Uhm, WHAT? Hello Kitty MMORPG?! It seems so, yes. It’s in Beta testing and can be found at http://www.hellokittyonline.com/us/ for all the fun.

“At last the amazing world of Hello Kitty and Friends is coming to interactive life as a massively multiplayer online game!

SanrioDigital and Typhoon Games have combined Sanrio’s much-loved characters with new eye-catching graphics and the engaging gameplay of MMORPGs. Gamers and fans finally have the opportunity to become a part of the Sanrio universe!”

There’s a trailer:

(Josh said it, not me): G.I. Johan – In Soviet Russia half the battle knows you!
——————
So yesterday among the travels in the Haight was a stop in a crazy lady used book store. Like I mean crazy. As in kept going on about how people had beaten her up for owning a bookstore and she made no money and had no other skills and hated her job and couldn’t type and hated technology and the Chinese were going to destroy us all with magnetic bombs because we used the Internet too much and why she couldn’t buy hardcover books much because her profits were too low and … crazy lady did not stop.

Other people came in and she started to talk to them and tell them the same crazy and…

Gah.

anyway there was a book there, I didn’t get a picture because lighting was bad and she had so many signs around! So many! Such as:

No pictures! No we won’t tell you why!

Don’t reach for books above your head, ask for help!

Don’t carry a lot of books for purchase and then reach for another book! (I didn’t quite get this, I assume it was due to dropping things but it felt like being told not to buy much.)

So there were a lot of crazy signs and I didn’t get a picture of this book but it was some german book, old thing, with a few farmers and a swastika on the cover. Olde Timey Farmers, too. So I decided the book was The Rise of the Nazi Amish, a book I hope to write some day.

The store also had a copy of Little Orphan Annie (the movie novelization) in German. Which I think is Anne Frank, really. I mean … aren’t the same the same story, but for location and time?

But then there was escape. And survival.

Hurray!

So yes, crazy lady used book store. They happen. Be warned.

First things first:

So anyway, yesterday I bumped about town with one Jeff Lester – Super Genius. Jeff is a great guy who writes stuff and knows comics and … he’s awesome to hang out with. Even if he did put me in a bookstore and then smile as my wallet screamed.

Still, the depth of conversation, about writing or comics and just theory and sub-structure … Jeff is a smart cat and it makes you think to have a conversation with him and it becomes this sweet jazz affair where yer riffin’ and playing and having good times. So yeah. Jeff Lester. If you have the means I highly recommend picking one up.

So while there with Jeff I picked up a copy of Brian Hibbs’ new Tilting at Windmills book (get it) and a copy of Teenagers from the Future. Yes, a book of deep looking essays about the Legion of Superheroes. What? WHAT?

Yeah.

So anyway, I got them both at Comix Experience, which is a kick-ass store.

Right, so I came back to home base and my sister then, laughingly, dragged me out to Comic Relief. The stores have a rivalry, except not really. So there ya are. Where, once there, we hung out with folk, looked at too many things, took a few home and generally had a nice time of it, capped off by BBQ and watching Barnum. Uh-huh, you heard me, BBQ and a musical. I roll like a rock star, motherfuckers.

In a few hours I have to jet out of here to go spend the day with another friend and have adventures of awesome, like I do. That is, in fact, how I roll. Downhill.

Future highlights will include: Heading back to CR on Weds, theoretically, and maybe seeing some other folk (Branwyn? I’ll try and bring cupcakes or pie.) and uhm, you know, taking care of some business.

Also some bidniz.

SRS BDNZ.

Today I lapsed into a coma, for a bit. Yah, by the time I went to bed last night I had been up something like 23 hours, easily, and so when I go up this morning, around 7, I quickly decided that I would like more sleep, and oh btw I might be getting sick. So yeah sleep.

I woke up at about 2:30pm. Woops!

But then Joe K (not to be confused with Hammerpants) sent me a text asking if I was in town yet, and lo and behold I was (and am) which lead to me bombing down to the Mission on a mission, as it were.

Now the first thing I noticed when I got off the train was a restaurant that had a sign. A sign of glory.

