I was extremely pleased to find this on YouTube: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain with a rather special guest, doing something that isn’t humorous.

(My admittedly limited exposure to their work has, with this one exception, all been very funny. They are, for example, quite devastating on “Wuthering Heights”.)

Cheers —
jon

For the benefit of people who haven’t even seen any of season one, the premise (to steal a bit from someone whose entry on the series I’ve misplaced) is that an organization called Celestial Being gives Gundams to four of the least sane people in existence, and sends them out to end war by waging war on countries which… wage war. This works about as well as one might expect.

Fast-paced and plotty, with a high quotient of crack and insanity, plus high production values, many compelling characters, lots of angst, space battles, psychic kids, and the craziest names since Leopard Solid and Eraldo Coil. (Hi, Bring Stabbity! Hi, Allelujah Haptism! Hi, Colonel Mannequin!)

I also wish to note for the record that the Celestial Being paramilitary operatives, male and female, now have military uniforms consisting of bolero jackets over pants and shirt, all colored to match their respective eyes and/or hair and/or Gundam.

Rilina said that 2x8 really brought the crack and suggested that we watch it on the phone together. OMG. That was the greatest thing since Oyce and I watched insane!Heero and insane!Zechs duel each other in their respective crazy-making Gundams.

( I shall now recite a litany for your death! )

Things to Say During Sex Flowchart!

Bwahahahaahahah!

Mostly Safe for Work.

But I managed to get where I needed to be, and also to eat, so that was all good. And there were some interesting surprises along the way.

I'm quite quite tired, but I'm happy to be here.

Oh, yeah. This is gonna end well.

Flesh-eating, potentially self-replicating, autonomous, steam-powered robots!

We'll call it "EATR!" WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

...I've seen this episode of Doctor Who.

Jupiter Jones here, activating the ghost-to-ghost network...

Item the first: cmpriest brings you a shinytastic new website, The Clockwork Century, for her shinytastic new steampunk project, beginning with Boneshaker, which is due out like any minute now, or this autumn, whichever comes first.


Item the second: Anticipation (the Worldcon) is having a writer's workshop this year, in which I am participating as an instructor or whatever they're calling it. Somehow, this has managed to not make it onto the website, and due to an outbreak of something-or-other (mass zombification in Montreal? Reports are sketchy) it will not be making it onto the website. However, if you are attending the Worldcon, and you want to come spend two hours having your beloved baby story picked over by cruel and heartless literary professionals who want nothing so much as to crush your spirit*, you can participate in this program by:

emailing Oz Whiston at "writers-workshop AT anticipationsf DOT ca" AFTER reading her blog post here detailing the submission process.


Item the third: there is no item the third.

---

So, yeah, apparently I am still plumb wore out and sleeping a lot, as I got up this morning two hours after I usually do (though not as late as yesterday) and so far have accomplished not a whole lot except playing with the dog, showering, making a pot of Russian caravan, and eating some raspberry bread and an apple.

This writing thing is exhausting, I tell you what. But that's okay, because I have delivered the book, and I'm allowed to crash for a week or two now.

Right. More animal protein and a nap, and maybe I will have the oomph to go climb something tonight.

---

*that would be me and/or my colleagues

When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you’re being shown, along with what’s being said, along with what you’re being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure...

--Warren Ellis

Word.

I have actually tried to do this in prose: Blood & Iron is the result, and as many can testify, using only one input stream for all those entangled information threads results in almost headsplitting density and limited success. (In your average comic panel, the streams may be visual/art/action/scene setting, narration, internalization, dialogue/thought, and white space. Yeah, think about that for a moment, and consider that maybe I missed one. Or two. And that they can contradict or ironicize each other.)

Comics are cool. They are an interstitial art form all in their lonesome.

There's a new update up at Sihaya Designs

(If I only had more ears! As it is, I damned well nearly bruised my fingers hitting my hands against the screen with the ooooh gimmee! gimmee! impulse.)

Preview available at Sihaya09's journal.

If I do not finish the book today, I will simply have to finish it tomorrow.

Page 357. Two chapters remaining.

