Blógünder Schlock

If you follow my Twitter feed you may have seen my tweet about renaming Swine Flu to Hogthrax. My buddy Dave said that Hamthrax is a much better name, and I agree. Later my brother Randy pointed out that H1N1 sounds like something out of Star Wars.

Do you want to defuse some of the hysteria surrounding this particular strain of Type A Influenza? Let’s make fun of it with pig-related names. Here are a few I’ve collected, and a few I’ve contributed …

• Hamthrax
• Hogthrax
• Spamthrax
• Tuporkulosis
• Porklio
• Cowpox oh wait that’s real
• Hogmumps
• The Other Yellow Fever
• Pigfluenza
• Mad Sow Disease
• Sowbola
• Sowmonella
• Spammonella
• Bacon AIDS
• Bacon Fever
• Baconator oh wait that’s at Wendy’s
• Whooping Oink
• Oinking Pneumonia
• Buboinking Pork

For you Star Wars fans:

• Gamorreanorhea

And the end-of-the-world scenarios for the epidemic?

• The Aporkalypse
• Hognarok

Yes,  I know that influenza kills tens of thousands of people annually. This is very sad. These people were not, however, killed by the name of this viral strain, which is what I’m actually mocking (unless I suggest that “Buboinking Pork” sounds more like how you caught the disease, which I would never do.)

Join me. Let’s hear your best names for an inappropriately pig-themed disease, and maybe our peals of laughter will make the world a happier and less hysteria-prone place.

As a follow-on to my last post, I’d like to add that Life is a Point-Buy system.
It’s kind of a complicated one, though. You start with a random set of genetic predispositions, along with some environmental modifiers so that by the time you actually get around to character generation it looks a little bit like your character was randomly rolled.

With most point-buy systems you have to short one stat (let’s say “Constitution”) in order to buff another (let’s say “Intelligence.”) In Life, however, there is a stat that can be dumped almost completely to zero in order to buff the others far above average.

That stat is “TIME.” Spend it wisely. It is never too late to buff your Intelligence, your Charisma, or even your Wisdom, but some folks insist on simply using it as target practice…

The gamers among you will get this immediately. Some of the rest of you may also get it immediately, though I won’t be surprised if a few of you need a nudge.

Here’s the full statement, which I found occasion to use during three different panels at Life, the Universe, and Everything XXVII: “If you want to work in this business, charisma is not a dump stat.”

My meaning should be obvious. If you want to be a professional writer, illustrator, or other creator, you may be enticed into believing that your dress, demeanor, and interpersonal skills are less important than they are in other fields. This is patently false. The only situation in which people will overlook what a jerk you are, or how smelly you are, or how shabbily dressed you are is when you are so incredibly impressive in other ways that they figure your eccentricities don’t matter, or may even be part of the mystique.

This is not a message that I send to my fellow creators who are successful in this business. Why not? Because whatever their current charisma score, they’re successful in this business and it probably doesn’t matter much. Whatever they’re doing is working.

But if you’re trying to break in, if you’re hoping to get hired by a comic book company, a video game company, or get an editor to read that 200,000 word manuscript, you cannot afford to be anything other than easy to get along with and inoffensive to the other senses. Write nice emails. Say kind things. I’m not suggesting that you become a simpering, obsequious, shallowly-flattering aspirant. Just be nice. Look nice, smell nice, act nice.

Why? Because you’re going to have to work with others, and they have to want to work with you.

And now, an observation…

Every full-time, creative professional at this most recent event looked really good. The authors, illustrators, game designers, animators, and editors all dressed sharply, carried themselves uprightly, spoke clearly, and if I stood close enough to them to smell them the only smells were clean clothing, and perhaps a hint of appropriate fragrance.

They did not all look sharp in the same way. Tracy and Laura Hickman wore muted colors, while Lee Modessit wore black and white. David Farland and Brandon Sanderson looked like college professors, casually yet very sharply academic.

There were a few fans, on the other hand, who looked, acted, and even smelled pretty bad. Yes, the smelly fan is kind of a cliché, and we laugh at it. But in some cases it’s sad because there are fans who desperately want to be professionals, and whether or not their work is up to that level they won’t be recognized as such… not unless their work is so incredible, so outstanding, so ground-breakingly, astoundingly awe-inspiring that those reviewing it are suddenly forced to pay attention to nothing but that work. And that’s a hard thing to pull off if you look like you haven’t showered in two days, and then, upon closer examination, it turns out that you smell that way too.