CHINESE FOOD AND DONUTS

Fuck! I didn’t get a picture and I was on the way to Joe’s place so I couldn’t just go in and be all “Take me to mecca, you mad, glorious bastards!” but I kinda wanted to, you know? Chinese food and donuts. Come the fuck on, that’s a combination that deserves your respect. Day-um.

Anyway, Joe hadn’t eaten, and neither had I so we went to get a few beers. Wait, what? Yeah, well, there you go. We then met up with his peeps (Joe got peeps, y’all) and went to this awesome chinese joint. They had some seriously kickass dim sum, hardcore, wonderful dim sum. Do you get that yet?

We ate so much that when we asked for the check the waiter actually smirked and said “Oh, no more?” like some kinda waiter smirking guy who was watching the white boys eat dim sum like it was going out of style.

In text, later, Marianne heard about this and replied “Isn’t miniature food the best?” and she might be right. Damn, that was some good eating. I still wonder about the Chinese Food and Donuts joint though. That sounds deadly, in more ways than one. Next time, my friends, next time.

But there you go. In about 12 hours I have to be back downtown, which sounds like a long time from now but honestly isn’t when you consider the whole having to sleep and get up and have some Red Bull and … there’s stuff between then and now, man. Stuff!

So for now I zipzoom off, to have adventures, or sleep, or both.

So here I am on a plane. The map screen readout tells me that I’m at 37982 feet, moving at 504 mph and have 1842 miles to go before SF. Zooming all the way in tells me I’m right above Milwaukee right now. As always the person in front of my is reclining as much as possible. I don’t know why but that seems to be my fate on planes, better than crying babies though. Still, it means that in order to get the laptop to a comfortable place to type on I have to have the screen bent a bit oddly.

So Virgin America. Never flown them before. Price was right so, hey, why not? First of all you have to understand that the plane itself, I mean when I got onboard at first I thought perhaps I had wandered onto a set from Josie and the Pussycats. They were placing early 90s relaxatron techno/ambient electronica crap. “Don’t worry, Mr. Knave,” it assured me, “this won’t hurt a bit.” Which is always, so you know, what they say before they take your fucking liver. Then there’s the lighting. Christ I bet they think it’s suave or relaxing. It isn’t. It is purple and blue and makes me feel like I’m in some smooth criminal whorehouse or something. It’s like Prince was all, “Purple Rain? Purple PLANE!” on this bitch. Mood lighting. Seriously.

But it’s a plane and so far it has stayed in the air. So I guess I can’t bitch too much, huh? Oh sure I can. I get charging for food, to an extent. And yes, we all know about the charging for using the toilet thing that went around recently, so shush, but still. Why is airline food priced like Event food? You know how you’ll pay more for a shitty hotdog because you’re at the game? Sure, all right I can kinda see that I guess. But 12 bucks for a roast beef on wheat that, for all the hype, tastes like something prewrapped from 7-11?

Yes I had one. I was that hungry. I didn’t eat dinner last night and got up at 4am and … shut the fuck up who asked you?

1744 miles to go @ 544mph/37992 feet. So you know.

There is also in seat entertainment. TV and shit. It has music though and that’s what I us. 20 channels are open for my use. Let’s take them each in turn. As I type I will turn to that channel and listen to it while I type about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kids today, huh? I know, right? They have everything and it’s spoiled them silly. They can’t do research or fix anything. They can’t learn right and expect everything to be handed to them on a platter.

Why in my day…

Shut the fuck up.

Technology is curved. Shit has been getting easier and every generation since the very first have played a round of “in my day.”

“Fuck, Bob, in my day we didn’t HAVE legs and couldn’t breathe air.”

Yeah, we get it. Your grandparents didn’t have the ease of access to cars their kids did, letting them travel so far and wide. Distance didn’t mean as much. Community was going to erode.

And your parents, shit they didn’t have TV the way you did. Holy shit! That will destroy all sense of community! It will raise kids automatically and ruin them forever.

Now your kids have the internet as kids. This will destroy community forever. They will learn to expect information to be handed to them and…

This is not new. It has never been new. It is, in fact, so old it is fucking stupid. Yes, every generation loses some information tat might have seemed necessary to the one before it. Things get easier and so on. But they also gain new things. Think of how much better you can sort massive amounts of data than your parents or grandparents generally can. Think of how you manage multiple data streams. I mean shit.

Everyone loses.

