“Do not meddle in the affairs of Garden Gnomes, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”

We got hit by Sandy, and lost power for a little bit. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant, but we got off a lot lighter than a lot of people, so we're thanking our lucky stars for that.

Lily has always been very literal minded. From the point when she was able to talk well enough to have a discussion with me, she's always been able to articulate that she understands that the people on TV are performers playing a role, that nobody has super powers and that special effects are used to make it look like they do.

Despite this, she sometimes comes up with a memorable turn of phrase. During a storm when was three years old, she said,  "The rain sounds like pebbles falling on the ocean floor." I wasn't expecting her language to be so metaphorical at her age.

The rain got heavier that night, and she was worried that it might storm. She said "Sometimes I think that thunder sounds like a dinosaur roaring up in the clouds and I get scared by that. I know it's not really a dinosaur, but I still get scared."

She fell asleep on Monday before we lost power and before the wind really picked up. She came into our bedroom, and here's where accounts differ. I'm a deeper sleeper than either of them, so I'm usually the groggiest for one of this midnight visits, but I swear that Lily said, "I'm very scared, because it sounds like the winds are saying 'You must chooooooooooooooose!", but Lily and Jen says that she each said something entirely different, that it sounded like teenagers on a roller coaster all going "Oooooooooooo!"

Since they both insist that they never heard that former phrase before I mentioned it, I think I must have been partly awake and I must have incorporated what I was dreaming to what Lily said.

I remember when I took Taekwondo as a kid that I was disappointed in how mundane the names for the maneuvers were. I grew up with the Shaw Brother chop-sockies, so I was expecting to learn things like the Dim-Mak, the Tiger Uppercut and the Icy-Fire jab and I got the inside-to-outside block and the front snap kick and the double jump front snap kick.

So when Lily goes on to develop her own martial arts style, I don't know if it will be composed of maneuvers she'll call Laser-Hyperdrive Exploding Head No-Shadow kicks or with techniques with prosaic names that could have come from the the monosyllabic judge from Karate Champ. "Half. Point."

Like I said up above, it was inconvenient, but not terrible by any stretch of the imagination, and we were very lucky. I don't even think we had any spoiled food.

My grandmother still lives on her own nearby. She's one of those tough old ladies who's going to outlive everyone, but she is getting up there in years, so we decided to check in on her.

This is what she saw when we pulled around the corner.

My father said that he happened to be in the house making a call from the second floor when the tree came down. He said that he was keeping an eye on it and that it was swaying back and forth, and then he realized that it had stopped with the back and was all the way forth and coming down right at him.

No one knows what it's like To be the bad gnome To be the sad gnome Behind blue eyes.

It's actually not nearly as bad as it looks. I guess the weight must be very evenly distributed, because even the drainpipes are barely damaged. For the brief time we were at my grandmother's, we were approached by wandering bands of tree-removal technicians, so at least she won't have trouble finding someone to get rid of it.

The authoritative list of the best siblings in fiction

When I was writing about Gravity Falls a couple weeks ago, I mentioned that brother-sister teams are one of my favorite vehicles for story telling. As you may know, I was born from the sea foam (like Aphrodite, but more manly) and never had any siblings, but I always wanted a sister. I think this might be part of why, as an adult, so many of my close friends are women.

Anyway, that got me thinking about sibling pairings in fiction I enjoy, and I decided to make a list, because that's what nerds do. My original thought for this piece was best brother-sister pairs. I thought I might be missing something, so when I brought it up on Facebook, I expanded it to "best siblings in popular fiction", and when my cousin asked me what I meant by "best", I said that I had deliberately left it undefined so as to receive the greatest variety of responses.

I got a bunch of good suggestions, but since my list was already heavily skewed towards my original conception of brother-sister sets, I eventually decided to limit it to that. (Though I did think that Phil's offer of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes was particularly inspired.)

So here's my list of the best brothers and sisters in fiction, with one sister-sister pair at the end because they were too good not to include. More specifically, it's a list of properties that I happen to enjoy primarily on the strength of the brother-sister sibling interaction, but that's hardly a catchy title.

