Avoiding the cold

Cold. Oh man, it’s cold. I need to get one of those window sealing kits for my bedroom; I’ve noticed the curtain moving and felt breezes coming through. But even downstairs, with sealed-up windows and real heat, is chilly.

I spent the afternoon dodging the chill at nice, toasty Ground. Finished Litany of the Long Sun, so now I’m starting on Epiphany, the second half of the series. I still don’t know whether I’ll go on to the Short Sun books after. I’ve got a copy of The Knight, Wolfe’s latest, and I still haven’t read all of Peace, or any of Pandora by Holly Hollander, though I’ve got copies of both. And I don’t remember much of The Fifth Head of Cerberus or There Are Doors, and drcpunk has a copy of Operation Ares.... I could easily spend the rest of winter reading Wolfe. By spring I’d be incapable of giving a straight answer to anyone. (Yeah, go ahead, take the cheap shot.)

I’ve done more drawing than this, but most of it is character redesigns. (Not Melorne, somebody else. Same story, though. One of the human characters.)

If you're not willing to do LJ support...

You’ve probably seen this argument: If you’re not willing to personally kill and butcher an animal, you shouldn’t eat meat.

( Let’s apply that logic to other areas of life, using the magic of reductio ad absurdum! )

"Interspecies Romance" should have clued me in

First, props to Andrew Northrup for his perfect summation of Colin Powell’s recent admission that the evidence he cited in support of the Iraq war doesn’t actually exist:

First of all, I'd like to thank Colin Powell for taking a break from his busy schedule of lying about Iraq's WMD and links to al-Qaeda to not lie about Iraq's non-existant links to al-Qaeda for two seconds.

But now the scary bit. See, for some months now, I’ve been convinced that we’re living in the future shown in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper — robot dogs, orgasmatrons, steak-as-health-food. Then I saw this bit in Northrup’s blog:

Nobody cares whether or not Iraq is the central front on the war on terror, because nobody cares about the war on terror, and nobody cares because there is no such thing. We're in the kind of war where you cut everyone's taxes and go to Mars

And I put it together with some recent news and realized: We’re living in Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!

American Flagg was published in the 1980s, and set in 2031. Y’know how every SF future timeline written between WW2 and 1990 had East and West Germany reunifying at some point, and nobody had it happening anywhere near as early as it actually did? Chaykin got it closer than anybody else I’ve seen: 1996, the year when everything goes to hell, and the US federal government relocates to Mars. “Temporarily, of course.”