I mentioned that Steven Brust was the sort of man who would be well received at an event like Readiation - a fictional convention for fiction enthusiasts - and had such a high opinion of his work that I brought some in and attempted to "sell" Gabe on it.  It's about an assassin who runs an increasingly large area of town, in a place where teleportation, telepathic communication, and even resurrection are an everyday occurrence.  You've got some "local color" language in there, but compared to most fantasy it isn't about fancy, vernacular diction.   The delivery is very modern.

Except for the punchline itself, the comic is our authentic conversation.   After we had finished yelling at each other and decided to make a comic about it,  I tried to give him a sense of how much he would hate the book I'm reading now - The Phoenix Guards is set in the same world, and by the same author, but is written in the style of The Three Musketeers.  I can picture him touching the cover, hesitantly, and then crumpling into a sleep like death.

While visiting Table of Malcontents - the Wired blog of personal hero Lore Sjoberg - I came across the single button sensation Chopper Drop. My immediate reaction was not joy, but remorse. Remorse!  Someone once showed me a charming game called "Sky Puppy," written by a friend I was vociferously assured, and I promised to mention it and then did no such thing. I am sorry, young man who did not under any circumstances write an attractive, accessible, adorable game. Your secret is safe with me.

I don't know if you are an Xfire user, I assume it's very popular indeed, because I'm often being asked what my Xfire is, "man." They're handing out beta slots to Sword of the Stars just for mailing them your account name, which is a trivial amount of work for something you might enjoy quite a lot. I say this because I have played almost nothing else for a week.  Indeed, I had a fever this weekend, and I experienced dreams about the game that were so gripping, so true to life, and in their way terrifying, that I now believe the future described in the Sword of the Stars wiki to be the accurately predicted future of our galaxy.  Going back a moment: "betas" these days are part of the marketing push, and you tolerate oddities in the game because you didn't have to pay for it.  That's not what this is.  If what you get is based on what I have here, I would say it's probably finished.

It was my great pleasure to write the introduction to Kristopher Straub's newest book, a collection of his Starslip Crisis comics entitled "Sparkling Diplomacy." I meant to link the Goddamn thing over a year ago, back when it was still called Starshift Crisis, but they had just launched Blank Label at the time, and there was some fear on my part that a link would do some injury to their venture, if not flood the colocation facility with the equivalent of digital lava. So, yes: Starslip Crisis is one of my favorite online comics. Storylines I especially enjoyed from the series would be "Hardware Pirates" and "The Compound Pluperfect," but that's because they appeal to my own predilections - I wouldn't start with them.  I'd recommend that you load up the First Strip and then consume the first year like starving men and women.

(CW)TB out.

da riddim vandaliss

I’ve mentioned my reading habits on the site before. For the most part I stick to Star Wars books. In fact I just finished up Triple Zero and so I was on the hunt for something new to read. Before I could get to the store Tycho suggested I try a book he had just read. He promised me I’d like it and when I asked about the dragon on the cover he told me that it was “not a dragon.” Here is a picture of the cover:

 

Now that is obviously a fucking Dragon but Tycho assured me it wasn’t so I started thinking about what the hell it might be. Was he saying that it wasn’t a “real” dragon? Like maybe it was a robot or a computer generated illusion! Now I was interested. It became clear after only a couple chapters that Tycho had lied to me. It wasn’t a robot or a computer construct or even a collection of sentient nano-machines capable of taking any shape they wanted. It was just a regular dragon.

I can blame Tycho but it’s honestly my fault. I have a very strict set of rules when it comes to choosing books and I didn’t follow them here. The first rule is to only read Star Wars books. Now if that’s not possible because a new one is not available I have a second set of rules that kicks in. The book must have a picture of an alien planet, a space station or a space ship on the cover. This means that I end up reading a lot of Alastair Reynolds. Sometimes that son of a bitch will have a cover with a space station orbiting an alien planet while launching a space ship! The holy trinity!

Anyway I only got about three chapters into Tycho’s dragons gone wild book before I lost interest. Luckily book one of the new Star Wars series “Legacy of the Force” just came out and I was able to pick that up. I’ve only just stared it but this looks to be a very promising series. I was a huge fan of the NJO books and the shit they pulled after that with the joiner bugs didn’t really do anything for me. Instead of creating some new alien enemy this storyline sets up a universe full of internal strife. Worlds are beginning to rebel against the Galactic Alliance which they view as a new Empire. That’s a solid hook and I’m excited to see where they go with it.

-Gabe out

I am sometimes taken to task by idiots for not linking more online comics.   These are often the same idiots - mealy-mouthed idiots, cabals of mumuring idiots in the dark, perpetual failures angry at the universe - that imagine we use our traffic as a weapon.  

What they don't seem to understand (because they are idiots - see above) is that any link I formulate is like directing the Eye of Sauron on that person's rack at the ISP.  Any link.  The intention is irrelevant.  Because they are scrabbling,  turned-in on themselves, base and carnal scavengers,  it must be that every act bears with it some hostile payload, because this is how they comport themselves in every gnarled chunk of electronic correspondence, and all the world must be thus.

The upshot is that I have linked you to something that I enjoy, and think you might enjoy, and what has actually happened is that the site is now barely accessible, and people with the misfortune of  being hosted on the same equipment are now inaccessible to me as well.  There's your dark consipiracy, idiots.  I'm polite.  That's why I don't link comics.

(CW)TB

We have three new "shoits" available, and in accordance with an ancient pact, three old shirts must go with a discount, which is to say big savings!  The newcomers are Annarchy (in men's and women's) , the return of Kiko's classic Shoryuken (also in men's and women's), and the stern new Jesus Says garment with a message of warning for mankind.

It is with some sadness that we see the following shirts go on into that eternal... closet, or wherever shirts go. Baby vs Rhino in men's and women's sizes, goodbye. Slash Spit, in men's and women's sizes, you were here for only a short time - but we came to love you, in our way. And I Duped This Shirt - oh, did you ever. You duped shirts in both men's and women's sizes, didn't you?

Hush now, little shirts. Hush now.  May your high quality and newly diminished price find you a good home.

(CW)TB