From this CNN article:

A new study commissioned by the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs recommends a complete ban on tobacco, which would end tobacco sales on military bases and prohibit smoking by anyone in uniform, not even combat troops in the thick of battle.

According to the study, tobacco use impairs military readiness in the short term. Over the long term, it can cause serious health problems, including lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. The study also says smokeless tobacco use can lead to oral and pancreatic cancer.

I read the entire article and never saw what friends of mine with military backgrounds have told me repeatedly: if you smoke, you get more break time.

"Hey sarge, I'm gonna go light one up. Back in ten minutes."

And you're off. You're still on the clock, you're still technically "on duty," but you're taking a paid break. And it's only available to smokers.

"Hey sarge. I'm gonna go lean against that wall with my hands in my pockets. Back in ten minutes."

That'll probably get you laughed at or worse.

Now I'm sure this will differ from unit to unit, base to base, deployment to deployment, and branch to branch. Please! If you read this and have military experience, I'd love to hear your take on it.

If it's as broadly true as I've been anecdotally led to believe then the military has one more really good reason to ban smoking - it will increase productivity.

Of course they should then employ some decent management practices so that the overworked, undercompensated men and women in uniform can find healthy ways to decompress, blow off steam, take five, or whatever. Because let's face it... whether or not you smoke, sometimes you just need to take a break.

Tags: politics

My friend Tex, a regular at Dragon's Keep, is on Facebook. We friended each other, and then about a week later I got a Facebook message from him de-friending me.

"Sorry, man. You tweet so often I can never see anybody else's updates because they've scrolled off the bottom."

This, believe it or not, is the very first time anybody has told me they can't be my friend because I talk too much.

So I explained to Tex that he can hide my updates by checking a little box. This way he can tune me out and still be my friend.

(Note: I suspect that this is what all my friends do in real-life.)

Our friend and fully-compensated minion-manager Janci Patterson ran an RPG last night at Dragon's Keep. The rule-set was "World of Darkness." The setting? Dragon's Keep, July 3rd, 9:00pm, in the Utah we know... only faced with zombies. The characters? Us, as ourselves. Me, Drew (Janci's husband and business partner), Timothy and Rebecca, Tim, Jared, and Big Mike. Oh, and my 14-year-old daughter.

It turns out I'm a fairly robust RPG character. Good firearm experience, solid knowledge of the lay of the land and back routes, and healthy enough to keep up. Most of us were probably a dot or two overpowered in places and I'm sure I was no exception, but the stuff you know how to do by the time you're 40 actually does count for something in games like this.

Game play began at around 8:00pm and ran with a few breaks until about 6:00am. The Keep was full of people until 1:00am, and downtown Provo had people camping along University Avenue all night in anticipation of the parade in the morning (which, following the game, I decided I would love to miss. So I drove me and mine home before the road closed.)

In-game, in a nutshell... there was a big crash, and we realized that there were dead people coming into the store. Hasty barricades and improvised weapons kept us alive long enough to get to cars. We zombie- and traffic-clogged roads prevent us from getting to Jared's house and his firearms, so we settled for my house (and MY firearms.) Another stop for ammo and supplies (Jared's Mom's place) led to our first real combat. We all lived. From there we headed up the canyon to this place I know, a place that is pretty defensible. Except when it's being swarmed by big stitched-together conglomerations of undead.

Still, all of us except Timothy lived. Timothy died once, and then undied a second time. It was sad. We almost lost the whole group, but the zombies rolled badly during those last three rounds, and I managed to get behind them with a semi-automatic shotgun and a pair of assault pistols while their attention was focused on trying to finish off the other party members (two of whom were unconscious.) And then morning came and the dead stopped being undead. No explanation for why. Life's like that. Apparently so is un-life.

It was an intense play session. So intense, in fact, that my daughter decided to bail out and play a different RPG upstairs with Bob and Gary and friends. We gave her a happy ending early -- the life-flight pilot came to get his wife near Jared's Mom's place, and had an extra seat, so Kiki flew to safety before the real fighting started. In that game she played some buccaneer sharp-shooter, popping off the guys with the fancy hats as the ships closed with each other. Oh, and apparently she accidentally seduced her way through Port Royal. I'm going to have to talk to her about that when she wakes up...

Speaking of which, I'm not as young as I used to be. That all-nighter was draining. I suspect I'm ruined for any sort of thinky work until Monday at the earliest.