I'll open with a brilliant show from the first decade of the 21st century. It featured Jewel Staite and a brother and sister and was cruelly axed by Fox before more than a handful of episodes had aired.


I speak, of course, of Wonderfalls.


Oh, were you expecting something different, Browncoats? I don't want to hear your bellyachin'. You got eleven episodes! We got four!

Wonderfalls, Jaye and Aaron Tyler:

Ah, Wonderfalls. I caught the show one night, fell in love with it, proclaimed it my new favorite show, and then issued a resigned sigh when it was cancelled before the next episode could air.

The main character, Jaye, is an Ivy League underachiever from a family of overachievers who works at a dead-end retail job while she tries to figure out what she wants to do with her life. I love that the other people in her family are named Karen, Sharon, Darrin, and Aaron, because it's a great way to show that she doesn't really belong.

Let me tell you a story about myself. After a particularly nasty breakup, my Evil Ex confronted me in the parking lot of the place where we both worked. She was crazy. Climbing on the roof of my car and trying to kick in the windshield crazy.  I finally got away from her and got into my car and got on the road. She had this bright blue Geo Metro. The color is called "Competition Blue". You might be able to imagine it if you've seen that model of car. Anyway, she starts following me on the highway. Somehow I lose her and she actually gets ahead of me. I see her waiting at a jug handle to turn around and go home, and in a demonstration of the motto ("We never leave well enough alone!") for which I've become famous, I beep at her as I go past.

So I'm driving over a hilly road now, and in my rear view mirror, I see the Geo, rising into view like the bright blue dorsal fin of a shark. She's right behind me this time, and I only lose her by pulling off the road next to a cop who was ticketing someone, something, I have learned, that they do not appreciate.

Anyway, I always felt sympathy for Jaye, because she's unable to resist the Akratic urge to honk that horn and self-destruct as stupidly as possible. She'll cut her whole head off to spite her face.   I like Aaron too, though. He's a phlegmatic counterweight to his neurotic sister.

Gravity Falls, Mable and Dipper Pines: 

Watching them is like getting the Halloween episode of the Simpsons every week! I mentioned in the Gravity Falls review that I think I like Dipper a little more than Mabel, but they're a package deal. You can't have one without the other. Unfortunately, I wrote that post pretty recently and I don't have much to add to what I said there. But you can click over if you're so inclined.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, Katara and Sokka: 

I love Avatar, in no small part due to these two. They bicker, they watch out for each other, they have the shared experiences that only siblings have. Again, I said everything I had to say in an earlier post about them.  But you can click over to that one too.

The Simpsons, Bart and Lisa Simpson: 

There's not a lot to say about the Simpsons that hasn't already been said. My favorite episodes of the show were always the one where the two of them work together.

The Fantastic Four, Sue and Johnny Storm: 

The Invisible Woman and the Human Torch. With a lot of super-people, you call them by their superheroic identity. When talking about the person who spins a web any size and catches thieves just like flies, you don't call him Peter Parker unless you're referring to his civilian identity. You don't call Superman Clark Kent unless he's wearing glasses and a tie. And so on. But with the Fantastic Four, they always seemed to be a family who happen to be superheroes and not the other way around, and when they talk to each other, it's never with the codenames, but always with their real names or affectionate nicknames.  I didn't especially care for the animated series, but I did like the dynamic between Sue and Johnny. 



And while we're on the subject, the Incredibles: Violet and Dash Parr.

Violet! An awkward teenaged Invisible Woman, PLUS Sarah Vowell's voice! And Dash is great. I think everybody has the same favorite scene with Dash. It's when he's running from the bad guys, realizes he's on the water but he's moving too fast to sink. And he looks down and throws back his head and laughs with a joy so pure that the sound of it would have killed the Dust Witch.

