xboxmas

Today I went to Best Buy, where my family braved a 20 minute line (in which we had quality parent-son time and I explained the concept of micropayment game economies when I saw the League of Legends pre-payed cards by the checkout) and ultimately bought only some cheap headphones and a DVD of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey at my sister's half-intentional request.

As we sidled and crab-hopped our way through the christmas eve aislethrongs, I was impressed by the number of Kinects under people's arms. There are moments that remind me how I really, truly don't understand the scope and scale of what gets manufactured, bought, and sold in this world. Within the past few years I've gotten a better understanding of money, earnings, and better living through disposable income (all new information for someone who has always gotten more enjoyment out of a cardboard hat than a hundred dollar bill), but today I saw at least six $400 Kinects sold within twenty minutes, at a single Best Buy in a single New York suburb. I can't extrapolate total sales without population density information, an economics degree, and a reason to care, but goddamn capitalism is huge.

squibbidy bop dop blam

My program at Tufts seems to directly impact and address my life issues. Whether this is because I see the issues as I study them or because I choose to study issues close to home, I have spent a semester learning about creativity and motivation, and why I can't seem to lasso either of them into my personal existential corral. If there is one take-home message I've gotten from the whole thing, it is this: creativity does not come from moments of spontaneous inspiration. Waiting around for that inspiration that will lead you to write your bestselling novel and quit your shitty job at the office will not actually do either.

Which is not to say that inspiration never strikes. But like other things that strike (bowling balls; lightning; labor unions), ideas are more likely to hit you in a land where they normally dwell (bowling alleys; open fields; sandwich shops). If you want to be savaged by a pack of grizzlies, you should probably go to a grizzly den. If you want creative inspiration, you should probably spend time working and thinking in the same domain where you want inspiration.

Actually, if you want to be savaged by a pack of grizzlies, you probably shouldn't go to a grizzly den. You should probably come over here, so I can make you a sandwich and talk about why you want to be savaged by a pack of grizzlies.

They might not even come in packs.

But what DOES come in packs (segue, bam) is Five-Hour Energy. Packs of 12. Of which I bought two, platoons armed and ready to push the beachheads of academia and keep me functional. As with everything else I bring into my life, these inevitably got combined with alcohol, and I can tell you there is nothing good about this union. Chaining 5-hour energies and whiskey is the only way I've ever managed a hangover that lasted for three full days. It's good to know I have talents.

The picture accompanying was drawn for MeghanTwitch, who picked "leopard" when I asked her to pick an animal because she was folding leopard print undies at the mall at the time. Meghan has the distinction of being the only human in the world who can play the little spoon for an entire night without putting the big spoon's arm to sleep. This one's a keeper, ladies and gents.

new things

I have poured grad school into the pot and turned on the burner. Within a few weeks hopefully there will be bubbling, and then I can pour it into a bowl and keep myself alive with it for a little while longer.

Grad school is apparently canned soup.

To switch metaphors and help me along the way, I've bought myself a sleek and sexy technological companion to strut around campus on my arm: an iPad. Like any good trophy wife, it constantly wants to go shopping and wears a lot of leather. The shopping is for apps to turn what is essentially a device meant for consumer-whoring and looking at kitties into a useful academic tool for data organization; the leather is so it will survive the inevitable bike accident that's going to happen as I bike the serious business commercial roads to and from Tufts.

I drew the accompanying drawing with my finger on the iPad. There is potential here, but I wish potential meant "a larger canvas size."

Aside from the academic, there's one major new situation: with Ashlyn moved to London I've fallen off the good ship Cohabitation into the salty, sultry waters of singledom. The singles pool? Does existing metaphor say it's a pool, not a sea? I guess it doesn't matter; kids pee in both. Which is gross.

I haven't had real experience with hunting, dating, and sexing outside the college bubble of "I'm going to stick my head in the sand and pretend STDs don't exist because I (foolishly) trust the people in my circles to be intelligent and take care of themselves." So now I need to do that thing where you're intelligent and responsible. Fortunately I seem to be getting better at that.

