I've been idly dreaming about a new car lately. Maybe a diesel VW, a hybrid Honda, or an all-electric like the Zap Xebra or the GM Volt.

But I may have found a new contender in a Steam Car With 360 HP. Oh yeah baby.

Man, some days the muppet goodness just rolls across the screen. First off, the Colbert Report hosts Cookie Monster to talk about his flip-flops on nutrition.

Then, the Muppet Wiki.

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

So wound up from a long week that there's no way I can sleep. Some tea and sleepy music, maybe.

Rode in today, because it was perfect biking weather, and learned that the biking season has truly begun. How do I know? I was passed on the uphill by not 1, not 2, but three cyclists all burning up the hill.

I was content to continue in low gear up and up. I save my strength for the downhills.

Trapspringers and tinkerers rejoice, there is now an RSS feed for the Kobold Quarterly blog, at http://syndicated.livejournal.com/kqrss/.

Rode the bike in this morning. Am now contemplating the shocking notion that I will need to ride it back.

Still hoping to buy an ordinary, aka penny farthing. I'm getting one of those or a tattoo when I finish Tales of Zobeck. Considering that a penny farthing replica costs $2500 (the brass plating is not optional for me), I'm thinking the tattoo is more likely.

For a writer, I don't actually write much. I type all day, but the physical act of writing words on paper, with ink, is one that is mostly reserved for checks and birthday cards.

Today was a notable exception. I attended a calligrapher's conference with my lovely bride, and we hung out with the writerly set. These are people who spend on pens, paper, and ink the kind of money I reserve for software or game supplements. I fell prey to a book called Fraktur Mon Amour (glorious blackletter!). shellyinseattle found pen nibs and materials obscure to me, and explained some of the basics. I was among an almost entirely female subculture, but a very friendly and literate one.

And I had a great time, because I got to participate in three mini-workshops, each about 2 hours long.

Bamboo Pen: The bamboo pen wrote the Torah, the Bible, the Koran, Sanskrit verse, and Roman records. It is still in wide use among Islamic calligraphers and a few canny Westerners. Take a big knife and a small piece of bamboo, file it to a chisel point, and you have a writing instrument that will outlast any quill and draw a sharper line than any bamboo brush. I enjoyed both making a tool and working with it, and I'm delighted that my bamboo pen writes REALLY BIG. Letters inches high are pretty good.
Biggest surprise for me with this pen was how smooth it was, and how it seemed to improve my usually crummy scrawl. While writers do obsess over pens and keyboards and notebooks, your tools do matter. And it's just fun to write with real ink instead of some miserable, soul-sucking ballpoint piece of junk.
Oh, and I got to handle a functional quill pen. It had been tricked out with a modern grip and speedball-style reservoir, but even a hot-rodded quill is a feather at heart.
Gold and Gilt: There's something about letters written in gold that elevates them above the run of common language. I've always wanted to have a book or text of mine illuminated, but, well, it's out of fashion. Now I know how to do it myself. Real gold is yours for the asking; working with it is .... easy to explain, but hard to master. I managed to gild a chocolate for Shelly without difficulty. Gilding wood was much more difficult, and gilding paper was even trickier (and can be done in at least three or four ways, depending on your style of adhesive).
The thing about the gold is that it does shine in a way that is impossible to scan or photograph well. In person, it is pure light and reflection, but capturing it kills the joy in it. I can see myself working up a capital or two, but it annoys me that I could not share it.
Seals and Wax: I have always love cylinder seals and way, ever since I took away a reproduction Babylonian cyclinder seal from the Field Museum as a young lad. I never quite got it to work with traditional sealing wax (which is brittle and hard to work with). This class let me play with fire, blowtorches, proper modern waxes, and a wild array of seals, from Hadrian to Aphrodite to beautiful letters, birds, skulls, and wolves rampant. The wax smells great when it chars, and I have a sense of what might work with props or my own correspondence. It doesn't take much practice ot make these work.
I think I could spend a lot of money on antique signet rings, seals, and the like. They certainly provide a deep satisfaction to finishing a piece or letter. "I have written, and now I have sealed it, and it is done." Yeah, if I could put a seal on email, I totally would.

I'm not sure any of this makes me a better writer of prose. But it might make my letters, cards, and contracts more interesting in the mail. Lots of fun to make things with substance, color, and heft when so much of a writer's life is pixels and bits. Oh, someday I shall have my own scriptorium, and my inks shall be lapis lazuli, oak gall, and madder rose.

Sometimes, a research result promises a lot for the future. This one, about cyanobacteria that produce glucose which can be continuously harvested from a saltwater-fed solution, made my day.

If it scales up (and it's a big if), give Prof. Brown his Nobel prize now. And hurray for the University of Texas.

My Polish is rusty, but this year's Origins Award nominations semi-finalist list appear to be loose on the Web. Maybe this was announced earlier, but without seeing the form in Dragon, I was bound to miss it.

I'm nominated as an editor for the first time in my life, for Kobold Quarterly. I'm in truly astounding company in the Non-Fiction category, with James Lowder for Hobby Games: the 100 Best!, with Robin Laws for 40 Years of Gen Con., and with many other worthies. Mr. Lowder pulls a nice trick by also being nominated as an editor in the Fiction category.

