Last night Nick came over. We ended up naked on the beanbag chair in the living room, with a music visualizer being projected across my body as I rocked up and down atop him. This is a kind of hippie bourgeois thing that even as I was doing it felt like something done by a kind of person I never thought I’d be.

Life is good.

I’d ordered a Leap when they were first announced. I had one thing in mind: control iTunes when my hands are covered in hair dye. Now I can do this. I’m happy. Any other uses of the Leap are pure lagniappe.

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re putting points into a skill – without having any idea what it is?

Whenever I wander through the local park, I find myself experimenting. How quietly can I walk on this leaf-strewn gravel path? Can I balance along this log? How can I traverse this terrain most efficiently?

Today I discovered that walking very, very slowly, such that I’m crouched on one foot for several seconds at a time while the other lazily finds a place to stand, creates a fascinating little rippling sensation in my hip if I move my hips just right. It feels more stable, too. Bodies are complicated, and it’s fascinating to spend time re-visiting things I worked out long ago to see how I can refine reflexive movements like “walking” for different purposes.

But I still keep feeling like I’m slowly trying to put points in a “cat burglar” character build or something.

Mooned around the apartment for a while.

Went out to Trabant and worked on Rita. Didn’t get the next page done yet; my queue is slowly emptying again. After skittering away from it to poke at the web instead for a while, I finally realized that I needed to hash out some things that weren’t quite right about the next few pages I have roughed out. So I fixed that. Which involved adding another page to this chapter – but I’m still pretty damn close to the end of this book.

Then I went to the comic shop. Got some of the usual stuff, and, on a whim, browsed the quarter bins. In them, I found a couple treasures: a color Konny & Czu story by Howarth, and this crazy, crazy thing from 1989 called “Gammarauders”. It’s from DC, based on some wacked-out TSR boardgame about people piloting cybered-out giant animals in a comic post-apocalypse world. It is loud and garish and everything DC’s current comics are not, and I was immediately in love.

I mean, look at this craziness. It’s just so pop. All the full-bleed panels in an American sized comic book give it a real immediacy when it’s in your hands; I’m gonna have to experiment with this someday. And you can tell the artist is having a blast doing this.

Some research at home revealed that it ended after ten issues. Hunting up a torrent let me see the sad disintegration of it; after the first three issues, the original penciler started getting substituted for by someone with a much more normal DC style every other issue. And the original penciller’s pages started slowly looking more generic-DC, as well. Which is very sad because this “Martin King” guy had a really fun style that sat somewhere between American comics tradition and the Japanese action cartoons that were starting to become a cultural force over here; every page was just bursting with energy and craziness. The scriptwriter stayed the same for every issue, but the dreadfully sane art for half the books really dragged the whimsey down.

Martin King is kinda hard to find on the net, what with being overshadowed by Martin LUTHER King Jr. He seems to have drifted through DC fairly quickly; in addition to six issues of Gammarauders, a DC wiki credits him with all of five other comics, two of which are Who’s Who and thus probably just have a couple illos by him somewhere in them. If he’s done anything else for any other comics presses, I have no idea.

Anyway, now that I’ve read the entire run of this obscure piece of madness, I think it’s bedtime.

I just googled myself and found the best thing I’ve ever filled a “about you” field with:

From the swampy miasma of the Crescent City an ancient beast arises. Its serpentine path weaves across the continent, a long black tail trailing to Los Angeles, to Boston, to Seattle – ah, there she is, in all her manic glory: Peggy.

Man I’m tempted to rewrite the about page of my site now. Which needs some css work anyway.

(Why was I googling myself? Well, a friend IMed me with a quote from her SO: “Is Peggy’s last name Trauth? She’s famous!”. She wasn’t around when I responded, so I decided to see if googling “margaret trauth” would turn up anything new and interesting.)

I just booked a flight home to visit my mother next month. I’ve been procrastinating on it for a while, and finally did it.

I’m trying something a little new: I got an account at Tripit, and forwarded the booking confirmation to “plans@tripit.com”, after setting up an account there. They parsed it, and stuck it into a calendar that I can point iCal to. And that I can point their mobile app to. I’ll be playing with that on my next trip, and comparing it to Gate Guru, which does much the same sort of thing. It’ll be interesting to see what it feels like to have a purpose-built app to aggregate all the information one wants when taking a flight, versus my usual habits of “manually create stuff in iCal, swearing as I convert times for cross-timezone flights, and throw stuff into Evernote as well”.