Blackmoor Vituperative

I love Christmas. It vexes me when this or that group wants to claim it as “theirs” and declare that no one else can have it. It vexes me when someone dismisses it as no more than an excuse for crass commercialism. Christmas isn’t about some guy being tortured to death, and it’s not about feral crowds and shopping. It’s not about this or that religious festival which coincidentally happens to be held at the same time. Christmas is about love, hope, good will, generosity, friends, and family. It’s about reaching out to people that you’d normally ignore, at best. Frankly I wish we — and by we I mean everyone: atheist, Jew, Buddhist, Christian, Pagan — would take Christmas back from the Scrooges that want to poison it.

Christmas is no more a “Christian” holiday than Tuesday is a “Norse” day of the week. It’s just a name: the actual holiday is much bigger than that. Christmas is a human holiday. Christmas is about love, hope, good will, generosity, friends, and family.

I typically have DVDs or something from Netflix streaming in the background while I work. As it happens, today I am running through the Universal Frankenstein movies. The movie currently running is Bride Of Frankenstein, which is actually my favorite of the series.

So I am typing away, adding validation to web forms (not a sexy project, but important nonetheless), and I notice that the sound of howling hounds is really loud. I stop and listen, and then I pause the DVD — the howling continues. The howling is coming from the woods behind Castle Blackmoor, out toward the creek that feeds the moors. Curious, I went outside to look and see what was doing all of this howling.

I got to the edge of the path which leads off down to the outpost, and the howling stopped. Not abruptly, mind you: it just sort of faded away. As I stood there, the woods were eerily silent, somehow made even more eerie by the bright sunny sky above. The sounds of wildlife, birds, churring insects and so on gradually came back, and then a bit later, I heard the howl again, so far away that I could barely hear it.

At which point I realized that I’d come outside without even taking along a pistol, much less a proper rifle, as one might reasonably do when investigating a mysterious howling on the moors. Imagine how foolish I’d have felt if I’d found the source of the howling.

It’s easy to criticize the behaviour of victims in horror movies when they do foolish things: going into dark basements alone, going outside to investigate strange noises, chasing an escaped cat in one’s space-underwear, and so on. It’s much easier to make foolish choices than we’d like to think, particularly when the sun is bright and the sky is clear and we are in a familiar environment where a monster has never attacked us before.

I am taking a break from the evil and general unpleasantness of the real world for the rest of the day. Susan is napping on the couch, Vixen is napping on my shins, and I am going to call my mom and say hi before settling in with a pitcher of screwdrivers and The Lost Skeleton Returns Again.

The Lost Skeleton Returns Again is a sequel to the famed Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra. I watched that the other day for the fifth or tenth time. Great fun. Last night we had some folks over and watch Godzilla vs. Biollante and Dark And Stormy Night. Dark And Stormy Night is also a Larry Blamire movie. Jennifer Blaire, who plays Animala in the Lost Skeleton movies, plays Billy Tuesday. Billy Tuesday is a real doll, a regular firecracker, see? She’s awesome. I also got a kick out of Brian Howe’s character, Burling Famish, Jr. His monologue next to the fireplace where he describes his uncle Sinas Cavinder is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Anyway, that’s my plan for Saturday. I hope yours is nice. Yes, there are terrible people in world, and awful things happen, but those things happened yesterday, and they’ll happen again tomorrow. Focus on the good things, once in a while. Like today, for example. Today is a marvelous opportunity to focus on good things.

I had an idea a couple of months ago. It would be a marketplace for writers, editors, and artists to come together as collaborators. It would be driven by the authors: in the new model of book distribution, authors are in control. They set the prices, they decide where the book will be distributed, and they are the ones that get paid by the distributors.

But authors need talented editors and gifted artists. Most authors aren’t either of those things. How is an author to find an editor with a good track record, one who sees themselves as on the authors side? How can an author find a cover artist or map artist who can meet a deadline and produce work according to spec? And how can the editors and artists find the authors who need them and who will pay on time (editors and artists want to feed their cats, too).

So my idea was a marketplace for this, where authors, artists, and editors would meet as peers. Everyone would be able to review everyone else, but only if they’d worked with them. The marketplace site would make sure that everyone got paid, and would act as the middleman to keep everyone honest. For this service, the marketplace would keep, say, 10% of the transacction (which should be enough to cover the site’s costs).

I pitched this to the company I work for, but it was too far from our current business focus to interest them. I would love to get it started, but I don’t have the start-up capital or the business acumen to make it work. I wish I did. So, here it is: a business that I believe is desperately needed. If you have the resources to start a business but just lack the idea, feel free to use this one.

Minor hiccup in the remodeling. The contractors were putting in the floor this week, and after a day it became clear that although the color was what we wanted, the finish was much too rustic (“imperial handscraped maple“), with an uneven surface and dark lines around each piece of wood. I am sure it would have been lovely in a farmhouse or log cabin, but Castle Blackmoor is not rustic. So I stopped them, and they had to tear up what they’d put down. Some calm but firm conversations followed, and I gave the contractors more specific instructions on what I wanted (which I should have done to begin with).

Here is a photo of what I want.

Van Dykes are not goatees. Goatees are not Van Dykes. For pete’s sake, use the right term. Calling a Van Dyke a “goatee” is like calling your beard your “eyebrows”.

The $1 a month razor is actually $3 a month, including shipping. That actually sounds like a pretty good deal, if you like twin-blade razors. 60 of the Dollar Shave Club twin blades would be $36 (12 months at five cartridges per month).

Myself, I like the Bic Metal single-blade razor. You can get 60 on Amazon for $25. On the other hand, I still can’t find the box of those I bought a few years ago, and I really do need a shave….

I write to my Congress people every so often asking them to abolish the TSA (not reform, not privatize — abolish). If more people did so, at least the corruption would be more obvious.

For the first time in a very long time, I got a good night’s sleep and woke up refreshed on New Year’s Day. I woke up late, but not hung over. The party at Mike & Rob’s was fun. I enjoyed the hospitality and the company. However, if I was a bore or a boor, I have only myself to blame, as I only had two glasses of wine all night.

I am not done writing Bulletproof Blues, which is disappointing. I’d hoped to have the text done by now, and be working on the layout. I am not in panic mode yet. As long as it’s done and up for sale on DriveThruRPG by Mysticon in February, I’ll be happy.

I am a little worried about when I’ll be able to play after we move, though. I game rarely enough as it is. Once we relocate to Charlottesville, I’ll be at least an hour away from any gamers I know — or, indeed, from anyone I know, other than my sweetheart. Kind of a bummer, that.

On the bright side, I have recovered from the horrific food poisoning I got at Carytown Sushi on Wednesday. I am actually hungry for the first time in four days.

I recently got the hatch of my car fixed at Pouncey Tract Collision. They did a great job. I just wanted to start off with that, because I keep forgetting to blog about it.

This has been a great weekend. We went to a friend’s Christmas party on Saturday, and then went out to dinner at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. Great food, but ludicrously overpriced. About double what we would normally pay. But it was a celebration, so what the heck. The food and service really were great.

Today we made lasagna and gingerbread cookies, and invited some good friends over to watch Christmas specials and movies. We watched Santa Claus (the crazy Mexican movie where Santa fights Satan), Elf, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas. That was great. I firmly believe that Christmas is for everyone, regardless of religion or lack thereof, and I love sharing it. As usual, we made too much food. We’ll be eating lasagna for the next week. Lucky for us, we really like lasagna.

Tomorrow we go to fill out the loan paperwork for our house. Yay!