... Wow...

It's happened. They've finally done it.

It's strange, because I was lying awake wondering about this a few nights ago. Because, naturally, it's the sort of thing I lie awake thinking about.

And today, Slashdot brought this gem up.

Scientists have finally filmed a live giant squid in the wild.

So... yeah...

Long week. Tired.

So eventually I need to write about what a strange country Salt Lake City is. And yes, it is a different country.

I have some comics to read and a samurai movie to watch. And then I'm going to sleep.

Bullet... Dodged!

Heard from my Dad today. My brother and his family are fine for now. His house suffered no damage from Rita, and no flooding in his area as of yet. They still have power (!) and his cell phone is still working (!!), which is how he contacted my parents.

So, phew. What a relief. Thanks for all the prayers/thoughts/animal sacrifices.

I hope my brother's case is the norm for most of the folks down there.

Hurricane Rita. Uhoh.

I just found out my older brother Dean and his six kids are trapped in Houston and they can't get out. I thought they were already safe. They've boarded up the house and are going to have to wait it out. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depends on how you look at it, his wife is in Boise, ID right now.

Traffic is not moving, the gas stations are empty, and cars are just running out of gas on the highway. People are just turning around and heading back home. He decided not to risk running out of gas in a minivan with six kids in it.

Positives: They live on the higher end of town, so hopefully flooding shouldn't affect them as much. Also, Houston isn't New Orleans: no levee.

So if you could pray to whatever deity you worship on behalf of my brother and his kids, I'd appreciate it.

The really scary part is knowing that we won't hear from him for days to know if he's okay. Here's hoping we've learned something from Katrina.

Geez.

Sick.

I'm sick.

Don't talk to me.

Don't look at me! Don't ever look at me!

With any luck, I'll be too sick to work tomorrow morning.

Good stuff.

Pretty interesting little story.

I was raised in the country, and I'm living in the big city now.

Helpful hint: the country is better.

Not to knock cities, I've lived in several all over the country. But city life is terrible.

Here's why: Fireflies.

Where I grew up, every summer our yard would be full of fireflies. If you could imagine the most magical place on Earth, that place would have to be our front yard.

Fireflies don't live West of Kansas. They also don't tend to hang out in cities.

If you've got fireflies where you live, I truly and wholeheartedly envy you.

Don't Do This.

Don't do this. Just don't. Here's the recipe for a perfectly apocalyptic Friday night. This will do strange things to your mind.

10pm-12pm - Watch the news, check some news sites, fill your head with imagery of the New Orleans Katrina disaster.
12-1am - Read some issues of Robert Kirkham's zombie comic "The Walking Dead."
1am - 3am - Sit down and watch George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead."
3am - 4:30am - Read some more "Walking Dead" issues, and stare at the Zombie Infection Simulator for a while.
4:30am - 5:30am - Swallow the fact that you're not prepared for a disaster of any kind, hurricane, zombie, or otherwise.

Zombie movies are a good thing. In between all the silly special effects and goofy extras wandering around with bad makeup, they provide a public service: to tell you that sometimes bad stuff happens, and that if something major goes down, you might be one of those victims. You could be one of those poor folks trapped at the Superdome.

Don't be complacent. Do something. Prepare yourself. Take some first aid classes. Store some food up. Learn how to get clean drinking water. Do you know how to build a fire? Read up on some survival techniques, and try them out. Do you have an emergency kit, something that will keep you alive for 3 or 4 days? Go out to the shooting range, at least until you feel comfortable holding a gun.

Don't just change channels and see what's on the WB.

No one's going to accuse you of being a right-wing militant. Not after this week. It behooves you to prepare yourself, and not be a victim. The idea is that you learn these things and hope you never need to use them.

What if it's your city next time?

Me loves the Interweb.

And this is one of the reasons why:

Flying Spaghetti Monster

I'm undecided on the whole Intelligent Design thing. I haven't researched it enough to make an informed opinion.

Either way, this was (to me) very amusing.

