans and exfoliates to remove dirt and dry skin. Use daily to scrub the slate clean.

Normally in ads you hear the word "exfoliate" as a flurry of rose petals wisp across a silky white backdrop, to mask the word's actual meaning: scraping the fucking skin off your body. To be perfectly honest I've always thought the concept was pretty badass, but I think having an "exfoliating" product in your bathroom without an accompanying double-X chromosome setup is a good way to get your ass kicked. By Tiny, the 300-pound bulldog-man whose only joy in life comes from looking through people's bathroom cabinet for sissy bath products and beating the living Loofah out of them.

But I digress. Cactus oil? Snake Peel? Getting men to worry and stress about keeping our skin delicate and fresh by conjuring up the dusty rugged desert? It's twisted, it's absurd, and for some reason it's stuck in my head enough to write two hundred ninety-two words on the topic and invent a hulking fictional bathroom snoop.

Anyway. My man-parts have been exfoliated by cactus oil. I thought you'd all like to know.

There are no visual words in this.

Sheldon DeLoach had never played basketball before. Nevertheless, he stepped onto the court prepared to do his best, and confident that he could succeed at anything he put his mind to and eager to defend his honor in the heartless arena of before-school one-on-one.

Martel Guapo had also never played basketball before. But he had a name that meant "the Handsome Hammer," which is really difficult to top. The bets were taken, the court arranged.

The ball went up. It should have come down and been snatched by the grubby, unskilled fingers of one of the two boys, launching a riveting game of fumbling, rolling basketball in the 7 am mists. The other kids should have cheered as the hopeless lads bungled shot after painfully easy shot. All this and more would have unfolded that day, if only Martel Guapo had closed the garden gate.

Alas, Martel Guapo had not closed the garden gate, and so had been followed all the way down to the school by the enormous lizard who had taken up residence beside his mother's parsley. Thus, as the ball came down it was snatched not by Sheldon and not by Martel, but rather by a joyful airborne predatory reptile. The beast sailed across the court, hit the ground, and savaged the rubbery sphere in ways that would almost certainly have traumatized the surrounding middle-schoolers had the ball possessed innards, guts, or other such gore-covered tasties. The carnivore lizard, who had been expecting no less, was quite put out.

Children screamed. The lizard panicked. These events, as they continued, formed what a Thinking Person might call a positive feedback loop. Sheldon DeLoach did so in his head -he was an intelligent lad- as he watched children and lizard whip one another into an elaborate frenzy of shrieking and flailing adolescent/reptilian abandon. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that the panicking lizard dropped the ball and ran.

What did come as a surprise, particularly to a certain Marian Brubbles, who held the second clarinet seat in the middle school band, was that the lizard dropped the ball and ran toward her. It hit her at the knee-caps, and sent her face-first into the asphalt before vanishing into the woods. She chipped a tooth, and after the full story came out later that day, vowed never to speak to Martel Guapo again. Had there been no lizard incident that day, things might have turned out differently between them. In fact I can say with the greatest assurance that they would have lived happily ever after, somewhere in the Netherlands. But they will never know.

And that is why basketball has been banned from the county of Hamshap since 1987.

dressup time

This doesn't really... CAN'T really have explanation. You can click the clothes to move them.

Here we are in the wee hours of the morning again, and I'm torn as usual. On the one (rational) hand, there's the desire for that really satisfying feeling of curling up under an unreasonably large pile of blankets and going away for several hours. On the other hand, I'm completely awake, and enjoying being productive. If only I can find some way to force this feeling of productivity during the day. Maybe it's isolation that does it, other people having gone to bed. Or maybe some sense that the day is done and I can do whatever I want now... I definitely have a psychological work-delaying mechanism that keeps me putting off useful things through the day with the logic of "if I have fun now, I'll still have time to do the work later" that inevitably leads to me NOT doing work and NOT enjoying the procrastinative fun because of the looming snowballing pile of responsibility I'm so vigorously ignoring.

And so I end up in the wee hours, making bizarre little flash beasties. Clickyclicky. (same link as above)

heft not thy woofer

Westward! he said, and with that they were off. The highway hummed by outside the window of the onrushing autobeast, the sound of speed lulled to a soothing audio gel that barely reached their ears over the exhalant coo of the air conditioner. The world was traversed unnoticed in a blur; they were a gliding puck on the air hockey table of the desert.

Franz poked the dog. "Dog" he observed, "you have not many teeth left."
"It is true" the dog replied, "for I have gnawed and known a great many things in this world, and the time for teeth has come and gone. Now is the time to pool myself at feet and look soulfully toward the world of tomorrow."
"How will you eat, Dog, if you have no means of chewing?" Franz asked. For a long time the dog did not answer. Then it yawned, stretched its haunches, and erupted in a five-tone shower of whimsy that quivered the heavens and compelled the very sun to resonance. Franz looked upon it, blinded by the elegant catastrophe, and wept, understanding at last why his mother never let him have sweets.

The board room meeting would have to be delayed. Another stanza was not forthcoming.