Howard Tayler

I was sure I'd related this before, but Google couldn't find it...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:56:07 GMT

Short version, cutting to the punchline as quickly as possible:

My mother-in-law sent us a plush nativity, complete with wise men and a camel. Its job was to sit under the tree and get played with.

About five years ago my son was playing with them, and from the other room I heard "Wap! Him dead! Now my take camel!"

That poor wise man was apparently unwise enough to get ambushed by some other toy (a Hamtaro, if memory serves.)

Tip your waitress!

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:28:58 GMT

Or waiter. Or sushi-chef.

I've only got anecdotal evidence supporting this, but the impression I get is that with tighter economic times people are eating out a little less, and tipping a LOT less. The restaurant managers I've spoken to (I know a few, yes) have said that average tips have dropped from around 18% to around 10%.

Sure, sure... a lot of us look at tipping as a way to reward excellent service, and will withhold a good tip from a lousy waiter or waitress. But that's not what's happening here. What's happening is that a lot of us don't want to give up eating out, so we're cutting back on our tips.

Two things:

1) Be the guy (or gal) who tips well. Start at 20% and round up. Factor that into your budgeting.

2) Crummy service? A low tip just says "I'm cheap." Unless the service is absolutely execrable, it's not really your job to discipline your server. Tip your server well, and then call the manager over and complain. If it was really that bad you'll probably come out further ahead than if you'd skimped on the tip. If not, well... you don't want to eat there again.

My friend Bob has a great policy when he eats out with a large group. He hands the unsuspecting server a $20 at the beginning of the ordering process and says "I want to make sure this is a great experience for everybody... including you." At the end of the meal he strongarms the rest of us into tipping a solid 20%. Funny thing... when Bob's around we ALWAYS have a great time at the restaurant.

But you don't have to go the extra mile. Just make sure you don't skimp. Waitresses and waiters are feeling the crunch at least as badly as the rest of us are.

$250,000 per Job? Only a little bit too expensive.

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:28:46 GMT

If you've been following the news, there are lots of people screaming about how incredibly expensive the stimulus package was, and how it didn't create enough jobs for the money spent.

I'm not a fan of stimulus, nor big government, but I do know how to do math like a capitalist. An employee costs a lot more than just salary, and I haven't seen much reporting in this vein.

Let's say you've been given stimulus money to hire somebody. GREAT! Do you start writing them paychecks immediately? No. You find work for them to do. Let's go on to say that the employee is (as many of them are reported to have been) a construction worker. How much is it going to cost to put that person to work? Well... you have to have land on which they can put a building, materials to put up the building with, and tools for them to use. Some of this you might already have, but with stimulus money you're going to go buy MORE of it so you can grow your business and (here's another form of the word) STIMULATE the economy as a result.

Pulling numbers out of my butt: if twenty guys can build a subdivision of 40 homes in a year, and the homes cost $120,000 each to build, you've spent just short of five million dollars creating 20 jobs, at a cost of $240,000 per job.

You also created forty homes (in a depressed real-estate market that is saturated with defaults, foreclosures, and short sales, but I digress...)

Also, somebody out there sold you a whole mess of lumber, nails, concrete, PVC, etc.

Sure, if all we wanted to do was feed people tax money we could do it much more efficiently by just dumping the entire stimulus package into the existing welfare system. But that doesn't stimulate the economy, and it provides incentives for the wrong sort of behavior.

Again, let me say that I'm not a fan of the stimulus package, not as implemented, and not in principle. But the math I use as a good capitalist who wants to be able to create jobs tells me that the critics of the stimulus package are being very loudly dishonest in their criticism.

(Note: If you gave me $240,000 and told me to create as many jobs as I could, I would hire a writer, two line-artists, and a colorist and create graphic novels out the wazoo. If the books sold well, I'd be able to keep my employees. If not, well... they worked for a year, and we all had a good time with taxpayer money. DO NOT SEND ME TAX DOLLARS IT WILL ONLY END IN TEARS.)

Mob Madness, 1996

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:55:21 GMT

I ran sound for a comedy troupe called "The Garrens" back in the mid-90's, and one of their largest performances was to be held at a Brigham Young University freshman orientation event. There were about 2,000 kids (even then they looked like kids to me) in attendance.

