Refugee from the Universe of Failure

Today is Veterans Day.  Is there anyone you know who has served or is serving in the military that you'd like to honor today? 

Both my parents served in the US Army in the seventies-early eighties. (Which is how they met, and how I came to be born in a former Hitler Youth complex in Landstuhl.

 

I don't know if any of y'alls are already aware of these or what, but I didn't find any mention of them, so here goes.

A company by the name of Quantum Mechanix makes licensed prop replicas for various properties, including Battlestar Galactica and Firefly. Most of their stuff is still on the TBA list and not yet available, but you can get a set of very cool personalized Battlestar Galactica dogtags for fifty dollars. I got some, and they're very nice. There's also supposed to be a set of character tags coming too, but they're dragging their feet on that. (In the meantime you can get a set with your favorite character's name and serial on it if you want.)

More photos:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't know if any of you guys like to collect stuff like this, but I find it a fun way to show my support for the show. (I wear mine pretty much every day.)

 

If you live in or near South Dakota, you may have heard about all the flooding we got in the northeast last May. If you haven't, well too bad, 'cause that's what this is about.

So on the night of May 5th, 2007, I was working at the north McDonald's location in Aberdeen, South Dakota. I usually work at the Sixth Avenue location, but at the time it had been torn down so they could build the new store. Anyway, it was raining quite a bit, but since I work in the kitchen I didn't really know how bad it was coming down until the kids at the back drive-thru window said they saw logs floating down the street. As the night went on I heard talk of being stuck there all night, which I can't say I was too keen on. I finally got off around eight-thirty, though I have no idea when I was supposed to be off. So I called for my ride and went out to wait.

It was crazy outside. The rain showed no sign of letting up, and the roads were completely flooded. Across the street people were pacing their front yards, screaming profanities at everyone who drove by. (Since it sent waves rolling over their lawns and into their basements, I can see why they were unhappy.) At one point an SUV full of hutterites drives right through the whole mess at about fives miles an hour, with one of the passengers holding a small digital camera out the window and taking pictures of the water. Not long after that a car comes from the north trying to get to the overpass, but it dies and drifts over to the curb. As the young woman driving it gets out the homeowners go rushing towards her, and I was half wondering if they were going to attack her. I'm not even exaggerating, it would not have surprised me to witness a murder right there. They were that pissed off. But they just hurled verbal abuse at her.

And they say people are nicer in small towns!

My grandpa finally showed up soon after that, and we got the hell out of there. Well, as fast as we could with most of the roads under something like three feet of water. I wanted to go straight home, but first we had to check the situation at gramp's veterinary clinic, which ended up taking nearly an hour. When I finally did get home I was relieved to find our basement without a drop of water; in fact most of the substantial flooding was pretty much restricted to the north part of town. Ha, suckers!

I later learned that we got a month's worth of precipitation in the space of an hour. And it rained all night. According to the paper it was a once-in-5,000-years storm. Something like three-quarters of the homes in Aberdeen had basement flooding, and a fair number of them had to be condemned. Some just straight-up collapsed. For the rest of the summer everywhere you went in the north part of town there was junk piled in front yards and houses blocked off my yellow caution tape. It was a little bizarre when the area I lived in was virtually untouched.

The day after I went over to the Mog to check the situation there. This is what I found:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thought that was pretty impressive, but I hadn't gone up north yet. My mom and I were wondering as to the situation at McDonald's, and whether I would be working that night. So off we went, walking directly into the worst part of the flooding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We found water pretty fast, and being the bold adventurers we are walked straight in. (As bad an idea as that may have been.) It was interesting to see the difference between people's attitudes on the day after as opposed to the night of. Most of the people we saw seemed fairly upbeat, with kids playing and splashing and parents standing ankle-deep in their flooded lawns, telling jokes.

 

I was further reminded that I want a canoe.

So we got to McDonald's, and I knew straight off that I wouldn't be going to work for a while. Though the water had gone down some (I heard that it had gotten clear up to the building, which is no small thing when the building's like six feet above the road), it was still completely surrounded by water; even if they opened, no customers could get to it.

 

 

 

 

 

After checking in with the store's owner we headed home, walking south down Second Street. Waist-deep in water, which was a lot of fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we walked up the overpass, I turned for one last shot:

 

I just got distracted, see!

Yesterday a baby duck was found. Without a mother he likely would not survive long, so we brought him into our home, whether to keep as a pet or turn over to someone more qualified we hadn't yet decided.

Then, that night, he died. Lame.

Anyway, look at the cute ducky!

 

 

 

 

 

Too bad he had to go and die on us.

See, this is why I'm not on Livejournal or MySpace (besides those places basically being composed entirely of teenage drama). I know, deep down, that I will not maintain it. I'll forget about it, or at the very least put off doing anything for months at a time.

But anyway, I'm back now! (Let's see for how long . . .) So what did I do in my absence? Not much. Got a sweet pay raise and I now own a house. Other than that not a whole lot.

Well this is an interesting development.

