« January 16, 2005 - January 22, 2005 | Main | January 30, 2005 - February 5, 2005 »
-->January 29, 2005
Eric Burns-White: This week has at last ended...
...and I'm feeling better tonight. I'm in Maine, having seen the family for festivities. My sister and both her daughters are now firm Todd and Penguin fans, to the point where one niece (the one sitting next to me) punctuated several statements with "so... I guess there aren't any cookies then?" I'm working on getting them to read Count Your Sheep.
With a little luck, I'll be far more myself in the upcoming week. Certainly I'd have to be feeling better, which means more concentrated and tons more writing. (I looked back at this week and just kind of shook my head. I'm glad I did the Rabbit Hole thing or else it'd practically be a wash on the writing front. And there aren't many washes on the writing front for me, usually.
Have a lovely tomorrow, all!
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:47 PM | Comments (2)
-->January 28, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Yet More Fan Art! (hey, didn't he used to... like, talk about webcomics or something?)
The answer is yes. Chalk it up to a week of pronounced enfevertude coupled with medicine and fatigue and crap.
And yet, there has also been art. And for the first time, we have fan art sequels. First up, after we had a little... spirited discussion on spelling in a previous entry, Sylvan Migdal of Ascent drew up a Snarky just a tiny bit fed up with spelling and grammar issues. I love the fact that he has a bag of baby chips on the counter. (Though I hear it's mostly tofu and other soy products.) The baby on the package looks just slightly like the baby from Bobby Crosby's Pupkin, which somehow makes sense to me.
The other picture comes to us from Sahsha Andrade, an up and coming South Florida artist whose website has some wonderfully evocative work. Feeding off of the Snarky in Snow picture and an offhanded comment of mine... we have Sad Snarky in Snow.
I wonder if somehow this will get me in trouble with the Megatokyo community. If so (or even if not, really), it's worth it because it's darn nice. Though sad. Which is of course the point.
It means a heck of a lot to me that folks take the time to draw these things. At the end of the day, I'm a guy with a blog. I'm just happy folks like it. To have people do up sketches and drawings just makes me feel good.
And yes, I'm going to try to actually snark stuff. The flu seems to be abating somewhat, so I'm hopeful I won't kind of zone my way through stuff any longer. Alternately, I might start typing gibberish.
Of course, people might not be able to tell the difference....
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 7:08 PM | Comments (9)
-->January 27, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Fan Art 2 of 2: I'm an Ovaraptor! I'm gonna eat your babies!
As mentioned before, this is the second piece of art to come out of Arisia -- this one done by the talented and charming Randy Milholland of Something Positive fame. You see, we actually had a point where a group of folks at Arisia -- all of whom were connected to the old Superguy mailing list -- hit the T out to the Bostonian Hinterlands to meet up with Randy, who shares Superguy in his past too.
During our meal and chat -- there were four of us, one other invited guest having another commitment and two others unsure about driving down from where they were in the coming snowstorm -- I had a glass of wine. Now, as you know from Burns Night, it doesn't exactly take a lot to get me drunk. And while I didn't get more than buzzed, it was still a source of merriment.
"This is tomorrow's S*P," Randy said. "My dinner with Snarky -- showing him drunk off his ass saying 'Hey! Don't you start shit with me! I'm a Ovaraptor! I'm gonna eat your babies!"
"Yeah? You do that, and I'll change the masthead to that!" I shouted back.
So he did. Snarky is clearly a mean ass drunk.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:18 PM | Comments (26)
-->Eric Burns-White: Fan Art (1 of 2), birthdays and rabbit holes
I'm still pretty damn sick. Fevers all through yesterday and last night (without the insulating power of scotch, I'm sorry to say), plus any number of other symptoms. Despite this fact, I did wake up this morning, and it was January 27. Which means that I have successfully cheated death for another year.
The best birthday present I could receive was seriously cool fiction, and that's been heartily available thanks to Down the Rabbit Hole day. See, I share my birthday with Lewis Carroll, and so this fellow called Crisper (fellow being unisex, because hey, how should I know?) suggested that instead of a crappy meme about how many pieces of Halloween Candy you received or something like that, this should be a meme where for 24 hours you write about the strange new world you woke up in, through the looking glass or down the rabbit hole.
I loved the very idea of it. And so I wrote a five part entry myself. If you'd like to have a look, they're here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and finally Part Five. Feel free to have a look if you want.
If you'd like to see some more primo examples of Down the Rabbit Holery, my good friend Greg Fishbone has been collecting examples of the best he's seen today. If you've been following along on Livejournal and seen one or two that Greg's missed, send them along to him for inclusion.