Fish oil, biking, rigorous academics, and whiskey. These four things are keeping me consistently happy, and consistent happiness is new for me. Things Are Going Well.

my carrots are rotten

A brand new bag of carrots, opened only to discover that slimy texture that tells you "this is not for eating." I'm sure they wouldn't hurt me, but when the only reason I'm eating is for my own entertainment, vegetables covered in suspicious mucus-y film are not what I ordered from culinary netflix.

I am making a game. A storytelling game. The king of the Beowulf-era mead hall is dead, and all would-be successors need to boast of their heroics to prove their worthiness to assume the crown. It's building itself into a hybrid of Munchkin and Once Upon a Time with a side of Liar's Dice, as whether you are mighty enough to do the things you say you've done is never really certain.

When this game is complete, I will launch a site where all the materials from all the games I've ever made will be downloadable. There will be The Jungle, Zombies vs Elves, Fishin' With Cthulhu, Time Machine Junkyard, Tiki God, and the as-yet untitled forthcoming creation. There will also be a Paypal button on the off chance that someone feels like buying me a sandwich, or perhaps a bottle of Snake Peel shower gel. Hopefully Ricky, Ashlyn, Tim, and I will keep making new things too.

and you make a neat gun for the people who are

...STILL ALIVE

and how. Alright, my little internet captchalogue. Here we are again.

As I type this, I am endlessly refreshing the login screen and/or server status of League of Legends. The talons of Maripongides, Lord of Video Games, remain lodged firmly in my tender mortal flesh. I spent the better part of a week in Canada doing A Different Spin shows (and being put up in the Hilton, which sounds swanky and pleasant until you realize that nothing is complimentary in classy establishments and you'd be better off with the Holiday Inn) and spent much of my downtime staring glassily into the screen of the Nintendo DS that I bought on an impulse to try Scribblenauts. This is why I'm bad at making friends.

F5. Server unavailable. F5. Server unavailable.

Going to try to swim back to this little boat of mine and turn it upright from its prolonged capsize of many moons. It's just hard to get leverage when you're neck deep in ocean.

the gallopy gallopy

As long as this gif is playing, I am laughing uncontrollably. This may be the funniest thing I've ever seen, and I want to know whether that makes me crazy.

holy mother of what

the fun.

First a note from real life, as a tip of the hat to the idea of "keeping a blog" as updates on one's actual doings: I am, in fact, going back to school in the fall. They have my money, I have a student ID number, and it's all very official and ivoried. In Celtic mysticism and the Tarot, fire is the element of inspiration, the start of the journey of an idea. I am now literally putting the fire behind me and moving on to the next stage. If the tarot is to be believed, I'm in for heavy rainstorms and will probably end up pregnant. Let's hope that's metaphorical.

And now, while I am on a watery note... a stream of consciousness. Pun! Pun! KaCHOW!

Tobie Bobbin had always suspected there was more to the toaster than met the eye. With two brothers dead in the war and his parents under a spectral, ever-present weepiness as a consequence, Tobie often found himself confined to the kitchen. The living room contained the uncomfortable silence of his parents' staring and sniffling, and his bedroom contained his brothers' ghosts, whose generally nasty dispositions had not been improved by traumatic, violent death. Tobie had tried to explain the situation to his parents after Compley, the eldest, had broken Tobie's model of the Empire State Building using ghostly telekinesis, but it only earned him five weeks of grief counseling and Compley's ghost ethereally peeing on him as he slept. This situation left the kitchen, with its mysterious toaster, as the main focus for Tobie Bobbin's hours and attentions. As the third day of continuous toaster contemplation drew to a close, Tobie was overcome with a sudden surge of understanding. He climbed inside, and played the saxophone So Hard.

The End. Suptacular, clopdandies. Which is a Shetland pony with a cravat. That is what a clopdandy is. Right now, on the other hand, is what bedtime is. Put that in your clop and dandy it.

image may be forthcoming, but I pray it isn't related.

It's been a while (a whole three posts) since I discussed gross things. So let me tell you about the trash can. The northeast has been flooded with a three-day deluge. Here in Brighton we have gotten at least ten inches of rain. I can say this confidently because there were at least ten inches of water in the garbage can that Tim and I just had to carry down our rickety back steps. Sharing the garbage can with the days-old water were two full bags of household refuse, which sent their olfactory essence brazenly out to explore the surrounding filth like tiny stink-particle Vikings. We walked it the half block to a storm drain and emptied the bilge water, wondering how anything could smell so bad.