Peanuts, Linus and Lucy Van Pelt: 

I put out a call for suggestions, and my buddy Tim provided this one, and I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't think of it myself. The thing I imagine when I think of Lucy is not the bit with Charlie Brown and the football (an image I instead now associate with the Democrats in Congress), but, when her brother falls asleep in the pumpkin patch as she knows he will, she arises in the predawn gloom, turns off her alarm, puts on her coat and tenderly retrieves him.

Freaks & Geeks, Lindsay and Sam Weir: 

Another show cancelled before its time and a rare non-genre example. I love the whole family, (Mrs. Weir: "Nobody's home. You wanna have a little sex?"  Mr. Weir: "Sex?! Well, okay." ) but these two in particular. I think the best scene is in the pilot. Sam is worried about a bully, but Lindsay clearly has something else on her mind and she tells him how she was the only one there when their grandmother died.

Sam: Can I come in? Do you think that me, Neal and Bill could beat up Alan?

Lindsay: Just Alan? Yeah. Alan and his buddies. No to maybe.

Sam: That's what I thought. Um, why are you throwing your life away?

Lindsay: Did Dad tell you to ask me that?

Sam: No. Millie did.

Lindsay: Figures. Forget it. You know, tell her to mind her own business.

Sam: You know just because she asked me to ask you doesn't mean I was going to tell her what you said.

Lindsay: Sam. Did Mom and Dad tell you I was the only one with Grandma when she died?

Sam: No.

Lindsay: Yeah. They went down to the cafeteria to get some coffee. And all the sudden Grandma looked so terrified. I didn't know what to do. She grabbed my hand, told me she didn't want to go. She looked so scared, Sam. I said, Well, you know, can you see God or Heaven or a light or anything?

Sam: What did she say?

Lindsay: "No. There's nothing." She was a good person all her life and that's what she got.

And there's a long pause when Lindsay, this middle class, middle America honor student is ruminating on the event that caused her to revaluate everything she thought she knew. She's in the midst of this when her brother speaks up.

Sam: So... you do think that we could beat up Alan?

Lindsay: Yeah. He's a goner.

And I just love her smile there. Because she knows he doesn't understand what she was saying, but he's her baby brother and she still loves him, so she puts on her brave face, because even though she can't comfort herself, she can still comfort him.

A Wrinkle in Time, Meg and Charles Wallace Murray:

And here's a rare non-TV example. (There's a TV movie version, but I didn't like it) This book has been one of my favorites since I read it in the fifth grade. Jen and I used to read out loud to each other before Lily was born, and this is the second book we read (the first being The Last Unicorn).

One of the things I like most is being awake with someone I love in the small hours of the day. Times like that make it seem like the night lasts forever and you're the only people awake in the whole world. A Wrinkle in Time opens with a scene like that, with thirteen year old Meg and five year old Charles Wallace making hot chocolate together, and it conveys that warm feeling of intimacy so lovingly.

Meg is one of my favorite characters in fiction anyway. And Charles Wallace too.  Each of them makes mistakes, but they always manage to pull the other back due to their unwavering love for each other. “I love you. Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

And honorable mention:

My Neighbor Totoro, Mei and Satsuki Kusakabe:

This is such a wonderful movie. I think it's one of the all time great movies ever made. It's set in post war Japan. The girls move with their father to the country in order to be closer to their mom, who's in the hospital with spinal tuberculosis.

There's a scene where the eight-year-old sister, Satsuki, is talking to the four-year-old, Mei. Their mom was supposed to come home for the weekend, but her visit from the hospital had been canceled because she had caught a cold. Mei says that she wants mom to come home anyway, and while Satsuki does too, she understands the reality of the situation and knows that she has to stay. In disappointment and frustration, she yells at her sister "Do you want mom to die?!"

Mei starts crying and she runs away and decides to walk to the hospital by herself. She gets lost and the whole village is searching for her. Satsuki is running all over the countryside, not with any hope of finding her, but because running is better than doing nothing, and someone catches her and tells her that they found a little girl's sandal by the pond and it might be Mei's.