As it is my birthday, I should mention a couple of gifts I've recently received. Namely, two pieces of art, both coming out of Arisia (which I still owe you a report from -- I've been very sick recently, in my defense). One really needs an entry all to itself, so it'll go up in a bit. This one, however, is an adorable Snarky in the Snow (not exactly Sad Snarky in Snow, either), done by the talented Poinko of Fever Dream. (You know, that comic title is apropos given how I feel...) It's so cute, and Snarky looks so thrilled! Yay!
The other piece of art... heh. You'll see.
Cheers!
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:30 PM | Comments (3)
-->January 26, 2005
Eric Burns-White: On the other hand, look at all those breasts. How sad can EDG be when surrounded by all those breasts?
(From Gaming Guardians. Click on the thumbnail for full sized bad potential situation.)
I've been frustrated as Hell by Gaming Guardians recently, because it's been really good, and yet I've never had that perfect strip to snark. This is a sad thing for me -- you want to snark the actually good perfect strip that pulls in the reader if you're grooving on the plot, and yet there's been no perfect strip for that.
This isn't Greg and Webtroll's problem. They're paying off years of setup with Greg/Unprodigal/Jester, and they've been doing it well. But the problem with payoff storylines is there's no good hook for new readers to come in. And yet, this sequence deserves them. For the first time, I feel like I understand what's going on with the Unprodigal and the Jester, and it's all tying together. There's glimpses of the original Greg/EDG dynamic, and yet there's glimpses of just how different they've become. There's still a sense of evil involved....
I don't know where it's going next, but I'm liking it. The Ultima additions are good ones. From here, almost anything can happen and I'm still going to like it. And yet, I'm not sure this was the right strip to snark.
Well, the Hell with it, Graveyard Greg and Webtroll are doing well and have my interest. Honestly, what more can I ask?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:59 AM | Comments (1)
-->Eric Burns-White: A Correction.
As I've said before, when I make mistakes here in the chair -- the mighty, mighty chair -- I will not conceal them. I will own up to them.
I reported that I had a lovely few drams of Dalwhinnie single malt scotch when I was celebrating Burns Night, in yesterday's post.
In fact, I had a few drams of The Dalmore. Which is quite a different scotch. It was wonderfully smooth, though reminded me it was indeed whiskey. The distinction is profound -- Dalwhinnie is a Speyside single malt, while the Dalmore is a Highland single malt scotch. Also, the Dalmore is a definite article, and Dalwhinnie is not.
Just to keep things clear.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:22 AM | Comments (6)
-->Eric Burns-White: Me am big reviewer guy.
Illness and fatigue (my all purpose excuse) conspired to prevent me from mentioning that my review of Goats went up on Sunday over at Comixpedia. I'd be appreciative if you'd have a looksee, and then look at many of the other articles and thingies. There's also an interview with Kris Straub and Chex which explains much, and Ping Teo's launched a new cartoon which distills the Essence of... well, things. That's right. There's an actual comic in Comixpedia. It only took... what, two years to make that connection?
(I'm going to be choked to death.)
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:46 AM | Comments (4)
-->January 25, 2005
Eric Burns-White: The Irish get parades, drink green beer, and have jokes about vomit on their special day. We Scots read poetry on ours. I think we come out ahead.
For those who have been wondering, I'm sick. I was completely exhausted on Sunday night from the trip back through the snow, I was a walking corpse of fatigue Monday, and then I fell asleep Monday night only to wake back up with stomach pain at 2 am, and stay awake the rest of the night. During the day, I began to develop chest congestion and head congestion, and even more fatigue. Writing was out of the question. I was lucky I could recognize the keyboard.
I fell asleep as soon as I got home, though I tried not to (I didn't even eat dinner). I slept through until a few minutes ago, and woke up more congested, more achy, and slightly fevered. I just put on a humidifier, threw a basic dinner into the microwave, and came here. Because there are things we need to talk about. It is January 25.
It is Burns Night.
Robert Burns is famous for any number of reasons, but somehow he didn't "click" with the American Educational System before college, at least when I was going through it. We all know he wrote Auld Lang Syne, but we didn't talk about his Romanticism, his class warfare, his unique voice in writing in the vernacular of the working classes of his native Scotland, not the poncey language of a Wordsworth or Keats. He lived through the American Revolution, and believed in the spirit of Revolution. He is revered in Europe, and Australia, and Russia. In fact, during the days of the Soviet Union, he was one of the few poets to be heavily studied, because he was felt to be a champion of Communist Ideals without Manifesto. Dogmatic though it may be, this was one of the few strong expressions of Western Civilization into Russia.