If you took twelve pounds of shredded cabbage and packed it into the unclean anus of some sort of enormous hyena, starved that hyena for ten days before gorging it on a bowl of extra-meaty chili and prune purée, then caught the resulting rear-end explosion head-on, I suspect you might recreate that smell.

And that's the exciting news for the day. Also, Tufts didn't give me enough money, so I'm asking them for a deferment. We'll see how that goes.

yet another fantasy picture

Look, another D&D drawing!

rabbits from hats!

I just finished the only full-time work I've done since the beginning of the summer, working a week at a local arts center instructing YOUTHS! Or, as I have been known to say on camera for national television, YOOFS! I'm sure all my toys and equipment are now covered in a putrescent slime in which all manner of microtic biological transactions are taking place, a veritable United Nations of pediatric germs who are learning and advancing from this bounty of exchanged culture, in every sense of the word. I'm going to take a bottle of Lysol and empty it into the prop bag. Millions of voices will cry out in terror and be suddenly silenced.

In other news, I got into grad school. Depending on professional prospects and financial aid, I may be going to Tufts in the Fall. More on this story as it emerges. Also, yesterday I witnessed a goose fight, something I've never seen before. Three male geese were Having it Out with one another, roaring and hissing and honking and swelling up and tearing one another rather apart.

I have lost track of time and need to go make pancakes for a Circus Guild potluck. Time management, like so many other things, is not a skill I have.

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.

disgusting vocabulary, science, and dogs

A new scientific theory of observed human anatomy, based on personal experience while on a night-time run in late Boston January without the forethought of bringing along tissues:

the philtrum (the little ridge under your nose) acts as a remarkably effective and remarkably gross snot channel. In much the same fashion as some historians -and SCA members- postulate fullers on the blades of stabbing weapons to have functioned with regard to the lifeblood of a skewered foe, the ridge-and-dimple structure on our faces seems to flow nasal offerings right down into our mouth, where they can be conveniently spit out on the street. If that image didn't gross you out, hopefully the grammar of that last sentence did. But grossness aside, it gave me an excuse to use TWO vocabulary words: philtrum and fuller. Both things that people occasionally talk about but whose proper names are almost never known! The moral of the story is, bring a tissue when you go out in the cold.

And the title of the post tells me I should write something about dogs. They have wet noses. Which, now that I typed it and think about it, is remarkably relevant. Gross.

The Lagolier

Not to be confused with a "langolier" which is a Stephen King creature that never really made any sense but likes to harass people in airports. Homeland Security should probably look into that.

I wonder why so many of us start blogs and let them slip by the wayside. I suppose it's one more thing in the day (or week) that has to get done, but I think maintaining them is almost meditative. I know for me, whether I'm creating some slapdash oddity -the only type I'm capable of- or actually talking about my latest feats of sloth, it becomes self-reflective and I often find that I feel differently about something than I had originally thought. Or at least I am often surprised at what comes out when I open the bloggity-box.

That said, meta-blogging is NOT very interesting- posts of "I should post more" or "why do we maintain these or fail to maintain them" are apologetic and unproductive. I know that in four years when I go back and read this as a bit of grinning nostalgia, there will be things that make me slap my knee and say "I remember that chapter of life; that was fun!" I also know that this will not be one of them.

In closing:

Down under the plates of the hull, the anaerobic newt looked out curiously. It had slunk its way onto the reflective plates of the shuttle to bask luxuriously on the heated surface in the sun, and then had crept under the plate for its growth phase, having absorbed all the light and heat it would need to finish the metamorphosis to adulthood. The dark, narrow crevice was perfect- millennia of evolution told it that no predators would be likely to find it here. The newt's body had begun secreting its self-cocooning sticky silk, and with bonds like titanium it had woven itself a bed, held fast to the hull and hibernating peacefully through the final checks and double checks, the blast of lift rockets and the rush of flight. Now, a million miles above the surface of its world, the newt awoke and crept out. In the joy of newly strengthened legs and cramped muscles, it did an exploratory leap.