I write science fiction. Not so much spaceship, aliens, and robots type science fiction, but science fiction nonetheless. The world that most of my stories are set in is called Gondolend, and aside from some geographic and ecological differences it's more or less like Earth, and is home to the same sorts of life forms. With one difference: On Gondolend, the mammals came and went first, meaning that dinosaurs are in charge by the time human beings arrive on the scene. And since evolution happens the way it does, Gondolend is home to some unique species not found on Earth.

The Dinosaurs of Gondolend: An Artist's Companion will be cram-packed with skeletal restorations of my fictional species, as well as muscular studies, life restorations, and notes on their anatomy. Not only that, but it will also feature a series of articles on various aspects of paleoart that one must know to achieve accuracy, such as anatomy, hand orientation, and feathers. Since I make it a point to portray the dinosaurs in my writing as accurately and believably as possible, the majority of the tips in my articles will be applicable to real animals as well as the fake ones used as examples. Possible exceptions, such as my habit of using various theories for my animals that have opposition in the scientific community, will be addressed and other possibilities explored.

So why am I telling you about this? After all, I probably won't have the book ready for print for quite a long while. Well, I'm bringing this up because I've recently decided to get started on the article portions early and make them available online as I finish them. So keep your eyes peeled, if drawin' dinosaurs be your baggage. I mean sure you may know a bunch of the stuff I'll be writing about already, but I got somethin' that Greg Paul and Tracy Ford and Mark Hallett and all those other big names who wrote about drawing dinosaurs don't (well aside from fake dinosaurs): indie cred. I'm underground man, online paleoart style goin' on six years now. All those other guys? Mainstream. Sell-outs.

Impatient? Want to see some fake dinosaurs right now? Well feast your eyes on these, bitches!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A while back I told you a story about my camping trip in Florida, and mentioned other such adventures that I would describe for you at a later date. Well, the date is indeed later, and it is time now for me to tell you all of the Great Canoe Chase of 2006.

See, the first night of our trip, along with myself, Don, Mike, Nick, Pie, and Monte, there was a girl named Jessica. At one point all of us were gatyhered 'round the campsite, except for Mike and Jessica. Everyone got to wondering what they were up to, and one by one went to look, except for me. So I'm by myself, wondering what the deal is.

Then Don and Nick come back. Don's quite drunk, and quite pissed off. And then he drinks some more. Picks his chair up over his head to smash it, but catches himself and just sets it back down. Eventually he and Nick take off again. Now, up until this point I have never dealt with a drunk dude, so I have no clue what I should be doing. So I should sit there all awkwardly. Time passes, and just as soon as I'm getting ready to turn in Nick shows up and tells me to follow him. Apparently Don had taken off in the kayak, and since everyone else was passed out it was up to us to go after him.

Allow me to explain the situation a little better: apparently in their time alone together Mike and Jessica had been, ah, physically intimate, so to speak. When Don caught up with Jessica afterward she was acting all awkward-like, and when Don saw her disheveled clothing all covered with sand and such he assumed that Mike had tried to rape her. So he decided, Well, looks like I'm gonna have to kill Mike. Hey, he was plowed. So he takes his sword (he has a sword, by the way) (seriously) and goes after him. There he runs into the others, threatens them all ("I'll gut you like a fish! Don't think I won't!"), and then passes out. Then he goes back to camp, drinks some more, sulks in the woods for a while, and then takes off in the kayak. At four-thirty in the morning. Stumbling drunk. Into shark-infested waters. Yeah, safe.

So Nick and I head out to make sure he doesn't drown or get turned into chum. I'm in front, and I just barely make out something that could be him, and the chase is on. We chase after him for about fifteen minutes or so before catching up with him at a sandbar, where he's beaced himself. Nick suggests we hang back and just keep an eye on him, so we do. He paddles across the sandbar back into the water, and the chase is on again. We then track him to an island, where he leaves the kayak and hides under the water while we circle around. Then he takes off again.

Then he starts shouting stuff at us, most of which we can't make out. As we get closer we have the following shouted exchange:

Donald: This is a test!

Me: What?!

Donald: See if you can catch me! If you think you're man enough!

Me: We're only chasing you to make sure you don't die, you idiot! This isn't a game!

Apparently that gave him pause; people seem to think I'm a really mellow guy, so that doing something that would piss me off is really crossing the line.

By this time I am pretty pissed off, so I decide if he wants us to catch him, let's catch him. I start paddling as fast as I can, and pretty soon we see him getting closer and closer as we run him down. We come alongside and he gives up. "Well, you caught me!" We then head back to the island he'd given us the slip at to rest a bit before going back to camp. As I'd suspected he'd just gone out to blow off some steam, until he saw us following.

On the way back to camp the mood was considerably lighter, so we decided to have another race. At some point Nick and I rammed Don's kayak, knocking him into the water. After going after him to make sure something like that didn't happen. Genius. (But like I told his girlfriend a few days later, we were right there, so if he got attacked by a bull shark we could've saved most of him.) By the time we got back to camp most everyone else was up again, so Donald told them all what happened.

And that is how I learned to paddle a canoe.

Have you ever Googled your own name? How did you feel about the results?
Submitted by elen.

 Seeing as the first three results pertain to me, I'd say they made me feel pretty weird. That aint right, bein' some two-bit no-name college dropout punk from the prairie and getting the top three spots in a Google search. What's the world coming to?