So Satsuki runs there as fast as she can, and you see the adults are dredging the pond. She gets there and an old woman holds up the sandal and asks if the sandal is Mei's. What follows is a ten-second eternity while Satsuki catches her breath enough to answer the question. The whole scene is so beautifully composed, and while we wait for Satsuki to answer, the focus slowly draws in on the woman holding the sandal, and that effect and the half-hopeful, half-fearful expression on her face gives the impression that the whole world is closing in.


Roger Ebert loved it. It's on his list of great movies.

From the review:

Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.

There is none of the kids-against-adults plotting of American films. The family is seen as a safe, comforting haven. The father is reasonable, insightful and tactful, accepts stories of strange creatures, trusts his girls, listens to explanations with an open mind. It lacks those dreary scenes where a parent misinterprets a well-meaning action and punishes it unfairly.

I'm afraid that in praising the virtues of ''My Neighbor Totoro'' I have made it sound merely good for you, but it would never have won its worldwide audience just because of its warm heart. It is also rich with human comedy in the way it observes the two remarkably convincing, lifelike little girls (I speak of their personalities, not their appearance). It is awe-inspiring in the scenes involving the totoro, and enchanting in the scenes with the Cat Bus. It is a little sad, a little scary, a little surprising and a little informative, just like life itself. It depends on a situation instead of a plot, and suggests that the wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.

And a list of other people's suggestion that didn't quite fit what wound up being the theme of the post.

• The March sisters from Little Women
• The Hardy Boys
• Thor and Loki, which I particularly liked.
• Jaime and Cersei Lannister from the Song of Ice and Fire series (nominated by a couple people. Poor Tyrion is their brother, but he always comes up short)
• From the Harry Potter series, in various combinations,  Fred and George, Ron and Ginny Weasley
• Various Greek Gods
• Corwin and his siblings from Zelazny's Amber books
• Neil Gaiman's Endless (Particularly Dream and Death in The Sound of her Wings)
• Tim mentioned Seita and Setsuko from Grave of the Fireflys but that movie is so sad that I couldn't include them because it would shift the whole timbre of the post
• Scott and Stacey Pilgrim (I wanted to include them, because I particularly liked Anna Kendrick's performance in the movie, but I couldn't think of a standout moment to justify them.)
• Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes (Win!)
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (also clever)
• Raistlin and Caramon Majere
• Cain and Abel (both Biblical and House of Mysteries/House of Secrets versions)
• Greg suggested some characters from the Sisters Grimm series of tweenie girls books, which is apparently what professors of Arthurian Lit read when they're not translating Geoffrey of Monmouth
• He also nominated Leto II and Ghanima from Dune, whom I had considered on my own, but rejected for being too obscure.
• Also Paul and Alia Atreides
• Luke and Leia came up too, from Star Wars, and while I like each of them individually as characters, I don't think of them as siblings, possibly because of Leia's propensity for sticking her tongue down Luke's throat whenever he's laid up in a hospital bed.

X-Com: The old and the new

I loved the old X-Com back in the day. I remember when I first played it. It was the Playstation port, so it would have been in 1995 or so. I was up in New Hampshire and my friend Tim and I rented a copy from VideoHQ, not knowing what to expect.

I guess the best way to describe it is a kind of Sim-Earth Defense. You're the administrator of a UNIT-type task force (The X-Com of the title) tasked with defending the earth against alien invasion. You build your bases and recruit the troops, decide what to research and reverse engineer from captured technology, and when you encounter aliens, you organize the squad and deploy them. I always loved the quartermaster parts more than the combat, but the combat had its own appeal and that's where a lot of the memorable stories came from too.

There was nothing quite like it at the time and even though there's a sequel 17 years later, there's still nothing quite like it.

The new game is great. They didn't include everything I liked about the original, but everything they did include was great. The combat is turn-based, which was a gutsy move in 2012, but it wouldn't feel like X-Com without it, and almost everything is a vast improvement over the original. The biggest change is that rather than each soldier having a pool of time units governing all actions, he or she has a move action and a combat action. I liked the time units, because you could take multiple actions in lieu of moving, but I have to admit, the new system certainly streamlines the tactical experience. It felt like some of the longer battles took hours in the original game.

