I should have known better than to read old Frank Miller comic books before bed, when I’m sick. I dreamed I was constantly changing political boundaries in a future America gone secession-crazy. (It was Give Me Liberty.) Now I have Mexicans on my apartment roof randomly firing nail guns. I think they’re fastening shingles.

So I’ve been sick the past few days. Took off early from work on Wednesday. Now I have a weekend of laundry and dressing up NPCs to look forward to. Sigh.

So yeah, Hurricane Rita only hit three or four little towns near the Gulf that have been blown away by hurricanes once every 50 years or so, and the people that live down there are damned near used to getting blown.

I went all the way to Austin and back yesterday and didn’t even get rained on. The Sinus Show was funny, and that KISS movie really is awful. Amazingly bad. Next month they’re doing The Lost Boys. It’ll all be Halloween-y and stuff, I imagine. In two weeks, they’re going to have The Video Game Pianist at the South Lamar Alamo.

I’m also planning to attend the next First Wednesday Lecture for ACC’s video game program, featuring Susan O’Connor. Apparently people pay her money to write for video games. To WRITE. Amazing stuff.

I’m surprised this kid has hands big enough to operate an Xbox controller. More power to him, he could probably kick my ass at Halo.

Alamo Drafthouse and Ain’t It Cool News recently a promotion for their planned pre-screening of “Serenity,” Joss Whedon’s movie in the universe of his tragically dumped sci-fi series, “Firefly.” Of all things, they wanted fans to compete in a poetry contest.

My friend Britton “Trynian” Gregory made it on the winner’s list. He’s had some experience with writing variations on a theme — he won the Shadowbane fan fiction contest four years ago with “Ballad of the Siege of Vodiranon”, and he’s on the writing staff for U5:Lazarus.

In his words, “My prose is okay, but the poetry could be better.” For those unfamiliar with the Serenity characters, “Simon is a young doctor who’s on the ship with Kaylee, the ship’s engineer. They have an awkward relationship…they’re attracted to each other, but he’s always saying the wrong thing and ticking her off.” So he had Simon write Kaylee a sonnet.

Copied below.
Continue reading Trynian likes Serenity…

Minutes of fun, if you can find the right verbiage. Lube, nuts, flirt, diaper, shoot, British, chicken, lotion, hack, meg, weed, porn, Simpsons.

I live in Central Texas. Well out of the immediate striking distance of Hurricane Rita, but the slow exodus north of people from the Houston-Galveston area, rising gas prices, knucklehead wannabe survivalists and residual bad weather blowing my way is likely to make my existence very difficult.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t know what this state is going to be like after the weekend.

I think I’ll be OK, but I found out today that all the bottled water and D-cell batteries are bought up in my town. Seriously. Unless I want to buy it by the bottle for 69 cents a pop, I ain’t getting none.

Tiberius posted fresh screenshots of Castle Britannia as it exists in pre-release state — not quite how it’ll look in Lazarus, but close. He spent the weekend building modular “nodes” for all the pieces necessary to put it together, and built the first few floors’ worth of content.

Then he put a house on top. Which was goofy, so he re-did it. You can also see the moongate and farmland from the Brittanys around it.

Join the conglomerate, if there’s any truth to the rumor and resolution in kind. Who knew News Corp. had so much liquid capital lying around waiting to be spent? I mean, they got out of Australia last year, and last month were rumored to be interested in something called BlinkX, and before that they blew half a billion on Intermix.

What will they pay for an Internet business that actually makes money?

Maybe Lord British could finally put the finish on that castle. And then start one on the moon.

In reply to a recent phone call, my dad sends e-mail.

Sorry I was not here to take your call. I was in the garage doing some “piddle projects”. I did not totally understand the comment about “peeing in a cup”. Why were you required to take a drug test?

Love,
Dad

p.s. Glad to hear that the job is going better.

“Another 50 billion dollars down the drain.”

It occurred to me that there’s at least one good thing about having an incompetent boob in charge of FEMA, one who resigned before anyone else could take the blame for the American federal government’s lackluster response to Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. It’s not like too many people care about who’s in charge there — it took a disaster to rival 9/11 to make people care enough to check his credentials.

The good news is for the sake of uncreative conspiracy theorists who rely on (un)popular culture to justify their paranoia. Usurping control of FEMA and using the agency to control the world was a major plot point of both the X-Files movie and the game Deus Ex. In the latter, an evil cyborg named Walton Simons (voiced by Tom Hall, whom I will ask to do the voice if I ever meet him,) goes around declaring government agencies “disasters” and assuming authority.

Except now it seems like someone qualified is now in charge. Fear.