Still working my way through the illustrations for the Worlds of Cthulhu assignment. To anyone who has been expecting to hear from me and hasn’t – please don’t hold your breath waiting. Blue is not your color.

The Big Book of Cults by Ben Counter is available from Chaosium. It’s got a cover and a few interior illustrations by me. I hadn’t intended to do the cover. I’d done the illustration for one of the interior articles and I guess Ben decided it fit for the cover.

Finished my Strange Eggs story. I’m not sure when the issue will be published. The first issue is just out so probably the next will be available in two or three months.

Finished Wicked. I enjoyed it. It’s one of those enjoy-the-ride novels; meaning that the ending wasn’t exactly satisfying but the events of the story and the way the story is told is engaging enough that I can forgive the lack of resolution. Which is fine. I didn’t expect it. Lack of resolution is probably part of the point. Elphaba was a great character. Not much of a witch. Also part of the point. It’s not a book to read if you haven’t seen the Movie. That’s obviously the inspiration for the story. Maguire uses Baum’s novels as base for his Oz but if you’d simply read Baum you’d have a very different Glinda and Wicked Witch of the West in your head. If you’d seen the Movie you could probably read Wicked without having read Baum. You’d miss a lot of the references but you’d probably still enjoy the story. Or at least get the story. Being as it’s a Tragedy I’m not sure if “enjoy” is the right term.

Opened the boxes that Luvset sent. I figured that since I had scanning to do anyway I might as well pull out the minis that I needed jpegs of. Oops. It’s worse than I guessed. While it looks like some of my minicomics are in there the bulk of the contents is something far scarier. Other people’s minicomics. Old correspondence. Crap. The boxes got closed up again. If I start looking through them it will be hours before I’m done. Best to leave them safely packed until we’re moved.

Today I do my best to eat through my Worlds of Cthulhu assignment.

The credits ran. Derek asked, “So which was better, this or Return of the Sith?”

To which I replied, “This, definitely.”

Nizzibet enjoyed herself. That was good. She’s often espressed a bafflement to the appeal of Godzilla. Godzilla: Final War did something that most Godzilla movies don’t. It never stopped moving. Scenes of people standing around talking, going over the latest pseudoscience, were short. Lots of action sequences. Lots of monsters.

Complaints? Too much Gigan. Godzilla’s head redesign gives him fragile looking duck jaws. Beyond that, why complain? It was a Big Loud Crazy Stupid Godzilla movie. Much as I love Godzilla most Godzilla movies are Stupid. Not all of them are Big and Crazy.

Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera Trilogy looked at kaiju through a serious, epic lense. Godzilla: Final Wars gets drunk and parties. If this really is the last Godzilla movie for a decade it’s a good note to end on.

There was an episode of the original Star Trek where the Enterprise landed on a world of superspeeded up people, people who lived their lives so fast that they couldn’t be seen by normal human senses. As a kid I thought that was pretty cool. There were plenty of times when I would have loved to be able to speed myself up so I could … well, as I kid I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking of getting more things done. I’m pretty sure I was thinking of using such a power for mischief if not downright Evil. I was a good kid who regularly contempted the violent death of most of the human race.

Now that I’m grown up and mature and all I’d just like some more time to get things done that I actually care about. Yeah, I know. Fuss. Whine.

Yesterday I got a couple of packages from Luvset that probably had my minicomics in them. I set the packages aside because I didn’t want to get sidetracked into going down memory lane. So much to do. Dishes. Making dinner. Finished the inking for the second page of the Strange Eggs story. Finished entirely the first page. Many illustrations to complete for Worlds of Cthulhu. Got a few more pages of script for Oz Squad. I’ll have to look through my back issues (and I’m missing #10 so I can’t be sure) but I think I get to be the first artist to draw Dorothy and Ozma kissing. Yay me!

I’m at work. One of my new responsibilities is to enter credit card charges into QuickBooks. It’s a responsibility that I acquired after our previous bookkeeper hadn’t gotten to it for almost three weeks. I’ve tried making entries here and there throughout the day but that really doesn’t work. There are too many to catch up on and during the day, while the phone is ringing and clients are stressed out because they are faced with computer, I’d rather not also be trying to remember where I left off in making entries. This morning I’m in early to get everything caught up.