Protein helped with the exhaustion. Memo to me: you do really feel better when you eat the red meat, even if you'd happily go vegetarian on most other grounds.

After not attempting any collodion portraits since I started with wet plate--oh my! a year ago now!--Snarl and I spent saturday making some plates. Working inside so exposures were pretty bloody long for lens-work, and I don't have a head brace, hence the lack of super-sharpness going on in this, but it's pretty still for a two minute exposure, no? Even though collodion goes slightly crazed for freckles, I rather dig this.

Sunday I went to pick up some more collodion, and we both had to be photographed. Outside! In sunlight! Man, that's quick. Second-long exposures and the first non-hated picture of me by someone else evah.

Zot: bounced back. Slightly tottery but no longer doing that feeble and fragile nonsense for the moment. Phew.

Summer project: slowly looking like it might happen with four so far saying yes, three no, and lots of silence which could go either way, and, hurrah, actual proper official press accreditation to make it all easier.

Work: worky.
Swimming: wet.
Snarl: lovely.
Twitter: strangely compelling.
Torchwood: remarkable.

I start a course in co-op development today: “From Workers to Owners: Steps to Start Worker Cooperatives”. It’s part the economy and part the recent press our store has gotten, but we are getting calls or emails multiple times a week from people wanting to start co-ops. In addition to the cheese buying, one of my jobs is to field those calls. It’s an online course – and not a free one -- and I heard that 83 people are signed up.

I don’t want to out anyone before they are ready so I won’t name any places or details, but I talked to two incredibly different groups last week. One group of African Americans from an urban area in another state who want to do something – anything – that will help provide jobs and better health in their community. They were information gathering in general, without a specific plan of the type of model they wanted.

The other was an API ethnic group with a very specific idea of taking an existing, successful franchise model and converting it into a worker-owned version of the same thing. I don’t know that business model well, but they seemed pretty sure they could make it work.

It’s almost unfair to have people come for a tour and answer questions about our modes of operation since our blueprint for success is uncopyable. They see the result of nearly 35 years of work, starting in a totally different economy and era, with the good luck to be starting in an industry that – at that time – wasn’t an industry. I think there could be a blueprint. (The Cheeseboard/Arizmendi model is certainly a very good one) We just haven’t figured it out yet.

Historically-speaking I also speak to about 25 groups for every one that actually starts a co-op. I hope that this course – and two other Rainbow workers are taking it as well -- helps provide some groundwork to increase that ratio.

my friend is sitting next to Kate Mulgrew in jury duty.
i asked her to steal her and bring her to me.
lol.

My poor meat is so dischuffed with me. I just managed to pry myself out of bed and I'm still exhausted and in the throes of the allergy attack that woke me up at three AM and would not let me go back to sleep until I fed myself benadryl and washed out my eyes. Really, my major life goal currently would be to lie down for a nap, but there is this deadline, see, and the deadline must be obeyed. Prodigious work lies before me today--revising at least fifty pages and/or three chapters of Chill, since today is a day without other scheduled duties. And I so badly want to crash. Alas, the meat must wait a few days still to collapse.

We went climbing at Pinnacle last night, and I managed both routes we set. One was easy--First Crack, which was the first route I ever sent outdoors, last year, and which I managed this time as a clean ascent--and the other was a more challenging, very edgy route on the slab, which may not even have a name. Basically it consisted of a fifteen-foot 5.7 slab ascent, a fifteen-foot 5.5 or so crack system, and another fifteen-foot slab at the top that was very sparse and crimpy and required a couple of fairly technical smears and matches. I got through it without any falls, and with only one bad moment--my shoe popped off the slab on a smear, but I held on and got myself back on without losing my hands.

I also got through both climbs without panic attacks, which was nice and may be a sign of progress. I do better at this whole outdoor climbing thing when I'm not throwing myself fruitlessly at routes that are way too hard for me. I wonder if my climbing buddies can be convinced of that? Because they tend towards the stupidly macho end of the scale when it comes to repeated failures being good for you....

I was going to take the dog for a run this morning, but it's just not going to happen. The flesh is weak. Poor young dog, saddled with a frail and aging monkey.