The Brains are mostly at Armadillicon, with the exception of Morgan who is home minding the store. This makes it difficult to keep up with posting. So I thought I’d post a link to this (to me) hysterical comic. I hesitated to do so because by admitting to finding this really really funny, I am revealing a serious and pretty profound understanding of table top RPGs. In particular, to D&D. I would rather the world not know certain things about my past. Just as certain famous women would prefer that certain photographs never surface, some of us would prefer that certain aspects of of our secretly geeky past remain…obscure.

If you have not played tabletop RPGs, skip this.

If you don’t have a certain fondness for LoTR, skip this.

If you have ever, ever been a DM, well, this guy is pretty funny.

Though I don’t have adorable kitty pictures this week, (not that I couldn’t have adorable kitty pictures at the drop of a hat, mind you) I do have a collection of random stuff that’s been floating in the ether at Casa Spector. (I know. I should really clean the freaking ether up here.) 

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I had to give up drinking coffee a couple of years ago.  For the most part, I was successful at this, though I have been known to poach coffee from The Dude at Saturday breakfast.  (Saturday breakfast is a tradition Sven Knudson started about twenty years ago.  A fluctuating group of malcontents show up at various restaurants to consume vast quantities of food – and to bitch.) 

Anyway, I met a friend at Starbucks the other day.  I haven’t been in Starbucks since I quit drinking coffee.  Not unlike the alcoholic who should stay away from bars, I found just being in a place so redolent of brewing Sweet Nectar of the Gods was more of a temptation than I could stand for the first year or so. 

My friend arrives and gets an iced coffee.  Being the shameless mooch I am, I ask if I can have a sip of her enticing cold beverage.  (Mmmmm, caffeine.)  She graciously obliged.   

I take a sip. And then I have that moment we’ve all had, (girls more so than guys I suspect) the, “Do I spit or swallow?” dilemma.  Because what I have in my mouth is not Sweet Nectar of the Gods, but rather Satan’s Piss.   

You know: The Devil’s Urine.  Beelzebub’s tee tee.  Lucifer’s pee.  Mephistopheles’s piddle.   This stuff is so foul I’m pretty sure they must have an EPA permit to sell it. 

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When I was a kid in elementary school, I used to get in trouble for reading. It seems absurd. But when I was ten, I could read with utter concentration. I could remain immersed in Bullfinch’s Mythology when the television was on and not know that Samantha was twinkling her nose at people. If Alex and the Black Stallion had been separated and Alex had lost his memory, I never knew my mother was calling for me. After I raced through whatever work we were doing in class and opened At the Back of the North Wind, I was oblivious to the teacher calling our attention and starting the next lesson. So Mr. Fish, my fourth grade teacher, used to take my library book from me and put it on the chalk rail of the blackboard, close to the door. I could pick it up at the end of the day. Once my book had been confiscated, I was forced to fall back on drawing horses, which probably says way too much about what kind of girl I was.

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Just in case anybody here has missed it, ‘Fido’ will be premiering this weekend. It’s about a time after the infestation, when zombies have supposedly been domesticated. Yeah, we all know how well that plan will turn out….

Click the pic to be transported to the Quicktime preview:

It would appear that the makers of this movie have seen ‘Shaun of the Dead’. Looks like it might be good ‘n funny.

My Fellow Americans,

It is with a great deal of humility that I carry out my patriotic duty to link to this post by Ken Houghton at Marginal Utility:

My Unity Party Ticket

Only once in several generations does an idea so right, so mind-bendingly appropriate, appear.

Ken’s post was an inspired response to Erin’s post at the Handbook:

If You Elect Me As The Next President Of The United States Of America

I’ll be setting up a PayPal account soon to accept donations, and a MySpace page to deal with the expected surge in grass-roots activism.

I’m sure that Erin can easily (oh, so very easily) be persuaded to release exclusive nude campaign pics to our supporters.

Thanking You in Advance for Your Money,

Vice-President Harper

Laura and I are travelling today to N’York,N’York for the Nebula Awards Weekend and following big time fun with our old stomping grounds. Hope we don’t get mugged.

Though Laura has been back several times, I haven’t been back since before 9/11 and I expect a little cognitive dissonance, especially as the Nebula venue is down in the Financial district.

I’m sure we’ll be online but I’ve already placed a few posts in the queue, waiting for their itty-bitty nanobot timers to go off and propagate themselves across your screens.

I’ll also try and post pictures of all the glitteratti.

“I used to be monophemus but now I’m polyphemus!”

This is the Shack that Jack Built.
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I interview David Thompson, David Barr Kirtley, Lisa Moore (not shown), Sharon Mock, and Zach Jarvis and more. Eight people in a hotel room. No video. Use your imagination.

We should’ve take a group shot but then the mystery would be diminished.

I’m travelling today.  Got up early and dropped Noble Girl off for her high school math classes before driving to beautiful and scenic Portales, New Mexico, home of Eastern New Mexico University, to attend the 31rst Jack Williamson Lectureship.

