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May 22, 2008 /

Kara and I are simultanublogging. It is a race to see who can post their entry first, and I am about to win it. Because Kara is not aware that it is a race.

This is ideally the only kind of race I would ever be in.

My neighborhood is named after a vampire slayer

May 21, 2008 /

After nearly two months in one sort of transition or another, I have achieved something like a temporary stability: I even bought a flat hard bed, manufactured (I am given to understand) by svirfneblin. All of which is to say my name is on a lease, my belongings no longer fit in the Fit and I like it here very much. I live with the very droll Kara, at least until she discovers I used to play Warcraft and kicks me out, and I’m slowly coming around to the idea of a bike.

I promise I’ll get the rest of the Hugner pictures up soon.

Sumana, you should probably stop reading here

May 14, 2008 /

What you have to understand about the Burger King Loaded Steakburger is that I had no choice in the matter. The moment I spied it billboardwise, during the long drive west, I was gripped by the same potent mixture of revulsion and lust that came upon me once in college, when Jon and I first saw the commercial for the Bacon Club Chalupa. We turned to each other, then, eyes wide and desperate, like two men drowning who each believe the other can swim.

Neither could.

So it was only a matter of time before I ran out of excuses for not planting this particular meatbomb in my face. Leaving the drive-thru not ten minutes ago, I left steering to my nervous left hand while my right fumbled through wrappers. The first thing I saw was the edge of the patty, protruding a full inch beyond the hapless bun like a beckoning pseudopod; the second was the utter absence of traditional dressing. There is no pickle here, no tomato. The bastards have delivered a sullen daub of gray potato and onion shards instead, and they have somehow transmuted lettuce to bacon. The rites involved are none I care to imagine.

The sandwich is not good. I stress this even in the full knowledge that it will accomplish nothing; those who weren’t going to eat it won’t, and the rest of you will have no more agency than I did. But like any Lovecraftian narrator, I am bound to commit these desperate words by sheer force of narrative. I must write of its taste, like barbecue Spam fried in motor oil. I must write of its texture, which is also like barbecue Spam fried in motor oil. I must tell you how it sits in my stomach e’en now, heavily roiled, plotting its course downward with the slow cunning of a brain-damaged tiger on spelunk.

Taco Bell recently reintroduced the Bacon Club Chalupa. Should I even have time to post this missive, I cannot imagine that I will outlive it long. The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some crispy flatbread, sliding deep-fried fingers up to caress the latch.

Photogration

May 6, 2008 /

A cool thing about the emergent behavior generated by Flickr’s embedded Creative Commons licensing: people can actually find your stuff and reuse it at will, the way CC was intended to work. That means that this year, my pictures have shown up in an abridged article about the scientific accuracy of the animals in 10,000 BC, a newsblog post about a stupid person claiming to have a phobia of little people, and an opinion piece about HIPAA usage from the father of a kid with ASD.

It’s Tuesday

May 6, 2008 /

Which means all my lovely readers in the UK are back from taking off St. Crispin’s Day or whatever, and all my lovely other readers are yawning and clicking idly on Digg as the work week slowly grinds into gear, and so it is the perfect time, my friends, to tell you that Ommatidia is for sale.

A couple sharp-eyed readers (from the old school of “actually checking the front page”) have already noticed that it was up over the weekend while I poked at it for bugs, but so far everything seems fine. Some things have changed since I made the original tentative announcement–most notably that the limited edition is now signed and numbered and includes a story written just for you, but is also the same softcover binding as the now-less-cheap viral edition (it is actually insane to bind a book this size in hardcover). And yes, it took me over two years to assemble a 133-page book. Turns out autodidactic self-publishing is sort of hard!

But I’m really proud of the result and I hope you’ll be satisfied. You can check out a preview at Lulu and see one of the fourteen all-new illustrations, and if you order soon you’ll be able to get your copy and read the last Cosette story before it goes up online next month. Finally, if you get your book, take a picture! If you send it to me or put it on Flickr and tag it “ommatidia book,” it’ll get pulled into the little badge I’m putting together now for the Ommatidia front page, and I’ll send you a copy of the “Welch” toon I hastily drew for buyers at my Stumptown booth.

Finally, some of you have probably already noticed that I’m linking to ommatidia.org in this post, rather than xorph.com/anacrusis–either URL scheme works almost exactly the same, because if there’s one poor web practice in which I want to engage, it’s duplicated content and split Pagerank. Seriously, think of Ommatidia as a web site for the book that happens to display a feed from Anacrusis. Both sites now include the other new toy I built this weekend: the “all names” page, which is not perfectly accurate, but is pretty close to an ongoing list of every name I’ve scrounged up for a story title. See why I have to steal from Leonard all the time?