Cake Batter Geese

Harold forked another mouthful of bean salad past his teeth, and chewed it halfheartedly. It was cold, sour, and vinegary. When he was three, he had told his mother he wanted to be a cook, but thirty-two years later he seemed cursed to permanent and extreme culinary tragedy. Even after buying several recipe books and stocking his kitchen with the best ingredients an air conditioner repairman's salary could afford, he still bungled hopelessly anything more complicated than basting a microwave hot dog with a half pint of mustard. Bean salad. How do you manage to muck up a bean salad, he asked aloud. Harold tipped the barely-touched plate into the garbage and reached for a delivery pizza coupon. He found that had used them all.


Python oil! This excellent keepsake now proven to repel ticks and vermin, draw in wild financial fortunes, and make sure no one's making a squinty face in the family portrait. Keeps change in your pockets and God in your heart, yours for the low low price of $45.79 and the last whoop of the eighth inning. Don't be caught out in the dark without it, friend. Immigrants and carnivore heliotropes may lurk these parks. At the end of days, the signs will crackle and letters fade. PER TO & S OP will spell out the nightmare name of him that comes, and all will be paper or plastic.


"Here's the deal," said the devil, "I'm gonna tear your arms off and leave you to die bleeding and vomiting, flexing bloody stumps to move limbs that are only an agonized memory. Why? Because I'm the god-damned devil, and you shoulda took off running the second you saw me." He smiled, and snarled, and reached.

you must constrict additional pythons

Ashlyn and I started playing Starcraft over the weekend. It didn't last long, though it would be fun to play some multiplayer, even though that would mean buying the game again to be able to play on Battle.net. I just looked, and it can be downloaded for $15. Right under the download button, Blizzard has posted a quote from the New York Times: "The game has become practically the national sport for South Koreans under 40". I wonder how effective that is as an advertisement for North Americans who might be considering buying it. To me, it just brings back the memories of trying to play the game online and being handily buttrumbled by Korean hordes.

It's sort of funny to me that both this drawing and the last feature very unhappy looking people. This pixel-lass is Clariet, who is a very unhappy girl. She was supposed to be the heiress to a badass magical family, but has discovered that she has no magical spark whatsoever. Though she had tutors, textbooks, and a castle full of magical apparatuses to learn from, she can't magic her way past a graham cracker. Which is fine, since should one ever be presented with a graham cracker as an obstacle, there are probably more efficient ways of getting past than magic.

Summer has remembered that it's supposed to be hot. I wish it hadn't.

Break out the combover and black spidey suit

because it's EMO TIME. It's actually not emo time, but it IS stream of consciousness time, and this stream has a current like a hot cross bun. Which evokes an image of trying to swim through a river of piping hot currants, which I imagine would be agonizing. And sticky, and dark. You would emerge on the opposite bank discolored from sticky fruity napalm juice and your own burned flesh.

And with that, we take a cliche metaphor and an antiquated pastry, and turn it into an image suitable for nightmare. Somehow whenever I start typing into the blogobox this is the result.

I don't imagine many people still check our tiny cross-linked blogosphere of Vassar expatriates and Boston folks, especially now that we've all more or less stopped updating, but I'd love to know who is out there. Aside from the tigers. Tigers... I know you're out there, and I'm watching you.

So life update, because that's what blogs are for. I'm adjusting to cohabitation, living with Ashlyn living in the same room. It's a very different existence. Anyone who knows me at all probably suspects -correctly- that I do some fairly strange things when I'm alone. Now, "strange" does not mean "twisted and obscene," just odd little irrational nonsense. The state of "being alone" is something that is gone now, and that fact has changed my existence profoundly. One of the side effects has been that this blog has fallen by the wayside. It's not a bad thing, and I can certainly still find ways to be alone, but it is a big change for me.

I've got ten million (actually around eight) projects that I'm working on, everything from a young adult fantasy romp in the style of the Lioness Quartet, to a wordless solo street performance routine that would ideally, theoretically, allow me to travel to foreign countries where my vocabulary consists of "thank you" "bathroom?"and "please remove the handcuffs, I did not kill those people" ("Kérjük, vegye ki a bilincs, nem én öltem meg azokat az embereket" in Hungarian, according to Google). I will try to use this blog to post progress on these projects, as a way of forcing myself to work on them. Comments, encouragement, and harassment are all highly encouraged.