I’m not pointing fingers.  If you were there, please don’t go thinking I was looking at you and saying to myself “what a slob.” I wasn’t. But if you think that maybe you did look that way, congratulations. You probably know enough to solve the problem.

Many of the panels and lectures at this event focused on developing the skills necessary to be a creative professional. We covered putting good science in your science fiction, writing believable romance, maintaining suspense, rewriting for clarity and concision, and a host of other things — and that’s just on the writing side. To my knowledge, however, there wasn’t a panel centered around crafting personal appearance in order to increase the chances of getting published.

Maybe there should have been. And maybe the title of that presentation should be “Charisma Is Not A Dump Stat.”

Yes, it is true: the Daystar boiled my frog.

Bear with me. I’m mixing and matching memes here.

First up: let’s start with an inconvenient fact: I do my best at-the-computer work (scripting and coloring) before 10am. If I haven’t started by 10am sometimes I can’t start at all. My head goes all stupid, and I get headaches. Getting up earlier does seem to help, so that’s been my solution. Get up early, work hard until 10am, take a nap, and then get out of the house for penciling and inking.

Next Up: Boiling frogs. I don’t know if this is true or not, but as the myth goes if you drop a live frog in boiling water it will leap out. It might even live. If, however, you drop the frog in tepid water and then slowly heat it you will be able to boil the frog. The moral? Slow changes, even deadly ones, may not be noticed by the victim.

Third, the Geek meme: We all know geeks hate direct sunlight. The Daystar, it burns us. This Penny-Arcade sums up many people’s feelings on the matter.

Now… let’s tie these together.

As it turns out, by 10am it has gotten quite bright behind my house, especially on a sunny day when there is lots of snow on the ground. There is a window in my office almost directly behind my monitors.

This morning at 11:00am I was lamenting the late start, the lack of productivity, and while nursing a headache at my desk I chanced to shield my eyes. Almost instantly the headache was gone, and awareness dawned on me like… well, like dawn, but I don’t want to cast the Daystar in a pleasant light. It makes enough darn light, thankyouverymuch.

Apparently I’m not self-aware enough to notice the gradual increase in Daystar-induced pain while I’m working.

Tomorrow’s productivity tool: drawn drapes! As it happens, the migraine-inducing radiation of the Daystar can be blocked with a single layer of tightly-woven, heavy, and above all opaque fabric.

Background: I’ve hiked the summit of Mt. Timpanogas half a dozen times, and done another half-dozen hikes to the Timpanogas basin. These were all when I was forty pounds lighter and eighteen years younger.

My son got his Arrow of Light from Cub Scouts on Wednesday, joined the Boy Scout Troop on the same night, and today, Saturday the 27th, was the troop’s big Timpanogas hike. It’s a twelve mile round-trip, with four thousand feet of elevation change making it feel more like a twenty-miler. That’s a lot for an eleven-year-old boy, especially one who has never done a five-miler.

I opted to join him. It was not convenient. I’m supposed to be re-stocking the buffer and signing books. Two factors entered into my decision to not only go with him, but to bring my 13-year-old daughter along as well (the Scoutmaster actually suggested it, and invited everybody’s families to join the troop on the jaunt.)

(”Jaunt.” HA! I kid.)

Where was I? Two factors. Right.

1) The point of the book signing and the buffer-stocking is so that I can be a Dad who spends more time with his kids. If cartooning ever gets the best of the family, cartooning will find itself maimed or dead. Family is far more important to me.

2) If I wait for the easy and convenient opportunities to spend time with my kids, I’ll never do the fun stuff, and I’ll probably end up resenting them for being difficult and inconvienent.  Which they are, but then again, so are most of the very best things in life.

I wont give you a full trip report. I will however give you a map.

The green is the part we hiked, both ways. It’s drawn from memory, but I studied the topo-map before AND after the trip, and I’m pretty sure I counted the switch-backs right. Also, “Scout Falls” (sounds like a Scoutmaster’s nightmare of a newspaper headline) was a “wrong turn” (well… wrong don’t-turn) at the end of a switchback, so I’ve got a good landmark.

The red is the part we missed out on. In terms of elevation and trail distance, we made it about half way. In terms of spectatular view, we missed roughly 70% of the trip. I know. I’ve seen it before.

The green “X” is where my asthma and my weight ganged up on me. We were hiking up this long, steep shot through some rock tailings (rocks ranging from gravel to boulders that have broken off of cliff-faces above over the last jumblety-rockillion years) and suddenly I was short of breath. And gasping. And trying not to panic, because that’s JUST what every eleven-year-old boy needs to see. I took an inhaler hit, and couldn’t breathe deeply enough to get it in. Second try, same result. Third hit was true… my lungs opened a bit, my vision cleared, and I was still short of breath.

