Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall

My encyclopedia is now open

Okay, first off, I should probably tell you that if you're looking for the crazy, you should probably be reading my new column at Fantasic Metropolis called Encyclopedia of Heresies. The first installment, a bit of a ramble about Belisarius, Procopius and alternate history is already online, and new ones will hopefully be appearing monthly. I also did a Listmania which will be appearing there shortly.

Here's the deal on Once I noticed's future survivals and Encyclopedia of Heresies: I have committed to doing monthly columns there. Those columns are basically just like the posts I often do here, the long crazy excursions into history, pseudo-history, fiction, occultism, and other stops along the primrose path into the goblin universe. Therefore, even though I just wrote a really nice entry that sort of covers Charles Fourier and his phalanstere, you won't be seeing that here: my first twelve such crazy essays of every year are tithed over to the guys at FM. Now, this means that if you want to read them, you merely need to click on the link to Fantastic Metropolis and select my column from the sidebar, easy-peasy. It also means that until I hit the magic number of twelve columns submitted to FM for this year, I won't be doing any of the crazy essays here and FM is posting them at a rate of one a month. So if you really like that stuff, you may have to wait (if, say, I only write twelve essays this year, they're going to be going up there, not here) for a while, and if that's what brings you to this blog I deeply apologize.

However, if I do get caught up, any surplus posts will be ending up here on Once I noticed. In addition, any musings about comic books, films, role playing games, books (books, he chortles malevolently, books) will definitely be ending up either here or on the Howling Curmudgeons site. I may save a lot of the comic book stuff for there, but that still leaves a whole lot for here. I'm a mouthy sort, I'm sure I'll be talking. And also, every time an FM column goes live, I'll post a link here in case of emergencies.

I'll also be making a couple of news announcements here in the next few months, if all goes well. Cross your fingers and anything else that'll bend, if you please. Anyway, may your year end gently and the next one be kinder than the last.

Oh, and I forgot, for all of the sudden excitement over quantum darwinism, I present to you a two year old essay about ten year old science that already said that.

The Story

Imagine about 5 to 6 billion years ago. At some point, several supernova explosions all took place in a relatively close region of space, at roughly the same time, at the scale of time that these things happen on. The corpses of these stars were scattered out into the void, their hearts made of oxygen, carbon, iron, nickel, lead, gold and helium, the matter forged by the fusion of hydrogen atoms that made them bright, crushed together by the gravity of their own enormous mass. These were big stars, far larger than the yellow one we orbit now, so large that when they ran out of hydrogen and were all helium at their cores they didn't give up the way our star will, but simply shrugged their cosmic shoulders and began crushing helium together, and so on, and so on. This is how matter is made more complex, this is how the cosmos grows more complex.

This is important to us, believe it or not. We wouldn't be here if not for it. Anyway, several of these titanic forges consumed themselves and scattered their hard-crafted bounty in clouds of gas out into the void, and these eventually came together in one massive slow-cooling pool of coalescing matter out here, on the spiral arm of a reasonably large and complex galaxy. Over time, the cloud cooled more, and coalesced more, and eddies formed in it, and these eddies drew in more and more of the stellar material, drawing it together in clumps, swirling masses of these scattered elements. We live on one of those eddies, billions of years later.

One of the clumps of matter became a great gas giant with many moons, and another was nearly as large and would come to be graced with a sophisticated ring system. But in close, the greatest amalgamation of gases became a pocket version of the great monster stars that died so that it might live, a small yellow ball of heat and light become active. A star, which if not the largest or hottest ever, was relatively stable as stars go, a star that could last billions of years. This would also be important later.

In close to the newborn, a small ball of rock became so tied to the apron strings of gravity that it would lock, one face always bathed in the radiance, one side exposed to the void. A bit further out, a larger world would seethe with a harsh atmosphere of acid, burning hot with trapped heat and poisonous fumes. But the third planet, to quote a little blond girl who steals food from bears, was just right. At least, it would become so, in a highly subjective way.

But that would be much later. For billions of years, this third world would seethe itself, and slowly cool. A great blow would be struck that would tear much of its matter away into the void, but that blow would also form a shield for the world... a smaller sister who would absorb many such blows that would have otherwise struck home again. They danced together, almost a twin planet system, this young world and its younger sister, and they changed, because that's what time does. It changes things. For instance, it changed Napoleon from a fetus into a corpse. It did that to Lincoln, too. There were stops along the way there that I'm leaving out. Anyway, back to the world we're talking about.