I've picked up the figpainting thing again for the first time in months. It feels nice to have actually finished something. It feels even better to be happy with how it turned out (even if the pictures do reveal my haste and slop in a few spots...) ( photo behind the cut )

I'm grateful for the good father I had. As I grow older and (in my own estimation) wiser I imagine that I can see more of the particular challenges that he faced, and the hurdles he both cleared and failed to clear. This passing-of-judgement in hindsight doesn't mean I'm any less grateful for my Dad. He stepped up and did the Dad job the best he knew how. He was a great man, and I miss him.

He's been gone almost 20 years now, so while there's no emotional scab to be picked there is certainly a scar. I know its shape intimately, having poked at it for the better part of the last two decades. The scar is shaped like "what am I supposed to do in THIS situation, Dad? Oh. Right. No problem... I'll figure something out."

My Dad loved being a dad, and I guess that's the part I always try to remember. Well... that and the fact that heart disease killed him at age 56. There's a reason I'm kind of obsessive about staying fit and getting fitter -- I love being a dad, too, and I'd rather not stop before I have the chance to see what being a grand-dad is like. But I digress...

That bit about loving being a dad... that's the important part. If there are men in your life who are like that, let them know you appreciate them and the job they do. And if you happen to be one of those men, I bow to you in sincere appreciation of what you've undertaken. Keep up the good work, Dad. The world needs more real men, and it doesn't get any more real than this.

Tags: family
I feel: grateful

When we went to bed last night Sandra left her braids in, and yesterday's braids were kind of a knotted, braidy bun at the back of her head.

Sometime in the wee morning hours Sandra and I snuggled together, her head resting on my right arm.

When I woke up this morning my right arm felt oddly numb. When I extracted myself from the snuggle I found that it was REALLY numb, and wasn't working right.

In fact, it wasn't working at all. The flexor system (make a fist, drop your wrist) was engaged, and the extensor system (extend your fingers, raise your wrist) was... gone? I couldn't extend my fingers or raise my wrist.

Also, there was a set of near-bruised indentations in the crook of my elbow that seemed to match the knotty braid pattern from the back of Sandra's head.

After about a minute of not panicking I managed to restore circulation to the sleeping extensor muscles. I expected the pins and needles to feel a lot worse than they did. Slowly the feeling returned and I was able to extend my fingers and wrist again. Yes, this was my right hand, the one that draws all the comics. Yes, I was frightened, but only a little. Mostly my brain was occupied with "how do I fix this" and "wow, this is kind of cool." As of now, five hours later, there's no trace of the problem.

What I've arrived at by way of conclusion, however, is "Sandra is not allowed to wear the evil knotty braid-bun to bed. And if she does, I'm not cuddling."

I'm musing upon this pursuit I embarked upon nine years ago.

It's kind of weird in that I don't really feel like what came before it was real. Maybe that's just me getting old (I'm only 41, folks, don't panic or send me prune-juice), but the past seems to be further away than it used to. Not in the obvious, "duh" sense. I mean, of course events that happened in 2000 are further away now than they were five years ago. No I mean it's like it's accelerating. As if I'm moving faster forward through time than I used to, and the events of five years ago feel much more distant than events five years previous to a ten-years-younger me felt.

If you followed all that, congratulations. Maybe this post isn't about musing upon my cartooning career. Maybe it's about musing upon musing upon the past. It's a meta-muse.

Which sounds like "Metamucil" when I say it out loud.

And that makes me laugh and think of prune juice.

This is what happens when I try to write my thoughts down before I'm done thinking them.

I met a veteran at the Scrapyard Release Party.

I should point out that there were probably several vets there, but this young man introduced himself as such, and pointed out that he got hooked on the comic while on tour in Iraq.

He asked me, in a quite goodnatured way, with no guile whatsoever, if my practice of sending free books to APO addresses was a marketing thing.

That was a tough question to answer, but today, Memorial Day, is a good day to write about it. See, no matter how charitable that act, the fact that it is good for my business will always call my motives into question. Whether or not I meant it to be good marketing, it IS good marketing, and that casts a long, long shadow.

The practice is a simple one. If an order comes in that is to be shipped to an APO address, Sandra and I put extra books in the box. We include cardstock bookmarks explaining ourselves. They read something like this:

Hey, look at that. A free book!

It’s yours because I respect what you’re doing to help me live in a free country. “Free Country” may not always mean “Free Book,” but for you and your buddies, today, it does.

I know that you’re part of the finest military the world has ever seen, and that you are a force for good. I know that you stand in harm’s way so that me and mine don’t have to. My prayers and the prayers of millions of others around the world are with you every day. We are thankful for your service, and humbled by the work you do.