So we stopped for breakfast. Kiki, Link, and I (names have been changed, obviously) ate MREs, and even used the water-powered heating envelopes. Mine was labeled “Chicken and Chunky Salsa,” and was the worst of the three. Link enjoyed (that word is not a lie, I swear) “Beef Enchiladas” and Kiki devoured “Beef in Barbecue Sauce.” Then she devoured the rest of Link’s “these-aren’t-enchiladas-but-I’m-really-hungry.”

And throughout our forty minute breakfast break I took inventory:

Number of times my vision fuzzed out while bending over to make breakfast? Three.

Number of times I felt like all I needed was some food and rest and I’d be fine? Zero.

Number of additional inhaler hits I took? Four.
Number of times I evaluated my children’s performance thus far, and suspected they were at the far edge of their own endurance limits? Two.

Number of times I suspected said evaluation was colored by my own condition? Six.

After a short spot of deliberation me and mine turned around. The rest of the group still had their two-deep adult leadership, strong older boys, and about four miles and two thousand feet of elevation ahead of them. I convinced Kiki and Link that we had to turn around because of ME. They were doing fine.

Fortunately for my ego, by the time we got back to the car they were both completely wiped out. No way would they have finished the hike without exhaustion, tears, turned ankles, and possibly some “carry me?”

I apologized to them for not being able to take them all the way up. Kiki said “It’s okay, Dad. We got to spend time with you, and that’s what’s important.”

Stamina fail. Parenting win. Also, it’s 3:41pm, I’ve had a two-hour nap, and I’m not still on that soul-crushing-though-awe-inspiring mountain. Oh, and I’m not dead, too.

Next week I shall flaunt my superior stamina by drawing pictures in the remaining seven hundred and four Teraport Wars sketch editions.

Twitter forces you to say whatever you plan to say in 140 characters or less. That’s not much room. It’s like a diet for verbose writers.

(The above paragraph can be twitted with just 3 characters to spare.)

That got me to thinking about diets in general, and how I have a hard time keeping track of what it is I actually eat and when. So… Twitter to the rescue. Starting Monday I’ll be twitting (or is it “tweeting?”) my meals, my gym trips, and my daily weight and body fat (as measured by the scale in my bathroom.) I’m going to try it for at least a week, and we’ll see how it goes.

If you’re following my tweets (www.twitter.com/howardtayler) then I expect this will get quite boring for you. It’ll probably be boring for me, too. This is an experiment, and experiments often are.

In the past I’ve found that the most effective diets for me are those which cut simple carbs to below 30g per day. I’ll be trying to eat the same way this time. From a scientific method perspective, since I lack a true control group, the easiest way to test something’s effectiveness is to only change one variable at a time. The variable here is “reporting.” I’m testing Twitter, not low-carbing. I already know low-carbing works.

For the record, this is not an invitation for any of you to start offering me diet advice. If even one reader out of a thousand decides to email me with suggestions, I’ll be buried in unsolicited advice on weight loss (read: SPAM.) If you’re an MD, a PA, or an RN, I ESPECIALLY encourage you to not send me advice. If I want it, I’ll pay you for it.

Okay, let the tweeting begin (in about 15 hours.)

I skipped out on Penguicon this year (it’s my favorite out-of-state convention), and it’s probably a good thing. All of Tuesday night was spent making trips to the bathroom to shout at the porcelain, and while this sort of thing usually kills a day or two, I was still running a fever and losing precious sleep Friday night, and stumbling around all achey like a zombie on a no-brains diet on Saturday.

Penguiconners, I missed you this weekend, and for this you should be thankful. Whatever I’ve got, you don’t want.

I colored two pages of Bonus Story before falling ill, and then, in spite of the illin’ an’ chillin’, I actually managed to bang out a week of comics on Friday and Saturday. They’ll probably need touch-ups when Smart Howard checks back in for work Monday, but most of the heavy lifting is done.

I know, I know… the buffer is supposed to give me time off for sickness, but with book deadlines crushing me, and conventions coming in May (Hello, Leprecon!) I really don’t want to lose a week just because the new entrees from Panda Express thought so much of themselves they demanded I taste them twice.