The lad on the right is named Oswald. He is a doctor's assistant who had the grave (har har) misfortune of digging up an infamous thief while on a routine search for cadavers in the name of medical science. He tried on one of the thief's perfectly preserved gloves out of curiosity, and has discovered that it has a mind of its own, often leading him to pilfer things when he's not looking, and filling his mind with all sorts of burglarly knowledge. What's more, no matter how he tries, he has found that the thing is utterly impossible to take off. Oswald was originally one of the illegitimate children hatched by myself and Sally Slade, but he's had a major overhaul since then. Next up you will meet Clariet.

llamaFace

When they were building the tree house, Tyler's dad always told him he used too many nails to hold each piece of wood in place, and that wood was a lot stronger than he gave it credit for. As the monsters outside his house howled in rage and slammed their bodies against his boarded-up windows, Tyler prayed that his dad had been right.

"Here's the deal" said the devil, "I'm going to give you this knife and this spear. Then I'm going to put you into a one room studio apartment plus kitchenette with a ravenous bear. For every ten seconds you stay alive, I'll give you 100 grams of gold (about $4000). Once the bear kills you, I'll bring you back to life and give you the money, but you and I will both treasure forever the memory of a bear mauling you to death. Of course, if you somehow manage to kill the bear instead, the gold keeps on coming, and you are set for life."

Don't fuck with me now man, I am Ahab!

A while ago in one of those "lets talk about game development and virtual worlds" conversations I have with other people and myself every now and then, I proposed that if someone ever succeeded in making an MMO game that managed to draw in the facebook and bejewelled casual webophile crowd, that person would rule the world. Apparently Sony Online Entertainment is trying to do it. They've just come out with a game, creatively entitled "Free Realms" where you can make a character straight out of a Lisa Frank sticker sheet and run around playing mini-games, beating monsters, and questioning your personal life decisions. I've only played it for about 20 minutes, but so far I've trained as a Brawler, doing standard MMO button mashing to beat up hobgoblins, and trained as a cook, playing a hybrid Bejewelled/Cooking Mama set of silliness to create stews and porridges. It apparently has video integration with youtube, and has a real-life trading card game that has in-game benefits and vice versa on top of all the pet-training and go-kart racing and ninja roleplaying you could ever imagine, so all the little boys and girls can get all their favorite hobbies amalgamated into one game. Basically I think it's interesting that someone is making a super-casual MMO game, and blurring even further the line between "gamer" and "kid who spends all his time online looking at facebook". Technology is weird, and it's doing strange things to the chilluns.

The attached image is the character I made to explore this online debacle- there is absolutely no way to make a dignified avatar in this universe, so I opted to shoot the moon. I'm trying to pretend I'm just dabbling in the game as an observer watching an interesting development in the sociological phenomenon of Online Worlds... but it's entirely possible that I just want pixie wings.

hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiey hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiry hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiety hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosirey hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery

gentlemens

Holy wow, what the damn. Cheese and crackers.


This is probably one of those videos that everyone but me saw two years ago. I found it linked as a "similar video" when I clicked the A Different Spin youtube account. I WISH we were similar to these madmen. If you like, check out the user's other videos, he has a lot more of the same.

Throw down, Moses. Way down in Egypt land.

Photoshop photoshop ooh laaa la photoshop, photoshop!

Ba doom doom doom doooooom. The computer and I continue to improve our relationship, though I think professional counseling could speed the process along. We've worked out the "pressure-sensitive tablet pen" issue and are now working on "starting up when I goddamn tell you to."

Last night as we were driving back from Spin Jam we observed a license plate, "637 EGO." Someone suggested that perhaps this gentleman (or lady) had intended to spell Eggo™(see that alt-key combination there? Windows and I are high-fiving.) to brag about how many instant waffles (s)he has consumed over the course of a lifespan. But thinking about it further, we realized that 637 is actually not that impressive a waffle body count, as far as lifetime achievements go. I've only been around 24 years and I think for most of my K-12 years I ate Eggo™ waffles at least once a week, and at least two at a time. All those waffles add up. We do a lot of insignificant things, and we build up some pretty impressive numbers in our lives, if anyone bothered to take note. As Ricky pointed out, I wish the user interface of life had a statistics-tracking feature that let us see exactly how many pine cones we've kicked, dandelions we've blown, and foreign objects we've accidentally hit ourselves in the eye with. Oh no here comes the dangling preposition wagon to take me away to grammar jail get in the grammar foxholes and fetch me a grammar bazooka colonel. Grammar thank you.

