Turpentine Mouthwash

I've been reading a lot about bitcoin. To those of you not in the know, bitcoin is an online currency that allows robust, non-returnable transactions without a central issuing authority. Transactions are broadcast throughout the network as a way to prevent double spending, and it's almost impossible to crash the network. Read more about it here . Why not use this same architecture for voting? Every online voting scheme out there now depends on proprietary hardware and software, black boxes the people can't see into, nor inspect for flaws. This makes it impossible to trust the veracity of votes moving through the system. But if you base it on an open source framework with widely trusted security, then we can take it apart and see how it works. More importantly WeVote (my clever little pastiche) takes away the vote counters, keeps the polls open and fair at any time, and allows for the start of a direct, local democracy movement.

One of my pet projects is a boardgame. Well, it's a boardgame in the sense that you play it at a table with a bunch of friends, not in the sense that there's an actual board that you move little doo-dads about on.  Ars Gladiatorum started because I watched three seasons of Spartacus in a two day span and said 'yes, I would do that in a New York Minute'. I have a propensity for making stupid decisions when I'm ODing on action serials. One time, after watching Saving Private Ryan, I ended up in the Army. True story. Age bringing wisdom (or at least bad knees) and sans time machine, I opted for the next best thing: a simulation of running a gladiator academy and arena combat. Shamelessly pilfering the best bits of a dozen different games and hot gluing them together, I have ended up with a robust combat system where death is an ever present threat, welded to a fighter management system where you decide how much a risk you want to take with your stable.  The base ...

I'd note that Mandy was wearing her Happy Egg Gnome hoodie while at the gun range.

I'm usually not one for public moaning about the trials and travails life brings. Usually, I keep my trouble to myself, at least on the internet. But this month deserves mention, if only because it has raised the bar of terrible months. I want you to understand, this is coming from a person who once slept in parks, who has broken both his legs, and has, on several occasions, lost all his friends and have to pack up and move. Even with the above sloppy shit sandwiches in mind, August, oh horrid August, will go down as one of the crappier months I've ever had. First, Mandy learns that her mother died. I'm not going to claim that as a bad thing for me, but it is hard to watch someone you love in pain. So she has to fly out to her hometown, which is one way or another, gonna cost money. For the record, most people don't realize just how tough and resilient Mandy is. She has not had an easy life and she's still a genuinely nice person. I know lots of childr...

Tonight, Madeline Waffles was hit by a car and died. She was a sweet, loving, loud and skittish little thing. She loved to sleep beside me and Mandy, wriggling between us until she'd achieved the maximum surface area exposure to snuggles possible. She'd follow the chinchilla around the house at a safe distance, then leap out of the way when the fearless Elmo would trot right up to her. Madeline was tiny and scared of her own shadow. A couple months ago she decided she would climb a tree outside out apartment. The tree led to the roof of the apartment next door. She naturally jumped onto the roof. Two hours later, I'm climbing up a rickety painting ladder up the side of a two-story building with a bag of kitty treats in my hand to lure her away. Stanley is walking around the house crying. They were inseparable their whole life, and now he's on his own. My wife-to-be is trapped in Virginia dealing with a death in her immediate family. I had to call her to tel...

Do You Trust Your Mechanic? Barring an unlikely intervention, he figured he had a minute before he was rendered sterile. It was moments like these (if by 'like these' one referred to dangling above the exhaust thrust, being pelted with cosmic radiation, and hoping one's EVA shield holds up) that he finally felt he understood the vast, incomprehensible stupidity of his lifelong dream. Jupiter lounged in the star field, turgid and inviting. Something childish and primordial in his brain tried to convince him that is wasn't all that large and quite likely very soft, like a massive beanbag. A boost in that direction and who knows, he could be sitting in the first relaxing position he had in nine years. The electromagnets wobbled in their moorings, millions of tiny craters dusting the ceramic and carbon shell of the exhaust assembly. Up close, the whole contraption looked slipshod, an amateur hack to keep the rocket looking stereotypically rocket-like. He pried the pa...

So this Saturday night I'm doing laundry and crunching numbers on comic creation. It doesn't take an accountant to tell you that printing, distributing, and selling your own books won't make you a profit. Case in point: If I print out 500 copies of the B&W issue of Virtuoso, I have to sell 315 of them just to break even. That's selling them at 3.00 a piece, which is on the cheap end of comics. But selling that many means doing the convention circuit, which drains the coffers fast. So take that profit I earned in and flush it if I do it that way. This isn't even thinking about paying myself or Krista. (Consequently, if you want to make sure that a fellow Whitechapeler gets paid for doing great art, go here:) Virtuoso Anyway, seeing as how this profit model doesn't really work, not if you want to make a living at comics, you have to think laterally. Most webcomics make money on merchandising. The comic is free and online, and connected to a merch st...