Enjoy the book, and pass it around your unit. I fully expect it to be dog-eared, heat-warped, and hammered inside of two weeks. “Mint condition” is a waste of perfectly good reading material.

You can find more Schlock Mercenary online and it’ll always be there, so don’t worry if you don’t have internet access right now. Just be sure to come home safely. We miss you.

I asked this young man, this honorable veteran, whether he'd gotten the bookmark. He had, but he seemed to want to hear those words with his own ears. I couldn't remember exactly what I'd written on the bookmarks, but I told him that the free books are something I do because they're something I CAN do. They're a gesture of gratitude, albeit a small one. I understand there is an epic level of boredom out there, with an underlying tension that is equally epic. If a good book and a good laugh dispels that just a bit, maybe for an hour or two, I feel like perhaps I've helped.

He told me that the extra books ended up on a bookshelf there in his camp, and were getting passed around pretty regularly. I was very, very happy to hear that.

He bought more books at the party, and I thanked him. But he and I both knew that I wasn't thanking him for buying books.

Brains are weird.

I just finished scripting a Thursday comic, and I got to the "Save As" dialog and brain-cramped.

My naming scheme for scripts goes like this: YYYYMMDDdayabbrev-punchline. I've been using this scheme since July of 2000. The script in question was going to be 20090604Thurs-Discreet.doc, but as I typed I couldn't remember whether it was supposed to be "Thur" or "Thurs" for the abbreviation.

I've typed that abbreviation the same way (or at least never questioned how I was typing it) over 450 times in the last nine years. And suddenly I could not for the life of me figure out which way it was supposed to go. So I flipped to my "Drawn Scripts" folder and checked. "Thurs." Fine.

Senility? Senescence? Somnambulance? I'm forty-one, after all, and I am a little drowsy.

Brains are weird.

"Dad, when is it going to be not tilted?" Patch asks. Patch is six, and I have no idea what he's talking about. I'm coloring comics at my computer.

"What?"

"It's still tilted." He gestures at the drawing table adjacent my computer station, a monsterous spring-loaded thing that can be adjusted quite a bit.

The light comes on. Before I started work on XDM, that particular drawing table was horizontal most of the time because I used it for recreation. I painted miniatures on it, and it was usually covered with little pewter figurines in various degrees of undress unpaint. One of Patch's very favorite things to do was to sit at that table with some fully-painted Cygnaran Stormblades, a few fully-painted Trollbloods, and carry on as six-year-olds are wont to carry on with such toys -- making explosion sounds and playing at warfare. I always trusted him to play gently. It was a privilege to play with Daddy's Stormblades, and he respected that.

But then came the crushing workload of "get this book illustrated in a month," and I put all my toys away, angled the table for drawing, and there it stayed.

Recently I decided to leave it angled, and to use it for marker-art. Just today, in fact, I markered a fresh background for the comic. Patch's playground is doomed to remain angled, because the moment I make it flat again it'll get covered with clutter.

This is not a digression from a first-person, present-tense narrative. These last three paragraphs are what run through my head. Especially the part about Patch's playground being doomed.

"It has to stay tilted" I tell him, and his face falls. "Did you want to play with some miniatures?" I ask, hoping he can be placated with $200 worth of nigh-indestructible Monsterpocalypse plastic figs rather than 200 hours worth of hand-painted pewter.

"Yeah. I want the Stormblades."

It is time for me to man up to this "Dad" thing I've been doing for thirteen years now. My youngest is my responsibility this evening, and I can make a minor concession.

"I tell you what... go get a TV table, and I'll set it up for you."

He does, and I do. And I wriggle past my marker-stand into my crowded closet to fish out a pair of boxy bags whose foam trays protect some 300 or so pewter figs.

"Which ones do you want?"

"The Stormblades. And some robots. And the big robot. The biggest one. And the wreck markers."

"For bad guys do you want the Trolls, or do you want the Undead?" I'm hoping he chooses the Undead. Alexia Ciannor and The Risen are an easy unit for me to fish out, while the Trolls will required digging into the BIG bag.

He pauses. "Undead." Good boy.

And so he sits and plays at a TV table next to me while I color. This goes on for half an hour or so, at which point he decides the Undead are not enough of a challenge for the Stormblades, two light Warjacks, and one heavy Defender Warjack. Good eye, son. That's because you've got close to four hundred points of Cygnarans up against maybe fifty points of Undead. No, wait. A hundred. They've got an Ogrun with them. But I don't say that. I get out the Trolls.

Half an hour later he's done. I send him off for a bath, and I carefully pack everything away.