The first great impact that created the moon also imparted a great deal of energy to the heart of the planet, even as a skin of rock cooled along its outermost surface, a fractured skin forever being drawn down into molten depths while new hot rock rose up to be cooled at the surface. These sections, scales, this mobile skin of the world was driven by the fury of the planetary furnace locked in its core, the molten fury of the heart of the planet. Over time, more of the impacts happened, evading the silvery shield in the sky and colliding with the still forming world, imparting the explosive energy of their arrival to the heart of the world. Winding the geothermal watch at the core of the world, keeping the scales shifting and grinding against each other. Water formed out of the atmosphere and fell upon the surface, covering much of it. In that water, newly fallen, the geological chemistry of the planet seeped into solution, also kissed by fallen material from the sky, also a product of the great explosion that formed all the things of this coalesced cloud of dead star guts.

This all took a great deal of time. Some call this deep time, the falling of year after year after year to get from event to event, so great a passage of time that to describe it in narrative terms renders it almost incomprehensible. Those folks haven't come up with a better way to talk about it, however, so until they do we're going to stick with a narrative, because that's what I do.

Oceans formed, and chemicals seethed in those oceans. Out of that chemical ferment the first long-chain carbon molecules formed, while the skin of the planet continued to grind and shift against itself, while rocks kept falling onto the moon, and occassionally getting past it to strike this rapidly blue-tinged world. Carbon molecules, what we today call organic chemistry, continued to form. Eventually, for whatever reason, these molecules clumped together much as the gas cloud that formed the whole world and all its sister worlds and their great burning nuclear companion had, and something not alive but closer to alive form. And got closer still, and closer still, until at last there was a living thing on the by now very blue world.

Remember, this took so long that by telling you this I'm annoying someone somewhere. That's a bonus.

The living things were anaerobic. That's a fancy way of saying that since there was no free oxygen on the planet, they didn't breathe it. Instead, they made it. Indeed, over more hundreds of millions of years (I can hear a cladastics supporter ripping his hair out) these industious little anaerobic critters made so much oxygen that today you can only find creatures like them huddled around volcanic vents in the deep ocean wondering what the fuck they did wrong. Well, they would wonder that, if they weren't totally unsuited to thinking at all, what with their having no brains, no neurons, and being unicellular.

The water became saturated with free oxygen. Oxygen spread through the mostly nitrogen atmosphere, bringing an end to the wild expansion of carbon molecules, since free oxygen is corrosive and causes the atmosphere to reduce, not encourage such things. (Now a chemist somewhere is also going mad at how oversimplified that statement was. I enjoy bringing pain to strangers.) In the water, a very long period followed where creatures that were unicellular thrived, followed by entities that were a few cells thick, entities that left very little behind to fossilize. After them were entities like amalocaris, who is very hard to describe so I won't try. After them came the arthropods, then the fish, then the amphibians, then the reptiles, the pelycosaurs, the therapsids, the archosaurs, the dinosaurs, the birds, mammals... a great deal of life. Many times life would reach a pitch of expansion and sophistication, while the great clock at the heart of the world ticked on, and the scales of the earth's skin would shift and buckle against each other, and then life would find itself tested and much of it would die, changed into something rather less alive by the passage of time. Time as the acid that breaks down all things, the suspension we all float in.

It's a lot to imagine. And in addition to the shifting atmosphere, stirred by heat falling from space and heat rising from within, and gases emitted by the molten clock, and even rocks falling and getting past the shield of the moon, life also preys on itself. These things happen over and over again. The trilobytes spread out, dominate every corner of the world, infiltrate every niche... and then they vanish, snuffed out in a cosmic trifle, gone utterly from a world they once so completely infested. The mighty pelycosaurs and therapsids die as the continents all collide together, leaving behind a few stragglers to grow fur and varied teeth and hide while the archosaurs produce titans who thrive and dominate every corner of thee world for one hundred and sixty million years, and then they die too. Over and over again.

What does it mean, you may ask? Does it mean anything?

Well, one could assume that the repeated impacts from above are the molten watch ticking at the heart of the world getting another turn, another winding, just as it has been since the beginning, even as our silver sister slows our rotation and shields us from impact. All part of the process, the means of production and what is produced at once. The cosmic DNA of the stars themselves telling them what to produce and how and when to release that bounty to space like spores to collide and writhe against itself, to condense, to form worlds and stars anew... and that every stage on the endlessly unfolding, terribly unlikely saga that moved this world from a red hot ball of gas to a rocky, mineral rich, water and air paradise for us is in fact the uncoiling of that cosmic DNA, be it morphic or implicate, that just as in our cells lies the very blueprint for all that lives that there is a field of force that tells worlds and stars how to be born and what to be born as. One could assume that.

