Go Forth And Read Other Blogs

Events are in motion. My journey into Oblivion has progressed in level, though not in depth. As a byproduct of my heroism, my fingers have petitioned for a break from the land of Cyrodiil, and the keyboard and mouse in general.

Serendipitously, this is a convenient time for a Real Life vacation, as I am prepping for Mr. Bile's west coast tour and a bout of paranoia, both of which I will elaborate upon in the days to come. In the meantime, allow me to suggest some other blogs to help you through your workday. All are guaranteed to have distracted me for 5 minutes or more.

Graphpaper.com
This is what our blog would look like if I remembered anything about graphic design and HTML. Just be glad I don't retain any skill solely in the latter, otherwise our background would be neon green and the text yellow and flashing. I really wish I had thought of a graph paper background before running across this site. I must find some other form of innocuous, underused material to pattern Canned Food and Shotguns on. Canned food labels perhaps?

Is This Thing On?
I was directed to Jan Burke's blog on the recommendation of Keith Snyder, un-mystery author and Renaissance Man. Keith's a vocal opponent of print-on-demand authorship and the vanity press, and Burke, a mystery writer herself, recently wrote a series of posts on the subject. Her reasons for who should take advantage of such services are particularly interesting ("So you're going to die..."). Browsing through her site, it's the most consistently interesting solitary author blog I've encountered. Her essay on the detective as serial interviewer is what won me over.

Natalie Goes To Japan
I'm just jealous that I don't get to pass angry kappa on my way to work. It makes me wish I could have a midlife crisis so I can move to a cool foreign country and have something to blog about every day. All I see is the 405, the office, and if I'm lucky, some guy in a parking lot yelling, "What the fuck are you doing with my weed!" Ah, Starbucks.

Feed The Spiders
This would make more sense if I could find the ant blog that supposedly inspired it. Casual research suggests that it no longer exists.

Enjoy these fine blogs in the event that I am otherwise preoccupied with houseguests, laundry, and what promises to be a damn fine week of television and live performances.

Japan's Children Are Our Future Taiko Drum Masters

Hello from the future, where one misplaced letter renders our very language into katakana or some other form of Asiany hieroglyph. A mere 15 hours from now spacebars will be half their former size and bordered by character changing keys that are easily hit by stubby American fingers. It's what Morgan Spurlock warned us about.

The flight to Japan was dehydrating but otherwise uneventful. If you must be stuck in the middle seat on an airplane for 11 hours, a destination in Japan is probably your safest bet. I finished Errors and Omissions, and will have a word for the Onion AV Club when I return. I also skimmed through a small press horror novel which I won't mention by title. The publisher begged in the back pages for positive reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble's web site. I will do him a better courtesy and not dissuade anyone from reading this novel with homophobic homosexual sex, boring gratuitous violence (the worst kind), and scrotums filled with centipedes.

I should have just picked up the latter books in Naomi Novik's dragons meet Patrick O'Brien series. Despite having more semicolons in the first three pages than I have ever seen in my life, Her Majesty's Dragon is kind of fun.

When hiking through my wife's hometown today, we passed by her old elementary school. Rather than struggling with sea shanties on plastic recorders, these kids were outside wailing on Taiko drums. I felt robbed. And unless we restore music to our public school curriculums and invest in Guitar Hero, it's only a matter of time before we're all listening to Johnny Hell.

On another frightening note, I had been warned that there were big spiders and centipedes in my wife's hometown in the summer. I ran into one in her family's house last night that was bigger than my hand, and not in that daddy-long-legs way. The thing was horrifyingly proportionate. I guess when you grow up in an environment with spiders that big you can't afford to be afraid of them, but as far as I'm concerned that's like siding with the demons just because you're in Hell.