(no subject)

Good morning all! It is April first, and while I am long out of the habit of April Foolin', I would like to ceremonially open April with two items I try to post yearly.

The first is always retold upon this day because April first was the day it happened to me. It is the Fractured Penis (Not Mine) story, about the time a student of mine broke his dick and told me about it.

Second, I don't know that I'll do poetry month this year, but even if I don't, I can still post the traditional Waka Waka poem.

The Symbolic Poem
by Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese

< > !* ' ' #
^ " ` $$-
!*=@$_
%*< > ~ #4
&[ ]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED

This poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.

(no subject)

I seem to always be posting about comic books that made me angry. I suppose there's a fine line between love and hate, it all stems from passion, etc. etc. etc.

Today we're going to be talking about 1602, and how it could have sucked less, with spiderine, amand_r, misswinterhill in her debut performance, and Claire.

This one also requires some context, mainly because it's the first time a bunch of us read a comic together instead of just trying to explain it to each other. So here's what you need to know about ( 1602. )

Again: I only explain them, I can't excuse them.

Claire: If you keep posting about comics, will you keep posting Fassbender smoking? What if you run out of images? HA HA HA what am I saying

Your emergency back-up can be Meryl Streep smoking.

"And now, while we discuss Spiderman, here's Meryl Streep puffing on a cigarette."

( 1602, or, frustration and racism in one tidy package! )

And that's everything you need to know about Marvel 1602: in the sequel, you get Iron Man.

(no subject)

So, before Ellis Graveworthy was a character in a book, he was my alter ego for stuff I wasn't sure I wanted to put my name to. Not in a "nobody knows it's me" way, just in a "Okay, this is the Ellis coming through" way. The first draft of Nameless, which I thought at the time was lyrical and it turns out was just dreadful (no really, none of you have seen that one, trust me) was written entirely in an Ellis headspace.

And before that he was a character in fanfic. You can find him in a couple of old HP stories and hilariously, in one, I hadn't even recognised it was him yet and his name was Greenworthy. Proto-Ellis. I didn't notice for years.

Anyway, sometime during the early years of Ellis I acquired this keychain, I'm not even sure from where, I think it was a free-sample deal, but it's a metal tag about an inch long. I thought it would be more interesting to get his initials on it than mine (possibly I was crazy? hard to know) so the tag is engraved ESG for Ellis Salazar Graveworthy. It's had my keys on it for years, since before I moved to Chicago. I don't even think about it, it's just there.

Last night I put the latest edit of Dead Isle to bed.

This morning the tag fell off my keychain. Bam, right there in my kitchen.

Now, I'm a superstitious person anyway, but that's just eerie. I'm working out what it means, other than "the stupid fob holding the tag on finally wore out", and attempting not to interpret it as a harbinger of doom. I mean, it's a book, how much doom can it possibly cause?

Maybe I can find an engraving shop or something and see if they'll repair it.

It's going to be fun explaining why I have a keyring with someone else's initials on it. I'm thinking I'll say it's the initials of my dead wife. Bet that gets me a discount.