Information Overload

I need to go on a diet. My information intake is tremendous. It hit me today that I'm overdoing it. I check tons of newsites each day. I'm on nearly a dozen mailing lists. My cell phone rings incessantly.

What this adds up to, is that I get home from work, and I get nothing done. Or at least, not as much as I could/should.

My name is Badger, and I'm an information junkie.

I've seriously got to trim the fat. Just checking my news site list takes me a couple of hours a night. Burning through my inbox is a neverending chore, I almost don't want to check it.

What I need to do now, is go through my information sources and ruthlessly cut them out of my life. My delicious, wonderful info sources.

Too much interesting content. Too much going on. Too much to keep tabs on.

Anyone out there have any good advice on where to start?

I'm not much on alarmism...

But check this out. I haven't done much blogging on the economic side of things, as I'm completely unqualified for that sort of thing. However, I consider myself fairly proficient at basic math, like addition and subtraction.

So follow my math here:

  Housing bubble will possibly burst next spring

  Oil prices continue to rise (Thanks Katrina!)

  Unsecured consumer debt is at an all-time high

+ Banks to double the minimum payments on credit cards in Oct.

------------------------------------------------------
  A Really Ugly Situation

See? I'm not too terrible at math. You just gotta know when to carry the twelve.

I can't forecast the markets, I'm just a normal joe, but it's a bit worrisome.

My advice is: get your stuff in order. I'm getting an ugly vibe, and I've been my luckiest when following my nose. Build up some savings. Make some preparations. I don't mean digging out an underground bunker and hoarding consumables, but expect some serious economic distress to come down within the year. If you're overextended in your spending, make some changes. If your investments are starting to smell funny, think about moving them into a more secure vehicle.

No one's paying me to say this, I have absolutely no incentive to share this stuff.

Preparing for the worst can't hurt. I've got 10 bucks that says it's gonna get ugly in about 6 months.

Blogger hacks are keen.

Google is such a force for evil. My comments are now poppable. It's keen.

If you've ever liked Vincent Price...

Go rent The Last Man on Earth.

Mr. Price survives a worldwide plague that wipes out the human race and turns them into zombies/vampires. His old friends and dead wife stumble to his door at sundown, calling his name: "Morgan... Come out... Come out!" All that's left for the last man on earth is to turn up his record player, and hope the mirrors and garlic he's hung around his boarded-up house hold out.

Bleak at best, the film is less optimistic about the fate of us puny humans than 28 Days Later, and has an ending that tastes like the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

Good stuff. While some of the dialogue is weak, and the science is hokey ("Perhaps that bite from that vampire bat has made me immune to this plague!") the mood is wonderfully apocalyptic.

It's like watching Night of the Living Dead, only with less chicks screeching and freaking out.

Sidenote: This is supposedly an adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel "I Am Legend." Anyone read it? Any good?

Bye.

Woo!

Yay! SortaRunnerGuy has decided to post semi-regularly!

Yet another innocent victim of the blog meme.

The great part is, whether you like it or not, he's smarter than you. It sucks. Sucks big time.

http://halfamonth.blogspot.com/

Stop what you're doing,

and read this Right Now.

That is, if you read comics, write comics, draw comics, or have ever been remotely interested in comics and their distribution.

The Escapist

One more thing. Thought that gaming and writing were mutually exclusive talents?

Maybe you were wrong.

My new favorite site:

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/watch-en.htm

I don't know about you, but I could watch this stuff all day.

In other news? My daughter has been swimming more than walking lately.

Finished Transmetropolitan. Warren Ellis is a whacked, whacked man.

Went to the comic shop today. It was a mixed experience. I got League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 1. They were flooded (burst pipe) earlier this week, so all their new stuff on the shelves was destroyed. In some ways it was an improvement.

Do yourself a favor and look over these essays on self-publishing by Dave Sim:

http://www.amptoons.com/howto/sim/index.html#self

Good day to you.

INEXCUSABLE

Yeah, I know. It's been like two weeks without a post.