Or not.

Happy holiday, you unlikeliest of miracles, reading this now.

The Nature of the Author

This is in part inspired by comments and a post over at Dave Fiore's blog. It doesn't really reference Dave's post so I didn't directly link to it (and I can't get his comment form to open so I can't quote from them) but it comes from a fundamental disconnect between Dave and I on one issue, that is, the author and the text.

Dave and I are both published authors, although neither of us are setting the world on fire with our work: nevertheless, I think it makes for an interesting twist on the interpretation of what the authorial role is. Dave believes that there is no author, ultimately: not that no one writes the books, but that when the writing of the book is over the writer him or herself has no more special relationship to the work in question than does anyone else. (If I'm misinterpreting you here, Dave, I apologize and invite you to correct me.) For myself, I believe that being the writer gives me an insight into what I wrote that the reader will never be able to have: that I have the personal experience of the rush of fire in my head when I managed to grab hold of inspiration and wrestle it down onto the 'page' as it were.

I do, however, tend to believe that this insight is not one that is easily or even often fruitfully conveyed. To a great degree, all that matters is what was set down: it's not like most readers will ever get a chance to discuss my work with me, and therefore it has to stand or fall on its own merits. A book that needs authorial explication is one that is crippled. That doesn't mean you can't write a dense, complex or multi-layered work that requires multiple readings to get the most out of it, just that if the only way a book can make sense to its audience is by relying on information related by the author at a later date (that is, not in the book itself) than that book has failed in the important task of being a text at all.

I view writing as sacremental, which may be a natural consequence of being someone who writes without having any other outlets for my natural tendencies towards mysticism and spirituality. Devoid of certainty, I take my vocation for an outlet. However, it's still true that I view the process of writing as sacremental, and the biggest part of that sacrement is the ritual consumption and absorption of the ideas contained in the writing by the readers. It's like telepathy and mensophagic communion at once, the knowing of another's thoughts by literal incorporation of them, however briefly, into your own mind. You may ultimately pass them back out of yourself as empty calories, or even regurgitate them in disgust, but for that brief moment the thoughts are taken in, broken down and reassembled within the mind of the reader. Recontextualized, reconceptualized, often combined with other thoughts from other sources that can be seen by those outside the process as wildly incompatible. And out of this process we cobble together ourselves and our beliefs, at least in a small fashion. By reading, we experience the minds of others via their encoded thoughts.

To me, the text is the author.

The way I see it, to create for an audience (and there is no other kind of creation) is a privilege, and no one, in our society, is "forced by circumstances" to "chain themselves to the drawingboard"

That's a quote of Dave's that I've been mulling around in my head since I read it. Dave believes that Art ultimately belongs to the World. He's willing to hand his book over for people to read for free. Now, in a way, I've done the same thing: most of what ended up in my book ended up on this blog first, after all. And I agree that art ultimately belongs to the world, but I don't share Dave's idea that no one is forced to chain themselves to the drawingboard, as he put it. I have never been able to stop writing: I have never been able to do anything else with my life. I tell stories, I come up with ideas, I play with them, take them apart, reassemble them, it's what I do and who I am. Could I take a job in a bakery or a machine shop to support myself financially while I toil onward with my craft? Yes, I could. But allowing that to happen ultimately rewards the parasites who profit from creative work, as far as I can tell: the publishing houses, the movie studios, those that get the word into the hands of the people and claim financial reward for doing so. Someone is going to make money off of the creation of art: why shouldn't it be the artist? I see Disney creating a permanent stranglehold on the creations of Walt Disney while also reaping fortunes off of animated films about public domain characters and I wonder how giving away my ideas for free would prevent that. I work hard on my writing: it's not a hobby for me, it's my vocation, it's a big part of who I am. Clearly there are enormous media companies making vast profits off of storytelling, so there's a demand: why should we simply accede to the idea that everyone but the artist gets a cut?

Perhaps creation is a privilege: clearly, were I existing on a pure subsistence level the idea of writing books would be a pipe dream, a luxury I couldn't possibly sustain. I can't argue that writing is more important than feeding the starving or healing the sick. But I don't see why it has to be the artists who have to suffer privation and poverty in the name of art being free to the world. Hell, I'll tell people stories for free: I do that here all the time. But that doesn't mean I don't deserve a living for my writing.