Things I miss from the original

Multiple interceptors: In the original game, you could build more than one base and engage a ship with several interceptors at one time. The game was very simulationist, and there was no story except what happened through the confluence of happenstance and your actions. But I've never felt so immersed in a game as when I had to bring down an alien battleship and the only thing I had was two basic interceptors, my good ships all in various states of repair after earlier battles. They were armed with powerful warheads, but were very fragile. I knew I had to get lucky, so I had one ship hanging just short of engagement, waiting on the other. When I got there, I launched both at the mothership and they darted in right on top of it, unloading nuke after nuke, hoping to bring it down before it landed a hit with its plasma bolts.

Multiple bases: In the new game, you're limited to a single base, but with the old one, I think you could have up to six. It added another element, because sometimes the aliens would hit a target while the team from your main base was already engaged or refueling or otherwise unable to respond, so you'd have to put down a contingent of Reapers and Chryssalids with Lt. Gorman and his gang that couldn't shoot straight.

Ripley: How many drops is this for you, Lieutenant?
Gorman: Thirty eight... simulated.
Vasquez: How many *combat* drops?
Gorman: Uh, two. Including this one.

Also, additional bases meant that losing one wouldn't end the game, so sometimes the aliens would find one of your bases and invade it. Base defense was my very favorite part of the game. I built my bases with a bunch of bottlenecks simply so they would be easier to defend. They didn't include it in the new one, I'm told, because, as you do have just one base, losing it would end the game. I think there are ways around that, but another aspect is that base defense, even moreso than the other battles in the game, tended to be one-sided slaughter, and this may have been a factor in deciding not to feature it. I think it could have been made to work, but I understand the decision.

And while we're on the topic of multiple bases, everyone who has ever played X-Com seems to have discovered this part independently. The laser stuff sold for a lot more than it cost to manufacture, so you could earn a ton of money by building it and selling it. As soon as I had enough money to do it, I would set up a base (Sweatshop-1) and staff it with engineers, workshops and a skeleton crew to protect them and set them to churning out gear to sell. I always used to joke that X-Com was earning its funding by arming third world dictators, and I'm not sure to what extent it was intended, but in the new game, it's made explicit, that if you sell your technology to nations, they will sometimes use them to oppress their people. Also, you sell them on the "Gray Market", which I thought was an amusing pun.

More options in combat: If I suspected that there was an alien was in a farmhouse, I would mine the entrances, then set it on fire with incendiary rounds. I would also arm my solders with a grenade with a 0 turn timer, meaning that it went off immediately. If an alien dropped a soldier, at least the soldier would get a retributive strike, because they dropped their inventory when killed, and the grenade would go off and hopefully kill the attacker. (This sometimes backfired, because sometimes attacks would stun, rather than kill a target, and a stunned soldier would drop a grenade, taking him from stunned to killed)

My favorite tactic had to be near the mid-to-late game, when we had flying power armer and handheld mini-nukes. I'd send the squad up to the top of the alien ship, blow a hole in the roof (the sides would withstand a blaster bomb, but not the roof) and we'd drop down like a cyborg ninja SWAT team. My friend Frederick, also an aficionado of the original game, got so good that he could steer the blaster bomb through the bowels of the ship on memory alone.

As I said, there was no story except what happened in the course of play. I remember the first time we encountered a Chryssalid. Chryssalids are like Giger aliens. They lack the acid blood, but they do transform their victims into more copies of themselves, and they move very fast and hit super hard.

So, we thought we were pretty hot stuff at this point. We were three months in, we had some laser weapons, some body armor and we'd brought a tank and I thought we would just roll over this mission. We're picking off the dinky little aliens and then a Chryssalid shows up. It looked scary, so my squad, which was still tightly clustered around the landing zone, starts unloading on it. It takes everything that we've got, sprints right in our midst, demolishes the tank and then kills a soldier. We finally drop it on the next turn, whereupon a new Chryssalid popped out of our dead guy. Tim said it best, "Team to Headquarters. We're fucked. Over."