a speedboat peels away

Just underfoot, there were dozens and dozens of pancakes. As field day continued, the children gleefully romped through relays and races and water breaks and orange slices. The subterranean pancakes had minimal effect on the proceedings; maybe the displacement of dirt caused by one particular flapjack made Tommy Chumbles lose the three-legged race, or maybe it didn't. It was irrelevant. To Principal Hob, who had spent four dark and silent hours the night before digging up the field, sowing the unassuming breakfast cakes under the topsoil, and replanting the entire field of grass in time for the 7 am bus arrivals, it was the most life-affirming sight imaginable. Because Principal Hob was absolutely, terrifyingly insane.

Horris stands on the roof, looks down, and gives the hushed crowds below a smile. Across the street, a dozen unique and deadly vipers are loaded into the cannon and fired. Horris straps nine pounds of bleeding raw ham onto his bandolier and leaps roaring into the twelve-story high emptiness. Horris and the reptiles clash high above the city streets and begin their deadly dance. The ham, the snakes, and Horris's mismatched limbs and tube socks intertwine and begin choking one another. Blood is drawn and bodies are broken. They plummet through space, none of them able to breathe, and slam into the pavement. The ball of man and meat and serpent explodes, and Horris's gore-drenched cravat lands squarely at the stockbroker's feet.

"Here's the deal:" said the devil, "you tell me how many people you're going to kill. I'll give you two hours to do it, and at the end I'll give you ten thousand dollars for each person. Plus if you manage to kill as many as you said you would, I'll rewind time, set the whole thing to rights. Nobody's dead, nobody remembers you did anything wrong, and you keep the cash. But if you DON'T reach your quota, you don't get the money and you don't get the reset. Sound fair?"

deserting

I got a new computer. It is a Windows machine. I'm still getting used to it, and I suspect I'll keep getting used to it for a good long while. It feels rather completely different from the old laptop, and I keep making typing mistakes, but I'm sure it will come to feel like home. As soon as I can wrangle something with which to make graphics, I will do so.

I killed the first zombie.

I might have saved the world. Or I might have just killed a man. Either way I want to write this fast because something may be coming. I was driving to go pick up an air mattress for the trip this weekend and I swear I saw the first zombie. A man shambling toward the gas station with his neck at a broken angle, dragging one leg and foaming at the mouth. He was headed for the minivan parked at the far pump. I slowed the car down to see what was wrong with the guy, and he turned his head around and sniffed for a second. His eyes were black, with some kind of red skin irritation all around them. He was moving toward the van, and the van had kids in it.

I know zombies aren't real. But I know that if they were real, they'd look like this guy, and if he bit even one person it would be over. It would spread like it does in all the movies, and we would just have to find out whether this one has a happy ending where only 99% of the population dies, or if this is it. I can't say whether what I did was sane. I just know that I would rather risk my own insanity and incarceration than risk the lives of every person in the western hemisphere.

I killed him. I stopped my car in the middle of the lane and I grabbed a golf club from my bag in the trunk. I ran into the gas station lot and while the two other people standing by the pumps started to scream, I bashed the zombie's head in. I caved in his skull, and I scattered bits of zombie brain all over the club, the pavement, my face. I didn't get any in my eyes. I was careful.

The people were screaming, and I could see the guy in the gas station looking out at me and dialing something on his phone. I ran back to the car, covered the license plate with my shirt, closed the trunk on it, and drove home. I checked the news for any stories that sounded like a zombie infection, but nothing has come up. Whether it was a virus or black magic that made the first zombie, I think I stopped it.

I don't know what to do, and I don't know how long I have until the police find me and put me away for murder. Maybe they won't. I don't know how it works, or how many cameras or how many witnesses there were. Obviously putting this online might not be the best idea, but I want you all to know what happened if I disappear, and I want you all to be on the lookout in case the one I got wasn't the first, or wasn't the last.

I killed the first zombie. I might have saved us all. I might never sleep well again.