There was a dance before the show, and the huge floor area was packed. The DJ's stage was in the middle of it all, and I was up there with him setting up the gear for The Garrens while he dropped jams, or mixes, or beats, or whatever you kids call that stuff. The heads and shoulders of 2,000 freshmen were a tumultous, rhythmic sea that came up to my knees.

Then the DJ dropped in "Macarena," and there was order in the chaos. Like iron filings in Hell's own magnetic field, 2,000 freshmen aligned themselves and oscillated in unison.

It was amazing, and just a little frightening. This was the sort of power supervillians crave, and it was being used as a party game.

What Will Finally Fix Health Care

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:33:34 GMT

You know what will finally fix health care?

Information.

For centuries good health care has not really been about seeing a doctor or a surgeon. It's been about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. Okay, sure, often that person WAS a doctor or a surgeon, but often it was not. And the smarter we got as societies, the longer and better we started living. The pattern still holds.

These days we have ready, free (or as close as makes no difference) access to all the information our doctors do. (Except patient records -- HIPAA says that would be a violation of privacy, and I agree...)

What we, the patient-class, the uninitiated do NOT have free and ready access to is trusted gatekeepers who will filter the good information from the not-so-good. You know, doctors who will tell us that although our Google search on these symptoms was flawed because we left out "night sweats," or something like that.

Assuming we haven't all succumbed to Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Nanocancer, or the Andromeda Strain in the next 200 years, I firmly believe that our descendants are going to look back at our primitive, 21st-century discussions and wonder why we wasted so much time and money when what finally fixed Health Care was information we'd been sitting on for decades.

We will probably always need a select few, skilled practitioners of the dark and arcane arts of medicine, but most of what we need to be healthy is a correct diagnosis, and the alignment of simple treatments with sets of symptoms.

That's just information.

I'm not belittling what my doctor does. He's worked hard to throw terabytes of information into his head so that his miraculously synaptic brain can quickly process my complaint and prescribe the treatments I need (and proscribe the things that are hurting me.)

But it's still just information.

Okay, not when he whips out his scalpel and removes a mass from my forearm (had that done in January. Ouch.) -- that's skill acquired through years of practice. And we'll always need somebody with that skill set to complete certain treatments. We'll also always need other things that cost money, like new medications, fancy devices for irradiating tissue, and diagnostic tools. But those things don't need to cost what they currently do. Not once we fix the flow of information.

I'm not proposing anything radical here. I'm not really proposing anything. I'm arm-chair quarterbacking, only instead of yelling at the television about the choice of plays, I'm yelling about how the game should really be taken into orbit and played in three dimensions by guys in armored EVA suits.

PAX, WSU, H1N1

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:46:53 GMT

CNN is reporting that 2500 students at Washington State University have come down with the H1N1 virus. From the article:

...officials were surprised that the long Labor Day weekend, when most students left campus, did not do more to interrupt the virus' spread.

Long Labor Day weekend, eh?

Maybe some of these students who left campus went across (EDIT: different towns!) the state to PAX. The Penny-Arcade Expo was also hit with H1N1. I mean, (EDIT!) Washington's a big place, but it's no stretch to imagine a few thousand local college students hitting a convention geared towards their demographic, right?

I'm not pointing fingers at anybody here. I'm just drawing connections that the CNN folks really should have already drawn -- there was a big event (EDIT!) across the state, and both the University and a crowded convention center make for a fantastic confluence of vectors.

You know what? H1N1 notwithstanding, I still wish I could have made it to PAX this year. But I'm glad I'm not in college anymore.

Musing upon Walt Marvel Disney Comics...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:17:31 GMT

Forget the humor inherent in Wolverine showing up in Kingdom Hearts, or a Howard the Darkwing Duck consolidation (let alone Mickey doing cameos in Deadpool,) I want to address the absolute perfection of this merger:

Both companies have iconic characters as their stock-in-trade. And the characters are so iconic they stop being characters. In fact, they stop being interesting. Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man are both franchises, like Tony the Tiger or the Pillsbury Dough-boy. When was the last time any of them got lasting character development? And by lasting I mean "didn't get stripped away with the last reset."

Answer: DECADES.

