1) "and the winner is" -- cherie has judged fivecats the winner of the short fiction contest. Whee! Send me your address and I'll ship out your autographed Boneshaker. mcmatz wins my special auxiliary prize, send me your address for some unspecified goodies.

2) my 2xcreative project with Liz Afif is done! Now we need to figure out what to do with it. So I'm making a poll. It's 44 pages long and done up in full color, which makes it expensive to produce. *



Poll #1500598 Format for a Rabbit Named Swine
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 100

I would buy this book

Here are some excerpts so you can see how ... inappropriately awesome it is.





(This makes the perfect gift if you're the sort of aunt or uncle who likes to give things like fireworks and slingshots to the nieces and nephews or if you're the sort of person who likes having books on their coffee table that make guests go "What the heck is wrong with you? Really. Were you dropped on your head as a baby or something?")


* If you work for a company that prints booklets and you're going "I can totally print those better/cheaper" -- let me know.

meet Flounder!

I miss ladymeat 

From City Kitties comes an amazing tail (yes tail) of a seven year old who saved up his allowance and gave everything he had, $46.75, to help homeless cats.



In Evan's honor I paypalled $46.75 to info@citykitties.org.

You can too.



And you can read City Kitties note about Evan here.

Hey folks,
Yesterday I got an email from a user saying there was a rumor that LJ was intending to make specifying gender on one's profile mandatory. Obviously there are various reasons why people either might not want that information known, or don't fit into one of the two categories commonly seen in such questions.

I wrote to LJ immediately asking about the rumor and advising that this wasn't a good idea without user input.

This morning I heard back with the Official Word and I'd be happy if you'd repost this or link to it to spread the news:

1) There are NO plans to make users specify gender in their profiles. The current options are "male/female/unspecified", this will remain.

2) The rumor started because on the current LJ BETA version (being tested now by some users) a programming error made the field mandatory, the same programming also broke profile editing. Users reported the bug to LJ and they are fixing the code along with other bugs people are discovering.

3) There will be a note with more details from the Customer Care team in the future.

4) That's all.

Thanks to everyone who emailed to let me know about this. If there are other questions or comments, please feel free to add them here and I'll pass everything along. I'm still working with LJ on the big status report but they're busy with the final software rollout for 2009, we'll have a meeting after that.

Your LJ user rep,

Kyle

This week we'll be going over the entries in the write a story, win an autographed copy of Cherie Priest's Boneshaker novel contest. There are many awesome entries. I ought to put together a .pdf of all of them that people can download, print out, and read on the subway.

While no winner has yet been chosen, I wanted to point out the FREAKING AWESOME ILLUSTRATION OF STEAMPUNKROSWELL that mcmatz did:



sweet barking cheese. Friend this woman. Seriously. How could this awesome have escaped me for so long? I think there will have to be a special prize for this, it was so unexpectedly awesome.

(and if anybody else wants to do steampunk roswell illustrations, I will indeed put together a .pdf of all the stories for people to download and read on the train, and I'll give out other special prizes which will likely consist of a photographic print of something.)

rock on with your bad selves



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Yesterday I went to see Guo-Qiang's Fallen Blossoms at the Philadelphia Museum of art -- he'd set up an elaborate drawing made out of gunpowder and set alight the front of the building (more or less). There was smoke, there was fire.

then trillian_stars and I went to XIX, high atop the Bellvue Stratford and celebrated being alive in a world where people set fire to the front of buildings and it's called art.

Then I took this photo of her with my iPhone



so that the moment couldn't entirely bleed away.

This morning I got up early and started working on book layouts -- there are two at the moment, one's my 2xcreative project which will be lovely but keeps getting knocked back by the bigger one which I hope to have done very soon.

This afternoon I skipped out on the book layouts and we went to a party at the Sketch Club where I have a piece hanging in the show (along with Rockwell Kent and N.C. Wyeth and Thoms Ekans -- fo shizzle. Right on the wall next to them) which comes down tomorrow. We had wonderful conversations with WWII vets and artists.

Tonight we're going to see Wagner's Ring (orchestral excerpts) at the Symphony which is wonderful because we get to dress up and act fabulous which we haven't done in a while.

cmpriest has written a scifi novel of epic and dangerous proport, and it's so awesome and I want y'all to read it so much, that I'm giving away an autographed copy.




Boneshaker is the story of Briar Wilkes who lives on the outskirts of Seattle, sixteen years after the Boneshaker, an insane steam powered drilling device built by her husband to drill for gold in the Klondike, broke free from the laboratory and dug down under the city, piercing a pocket of deadly, poison gas that killed most of the city's inhabitants, but kept some others in a strange, crazed, not dead state of ravenous hunger for human flesh. Now Briar is forced to return to the city to find her son, the heady 16 year old Zeke who has snuck into old Seattle in the hopes of proving his father was not responsible for the catastrophic event which destroyed that city. In the ruins, he is certain, he will find the truth. What they both find is that there are others in the city, unexpected people who've formed a fiercely independent society living within the walls with both the help and the hinderance of a mad, reclusive inventor, Dr. Minnericht.