I expect the comment thread here to be more interesting than this post. Let's see if I'm right.

And so, another birthday

It's been a hell of a year.

When you look back on it, future me, as I know you will, remember this: you survived another one.

I'll probably write more about it in detail soon, but for now I'll hit the highlights on my recent birthday present (Thanks, Pete) Mark Waid, Leinil Francis Yu and Gerry Alanguilan's Superman: Birthright collected in hardback. (Can't call it a trade paperback when it's not a paperback, right?) I do this in part to fill out the entry a little and in part because it was a damn fine present to get and one that lifted my spirits a little.

The art style is an interesting choice for Superman: I love the new look of Krypton, which manages to incorporate several past versions of the planet, and I like that Lara is much more involved in the process of trying to save Kal-El from Krypton's destruction. It's a damn sight better than having her show up and get in the way, or stand around and do nothing. I also like the return of the industructable fabrics from Krypton making up the costume later, and using the S-shield as a Kryptonian sigil of great importance (the equivalent of Krypton's flag) is inspired and works, I think. I also like that Waid brought the notion in from Elliot S. Maggin's late 70's Superman novels that Clark can actually see an aura of light and color emitted by living things and it helps inspire his reverence for life.

I'm on the fence on Leinil Francis Yu's art style. Sometimes I really like it... his Krypton and Kryptonians I like very much, and his look at a young pre-Superman Clark Kent really stands out (I like the idea of a globetrotting Clark Kent before the idea of Superman comes to him, earning a degree in journalism piecemeal and trying to figure out what to do with himself, and Yu enfuses the young Clark with a cocksure ease that masks a profound isolation... it's a winning visual 'performance' as it were): I also like how he draws Jonathan and Martha Kent and Lex Luthor. But his faces are often extremely angular and a little off-putting to me, and some of his action pieces are exceedingly difficult to decipher.

Waid's writing here is much better (for my money, anyway) than his recent runs on Captain America or Fantastic Four: I like it quite a bit. There are a few false notes for me... I don't like the moment when Jonathan Kent freaks out in the barn or the extent to which Waid makes Clark Kent a non-entity once he devises the Superman identity. But I do like his more pro-active Kryptonians, the idea of Clark devising Superman as a means to reach back to his own heritage as well as using his gifts to the fullest without freaking people out. And his Luthor is much better than the criminal parody of Wilson Fisk: this Luthor is a freakishly intellgent, twisted by self-solitude genius who can't relate to anyone and thus doesn't really care about them. Waid succeeds in weaving the pre and post-Crisis versions of the character together.

I'll do an issue by issue review over on the Curmudgeons, I'm sure, but for now I'll just say that I like Birthright.

Tales of Suspense

I promised you Iron Man, didn't I? Before we get started, for Dave Fiore, here's a gallery of Gene Colan'a Iron Man art. Don't say I never gave you anything, Dave. Also, as an aside, if you're interested in Bob Layton's version of the above image (one of my favorite moments in Iron Man's history) he has it up in his gallery: I find it interesting just to see how Layton's techniques more or less became the standard for Iron Man. The Starlin cover is excellent on its own, however.

So, why do I think an alcoholic ex-arms merchant is the coolest character to come out of Marvel Comics, which has hosted such luminaries as Captain America (the sentinel of liberty himself), various X-Men, and Spider-Man himself? What makes me an unabashed fan of the guy, when it's fair to say that he's a fairly unsympathetic character? How do I defend him?

I don't. Tony Stark is an egomaniac, he grew up rich and has had all the fame and social success that comes with that for most of his life, he' s arrogant and cocksure, and he turned his considerable intellect towards the manufacture and sale of weapons and making weapons more efficient. He's not a nice man.

Seriously, what's more interesting: a billionaire who uses his vast fortune to bankroll a crusade against crime because of a childhood trauma, or a billionaire who uses his vast fortune to bankroll a suit of sophisticated battle armor in an attempt to essentially prove himself against gods and titans for no other real reason than because he can? Tony Stark is like Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Howard Hughes all in one package. He's not in the superhero game because of an obsession... he originally started wearing the armor because he had to or he'd die. His origin is hopelessly mired in an outdated war and will doubtlessly be updated to Iraq one of these days. The interesting aspect of Tony Stark is that he's willing to go toe to toe with the Hulk or a giant chinese dragon from outer space wearing a few inches of metal: he's the superhero equivalent of a rich man playing race car driver or riding a hot-air balloon around the world, except that he's actually doing something useful with his time.