So... Marvel and Disney have always shared a certain measure of business philosophy in this regard. Now they can share business practices, HR departments, and script doctors, too. What will change? Marvel will get more efficient, Disney will get bigger, and super-hero comics will remain utterly staid and boring.

It really is the perfect merger. Unless you were hoping that comics would get more interesting.

My favorite part about GenCon

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:06:50 GMT

I think my favorite part about GenCon was when my good friend ssanfratello showed up on Saturday evening following a 5-hour drive from Michigan, and he, Jonathan "Skippy" Schwarz and I went out for dinner. Skippy had a game demo to run aftewards, so Sal and I hit the convention center (which had just been emptied, and then re-filled thanks to a fire alarm) and walked through the game areas.

Upshot: For me it's never about places or events. It's always about people. The thrill of a convention center full of cool displays and awesome programming pales quickly when I bump into a friend and we get to geek out together.

Sandra was suggesting family trips for next summer and I realized that I don't care where we go as long as we go someplace where there are people I like. Sure, sure, I'll be going WITH people I like, but I want to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I don't need to see the sights, ride the rides, or even eat the authentic eats. Not unless I'm doing it with friends.

Leaving Indy, the magic is gone

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:02:31 GMT

I am always saddened when I stay in a convention hotel beyond the end of the con. The cool, nerdy, familiar things are gone and the place is just a hotel again. Here in downtown Indy the GenCon layer has been stripped away from countless locations and it's just another city center. My tribe has left. The magic is gone.

Maybe this is a good thing, because it leaves me all the more anxious to be home again. My plane leaves at 11am. Not soon enough.

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A Quick Critical Analysis of "Taken"

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:12:26 GMT

Rented Taken this evening. I kept hearing good things about it.

If you haven't seen the film by now it's probably because the "super-spy father saves abducted daughter" genre isn't your thing. I can understand that. What's neat is that this film does a great job of putting the hero in crisis situations.

Sure, you expect the hero to fight more effectively than the bad guys. You expect him to track more effectively than they hide. He's a super-spy, after all. You know he's going to live, right? But the three real crises the film provides work around that.

Spoilers follow. But it's been on DVD for a while now, so I'm declaring us to be beyond the statute of limitations. No LJ-cut for you!

Crisis #1: He's too late. That's our biggest fear, right? Well... he can't be too late to save his daughter or the film becomes pointless. So he's too late to save the friend. I saw this coming, but it was still well-done.

Crisis #2: He has to do something unthinkable in order to progress. I thought this was going to be the torture scene, but I was wrong. The unthinkable thing he does is shoot an innocent woman at the dinner table in order to get her corrupt government official husband to talk. He doesn't kill her, but he threatens to. This I did not see coming, and it added a measure of depth to the character that was equally unexpected. The hero really is a horrible person... but we still want to see him win.

Crisis #3: He gets captured. This is obvious, we all expect it and see it coming, and I even predicted exactly when it would happen (within two minutes of him finally finding his daughter) but it was still effective.

Lessons here? Well... if you want to crank up the tension, find good crises for your heroes. If you can be unpredictable, great. If not, try to take the expected crises and deliver them in unexpected ways. This film pretty much delivered exactly what it said it would, and had very little to offer in terms of plot complexity, but still worked because of how nicely the crises were executed.

Missing from the Pentagon's proposed ban on smoking in the military

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:33:08 GMT

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.

"You talk too much."

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:17:44 GMT

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.)

The DK Zombie Apocalypse

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:45:55 GMT

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.

Finally finished painting something new

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:31:41 GMT

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...)

Father's Day

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:50:51 GMT

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.

Sandra's Evil Braids

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:01:15 GMT

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."

Pondering Nine Years of Daily Cartooning

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:56:18 GMT

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

Tue, 26 May 2009 03:34:13 GMT

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.

Thur or Thurs?

Sat, 09 May 2009 15:37:41 GMT

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.

Accidental Good-Dad

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:55:57 GMT

"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.

The Land of Make Believe

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:53:50 GMT

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.

Scrapyard Pre-orders open tomorrow!

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:30:16 GMT

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.)

Got very lucky just now...

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:27:11 GMT

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!

Jordan enticing me to work...

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:05:50 GMT

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...

I just realized that Madoff did a good thing...

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:49:11 GMT

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...)