Blackmoor Vituperative

What a day. I tracked down a very devious bug of my own design and fixed it, so hopefully that project I am two days behind on will be finished before I am four days behind on it.

Then I cleaned the hot tub thoroughly with a mop and a bucket of bleach-water, in the dark. Thank goodness for security lights and cotton string mops! There’s nothing quite like a cotton string mop for a job like that. Then I filled the tub and started it up. The pump is running and the tub doesn’t appear to be leaking, but there’s a lot of water splashed all over the place so I can’t be absolutely certain about the lack of leaking. The current water temperature is 58 degrees — let’s hope the temperature rises!

And now I get to spend the next couple of hours before bedtime working on the Character Sheet Helper for Bulletproof Blues. I have renamed it from “Character Builder” in the hope that the new name will better convey the notion that this spreadsheet isn’t required to play the game: its main purpose is to help make attractive, easy-to-share character sheets.

I have been suffering through various TV talent show contests such as The Voice and The X Factor and so on. Here is a list of things that I would be happy to never see or hear again:

• Excessive head-swinging and upper body swaying (almost always female singers)
• Waving hands around: punching the sky, making wave motions, reaching out, and so on — especially the wave motions
• Hunching up shoulders and holding elbows in close to the body (almost always male singers)
• Repeating “uh-huh, yeah” between each verse (almost always male singers)
• Warbling vibrato-ee-ooo-eee-ooo-eee-ooo
• Bizarre spasms of the head and/or lower jaw while holding notes (often accompanied with warbling vibrato-ee-ooo-ee-ooo-ee-ooo)
• Weird twitchy arm movements like the singer is going through drug withdrawal (often accompanied by hunching up shoulders and holding elbows in close to the body)

If you do any of these things, please do the world a favor and stay away from cameras and microphones.

While visiting my mom, one of my sisters, and my sister’s family a few weeks ago, I took a few minutes to change my Champions Online password because I received an email that made me suspect my account might have been hacked. I logged in just long enough to do that and then logged out again: a minute, perhaps, at most.

I did not realize that my 6-year-old nephew Malakai was looking over my shoulder while I did so (children are sneaky). Later that day, he presented me with the drawing on the left, which he had done entirely from memory. Note the things he noticed and remembered: not just Grimknight in the foreground, but the waving police officer and the insectoid spaceship behind him! I was, and am, amazed.

Here are two meme images I made in response to the outrage over the cost of PBS, and the outrage over that outrage.