I've always considered Iron Man the most plausible of all super-heroes, for what little that's worth. He doesn't have any superhuman abilities, really: no super-soldier serum, no magic hammer, no mutant facility to invent, no ovoid-based technique to transfer his mind out of his body or sorcerous talent, no cosmic ray based elongation, no gamma ray fury... Tony Stark isn't just a normal man, he's a normal man with a heart condition and alcoholism. And yet, based solely on his inventive genius, he's been in the front ranks of the Avengers for years, standing alongside Thor and Captain America as the three most iconic of that particular ground and has been a member since they were founded (I'm not discussing Avengers Disassembled here), and furthermore has always been one of their most powerful members. The nature of the character... a normal man walking around in the most advanced weapons system the planet Earth can devise... means that he's essentially a walking toolkit, a powerhouse and a utility player: if you need someone to decipher a Kree database, or go toe to toe with Ronan the Accuser, Iron Man's your guy either way.

But for me, it's the untapped potential of the character that has always appealed to me. I hope Warren Ellis does something with the idea of a man who has been up and down in the corporate world... who has built and lost three fortunes, has lost and gained and lost and gained back his father's original company and built it to a scale undreamt of, then done the same for two other companies, who's built the armory for international spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and bankrolled the Avengers... it really cries out for exploration. Ian Brill mentioned that Tony Stark would probably be friends with Dick Cheney if he were real, but I don't see it... the interesting thing about Stark is that he's a throwback to a more flamboyant age, back when it was believable that the head of a multinational corporation could be colorful and eccentric. You should always have a sense with Tony that the pressure of his genius is threatening to blow the top of his head clean off: when Michelinie and Layton decided that Tony should be an alcoholic, my first thought was that they didn't take it far enough, and Dennis O'Neil dwelled too much on Stark's descent into the gutter. Instead, it would be interesting to detail the idea that Tony drinks and carouses with various nymphets and jet-sets around the globe to get his head to shut up: that if left alone with his own thoughts too long, Stark could easily end up in a white suite somewhere with boxes on his feet, scribbling out entirely new circuit designs on the walls with a felt-tip marker. (Robin Laws touched upon this aspect of the character in his recent Iron Man run, and it always felt like Mike Grell was going to, but he never quite got there: he did have an interesting few moments in his run when an armorless Tony Stark tried to step in and halt a mugging only to get clocked by the woman being mugged)

In essence: Tony Stark is crazy. He's crazy and he has no real excuse. He's not Batman with a massive childhood trauma to deal with (I have my own ideas on a cool way to bring a more adventurous aspect to Tony's childhood), he's just a really smart guy who grew up pampered and spoiled only to have his parents die in an accident that polarized his mind, making him obsessed with technology and design. He's a addict, and he's not merely addicted to alcohol: he's addicted to danger, excitement, and the tin suit is merely the most amazingly efficient means by which to get his fix. The twin obsessions of Tony Stark... technological innovation and ridiculous danger... come together in one package. The cover story... that Iron Man is Tony Stark's bodyguard... would actually make more sense than the CEO of an enormous international technological design house actually wearing the goddamn thing! Imagine if the CEO of Lockheed-Martin was not only its most talented designer and engineer, but he flew all the fucking jets, too! Tony Stark is crazy. He's crazy to wear the suit now that he doesn't really have to anymore, he's crazy to wear it into combat with gods and monsters and Ultimo and the Mandarin (and man, the Mandarin really needs some help to be brought up to speed as an effective villain for the 21st century, but the potential is there: he's a goddamn Sax Roehmer villain. Use him like one! How is it that the creator of Ra's Al Ghul wrote Iron Man for years and we never got a good Mandarin story out of it?) - one of the real charms of the Iron Man body of work is the insanely elaborate gang of villains, the iconization of Iron Man as an avatar of American industy (seriously, the Russians sent two guys in powered armor to kick Iron Man's ass just to dispirit America... were they overestimating Shellhead's popularity, or was there a hermeticism involved in the attempt) and Tony's complicated romantic history. This is a guy who's dated psychics, mafia princesses who hide their faces behind metal masks, ass-kicking ex-CIA bodyguards for hire and even made a move on Janet Van Dyne when Hank Pym was indisposed. (By the way, you can expect a Why Hank Pym is a damn cool character essay at some point.)