Busy, what can I say? I'm reading five books at once, I flew out to Salt Lake City for a few days, I'm running myself ragged.

Hey, at least I'm doing better than William Gibson on the blogging.

Lazy, lazy William Gibson.

Actually, he's probably realized how fruitless a pursuit blogging is, and how it's preventing him from his real endeavor: making lots and lots of money.

Which is something else I've been busy at for the last few days: exterminating distractions.

There a series of rituals I go through when I get home from work. How many of them are necessary? None of them, except for kissing my wife and daughter. So I've been methodically determining what these unnecessary tics I fall victim to in my spare time are, and eliminating them. Ruthlessly. With the intention of freeing up more time to write. We'll see if I succeed.

I haven't been to the comic store in a long while, and I'm itching to go back.
Here's my dilemma:

I know there's good stuff in there somewhere, but invariably I pass through the door, and am immediately assaulted by body odor, bad rap music, and insulting comic book covers. I grab a couple titles from creative talents that I hold dear, and run for the door without uttering a word.

Know what? Every time I leave the comic store, I leave depressed. Seriously and crushingly maudlin.

So I don't want to go back the next week. Or the next. Only after a month or two do I forget the major bummer I suffered from the last visit.

I've had a much better experience doing my shopping on eBay and Amazon. My experiences online are consistently composed of the following:
I choose my trade paperback.
I purchase it.
It comes in the mail.
I read it.
I'm very happy.

I'm not saying anything new here, and for that I apologize. But I miss the comic store. I miss getting my socks blown off by covers that begged for my purchase. I miss stumbling onto amazing fringe material that everyone else had overlooked. I miss not being offended.

I don't have any solutions. Maybe there aren't enough people in my demographic to sustain a store oriented towards a more mature clientele.

But for now, it sure as hell feels like going to ToysRUs to buy condoms.

Stranger and stranger

I'm not going to pretend to have any kind of understanding of how things are in Great Britain right now. I'm trying to be empathetic. I can only offer condolences to those who lost loved ones and those who are in pain. The world is full of evil people. Should we go get them? Absolutely. There's nothing more I can say about it. Britain is tough (tougher than the US, I daresay), and I have no doubt they'll hang in there.

Very strange, since I just read V for Vendetta a couple days ago. A mere coincidence, if you believe in that sort of thing. There's no question, V for Vendetta presents a worst-case scenario of knee-jerk reactionism to disaster. But it's not a terrible stretch of imagination to picture a jump to fascism after the series of attacks there.

We're already well on our way here in the States. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a babbling Michael Moore supporter, I'm not waving the flag while screaming for Bush to leave office. But we're getting locked down here in the US. There aren't marches in the streets, or armbands, or book burnings.

But you can't deny the presence of racial profiling. Gitmo looks like a concentration camp. In a few months I'll be carrying a national ID card.

I didn't plan on talking about this when I got up this morning.

Go get a copy of the V for Vendetta trade paperback by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, for the love of Mike. Hit Amazon or eBay or some other publicly traded dot-com survivor.

Today of all days, read V for Vendetta.

England Prevails.

Posts like the one below:

Give me the shakes. We're reaching a magnificent point in civilization.

We've reached the point where we have a choice. We can turn to the media companys and softly mutter:

"We don't need you."

Content is accessible and distributable on an individual basis. The individual is rewarded for his/her efforts directly, no middleman. No commercials. No hype machine. Notoriety based solely on merit.

Firefly is succeeding -despite- what the Fox executives wanted. Media is driven now by the consumer, instead of what a room full of wealthy people decide to shove down our throats.

I'm just shaking my head here. Now to destroy the television companies... Sorry to my television friends.

It's all very William-Gibson.

I'm going to say that again:

"We don't need you."

We Are Not Evil

Finally, someone is getting the right idea:

http://magnatune.com/

Downloads are donation based, and the artist gets 50% of the cut. Stream for free, download for donation.

Stop feeding the monster.

Starve a music exec.