When I called my friend Bob Defendi to let him know I couldn’t join his game Wednesday night, I told him I probably wouldn’t be eating at Panda for a looong time to come. “The taste of chinese food on the way back up is one of those memories that just won’t let go,” I said. Bob told me that would be a great first line for a book. It made me laugh, but laughing still hurt a lot.

Sorry for the huge quantities of “Too Much Information.” I’m sure you’ll agree (to complete the song lyric in the title of this post,) “these are the things we can do without.”

I fell ill Monday afternoon. It cut my workday short. For the rest of the week I tried to muscle through it, propping myself up with piles of Vitamin C, caffeine, cold medicine, and mid-day sleep.

I’m still wiped out. I managed to get a very small amount of work done during my six-day work week: two pages of Bonus Story, and 2/3 of a week of comics. I’m grateful for the buffer. Here’s hoping the coming week goes a little better. I really, REALLY need to finish the Bonus Story and cover for The Teraport Wars so we can start printing books (and, by extension, selling books and paying the bills.) What I failed to get done, in spite of some aggressive convalescing on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, was get better. It’s frustrating, because usually any task I devote half a day to gets finished.

On a semi-related (and cross-posted from the Nightstar forum) note, We are very, very close to the end of Book 9: The Body Politic, which will draw to a close on Thursday the 28th. Book 10: I’d better Hurry Up And Name This Thing Or People Will Start To Suspect That I Make This Crap Up On The Run begins on Friday, February 29th… the day I turn 40.

Is it coincidence that Book 10 begins on the 10th Leap Day since my birth? Is there numerological significance to it? There MUST be…. otherwise I’m not just making this crap up on the run, I’m getting infernally lucky at the same time.

Enough of that. I’ll post more “wall-o’-postcards” updates, along with a link to this week’s Writing Excuses sometime Monday morning. For now, however, I’m chugging some Nyquil and going to bed.

I keep meaning to update this blog, and then keep not doing it because the time I usually spend doing it I’ve been spending walking a few blocks in order to shed some particularly ugly pounds.

The good news is that five of those pounds have come off. The bad news is that all of the good ideas I usually have for blogging have been displaced by thoughts of putting one foot in front of the other. And then the Voices In My Head start yammering, and when I come back home I’m writing scripts for the strip instead of insightful, wry-and-dry commentary for this page.

I like it when the bad news is actually just another flavor of good news.

When I plunked down $450 on the Austin Health-Mate air purifier, last week I expected to be disappointed, and to execute the “money back if you’re not satisfied” clause. But I was desperate, because my allergies and asthma were as bad as I ever remember them being.

Well, the escape clause will remain un-escaped, much as I’d love to have $450 rattling around in my pocket.

Yesterday my nose ran like a faucet, my lungs sounded like an accordion, and I went through kleenex like I own stock in the company. I doped up on Excedrin PM for a good night’s sleep, but in the morning as the meds wore off, I started to go drippy and wheezy again.

Late this morning the Health-Mate finally showed up. I yanked it out of the box, plugged it in upstairs, and got back to work. For two hours I was still a little drippy, but then I noticed a smell, and at about the same time I noticed that I was breathing clearly.

The smell… well, it smells like a really good air-freshener, only not “sticky.” What does clean air smell like? Surprisingly, it doesn’t smell like “nothing.” But it also doesn’t smell like whatever allergens have been blowing around inside my house for the last who-knows-how-long. It just smells… clean.

The real test for this sucker will be in April, when the pollen starts a blowin’. If I can wake up in the mornings without the runny nose and watery eyes… ahh, bliss.

I’ve been spending upwards of $50 per month on allergy treatments for the past four years, and while they’ve helped significantly, I’m not cured. Spending the equivalent of 9 months of that treatment money on keeping the air clean in the house for five years is worth it.

Yeah, I know. The filter probably won’t last that long, and it’s a two hundred dollar item. But Austin has a pro-rated usage clause saying that if your last filter does NOT last five years, you don’t pay full price on the new one. NICE.

Regardless, it’s still worth it.

UPDATE:  the morning of February 8th …

I woke up without a head full of snot for the first time in recent memory. I did have a little bit of coughing and wheezing right about the time the furnace kicked in, which means that the filter in my bedroom had to play catch-up as the furnace blew fresh crap around the room (yes, we’ve cleaned the ducts, grills, and central filter), but that little jag only lasted maybe 30 seconds, and then I was back asleep.

Over the next few days we’ll be cleaning house, and moving the purifier into the room where we clean — hopefully chasing down piles of allergens, dust, mold spores, and who knows what else.