Everybody has stories like that from the original, which is why I think it's endured as long as it has. The new game has a slightly more structured framework. Soldiers have classes now (Heavy, Support, Assault and Sniper) and you pick various feats as you level up. I like that. They start out very similar in capabilities, but as they advance through the ranks, they play very differently.  My standard compliment is two support, two assault, one sniper, one heavy.

Squads are a lot smaller, maxing out at six, compared to the platoons you could field in the original. Maps are smaller too, and these combine with faster movements of the characters on screen to really speed up the battles. (Nothing like spending 45 minutes hunting that last sectoid who's hunkered down in an attic somewhere.) Soldiers recover a lot faster too. Being badly wounded could sideline a soldier for weeks in the original and I think the worst I've seen so far is nine days.Cyberdiscs and floaters are tough now, though. Back in the day, they were like training dummies.

Overall, XCOM 2012, is a superb game and a worthy successor to the name.The maps are wonderful. You haven't lived until you've chased a Chryssalid through a Barnes & Noble armed with nothing but a shotgun and sand in your belly.

(Though I'm not entirely pleased that whenever there's one with a gas station, the guy who flies our skyranger always drops my squad right next to the pumps.)

A tale of Wiener dog racing, Cemetery walking, Cthulhu Worshiping, Animal Blessing, Oktoberfest, Temper Tantrums, Gravity Falls, Freaks & Geeks and protecting the world from the six-fingered hand of alien domination.

I was going to post about our weekend, but Jen went ahead and wrote the post that I was going to write. (There are two Jens in this story. The Jen I am married to is Jen Classic and the one who came to visit us is Kenobi Jen.)

The weekend started on a bleak note. The services for Nick, my friend and old boss, were on Friday night, and I headed over to the funeral home right after work. It was tougher than I had been expecting. Funerals are never easy, but the thing that really chokes me up is when the departed is surrounded by the things they loved in life. For Lily's grandfather, it was a picture of her. For Nick, it was Halloween napkins and comic book stuff. I don't know why that saddens me like it does. Maybe it's the juxtaposition, or the knowledge that they will never be around to enjoy the things they loved. I don't know.

I always think of a line from Slaughterhouse-Five that reminds me that we'll always have the memories of the people who are gone.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

So I said my goodbyes to Nick.

After that, the happy part of our weekend began. As the title suggests, it included Wiener dog racing, Cemetery walking, Cthulhu Worshiping, Animal Blessing, Oktoberfest, Temper Tantrums, Gravity Falls, Freaks & Geeks and protecting the world from the six-fingered hand of alien domination.

Our original plan was to head to the PA Ren Faire, but it turned out to be a bit further away than we had thought, and it was pricey to boot. So we settled on something almost as fun, but much less expensive.

Jen Classic, Kenobi Jen and I all went out for Indian at the place that had catered Lily's culture night. They were pretty decent. To hear Kenobi Jen tell it, she lives in some kind of post apocalyptic wasteland and subsists on gruel and and whatever roots she can forage. We all enjoyed the meal. Oma came to drop off Lily halfway through and we had an impromptu round of My Little Pony trivia. Kenobi Jen claims, over at her blog, that Lily won the contest, but that's just bullshit. Only Bill Clinton and Batman know more about My Little Pony than I do. I happen to know that she was hopped up on goofballs when she wrote that post anyway.

We returned home and watched some Gravity Falls. I stayed up a little later to play some of the new XCOM game. I loved the old one and while the new one didn't retain everything I loved about the old one, I don't think it has a single element that I don't enjoy tremendously.

Then we woke up in time to go the local Farmer's Market. Lily was moaning about going, but I don't know why. There are always a million dogs there and she gets to pet every single one.

After that, we headed to SteelStacks for their Oktoberfest and Wiener Dog Races. Jen Classic noticed that there were some people watching the races from a sparsely populated gallery, so we made our way up there.

Here's a picture if you think this was some elaborate troll about wiener dog races.