And I get back to work. I'm way behind schedule. I could have knocked down four strips during that hour, and only managed one and a half. All the packing and unpacking, plus the broken concentration... it's expensive, time-wise. Oh, and one of the miniatures is broken. I examine it closely and decide it's an easy fix - it's not broken pewter, it's a separated joint. Super-glue and a daub of paint will do the trick.

Twenty minutes later he returns from his bath with his Mom. Sandra lets me know that during bath-time he could talk about nothing besides his hour in my office. I briefly consider calling his attention to the broken miniature, and hold my tongue as I realize that being in my office with me and my expensive toys was the best part of his day -- a day that included hours of Lego Star-Wars games with a friend, bike-riding, two different stints on a trampoline, and pizza.

I pick him up and collect a hug. "Goodnight, buddy. I love you." We part, him off to bed with happy thoughts of victorious Cygnarans, me alone again in my office with introspection.

I realize that the best part of his day was the part that I almost sent him away from, and very nearly ruined after the fact with a scolding. I realize that I almost decided that I was too busy, that he could just play more video games, or make do with a lesser set of miniatures. I realize that if I am a Good Dad it's only accidentally.

Hopefully the act of writing this down will help me remember to have this kind of accident more often.

I refer to my years at Novell as time spent in "Day-Job Land." I haven't had a similarly apt descriptor for the land where I get to be a cartoonist, working for myself, playing with my family.

A private conversation with David Malki of Wondermark shook loose the descriptor I want to use. "The Land of Make Believe."

Yeah, it's been trademarked and copyrighted and all that by somebody else. I think it's an amusement park in Jersey. But the idea is bigger than that.

My Land of Make Believe is not just about pretending, it's not "make-believe" in the child's play sense. No, this is the Land where every day I get to Make the things that I Believe in. I build universes and draw pictures about them. I share my stories and pictures with others, and I Make them Believe too. I've said before that few things are as flattering as learning that I've captured the imagination of another human being. I can't bring myself to think of "fans" without feeling both humbled and exalted by their very existence.

But my Land of Make Believe is not just about creating worlds and inviting others to experience them with me. It's also about Believing that these worlds, this shared experience can somehow support me and my family, and then Making that happen.

And every so often it's about looking a skeptic or a critic right in the eye and Making him or her Believe, too. It's a land of proof in the pudding, and then second helpings of pudding.

And yes, sometimes it's about pretending I know what I'm doing, and then getting on with my day.

I feel: contemplative

Quick announcement/reminder: Pre-orders for Schlock Mercenary: The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance open tomorrow at 8:00am Mountain (roughly 24-point-five hours from this post.)

I'm not talking about the recovery of my computer after its power supply failed. That wasn't just now. That was last night.

No, I'm talking about not burning myself because my hand was wet and my brain was on.

I just finished cooking breakfast in the oven, and our gas oven has a vent that blows across the back of the stovetop. Not an ideal design -- it tends to heat pot-handles if you've been careless enough to leave them turned towards the vent. It also heats the back of the small Corelle serving tray we use to set spatulas on so their drips are contained.

I was giving a quick wash to the tools I used at breakfast -- spatula, cheese slicer, cheese grater, pizza-cutter -- and saw that the Corelle tray was full of gunk from my project and the breakfast Sandra made for the kids (French toast and scrambled eggs; there was a big yellow puddle). So I reached out and grabbed it by the non-sticky-yellow end, which happened to be the end closest to the vent.

That noise you hear when you drip water onto a griddle? That came off of my fingers. I could FEEL the water on my fingertips boiling away. In less than a second (what IS minimum human reaction time? Figure that long plus a little change) I had snatched my hand away and stuck it back under the running water in the sink. I checked my fingertips.

No burns. No redness. No sensation of ANYTHING other than normal "hi, I'm your fingertip, touch the world with me" I usually get.

I boiled water off of my fingertips, and didn't get burned. Whew!

I'm sitting in front of my computer, exhausted. It's been a long, productive day. It's not over yet -- I don't try to go to sleep until 10:30pm, lest I end up awake at 2:00am -- but there's nothing really left to do.

Except more work. I could color. Coloring needs to be done.

Nah. Too tired. I want to be entertained.

I've got the first four The Wheel Of Time audiobooks, though. I've listened to the first one. I could queue up the next chapter of The Great Hunt and listen to that. But what should I do while my ears are busy?

Oooh, I know. I could color. Coloring needs to be done...

Madoff pleaded guilty.

The trial is over. He's off to jail. He actually saved us taxpayers some money in legal fees, court costs, not to mention lost productivity as we all tune in to the trial (which would have been a circus.)