The Lectureship was created when Jack retired from the university but this is the first one that he hasn’t attended and, as Connie Willis said (as the first speaker) we remeber the face the smile the voice but much is lost.  I’m not going to repeat what was said earlier but  here are links to previous posts about Jack:

 Memorial Service

A Sky Thick With Stars

And these are just the novels 

I’m staying the night and tomorrow, along with Walter Jon Williams, Ed Bryant, Connie Willis, Rick Hauptman, and others, I’m caravanning out to the ranch, the homestead where Jack was raised, to see the shack where Jack wrote his first stories.

When Jack sold his first story, Isaac Asimov was eight years old.  I want to touch that shack.  I’m a rationalist but if there was any magic in the world, if we can absorb any bit of another’s talent and imagination, then I want his.

And even without touching his shack I can still pick up his work.

Thanks, Jack.

I have had enough of The Real World. The Real World is suffused with Ugliness.

I want beauty. I want magic.

So I wish that Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, weren’t so far away from where I’m sitting right now.  I saw genuine, beautiful magic there.

It was in October 2005 at a place called the Image Theatre.

The Image Theatre is a “Black Light Theatre.” Black Light Theatre combines illusion, dance, pantomime, comedy, and eroticism in a mixture found only in Prague. Some have compared it to Cirque du Soleil — but I found both shows (“Black Box” and “Cabinet“) that Barb and I saw at the Image to be far more earthy and intimate than the Cirque shows I’ve seen.

Cirque du Soleil seems to say, “These are things beyond your experience that you could never do.” But Black Light Theatre says, “This experience is yours. This magic depends on you.”

Besides, the Czech Republic has other things to attract me as well. After four centuries of religious oppression under the Hapsburgs and four decades of secular oppression under the Communists (not to mention the horrors of the Nazi occupation), the Czechs have pretty much had it with authoritarian jerks of all stripes. They clearly disapprove of any people who shoot, blow up, torture, or otherwise hassle any other people.

After all, such bullying behavior stymies not only life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also art, literature, science, sex, food, and beer – all areas in which the citizens of the Czech Republic strive for excellence.

I mean, damn. Let’s go.

And I’m telling you:  That girl in the white leotard at the Image Theatre really was flying.

Interview with Cory Doctorow. Transformative experiences and some really cool Young Adult novels.

I interview James D. Macdonald and Debra Doyle about the mysterious radioactive spider origins of the Viable Paradise Writers Workshop.

When I was younger (so much younger than today) I guess I could have attended the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. It started at Clarion College (now Clarion University) back in 1968. I didn’t start trying to write until 1974, so it was around, first there in Pennsylvania, then Michigan, and now, this year, at UCSD in San Diego (Surf’s UP!)

Oddly enough, I wasn’t even aware of it until after I’d sold three or four stories and I had the feeling, then, that I was SO beyond all that. And that’s too bad.

I probably could have gone. My wife, Laura J. Mixon, went in ’81. Like many who’ve gone through that particular trial by fire, she still has many of the friends from back then (including our own Mad Robbins and frequent commenter, Terry Boren.) Laura managed to go because she’d already quit her engineering job to go into the Peace Corp when she was accepted. She managed to get her intake-date postponed with Peace Corp and was able to take that six weeks.

Six weeks. This, of all the barriers, has got to be the hardest thing about going to Clarion. Six weeks away from your job, away from your family, away from your friends. And it’s probably the best thing about Clarion. Six weeks! Six weeks to work on your craft, to steep yourself in it. Six weeks.

I wish I’d gone.

The deadline to apply to Clarion has passed (for this year.) But you still have two months to apply to Viable Paradise (June 15th.) Viable paradise is only One Week. This is almost an order of magnitude easier to manage. One can leave one’s job for a week without losing it. (They call it vacation.) One can leave one’s family for that amount of time without too high a chance of divorce (though, like Clarion, this has happened.)

I did a little audio promo for VP for Mur Lafferty to play over at her writing podcast, I Should Be Writing. It’s only 58 seconds (at the bottom of this post.) I also do the Podible Paradise podcast I’ve mentioned before which interviews former students and instructors. If you are someone who has always wanted to go to Clarion but couldn’t take that month and a half, consider Viable Paradise on beautiful Martha’s Vineyard island. This year it’s held September 30th to October 6th.

One week.

Just a quick question for the folks here. One of the regulars on KVR has posted asking if there are any good on-line groups where he can work on a fantasy story/novel.

He’s late teens, early twenties, German, though writes as if English is his native tongue. Is a bit of a rowdy punk. I like him.

This would be a first time for him to take a chop at writing fantasy, though he says he’s been plotting and mapping out his world for some years.

Alternatively, if y’all know of any good German writing groups or cons I could point him at, where he might meet peers, that would be cool.

Any thoughts?