But it's still spam | June 29, 2004 7:27:50 AM

Gauntlet thrown | June 28, 2004 13:47:32 PM

Kurt and I watched about twenty minutes of The Dead Pool yesterday, in which Dirty Harry wanders around murder scenes and his partner makes corny wisecracks about the nature of the death.

On a famous film reviewer's death (paraphrased): "Well, it's not the best I've seen, but I give it an eight."

On a murder by car bomb (paraphrased): "Guess things got a little too hot for him."

Then we began to suggest some more obvious ones: "looks like it was a hot time on the old town tonight, guess he was a little hot under the collar, I guess he's burnin' for you, etc." Then Kurt offers that the partner should just make up cliches that don't exist, to suit his schtick. In the case of the car bomb, it was "looks like he stole some heat from Satan."

I guess my point is, I bet that corny partner got killed.

O,C-a*n-A,d,a | June 25, 2004 13:43:29 PM

That just marked my third piece of spam that mentioned "Toronto" in the subject line. And it wasn't the same pattern of random words, or even the same vendor. They just all alluded to these products or service I might want in Toronto. Toronto must be the new hotness, leading me to believe that I presently live in what is old and busted.

Looking for web hosting? | June 18, 2004 11:46:37 AM

I'm going to have to recommend the host I'm still using, and have been using since 2000: Canaca-com. It's a Canadian company, but crimony, look at those options! $17 a month for, like, 80,000 GB with 240,000,000 TB/month transfer, it's insane. The support has been good, particularly if you call in instead of write, and I haven't been disappointed at all. The one problem I truly had was when they had that big blackout in the Northern US and Canada, the servers went down, but that was hardly their fault.

So if you need sturdy web hosting, I recommend them.

Fiction redesign and a story about the latest story | June 16, 2004 21:41:12 PM

The Fiction Abattoir has been streamlined and automated to some degree. Also, I have a new short story up: Lemon Blossom Girl.

Actually I wanted to give some background on that story, so go read it first before you read this, or else it'll spoil some of it. I went to San Diego a month ago or so to see a friend, and we went to Balboa Park where they have at least one museum. We went to look at the Human History section. Inside, there were a couple old mummies, natural ones, not the bandaged kind.

One of them was the Lemon Grove Girl, which is obviously the template for this story. She too was South American, died pregnant in a bog somewhere earlier in the last millennium. (I read somewhere that she was actually stolen, and apparently there is some effort to return her to South America for proper burial.) I took some pictures: the Lemon Grove Girl, and another one which looks like a Pirates of the Caribbean prop.

Anyway, beneath the Lemon Grove Girl really was a button that said "START," and although we didn't have the guts to press it, I'm sure it would have just started playing one of those narratives recorded in the 1970s, the kind that startles the entire wing of the museum because it's too goddamn loud. But we were talking about how it wasn't "START NARRATION," it was just "START." I do not want to give a mummy an open-ended command like "start."

Something I didn't include in my story was the long hair. Ugh, it's just really unpleasant.

Incidentally, you will also notice that this site now reports, on the left side in the menu, when ongoing features like Dreaming of 4000 and the stories have been updated. I totally just added value.

New design | June 15, 2004 22:45:23 PM

What do you think? I will be continuing conversion and browser compatibility tests as time goes on. I hope to have it all finished by the start of July. Anything hard to read? Anything broken? What browser are you using? It's looking good on IE and Firefox.

Redesign and Agatha Christie's grave-rolling-in | June 14, 2004 12:57:01 PM

Sorry about the formatting of this page being all bland. I'm in the middle of something, so pardon my dust.

Meanwhile, you can go ahead and enjoy Agatha Christie's Poirot -- the anime.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/anime/agatha/

Pitch Black 2 | June 10, 2004 20:32:49 PM

Here's a screen cap of the corpse, in case your mental image of that transition isn't dumb enough.

http://www.pitcherblacker.com/pb/caps/0062.jpg

Pitch Black | June 10, 2004 9:42:28 AM

Kurt was over on the weekend and we were taking care of Adam and Kim's rabbit. We watched Brazil and Pitch Black, since Adam has a ton of movies. Brazil was good as usual, but Pitch Black I'd not seen before.

It was very French, a term Kurt and I use to describe movies with foreign humor or bizarre, artsy cinematography. I'm trying to think of some examples. The idea of a "French" movie originated from Alien Resurrection, which had a French director, and the film had a number of show-offy, pointless zooms and odd staging choices.

Pitch Black is pretty French-looking. At one point -- spoilers! -- a kid wanders into a dark building on the planet, and when light streams in, the room has a flock of light-hating bat things that tear around. The kid hides from the bats, and we don't really see what happens to him until the others enter the room.

His father is crawling towards the camera, looking for his son, and then in the extreme foreground, the upper half of a chewed-up corpse swiftly falls horizontally from its hiding place, practically smiling at the camera. Then there is an iris-in to the next scene, expanding from the eye socket. No sounds of reaction from the father, just "next scene."

Kurt suggested that this corpse-falling-iris-in-from-its-eye transition should have been the film's generic scene transition. Even occurring before the kid's death. Because it was so stupid.

Anyway, I hope the corpse-fall wipe becomes as common a convention as "fade in" and "credits roll upwards" in movies.

Hooray | June 9, 2004 22:49:36 PM

http://www.amazon.com/

The Checkerboard Nightmare book is still delayed until early 2005, but it's neat to see myself at amazon.com as an author. Unfortunately, it also gives away the title of the collection, but that's okay.

Yes sir, three bags full | June 8, 2004 22:43:18 PM

I think I'm looking into a redesign of this site. It's functional enough, but a couple things. Number one, I can do way better than this. I'd like it to look a little more stylish, but be less kludgy. Two, there's too much dark. I'd like to have something that can be updated daily, something a little more interesting to the stumbler-upon.

And for anyone who bothers to check here, I've finished five of the consolation prizes (twenty total). I should have them in the mail this weekend, and then I can get to work mailing the prints.

Michael | June 7, 2004 20:13:41 PM

Michael's suicide (go look at CxN) is really bothering me. I've been down a lot lately, since February I've been feeling sort of trapped, and lost. I guess his death hits me particularly hard. He and I both have webcomics. He wrote short stories, so do I. He was 25, as am I. His girlfriend had gone, as did mine.

It makes me so upset to see that someone with the same kind of drive and the same sort of worries as me would choose suicide. We talked occasionally; the last time was a month ago, nothing related to his problems or anything. I wish I'd said more when he was still there. We had pleasant talks, and appreciated each others' work. He got a kick out of the parody or three I did of his work in CxN. Now he isn't around anymore.

This was spam for Viagra. | June 3, 2004 22:51:25 PM

Enron | June 3, 2004 10:20:48 AM

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001945474_webenronaudio02.html

You want to read something offensive, here's some of the transcripts from Enron boardroom meetings and such, where they're overjoyed that California is a mess.

The first prank call | June 1, 2004 22:31:55 PM