Good morning, existential malaise.

A bee flew down my shirt and stung me, which means I'm gonna drink a saison. That's the proper treatment, yes?

Guess I gotta learn to draw mecha shit so I can draw gratuitously dramatic fan art of @dapperdinobot.bsky.social's new book about a kickass lady with a sword, a dog, and a bigass clockpunk robot.

Meanwhile, I'm tinkering away with my manuscript to THE CATAPHRACT ERRANT, sequel to THE CATAPHRACT OATH. Hoping to release it by the end of the year! ... if I can write a snappy back cover blurb, that is. This may take a bit.

The thing that baffles me most about HP fandom is how many people glommed onto Draco, a character consistently portrayed as a bully loser fascist, and decided "yes he is a misunderstood leather pants bad boy." (Then again, I'm also not a fan of the Spike/Buffy ship, among other things ... )

Finished reading @annaleen.bsky.social's Automatic Noodle last night. It's fun and cozy and queer as all get out, but honestly the biggest praise I have for it is that it made me want to get hand-made noodles.

Don't you dare put that baby in pelican mouth.

I have taken the Tylenol that was in the medicine cabinet and which they think probably is the reason you like trains forgive me but that’s bullshit you got autism from your dad

Meanwhile, I may have just hammered out about 1000 words of backstory for a character in an RPG I may be joining soonish. Or, as the saying goes, "back on my bullshit." #letmetellyouaboutmycharacter

What I'm wearing to the Rapture:

What video game do you consider perfect?

What movie do you consider perfect?

Drop some Snakes:

There are always two: the Chicken of Darkness, and the Chicken of Light.

I miss when AI meant adobe illustrator Btw I also hate adobe illustrator

Meanwhile, I'm going down the rabbit hole of watching Japan travel guides on Youtube, as I'm giving vague consideration to doing a big vacation there next September. Problem is, Kayak dot com doesn't go that far out when it comes to comparing flight prices/times/etc. Harrumph.

Light in a dark time.

Oh hey, it's Talk Like a Pirate Day, isn't it? Well then. *clears throat* "Lars Ulrich is a litigious jerk."

👀Uh...cheers? #Primates

Inside you are two wolves

Not that I am in any position of any importance, but I like to think that I'm self aware enough to start asking questions if a woman with an Eastern European accent who's waaay out of my league starts chatting me up over drinks. No, this is not a challenge for the femme fatales out there. Honest.

Grave robbing just doesn't provide the charge of excitement it used to. I blame woke.

So, just finished Joe Ambercrombie's The Devils, and it was just as good as people tell you it is. I also want to be completely unfair and throw this book at various people while yelling "Now -this- is how you do dark comedy that's actually funny!"

If you see this, quote with the energy you bring to bluesky.

So, my book doesn't have dragons per-se. Though there was once a whole mess of enormous creatures labeled Behemoths, which necessitated the construction of giant alchemy powered mecha to fight them. As you do. They're extinct now and totally won't show up in a later book. Honest.

Got a flu shot and this year's Covid booster, which SHOULDN'T be an act of political spite, but here we are. I mean, I would've gotten them anyway, but a spiteful "fuck you, RFK Jr" is a bonus, I guess?

My mom says my dog needs a job.

Everything is bad, but books are good. Get a book. Read the book. Cherish the book. Finish the book. Tell your friends about the book, and leave a review of the book. Hold the book close. Listen to what it tells you. Do as it commands. Place it on the dread altar and let it guide your every choice.

Gonna run #CourtofBlades (a swashbuckling riff on #BladesintheDark) this afternoon! "Two Houses, Both Alike in Indignity" is a goofy one-shot I've run a couple of times before, but my current TTRPG group's never played it, so now I get to show them a new system & reuse stuff I've already prepped.

Thinking about how if I had a time machine, wiping the Something Awful servers before the website could ever launch would be high on my list of priorities.

I just learned there's a new Dan Brown novel out. I've got enough to do already than to seek out something to specifically hate-read, but ...

So I'm listening to an @ouropinions.bsky.social podcast episode about AI, and they keep mentioning Sam Altman, who for whatever reason I keep getting conflated with Sam Bankman-Fried and thinking "wait, isn't he in jail?" Wishful thinking, I guess.

wild that MP3 is an audio file, MP4 is a video file, but MP5 is a submachine gun. Digimon-ass evolution line.

So, Squid Game, but Chanbara? I dig it.

So, with everyone talking about Silksong, I'm ... vaguely pondering picking up Hollow Knight? As if my backlog isn't big enough already. Though Bloodstained remains my favorite Metroidvania on account of the protagonist being a tattooed goth girl, as well as the haunted monster castle aesthetic.

Getting to the part of the year where sunrise comes later and later. Which, considering I'm a morning person who's used to waking up with the sunrise, is ... annoying. Just means that before long I'll have to get to work before there's any sunlight and that's just a miserable feeling.

"about 5-10% of the most popular posts on Bluesky — 1,000 likes or more — are actually just cartoon erotica" I believe in us. We can raise this percentage. We can do better. C'mon Bluesky! The future is in our hands

Alright, getting the hang of the MGS3 remaster. And there's a lot to unpack here. Like, Snake is a filthy, foul-smelling wilderness survival expert who doesn't know how to talk to women, and I probably identified with him entirely too much when this game came out twenty years ago. Oof.

Meanwhile, just started playing the #MetalGearSolid3 remake. And, uh. I'm out of practice. Trying a new control scheme likely doesn't help, either. But the biggest thing is that I've forgotten how LONG Kojima cutscenes are.

There are varying levels of relics. There's pieces of a saint-- but also, anything a saint touched can be a relic. So this means, somewhere out there, there's a relic computer of St. Carlo. Or even a relic Nintendo.

In other news, I'm about 25 percent into The Devils, by Joe Ambercrombie, and dang it's good. It's basically The Suicide Squad (but like the James Gunn version) in the 14th Century. Messy and ultraviolent, but also surprisingly funny (in a black comedy sort of way).

"And in your time of need he will return, the técnico under the mountain, to restore the land to peace and to deliver justice to those who do wrong."

I sure know a lot about star wars for someone who doesn't even really like star wars

It's always exciting when someone publishes a breakthrough in a cutting-edge discipline.

A few days late for Labor Day, but ...

Morning

Meanwhile, it's September 4th, and while I know what my Halloween costume will be, I have not yet acquired all of the pieces it will need. I'm usually better at planning than this.