Apparently, too, wiener dogs are known by some other name sometimes, but I'm not one of your highfalutin' professors of dog-ology, so I couldn't tell you.

Then we went home and had some falafel and couscous and watched a little Avatar. Lily had a bit of tantrum, and while that's always embarassing, I'm sometimes kind of of grateful for it too, so my friends don't think we have this perfect little child.

Kenobi Jen was supposed to show me a good Matt Smith episode, but she was unable to find one, so we skipped it for now. Lily went to bed and got a bedtime story from all three grownups. Jen and Jen and I played a little Taboo, which was fun, (We didn't have the buzzer, so we just took turns reading off the cards) and we watched some Freaks and Geeks and I remembered why I fell in love with the show.

On Sunday, we went to Jen's church. She had a meeting before the service started, so Kenobi Jen and Lily and I walked around a local cemetery. Lily read three paragraphs of rules off the sign before losing interest, which is about two paragraphs more than most people.

We were at this particular service because it was their annual blessing of the animals. Because this was a Unitarian Church, in addition to the usual cats and dogs and birds, parishioners brought shoggoths and byakhee and mi-go. Somebody even brought Ghroth, but he had to stay out in the foyer.

It was a pretty fun visit. I'm glad that Jen was able to make it to see us.

Josh's Zelazny Tribute: The Great and Groovy Game!

I said a while back that I don't really write fiction. I used to. I wrote my own stories as a teenager, but I think every teenaged geek did that. I had discovered Zelazny in my early teens and while I could eventually mimic the superficial characteristics of his prose, I lacked his imagination and his depth and breadth of knowledge, and now that I look back at the stories I had written back then from the vantage point of adulthood, I see them for the fan-fictiony knock-offs that they always were. Also, I'm trained as a technical writer (and I even find work as one once in a while), and the skill set involved with that tend to be incompatible with writing fiction.  So I drifted away from it, and satisfied my need to write with this blog, which is a strange combination of a weird Roger Zelazny shrine and family stories.

I didn't think anything could ever move me to write fiction again. However, I saw the call for stories for submissions for sequels to A Night in the Lonesome October in Lovecraftzine, which I've long felt is the story written by Zelazny that most deserved the anthology treatment.

If you'll excuse the digression for a moment, my grandfather died in 2000. I loved him more than almost anyone in the world. I was a painfully shy kid and that endured well into adulthood. I had a chance to speak at his funeral and I was petrified at the thought of speaking in front of so many people. But I knew if I didn't, that I would regret it for the rest of my life.

So, I put together a list of the things I loved and admired about him and when the time came, I got up and said them. And I never had a problem speaking in public again. I call myself an atheist, but I also call that his final gift to me.

And likewise, with the October sequel, I didn't know if I would have a good idea or if I could express it, but I knew that I had to try. I knew this would be my final chance to write this story (this was before Mike Davis announced that this would be an annual event), so I screwed my courage to the sticking place, did my best and sent it off.

And here we are.  And well, you're probably reading this because the story was published. (If not, here's the link!) You can read it on the web or buy an issue for a buck on your Kindle or Nook. Buy it today! Support your local starving artists!

I particularly like the art they used for my story. I had no idea that that there would be art and certainly nothing that good. I'm always a sucker for cover art that actually reflects the source material, and I would have loved this piece even if it had nothing to do with me. Likewise, I didn't know there would be an mp3 version of the story. I love audiobooks! (And they even pronounced my name correctly, which is something that very rarely happens in real life.)

If I ever do go on to write more fiction, this will be one of the two events that moved me. Lovecraftzine actually pays its writers. The fact that it's any amount at all tells me, hey, maybe my writing is good enough that people want to read it!

The other thing, and the one that is more important to me, is that I was reading a story I had written for my daughter to her and she was bouncing up and down on the couch and beaming throughout it, and when I got to the end she said "I could see it all happening in my mind!"

So, check out Lonesome October. Check out my story and all the others! I'm happy with it and I hope you will be too.