Tomorrow I add doing credit card charges to my list of daily activities. That should make it easy.

I probably wouldn’t have remembered that today was my birthday if, last week, one of the techs hadn’t pointed out that the staff meeting fell on this day. I always remember when staff meetings are. I have to buy donuts and cut veggies. The last few years I’ve tended to not notice that the 23rd has any significance until well into the day.

The illustration work continues. Slower than I’d like but it goes. I’m almost finished with the pre-photoshopping for the first page of the Strange Eggs story. I’ve got some of the Worlds of Cthulhu illustrations down to final pencils. Much to do yet.

Revenge of the Sith – mostly I breathe a sigh of relief that the Star Wars saga is done. Marvel Comics and giant monster movies provided most of my personal mythology as a kid. Star Wars came too late (I was twelve or thirteen) to worm its way in too deeply. This movie was mercifully lacking comic relief. R2D2 gave us most of it. R2 rocks. C3PO wasn’t actually annoying. I hated him every time I saw him but that’s because, after five movies worth of his whining and fussing, I’m predisposed to hating him.

Anyway. Done. The saga of a talented but self-centered and selfish young man who becomes a mass murderer and the prime tool of genocidal fascist (and yet is redeemed by one rebellious (and self-centered) act) has come to end.

In chapter three of Zorro’s Black Whip, the Whip gets into a fight with a couple of the bad guys. She doesn’t punch either of them but she does slam them around a bit. I’m impressed. The Black Whip rocks.

I’ve begun reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire. It’s neither a sequel (prequel, whatever) to the Movie or Baum’s Oz novels. It’s “inspired” by both. The green Wicked Witch comes from the Movie. Maguire has obviously read at least some of Baum’s books but he doesn’t try to rationalize Baum’s Oz. He’s created his own Oz inspired by Baum’s map. This book is more Barnstormer than it is Emerald Burrito. I am enjoying it as itself. I probably would have hated it as a kid. I’m not too far into it but, as a little green baby with big vicious teeth, Elphaba rocks.

One of our recent discard purchases from Rain City Video is Zorro’s Black Whip. It’s a 12 part serial from 1944. We’re going to watch a chapter or two every few nights until we get to the thrilling conclusion! So far Zorro has survived a sex change, many gunfights and at the end of the second chapter she was trapped in a bank vault explosion! The serial is set in Idaho in 1888 (I think), just prior to statehood. The bad guys are robbing and pillaging the poor settlers and getting away with it because there’s no law to arrest them. Justice takes the form of Zorro! More specifically, The Black Whip. No body calls him/her Zorro. Everyone refers to him/her as the Black Whip. Zorro in Idaho sounds silly anyway. The first Whip gets himself shot and killed so his sister takes over the role. The movie was made in 1944 so Lady Whip can’t go around getting in fist fights (and a serial without fist fights is like Seattle without rain) so there’s an undercover fed in town trying to discover the leader of the bad guys. The two fights he’s been in thus far completely destroyed the rooms they happened in. As per serial rules of clothing physics, neither he nor his adversaries ever lose their hats no matter how much furniture got broken on their heads.

This serial gets us prepped for the upcoming Legend of Zorro, sequel to Mask of Zorro. Mask is one of Nizzibet’s favorite movies. Nizzibet is sort of a Zorro fan. As much as she’s a fan of anything. Zorro was one of the inspirations behind Billi 99. Coincidentally I discovered yesterday, in an interview at Salon, that Isabel Allende has written a Zorro novel. Sounded like fun so I ordered a copy for the Nizz. Shh! Don’t tell her.

The dream I woke from this morning involved getting these huge manila envelopes filled with something hard and mysterious. I was excited until I realized that the envelopes were filled with 3 1/2 computer disks. Lovesettlement was sending me the disks I’d been storing at my mom’s house.

I’m sure there are no disks at my mom’s house. Lots of other things. No disks. I’ve got one ancient Mac that might run them otherwise I’ve long since transferred everything important onto other media.

This is what I get from sleeping on Nizzibet’s side of the bed. She was feeling sick last night and needed to be able to get up quickly so she wanted to sleep on my side, the outside side. Whenever this happens I end up sleeping lightly and remembering my dreams. The last time I dreamed that a giant grizzly was trying to eat me.