Drat. I was going to make a pizza for tonight, but it turned out the cheese had gone bad. Of course I didn’t check this until after I’d already rolled out a piece of dough and put sauce on it. If I actually knew something about cooking maybe I could’ve made something tasty out of that, but I was like, screw it, I’ve got pasta in the fridge.

So since I had a half-full trash bag with scary cheese waiting in it, I decided what the hell, let’s fill it up with other stuff that’s been hanging around the fridge being forgotten – that bottle of OJ from when I was sick in fall, some milk from whoknows when, an elderly tomato quietly turning to slush, and so on. And threw that all in the dumpster out back.

I really need to get into the habit of making sure all my ingredients are good to go BEFORE I start making a pizza. Usually I can just run out to Safeway if I need something, but tonight, unsurprisingly, they were closed.

Other than that my day mostly consisted of mooning about the house failing to apply myself to working on something that’s been stuck at like 90% done for months. No Christmas stuff, I’d gone down to New Orleans just last week since I like to avoid the seasonal travel rush to some degree if possible, and I didn’t go chasing after any kind of invites to whatever my local friends might have been doing.

And now my pasta’s done.

Feel free to enjoy this seasonal cartoon.

So today I did a thing I haven’t done in a while: exercised in the morning. I’m using a slightly modified version of the Canadian 5bx program; I was originally introduced to it by the Hacker’s Diet and used the simplified version in there to pretty good effect. This morning was the first time in a long while I’d done any real strenuous exercise – the last time was somewhere in the middle of summer, before the burlesque class I was taking stopped. And I’ve got to say, it felt good after I was done running. I was a little winded, sure, but my legs were pulsing with the sensation of being well-used; my body was taking a simple joy in moving.

Hopefully I can re-build the habit and keep it up. It’d be nice to have a flat belly again like I did last year.

Also yesterday I went in for another tattoo session; we ended up doing the white lines and some of the stars on my left arm. It was looking pretty cool before, but having the white there contrasting against the blue/black/purple? Wow.

Plans for today: get paper so I can run off the prints for Kickstarter fulfillment, grab the mail I had held at the post office while I was down in New Orleans, possibly go by Jason’s place for some gaming.

I’m tapping this out on the train home from the airport.

One thing I really noticed on this visit to New Orleans: Portion size. Just about EVERY SINGLE PLACE I went to eat at served me 2-3x what I felt was a sane amount. So then I could waste food, overeat, or take some home for later – and honestly I was like, I wanted to eat this thing ONCE, not for the next two damn days. It is no wonder that people in that city are so fat.

I’m glad to be back in a West Coast city that routinely serves people one person’s worth of food at restaurants.

Fifteen minutes from now, I’ll be on a plane back to Seattle. But right now I’m sitting in the Vegas airport, listening to the endless burbling of slot machines rolling their virtual wheels. I almost dropped a buck in one of them when I was getting a drink – the back of my head really thought that one lonely “Alien” machine among all the “Wheel of Fortune” slots was about to pay out, or something – but didn’t even bother looking to see if I had enough quarters on me.

Not that I didn’t have a windfall anyway; one thing I did during my trip to see my mother was to go out to a bank in Gretna, where I dealt with even MORE investments my grandmother left me. Enough to put off getting a “real job” by a few more years; hopefully I’ll get this “small press creator” thing off the ground before then.

I think the main thing I gave my mother was her library back. Ever since she moved into her current apartment, her books have been a total jumble, just thrown onto the shelves with no order. She’s getting old and just doesn’t have the strength needed for a day or three of re-ordering the books (especially with having to crouch to deal with lower shelves), so it had stayed that way. But earlier this week, I started pulling books off the shelves and putting them in piles based on sections (well, mostly handing them to her, whereupon she made the section call), then putting them all back on the shelves. There’s still ordering to be done within the sections, but it already looks a lot more ordered – there’s lots of sets of multiple related volumes shelved next to each other now. We also got rid of a decent chunk of stuff, so she’ll have room to expand that felt lacking before.

It all had to happen in a day because I was sleeping in the library, on a folded-out bed. The stacks of books on the floor kinda meant I couldn’t fold the bed out until the books were out of the way! The fiction’s not really done; I only loosely alphabetized by first letter, and that only up to about half of the Gs.

It was good to spend time with her, but I’m going to be glad to get back to my own bed, and my studio. Where I think my main task for tomorrow is going to be trying to sign, draw in, and send out some more Rita books.

I should also see if there are any end-of-the-world parties coming up…

I just got two photos in my email of the proofs of the shirts for Further Confusion. This is the one under normal light. You’ll have to find out what it looks like in the dark, or under a UV light, for yourself.

Trust me, it looks pretty damn cool.

If you’re not going to the con and want a shirt (I’ve had a few people say this!), let me know and I can get ahold of one for you. I need to know by the 11th of January. Paypal me $25 if you’re in the continental Americas, $30 for everyone else; I’ll get them at the convention and ship them once I get back home. Sizes are small to 5XL.

Oh man there is like a $250 dollar difference in the flights available between Seattle and San Francisco on the 17th (first day of Further Confusion)/21st (Monday after FC) and those available on the 16th and 22nd. Hmm. Pondering, I think my best plan is to arrive on the 17th and leave on the 22nd, for reasons – I’ll only keep the hotel until Monday, but I figure I have enough acquaintances there that I can find a place to crash for a night and unwind after the con a little. And if I can’t then I’ll extend the hotel for another day and probably still come out better.

Also I need to finalize my roomie plans. I’ve got a two-double room and I am not sure if my usual roomies are going to be doing the con. So I might end up trolling for other people to fill my room, or for some friends who need a fourth and drop mine. I sent out email checking on what my usual roomies are doing, and will work from there…

Something I got in the mail the other day, after ordering a bunch of shipping materials. Rolodex? People still use those? Welcome to the forties, Uline!

Today my computer is busily downloading a bunch of Moebius so I’ll have something to read on the airplane. I would totally buy physical copies of these things if they were easily available in the US, but they ain’t, and most of this stuff goes for multiple hundreds of dollars. So instead of giving money to his estate, I suppose I’ll give some love to his reputation instead by spreading that link – if you’ve been meaning to read his stuff but just haven’t gotten around to it because it’s largely out of print, go there and get some torrents going and maybe go pick up that gorgeous hardback of the Incal while it’s still on the shelves.

Just some random thought fragments that follow on from my previous post on some thoughts that Saints Row 3 engendered in me.

Sandbox games are generally about being dumped into a huge, chaotic place, with an excuse to run around Fucking Shit Up. You’re either a criminal in a city, a survivor in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or a person in the middle of a war-torn fantasy land. Or a cowboy in the Wild West. (And I find it interesting to contrast my SR3 experiences with my GTA3/4 experiences: in the 3d GTAs, I’ve tended to begin by trying to not kill anyone outside of the plot, until that fateful moment where I accidentally clip a pedestrian, then just quit caring, whereas in SR3 it pretty much ensures you’ve caused a lot of collateral damage before you ever have a real choice besides what your character looks like, so it’s a lot easier to approach the game as A Silly, Violent Game rather than a MURDER SIMULATOR.)

I’d like to see a sandbox set in the future. Where’s the game where you’re committing a crime just by driving a car with your fallible biological reflexes?

I also feel like one of the unspoken conventions of the Sandbox is that there never seems to be more than about eight cars in the observable world at once. You never get stuck in a traffic jam, you know? Or if it’s not a city game, there’s usually still a pretty tight limit on how many things are being simulated.

And if the game’s not set in a wilderness, you are pretty much guaranteed that there are no kids and no animals…