The Slate essay about the Dove Real Beauty campaign. Mr. Stevenson is an idiot. I’d go in to further detail but, really, why waste the time typing about it?

By the end of this month we’ll be in a new apartment. That’s the plan anyway. Nizzibet will be doing the basic searching this week. We’d wanted to look sooner but the lack of car delayed that. Once we’ve got a place located I’ll be doing a lot of small trips moving clutter. You know, that stuff that you always leave until last to move?

We should be able to do a big move on the 20th or 21st and then have the next week and a half to finish clean/destroying evidence in the old place.

This is, of course, if things go as planned.

And I’ve signed up for a Web Comics Nation site. Nothing to see yet.

A Toyota Corolla has replaced our Suzuki Sidekick.

The house is a mess. Stacks of boxes are filling the unused rooms upstairs. Dull white paint is replacing the cheery colors that have graced our walls for the last few years.

There’s a lot of furniture that we need to find new homes for.

Worlds of Cthulhu #3 has finally gone to press. I know this because I was the last contributor holding things up. Damn me.

Normally I don’t care much about new prose Oz books. There are multitudes. I’ve read few of them so I’ve probably missed a number of good little stories. The Emerald Wand of Oz is illustrated by William Stout so it will be gorgeous. It hereby joins the other 600+ items on my Amazon wish list.

Which is not to say that it’s the most enjoyable werewolf novel ever. Wilding by Melanie Tem is the story of four generations of a pack of female werewolves in the season of the youngest’s pregnancy. The novel features no likeable protagonists (understandable – yes, sympathetic – yes, likeable – not in my world), incest, torture, killings of cute little animals and children, filth and slaughter. I’ve certainly read werewolf novels that were more fun but few that seemed as “realistic” as this one. Am I recommending it? If the above sounds interesting to you then yes. If anything in the above makes you hesitate then definitely not.

“I’m not trying to frighten people. If anything, I guess I would say I try to disturb people, to shake up how people look at the world. Mostly, though, I write out of an impulse in myself to understand something I don’t understand in human nature. That may be something dark, or it may not be. It may be just something mysterious that I don’t understand.” – Melanie Tem

Spent yesterday limping around with the aid of Nizzibet’s collapsible cane. It did help a bit. I adjusted my chair at work so that my leg dangled less. That also seemed to help. I kept getting asked if I was going to see a doctor about the leg.

Hmm. I’ve nothing against doctors. We didn’t use them much growing up. Visiting the dentist was a regular activity but the doctor? Not so much. No regular check-ups. We only went if something really inexplicapable was going on. My mother preferred home remedies. In later years she really disliked “Western” medicine. Mostly I don’t think about seeing a doctor because seeing one would interrupt my routine and usually any problem I’ve had has gone away in a short enough time that going to a doctor would have seemed pointless.

As far as we can remember our lease runs out at the end of August. Given that this is more house than we need (and want to spend time taking care of) we’re moving to an apartment rather than renew. So I’ve been trying to pack up our books and get rid of the stuff we don’t really need. With the deadline looming I want to speed up my packing.

This weekend was frustrating. My leg hurts the least if I keep it elevated. In that position it’s difficult to draw. And I certainly can’t pack books and then carry the box upstairs.

Today we should get some word on the car. Hopefully the problem is less expensive to fix than it would be to buy a new (used) car. Fingers crossed.

And monsters? More posted to my gallery at Kaijuphile. I’m trying to improve my color skills. Work continues slowly on my other projects. The monster drawings are done in my sketchbooks when I have short moments of deadtime away from home. I wish I could fit my other projects into that deadtime but they seem to require more concentration than I’ve got available when on I’m on the go.

First there was this –
So many of the films I’ve watched recently have incorporated into their plots some kind of inane romance, affair, or love story involving heterosexual couples. This was never as unfortunate as it was in the recent Land of the Dead, where, among the walking corpses, two plucky heteros—one a freedom fighter, the other a virtuous whore—come together.

And then LuvSet commented –
Plus I disagree that the cute male lead (worked for me!) hooks up with the gun-wielding prostitute. They never kiss. They never even embrace. They don’t even exchange charged looks. The most significant looks between her and another male character, I’d say, are between her and Riley’s buddy when she’s sussing out their relationship.

(Follow the links to read the full texts.)

And so I added –
I’d agree with my bro. It didn’t occur to me that Riley(?) and Slack had hooked up. Given the lack of subtlety in the rest of the movie I’m pretty sure that if they’d hooked up there would have been some face sucking.

Genre movies have always had a tendency to include pointless (hetero) romantic subplots. I doubt that there are any more of them now than there were in the past. I certainly remember being annoyed as a kid by pointless romantic subplots getting in the way of the death and destruction in the monster movies I was watching. If anything (in horror movies at least) if “they” were trying to reinforce the hetero ideal there’d be more queer characters getting killed and more final couples instead of final girls.

I don’t remember any significant queer characters in other Romero movies that I’ve seen. Queer subtext in Martin would have gone over my head at the time I watched it. And probably even today. I’m mostly too clueless.

Possibly there were queer characters in Knight Riders. It seems like there was both a lesbian couple and a gay couple but I can’t remember clearly. The listing in the IMDB seems to back up my fuzzy memory. And while I liked Knight Riders when I was twenty I thought it was mostly just silly when I saw it again a couple of years ago. But then, I seem to be becoming a cranky old man.

My knee hasn’t been the same since LittleM used me as a jungle gym a while back. Mostly it felt stiff and sore after I’d spend a day sitting around at work. The stiffness and soreness would work itself out once I’d gotten up and moved around for a while. Lately though, the knee has felt aggrieved and stayed feeling that way even after exercise.

Fah. Stupid knee. Doesn’t it know I can have it replaced with a shiny new tin one?

The car is resting in a garage in Olympia. Hopefully the mechanics will take a look at it and be able to cheaply heal it’s weary self.