He drank too much. He fathered an inordinate number of children, including several bastards (or so they say). Burns itself is a dirt common name in Scotland (it means rivers or brooks, which seems funny to me, since it seems to mean 'Careless with Matches.') He was rude, he was perfectly willing to publish poetry castigating his enemies, and the semantic quality of much of his poetry seems to boil down to "My luv is faire an' tru/an mine is the heart that luvs/an she feels my luv too/but now she's dead and lying in the fucking ground and worms -- worms -- are eating her skin and eyes and CHRIST I need a drink." Which made him both an early Goth and early Emo. It's also felt he was among the first poets to use the pain within his soul to talk otherwise respectable women into having indiscriminate sex.
He was an archivist. Many of his poems -- especially those published in the volumes of his Scots Musical Museum -- were meant to clean up folk poems and folk songs and the native music of the Scottish people and put it into a form where it would never be forgotten. This has been successful: I can sing about nine Burns songs off the top of my head with their original music, up to and including the real tune of Auld Lang Syne. (There are two tunes associated with it. The one you know, and the good one. Just, you know, for the record.)
I'm Scottish American, and my name is Burns, and I love Burns Night. I don't usually have a Haggis and speak the traditional prayer -- the Selkirk Grace -- and I sure as Hell wouldn't put Haggis in my mouth already feeling sick. Still, as I look at microwaved meatloaf, now sitting and waiting for me, I stop and ponder, and at least think, if not say:
Some hae meat and canna eat, And some would eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, Sae let the Lord be thankit.
And as I eat, I consider Burns's poetry. The songs, the airs, the ode to a mouse whose home was destroyed by a plow. The satirical ode to a bug that crawls on a rich woman's head. Green growing rashes. To the weavers we gin going.
And I remember the words to a song everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows, despite the fact that not twelve of them actually know the lyrics. They are an invocation of good health, for good friends, for those we know now, and for those we have known who are not here today. And I think of all of you.
And I think of all of you as my friends, coming here and reading what I have to say. Which is nuts. I mean, it's totally batshit insane.
But still. You're my friends.
And so although I'm sick, I pour some Dalwhinnie in a glass (I should probably have Laphroig -- that'll kill any disease in me -- but it doesn't seem right), and I drink a toast to my food, and a toast to the beautiful lassies I know. I imagine the toast they make in response. And I eat, and I read, and think of friends and think of a man who died after only 37 years, his heart strained by backbreaking labor in his youth (not to mention all the alcohol). And though I'm coughing to much to sing out loud, inside, I hear the words sung:
And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp,
And surely I'll be mine,
And we'll tak a cup o kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou'd the gowans fine,
But we've wander'd monie a weary fit,
Sin auld lang syne.We twa hae paidl'd in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne.And there's a hand my trusty fiere,
And gie's a hand o thine,
And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught,
For auld lang syneFor auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
And though I'm not a religious man, I'm reminded of two prayers right now. The first, I'm told, is modern Wiccan, and they say it at the Renaissance Festival where once I worked, because that's where one says Modern Wiccan Prayers to middle Americans and not get yelled at:
Merry meet, Merry part, And merry meet again.
And the other? Though I'm no more Christian than I am Wiccan, there's only one thing left to say:
God bless you, and God bless Bobbie Burns.
Good night.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:50 PM | Comments (10)
-->January 24, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Some days, I'm just too tired...
...and this is one of those days. Work was a grind, and I'm still pretty exhausted from the slog home last night.
I did play some City of Heroes, but just long enough to earn the second 'event' badge for the Winter Lord attack. Said Winter Lord attack has been underwhelming at best, though the 'snowball' power was practically worth the price of admission.
Maybe next year.
G'night. Snarking tomorrow.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:45 PM | Comments (2)
-->January 23, 2005
Eric Burns-White: I'm not dead.
And I'm home. My cat is very happy, and I am very tired.
The hotel lost my car for a little while, but they found it.
The roads were bad until literally when I crossed the border into New Hampshire, when they suddenly turned wet but safe.
I'm so tired I could die. So I think I will.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:57 PM | Comments (2)
-->Eric Burns-White: Live from the Internet Room at Arisia... your reporters are stuck.
So I checked out of my room. I called for my car. I went downstairs, because I know that it's going to take many hours of driving to get to New Hampshire with all the blizzard and snow.
And I discovered, upon trying to leave, that the police were turning motorists away.
So, I'm still at the con, until at least six pm, my luggage safely in my car, and me broke and tired.
Pray for me. Pray for Bobo.
On the plus side, I got measured for a utilikilt. It was... liberating.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:02 PM | Comments (7)
