If there's a particular subject of interest, click one of the tags below and you'll get a list of relevant, irrelevant, and sometimes irreverent postings.

Wikipedia showed of a lovely 3,820 × 2,964 resolution of Raphael's The School of Athens.

Hypatia looks a little shocked at the amount of smut on my hard drive, but it's not like I'm making her catalog it.

Scalzi's got a very good post on finances. Which I suck at, unless presented to me in easy-to-understand form like The Richest Man In Babylon. My only quibble is I would suggest a SEP-IRA as superior to a Roth for the simple reason that you can put a lot more into it, but it's only available to you if writing or other free-lancy stuff is your income.

Oh, and save and organize your receipts.

In other links, Fresh Fiction reviewed Dragon Outcast. It's more of a "this is what goes on in the story" type review than an "E.E. Knight just made my literary life complete, I'll put my eyes out before I read any other author" that I'm used to on a day-to-day basis from those bottom-kissers at Kirkus.

My friend Jack Fredrickson had an essay printed in this weekend's Chicago Tribune Magazine (it's about the Midwest and globalization). As you may remember, Jack wrote the wonderful Chicago-centric mystery A Safe Place For Dying.

It's only 600 words, but it's got Jack's typical wry voice and black-label-bourbon smoothness and bite.

I stole the hardware man's thermometer. I don't claim any real excuse. Certainly, I was decades past learning it's wrong to steal. All I can offer up is that I was new to being old enough to understand what that thermometer meant.

It happened the night I learned he was dead. Back for a walk in my hometown, I saw the poster board his kids had jammed in the window of the dark, emptied store. The words they'd aimed at the world were angry: He'd been carried out a month before, a victim of too few customers and too many competitors. But his death was from a legacy, too, a legacy of something lost. And a good bad heart.

Read the rest here...

Why the man asks me about writing I can't figure.

antonstrout points out that Jessica Wade is this week's guest blogger at Penguin's editorial blog.

My editor, Ginjer, had her turn at the end of November.

Good resources if you want to learn more about editorial life.

jimvanpelt has a list of his top ten rookie writer mistakes that's nice and concise and printable. That's what I'm doing with it right now, as a matter of fact.

Eric Cherry, one of the Twilight Tales crew, had a great blog entry about craft.

Well worth your time.

But I do like the Old Farmer's Almanac. Who wudda thunk pizza topping choice predicted personality?

I'm being such a blog spammer today. I think it's the rain.

Oh, you can get Daily OFA Advice.

I also followed the link to the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago and learned the top penile blood flow odor stimulants. Lavender and Pumpkin Pie is the winner. I'll avoid the temptation to make a pie joke.

Giant multi-queen yellowjacket nests the size of a 55 Chevy.

Spotted at kradical and scavgraphics

Okay, so evidently Popstrology uses the year and date of your birth to determine what kind of person you are. I'm from "The Second Coming of the Beatles" (oddly I've always considered myself an Elvis man) and the song I was born under was the Beatles Eight Days A Week
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A three-hundred-year-old book bound in human skin has been found by police in Northern England. If it's a translation by John Dee of Abdul Alhazred I'd suggest making peace with any loved ones and slathering yourself in barbecue sauce so Cthulhu eats you quickly.

Made the New York Times, if you can believe it (enter with password found at http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.nytimes.com if you don't want to register).

Nonetheless, D&D Online is meant in almost every way to mimic the classic pen-and-paper dungeon crawl. In both the online and traditional game, each player creates an avatar, with its own special abilities based on its race and profession, such as a dwarf warrior or an elf cleric. The players then form an adventuring band and strike off into a game world that is usually filled with innumerable monsters ripe for defeat and plunder.

While pen-and-paper role playing usually involves thick rule books and sacks of special dice, in D&D Online the computer handles the number-crunching and rules adjudication while the players can see a computerized representation of their actions rather than having to (or being enabled to) imagine them.

While players in most online games communicate by typing, Turbine has tried to enhance the in-person feel of D&D Online by building voice-chat software into the game so players can speak with one another using a microphone plugged into their computer. And while most video games try to adopt a cinematic mode of storytelling, D&D Online plainly reminds users that they are playing a computer approximation of a pen-and-paper game. During combat, an icon of a spinning 20-sided die appears in a corner of the screen, just as modern slot machines still show spinning reels even though a microchip has already decided if you've won the jackpot.

Experienced video gamers will scoff at such window dressing, but those little touches are meant to provide a comfort level for pen-and-paper traditionalists. In addition, the game's makers hope to recapture men who may have played D&D in their youth but then given it up amid the mundane responsibilities of adulthood. (Women are a clear minority in almost all serious gaming circles.)

I'm a bit skeptical, because as a veteran geek, half the fun was sitting around the table with your buddies enjoying the byplay and eyerolling: "Time for Kevin to get us all killed again, thanks to insisting on stopping the horde of orcs with his Wand of Magic Missiles. The clerics at Resurrection n' Go are going to be soooooo pissed."

Submitted without comment:

G-Whiz!

Chocolate Milk!

As someone who was born in Wisconsin and a chocolate lover I heartily approve.

Locus has done an interesting 2005 cover art summary. Those of you interested in fantasy and sf art might want to take a peek.

2005 Directory of Cover Artists.

For the record, I've had covers done by Koveck, Paul Youll, and Steve Stone.

Mild storm outside, complete with thunder and lighting to drive the cats bonkers. Of course any storm seems mild when you're reading about a Category 5 hurricane.

Finally got around to ordering some new business cards. While the aged ones with the 2001 AOLTWBG iPublish "it's graphical -- sorta" Way of the Wolf cover still hold a certain emotional cachet -- viva nostalgia! cries the hoary old maximum leader within -- the email addy is wrong and has been wrong for some time. There's something very Ol' Gil about handing out a card with your email crossed out and a new one written in. I went with an understated black design, no book covers or anything, sort of a WWNGD (what would Neil Gaiman do?) look.

Back to the salt mines. Which don't necessarily have to be awful. Look at these in Poland, the legendary Wieliczka Salt Mines...

The Army is teaching Iraqi women to shoot.

Sweet on so many levels.

Of course Lileks ends up hitting just the right note:

It’s impossible to understate Doohan's appeal - if you sneak into a NASA control room during a mission and ask the controllers how many chose their profession because of Scotty, half the hands in the room would go up. No one wanted to go into space because of that whiny little red-head kid on Lost in Space. It takes something indefinable to be a Kirk, it takes med school to be a McCoy, it takes green blood to be Spock, but Scotty – aye. Any man could be Scotty, if he applied himself. And he'd be among manly things, too.

In a hundred years from now, no one will remember Brad Pitt. But they’ll have a picture of Scotty taped up in the break room off the moon shuttle.

In the mood to confuse and delight your visual neural pathways?

Optical illusions!