Words cannot express my love for this Threadless design. And yet…it's in forest green. So I cannot wear it. Why must they taunt me so? Why must everything be heartless and cruel? Sigh.

In case you missed the Please Stand By message on the LiveJournal, I've pulled the trigger on the PDF versions of both Something Else: The Complete First Season and The Sunday Before You. These are both available under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to download and enjoy. If you really enjoy Sunday, order a copy. Still working up the hard copy chapbooks of Something Else, so stand by for those.

I've already gotten requests from folks for HTML and PDB versions of the files, and that's on the to-do list. So never fear.

Here's the latest Lying in the Gutters, from Rich Johnston. In it, he spends a great deal of time talking comic piracy, bit torrents and such. A couple thoughts.

First up, I have downloaded comics. And I will attest to the fact that things I like, I will go and add to my pull list at my local shop. I would never have picked up Strange Girl from Image otherwise, nor would I have ever ventured into Goon from Dark Horse. But now Strange Girl is on my pull list and Goon, I just bought the hardback edition of his first story arc. (Goon is brilliant, BTW, and I have no idea why someone didn't force it on me much earlier.) So there. You've got an unsolicited testimonial. With me, it's a net gain. I buy things that I download, and the stuff I didn't buy, I wasn't planning on buying anyway. Congrats.

Second up, they mention CrossGen, which around here we call Valiant 2.0 (V2). And I have no idea if they made any money in the long run off of their online presence, but V2's Comics on the Web website was awesome. For a reasonable monthly fee, you had access to their entire run. Yes, they only showed up on a staggered basis, but they were there. And you could very quickly catch up on whatever it was you were interested in. If a company was smart, they would figure out some way to make this model work.

Third up and finally, comics, for the most part, suck today. I'm sorry, if you actually dig what's going on in the DCU, you have issues. No pun intended. Murder, rape, torture–is this what passes for a "mature" comic these days? If so, we're all fucked. I haven't read a DCU comic I really enjoyed in I don't know how long. Marvel's House of M series is all right, but the spinoffs are tossoffs, really. And I can't tell you how little I'm looking forward to this idea that Xavier had some kind of deep, dark secret in the foundation of the new X-Men team (circa GS X-Men #1, if I understand it). Why the hell must everything have a deep dark secret to begin with, anyway? And the fact that a major DC comic character is going to needlessly bite it in the wake of Infinite Catharsis…oh yeah, really looking forward to that. So yeah, a lot of the Big 2's books simply aren't worth buying.

What does all of this mean? Nothing. While folks like Carla Speed McNeil and Batton Lash lead the while, the Big 2 and others will sit on their asses, produce crap, and try to sell it to you. And, sadly, a lot of you will pay them for it.

It's not an everything bagel if it doesn't have everything on it. Otherwise it's a "almost everything" bagel or, more likely, a "few things" bagel.

Get it straight.

Check out this 1954 Christian children's activity book. Isn't it brilliant?

"Here is a man of India. He is praying to his god. His god cannot help him. This must know about Jesus. Can you think of some ways to help him?"

Split a pizza with him?

Respect his right to have his imaginary friends, just like I have my own?

Sell him a used Robert Anton Wilson book?

The possibilities are endless!

You BASTARDS.

In between snickering at the idea of telling little kids that trick or treat for UNICEF this year that UNICEF killed the Smurfs, I realized a genius idea:

Grab a bunch of people and be Zombie Smurfs for Halloween.

I'm going to be at home watching movies, so feel free to take the idea and run with it.

Just send me pictures.