Tony Stark is crazy, and when the comic works, Iron Man's whole world is crazy: he might end up in Transylvania fighting Frankenstein's monster, or in the South China Sea against a dragon-shaped airship, or dealing with a bald guy who hates him for no particular reason (and that was one of Dennis O'Neil's flashes of brilliance, having Obadiah Stane wage unceasing war to ruin Tony Stark's whole life just because he was bored - that's the kind of crazy fuck that Tony Stark should have to deal with, it's a shame he's dead, although since the guy had a brain-switching machine that he used to put Madame Masque in Bethany Cabe's body, how dead he actually is becomes debatable) - in that light, the decision to keep wearing the armor becomes sane, the action of a genius in thrall to his addictions trying to gain some measure of control over a world that refuses to be controlled. Iron Man can do what Tony Stark can't: he can impose order over chaos, by force if necessary. It's a fascinatingly complex situation, and one you could wring reams of story out of: I'm hoping Warren Ellis can prove me wrong and come up with some interesting tales with it all.

Finally, I'll detail the last reason why Iron Man is so cool: the goddamn armor itself. The first two designs have never done it for me, but once he went with the red and gold design from Tales of Suspense 48 (which can be seen alongside many other designs here or here) he's been one of the best-looking characters Marvel's ever had. Beyond that, the very concept of the armor... a high-tech skin bristling with advanced weapons systems and exotic gadgets... well, if you don't dig that, I have to question why you read comic books at all, really. From the days when he used 'reverse magnetism' to accomplish his aims to the introduction of the 'repulsor rays' (and man, when I was a kid, that telescoping iris in his palm obsessed me to the point where I actually drew a set onto gloves), Iron Man's armor-mongery has been one of the fun bits of the character, as well as an excuse for a new creative team to visually redesign him when they start the book... which keeps the character fresh in the visually dynamic world of comic books.

I really just dig Iron Man and always have. I dig that Tony Stark's a womanizer and a cocksure elitist, that he's not some paragon of righteousness and morality: I dig that his flaws are as huge as his talents: I dig his rogues gallery, full of guys like Blizzard, Blacklash, the Melter, the Raiders, the Mauler, Justin Hammer (and man, Justin Hammer's one of the better villains Iron Man ever had... so evil he found a way to make Iron Man's repulsors malfunction and kill a guy just because he was mad Tony Stark got a contract he wanted himself) not to mention the big guns like Ultimo, Fin Fang Foom, the Titanium Man or the Mandarin, all of whom are visually dynamic if sometimes flawed (very flawed, in the case of the Mandarin) in the execution: still, I'll never forget Mantlo's use of Ultimo. I dig that Tony Stark will design a wholly new suit of armor for a theoretical situation that may never even come up ("This is my ablative armor" or "This is the Thorbuster armor with a magical chip of Uru powering it") because I always enjoy those scenes of Tony descending into the vault full of suit after suit of armor, some of them painstaking recreations of his older suits with the original flaws built in, showing a level of obsession that convinces me if Tony didn't have Iron Man he'd be locked in a room somewhere covering every surface with berserk scrawls that would make ten lesser men insanely rich. And finally, I like Iron Man because if I was going to go fight crime, you wouldn't catch me wearing spandex like Batman does: head to toe battle armor with a suit of weapons powerful enough to destroy buildings sounds just about right to me.

Odds and ends

First up, I just made a sale of a couple of my essays to Postscripts Magazine. Consider how bad the month of November sucked, it was a nice way to open into my December, which as everybody knows is the Month of Matthew anyway. I hereby declare Rossianity's Festival of Birth, to conclude with a raucous gala this December 7th, when the man himself with have yet another birthday. Be there, or be wherever you are!

Seriously, I'm really jazzed about the magazine sale. Here's hoping it leads to bigger and better things, right?

Still working on a few essays, like one dealing with Sumerian and Assyrian mythology, Augustin Calmet and my home state, good ol' Rhode Island. Here's hoping I get it off by my birthday. Going is slow, but please be patient with me: I promise new content in celebration of my nativity.

Anyway, that's about all for now: gotta get to the airport to pick up my houseguest for the week. That's right, the infamous hermit is having company this week. Gotta fill the silence somehow. Take care and may whatever divine forces you believe in keep you safe. When I get back, expect a long essay on why Iron Man is the coolest character to ever come out of Marvel Comics.