Granted, it doesn't begin to make up for his crime. That's why he's in jail.

(Hey, Bernie! If you'd been a REALLY clever criminal you'd have stolen money in such a way that they named the scheme after you. But no, you're just another Ponzi-wannabe...)

I do.

I bought some plain chevre (that's fancy-speak for "goat cheese") at Sam's club for about $7.00 a pound, cut into the bag, and squooshed some of it straight into my mouth.

Yum!

I've since squooshed the rest of it into some tupperware. Forkfuls of chevre swirled through pesto? Yum!

(Yes, I'm posting this to take my mind off of the smutto video.)

Goat cheese! Delicious!

For the first time in at least a year, possibly four, I'm tipping the scales at less than 180 pounds. I've been as high as 190 as recently as December. For most of the last year I've been unsuccessfully experimenting with diet and exercise regimes, but most of them have only resulted in a maintenance diet rather than any sort of fat loss. Since January, however, I've gone back to my old stand-by and eschewed carbohydrates. I'm feeling great, and I'm down ten pounds from my all-time high.

My diet includes:
low-carb pizzas, homemade with Mission "carb balance" tortillas (baked dry and crispy on a griddle) and good cheeses
Fresh, crisp Fuji apples (one a day, maybe two if I'm munchy)
Uncooked instant oatmeal packets with some milk (treat food, once every couple of days maybe)
Good cheese. Blue, Havarti, sharp Cheddar, spiced Jack, Brie... all used for small snacks.
Lettuce-wrapped burgers at Carl's Jr (maybe two per week)
Fresh broccoli with some blue cheese dressing
Assorted "oh, I might as well have what you're having" meals in moderation, one every couple of days, max.
12oz cans of Muscle Milk, but only right after a trip to the gym.
Assorted sugar-free beverages, some carbonated, some not. Some caffeinated, some not.

I've also been doing the olive oil trick from Freakonomics. Sometimes I'll skip a meal, and I'll just have a sip of extra virgin olive oil instead. It comes out to about 100 calories, and it shuts down my appetite for a few hours. As long as I take it easy with the next meal this trick allows me to almost effortlessly shave as much as 1000 calories off of my day. As an added benefit that's one more meal I don't have to spend time preparing, so I get more work done.

I'm thrilled to be looking at the one-seventies on the scale. My goal is to get myself at LEAST down to 165, with my stretch goal being 155. I still have a long way to go, but this diet feels maintainable.

Tags: low carb
I feel: accomplished

While "Watchmen" was a powerful movie, it was most certainly not as significant to its medium (film) as the "Watchmen" comic was to its own.

But I'll argue that there's just no way for a groundbreaking book to be made into a groundbreaking movie. Take The Lord of The Rings, for example. The films are powerful adaptations of one of the most important works of 20th century literature, but they themselves are not among the most important works of film. (Well... they were groundbreaking, in that nothing that large had been attempted before, but I digress...)

But that doesn't mean I was at all disappointed by "Watchmen" on the big screen. It was amazing. (But it probably will not be my #1 movie of the year.)

I was wrong. I didn't think the "Watchmen" movie could do the book justice.

It did the book justice. It may have even improved on it in spite of (or perhaps thanks to) certain missing elements.
( potential spoilers )
The film had more emotional impact than the book did.

It earned its R rating on all counts. Not a film to take the kids to.

Also, it's probably not a film that somebody unfamiliar with the culture of the late '70s and early '80s will fully appreciate. You twenty-somethings who mercilessly mock the decades of my youth... let me know how you liked the film. Oh, and PULL UP YOUR PANTS. Your decade is going to get its comeuppance, rest assured.

I've been aggressively low-carbing and appetite-suppressing since mid-January, and it has been working. I'm down about four or five notches on my belt, about 1% or 2% body-fat, and my weight is down 8 pounds from my high of 190, and my average weight (the "center point" around which it seems to fluctuate during the week) is down 5 pounds from 188.

Oh, and the cholesterol test I took on Wednesday came back at 160.

I'm feeling great.

Last night I ate out at Bangkok Grill in Orem (800 S State, on the east side of State and the south side of 800 -- you REALLY need to eat there if you haven't) with a bunch of local pros and friends. My stomach seems to be smaller than it used to be. I overate, yes (it's still quite hard not to) but I hit the "I have overeaten" feeling far, far sooner than usual.

My goal: By the time any of you non-Utah folk actually see me again (WorldCon in August, Self-Syndication Seminar in September) I want to weigh in at a trim-no-wait-that's-actually-svelte 160.

Tags: low carb