In the RPG category, I'm happy to see both aaronace's Suzerain and freeportpirate's Guide to Freeport, plus Ed Greenwood's Castlemourn and Paizo's Rise of the Runelords... And the Traditional Card Game category seems full of greatness. Well, it really was a good year, wasn't it?

Congrats to all the nomineessemi-finalists! ( And Here's the list! )

My artistic double life, exposed at last.

And the spelling is so.... close.

I've created a twitter account: monkeyking.

Men become wolves on every slight occasion.

Thank you to everyone who sent me the assault with a deadly hedgehog story. I'm glad the assailant is being charged and may do time.

But the animal story I really like today is about the Squirrelman and his treehouse. Very sad news, but a well-done bit of human interest reporting.

If you love the Arabian Nights, you should check out Ted Chiang's wonderful short story, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", posted as a freebie at F&SF.

So I've a had week of dead batteries, crippling flu, and nightmarish whiplash projects at the day job. This makes for a Cranky Monkey King.

Fortunately, this is also the week that my copy of My Life With Master by Paul Czege arrived. I read it in a single sitting, and I'm itchy to play.

It's an indie RPG of the kind that my old buddy Lester Smith once brought into the TSR office on a regular basis. In other words, normally I wouldn't have dug this one up (my FLGS takes few flyers on indie games), but hey, I had been hearing about it for years on the grapevine. Then BoingBoing plugged it, and whaddya know, it's amazing. I'll save the full report for after a game session, but let's just say that it reminds me of The Whispering Vault in the best possible way.

I am halfway to finding my top hat, brass goggles, and frock coat, just so I can run a manical session or three of this game. Why? Well, there's all the edition-zealot noise in D&D-land for the last few months (and the prospect of more to come), and there's my sad ponderings on whether the GSL will be released before GAMA. Combined, they put me in a generally foul mood about traditional heavy-tome, wargaming-derived RPGs. A little character-heavy, scene-chewing hilarity might be just what the doctor ordered to inject some fun into the genre.

And if that works out as planned, I think I may just go pick up Bacchanal next. These indie games are tasty, like thin mints.

It's been one of those days that started with a dead battery. Not me, dragging myself out of bed for coffee: a literal dead battery in the car. As it turns out, you need to replace those suckers every 80K miles or so.

I knocked on some neighbor's doors, but they were all gone to work already, so I called the roadside assistance folks. They sent a freaking Paladin. I kid you not, Paladin Roadside Assistance showed up, namely a smart fellow named Tom who does what the tow companies do, but better and cheaper. He doesn't tow anyone, just does tires and batteries. He arrived BEFORE the confirmation call from the dispatcher came through. I'd link his site, if he had one.

I loved getting the dispatcher call telling me he'd be there in 15 minutes when the Paladin was already there, cables hooked up. Awesome.

shellyinseattle got us a new battery not long after that. But really, how often can you rave about a tow company like this?

Great name, too.

I'm back from vacation, and everything around Seattle seems oddly grey and dark (including the citizenry).

Who painted the place gloomy while I was gone? Put it back the way it was, people.

( Gygax and Gaming )

Assume for sanity's sake that I haven't heard anything much from LJ or the media in the past couple weeks, if it didn't involve a phone call around dawn. What did I miss?

I've done no diving since the last report, but lots of snorkeling, both at Kapoho Kai (an abandoned set of royal fishponds) and at Muhakona (an abandoned sugar company harbor). I've seen needlefish, more trumpetfish, Hawaiian skipperjacks, rockfish, and a bunch of species I can't identify. The one with black flapping "wings" was really odd, like a Babylon 5 ship design. Yes, I am geeky enough to compare tropical fish to SF series. Plus some HUGE Moorish idols, and sunken tires, harbor chains and a bit of a shipwreck.

I've also sampled more of the weird foods around here: Poha berries (think gooseberries that mated with, oh, kumquats or something), kava (a sedative drink made from a local tuber that tastes terrible, but is very calming indeed), and durian fruit ice cream (amazingly great, with lots of umaa and a strangely savory sweetness). And the fish continues to be fresh and great, except for the sushi, which is better in Seattle.

Can't have everything. More later.

I did some snorkeling and then another scuba dive. This one was a shore dive rather than a boat dive. The downside of a shore dive is that you have to carry your tanks from a truck down to the shore and into the water. Worse, you carry them up after a longish swim. The upside is that you get down to depth more slowly as you follow the seabed down, and my ears didn't suffer at all while equalizing.

The dive did start oddly, with us in freshwater springs that made for a halocline. The resulting lack of visibility resembled turbulence, but it was just the mixing of salt and fresh.

And in my case, you dive within a few hundred yards of a mother whale and her calf. Visibility was about 60 feet, so we didn't see them underwater, but I heard the mother and calf singing and speaking the whole time I was underwater. It's an unmistakable sound, and made a heck of a soundtrack for diving.

Recent sea life spotted: a swarm of needlefish, a trumpetfish, a razor fish, nine sea turtles, and the usual assortment of colorful stripes and spots, including the reef trigger fish. The razor fish is an odd one, apparently a very rare breed, with a sort of horn or lure projecting from its forehead. The other divers were very excited by this one, but I didn't know what all the fuss was about until we got to the surface.