Cherie has produced a fabulous steampunk adventure (it's written in brown ink, that's how steampunk it is) and I want people to read it.

You will all no doubt remember back in August when I gave away a copy of Chris Howard's novel Seaborn, this is going to work the same way. Here's how it goes:

To win this book, mailed to your door, write a short story in 350 words or less that involves Roswell and any mix of the following:

a) airships
b) mysterious deadly fog
c) zombies (they're called "rotters" in Cherie's book)
d) mysterious mad masked scientists
e) tunnels under Seattle
f) gas masks




Boneshaker photographed with Roswell to Enhance Value

Post your entry here in the comments. The final winner, as is our tradition, will be picked by Cherie Freaking Priest herself.

Contest goes until midnight SUNDAY, December 13th 2009. I can probably guarantee delivery by Xmas, continental US only. In the event of a winner from outside the con. US a substitute, but equally cool prize may be awarded.

Now get writing. And feel free to repost this in your own LJ's.




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For those of you who are not getting email alerts or are getting the wrong email alerts, I heard back from LJ -- they know about the issue, & an official update will be posted in support. Right now there's a large que of notification messages clogging things up, no doubt over the next couple days you'll get blasted with all your back notifications. Support is working on this.

Please feel free to repost this in your own LJ.

1) I'm preparing a big LJ Rep post that will show the progress Livejournal's made since my election to be your user representative on the board. Next week or so.

2) There's been excellent news in the Kyle Cassidy / Elizabeth Bear collaboration front. Most excellent news. I was hoping that it might come out before Xmas but I don't think that's the case.

3) I did a 2xcreative project with Liz Afif who shares my ... unfortunate sense of humor. That one should be out in time for xmas. Titled "A Bunny Called Swine" it started when I twittered: "http://twitpic.com/qselh - This airport feels like hot, baking swine flu wrapped in crying babies" a couple weeks ago. If you have a niece or nephew you would like to buy an inappropriate gift for, this might be it.

4) I've got an article in this month's Videomaker Magazine -- which isn't unusual, because I've been doing a column there for years, I just keep forgetting to mention it. This one's on video formats.

5) Here's an Amanda Palmer shot from lastweekish.



This was taken using an Alien Bees 800 head with a grid.

6) I'm putting together a travel diary from Wyoming, it'll be nice. Last year I did one about the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts. If you haven't seen / read it, you should take a look.



Click here to see it. It's a 19mb pdf

7) There's other news but I don't want to dilute things too much. I need a couple of extra days in the week where nothing happens.

8) It's pouring rain outside. I have an overwhelming urge to go walk in it and drink hot tea. I have a clear umbrella. It's fun. I would have preferred snow, but if life sends you rain, you ought to at least go splash in the puddles.

9) In closing, here's Mount Hood.



Hope y'all are having a swell day.




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If you were in my Seattle photo workshop, post your best photo (or two) in the comments here. If you have the time, write a sentence or two about your photography and what you liked best about the workshop.

Everybody else, feel free to look back today at all the purdy pixtures and comment.

I'm sitting here ostensibly working on a blog post about the last two weeks but not very well. Which means a fair amount of twiddling around LJ maxomai brings up Ouija boards, which reminds me ... We watched Paranormal Activity a couple weeks ago and I really liked it. Which got me thinking about ghosts and Conan Doyle and Spirit Photography and ectoplasm and Houdini and locked cabinets and all the sorts of things my mind will run to if given any room. This lead me to a rare book store where I got a copy of Patience Worth a book, dictated via Ouija board (or psychosis) to a man named Casper Yost (I wonder if he was friendly) and published in 1916. My copy is green and gold and beautiful and inscribed in the front "Property of the Bellingham Psychic Research Center" -- which is almost as cool as the book itself. It contains poetry, prose, and a play, works Mr. Yost assures us are the musings of the spirit of Patience Worth, delivered from Beyond The Grave like a telegram. Sadly though, Patience Worth is a terrible playwright and an even worse poet.

I climb a web to reach a star,
And stub my toe against a moonbeam

But that didn't stop it from becoming a runaway best seller. I imagine Casper sitting at his desk, perhaps a witchboard nearby for appearances sake, tapping his pencil on his forehead and jotting down the first thing that comes to mind.

But all that reminded me of this photo that Feisty Diva of Peacock Blue Designs and I did a few years ago. I'm quite fond of it. Were I to do it again, I'd do it in the dark and light it better and have the candles actually going. I didn't know so much about lighting back then. It's nice to see that I've come a distance, improved technically, and still retained a stylistic voice.



I think I'm going to make some bananna bread and not so much lament everything that I didn't get done today.