Everyone gains.

That’s the way it works. We lose the ability to breathe underwater one day. We gained the ability to breathe air. Well, not like it was a switch but you see what I mean.

And this isn’t saying everything is for the better but come on.

A friend has a kid who didn’t want to do research for a paper. Expected Google to hand him everything, to the point of not wanting to go through the links and comb for data. Well, shitfuck, ok that can get old for me, too, some nights. But that isn’t the point.

The point is that in my day you went to libraries but some kids just wanted to look it up in an encyclopedia and be done. They wanted it handed to them from the broadest source they had. Or they only wanted to go to one library not two.

And so it goes.

The idea, the feelings, don’t change at all. The external shapes do. Mistaking one for the other doesn’t help.

So yeah. Those damn kids today. Evolving. Finding new problems as they use things in intuitive ways we don’t instantly see, just as did with tech our parents gave us way early. How dare they?

What the fuck does she do the NEXT time she levels up? Gets more of the bars filled in? What happens if she loses points? I don’t think she’s thought this through.

On the other hand I hear she likes orgies, always travels with a party, but they will only take turns, never full on pulling a train, ya know? Just one at a time, over and over again. So that’s odd.

So in the course of thinking of something utterly horrible I came up with “It’s like Vern Troyer’s sex tape and Dustin Diamond’s sex tape mixed together. MIDGET SCREECH! MEECH!”

And now MEECHSECKS is a thing of it’s own. A midget, with Screech’s face, in a Napoleon hat, having horrible, clumsy, sex with some unwilling bint, probably trying to not fall off a stool or some such and grasping at the frayed wooden edges of the table with fingers even as splinters gnaw into MEECH’S flesh. For the MEECH is a mighty, sweaty, lumpy beast. It is neither fish nor fowl, man nor mineral but something different. Something both more and less. It is THE MEECH.

And it wants to have MEECHSECKS with you. Dirty, dirty MEECHSECKS.

(via the AP Wire) TOKYO (AP) — A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II, officials said Tuesday.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified “hibakusha,” or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.

Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, city officials said.

“As far as we know, he is the first one to be officially recognized as a survivor of atomic bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Nagasaki city official Toshiro Miyamoto said.

Certification qualifies survivors for government compensation – including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs – but Yamaguchi’s compensation will not increase, Miyamoto said.

Yet, Yamaguchi is satisfied that his record is now a historical fact

Japan is the only country to have suffered atomic bomb attacks. About 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.

Yamaguchi is one of about 260,000 people who survived the attacks. Bombing survivors have developed various illnesses from radiation exposure, including cancer and liver illnesses.

——————–

Dude. I just found a new scale for bad ass. I mean can you imagine what went thought this guy’s head? In town, bomb drops. Say “Fuck this!” and go home as ANOTHER NUKE DROPS. At that point, fucking hell, you take up playing chicken with lightning while wearing a metal rod around your dick, as a LOW RISK game. Fuuuuck.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

So life has been interesting here recently for a lot of reasons I can’t go into any more than on the surface: work stuff, family health stuff, my own health stuff and a general huge level of stress.

My own health stuff I can and will go into detail on quickly. I injured my left arm. Taadaa. And that made it so I couldn’t quite type as much as normal or really write. A few close friends and my editors are the only ones I told. Which says a lot. Anyway, thanks to some downtime and other such stuff, I am back to almost full use and hooray.

The rest of the stuff that’s been going on is … well … going on.

But I am, mentally, in a lot better place. Which doesn’t mean that I won’t still have bouts of terrifying stress and crushing confusion. Of course I will, but for the most part I have gotten through stuff, mentally at least.

Anyway!

On Friday I leave for San Francisco. I’ll leave to head back home on the following Friday. So that’ll be nice. A small vacation. I need one. A lot going on during it, mind you, dinners and beers and being interviewed oh my, but it is still my vacation, damn you.

Which means I won’t be online as much as all as of Friday, for a whole week. I’ll still try and post with strange updates at some point during each day and the comic trains will run on time (Burrito Blade chapter 2 starts Monday, folks! Things Wrong With Me keeps being itself!) Still, if there is less of me that’s why.

Also, while I am on the other coast, if anyone does want to hang let me know. I can’t promise nothing but I can and will try.