Category Archives: Meta

I am hooked on Dragon Age: Origins for the PS3. All other life has been shoved to the corners, madly scrambling for its fair share of my time and focus. Haven't showered for days ... eyes blurry ... theme music running constantly in my head ... starting to ... twitch ... getting ... weaker ...

(Still working on female items, yes, never fear, but the demons must be fed ...)

How utterly cool! In this New York Times "Style" section article, Michael Chabon (author of 2001's Pulitzer-winning “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” which is a fictionalized account of the start of the super-hero comic business and a fantastic read) is described thusly:

On a recent day, Mr. Chabon scrambled to depart for the airport while the two youngest children busied themselves on HeroMachine, a software program that lets users build their own superheroes. Abe triumphantly held up a printout of a muscled hero who borrows superpowers from animals. “Look,” he said, “Animal man can take power from a seagull and fly.”

How cool is that?! Wow. I might've gotten slaughtered in my fantasy football league today, but this helps make up for it. I loved that book and to know the guy's kids are out there having fun with something I created ... wow. That's a pretty good feeling.

We're flying to Colorado today, returning on Monday evening, so be good to each other until then. I'll be checking in via iPhone as I can, but if your comments take a while to show up, that's why.

As an aside, in general the Daily Random Panel should be considered open threads so feel free to post on any topic you like on those.

Just wanted you all to know I'll be out for the morning taking my lovely wife to the dentist, so the contest winner and new contest won't be posted til this afternoon.

Until then, feel free to discuss whatever you like in the comments, including nominating specific contest entries you thought were deserving of a win; why bald guys are awesome; anything related to super-heroes; or anything else you like.

I'm headed to Fort Worth for the Extreme Mutt Makeover challenge with my lovely dog-trainer wife, so while I'll be in touch via the iPhone, I won't be as fully present as usual. I've scheduled several posts to be published in my absence to keep you entertained, though, so hopefully you won't even notice I'm gone. I'll be back some time on Sunday.

Sorry for the outage, folks, a combination of a changed DNS table and a vacation at UGO HQ resulted in a site outage -- the main host couldn't communicate with the MySQL server, in a nutshell. How they got computers in a nutshell is beyond me, but there you have it.

I'll be out til Sunday night at DragonCon in Atlanta, so posting will be very light. I'll be keeping loose tabs via my iPhone but no promises on how quickly I can approve held comments and such.

I have scheduled "Daily Random Panel" posts for each day so you'll have that, and by all means consider those "open threads" where you can talk about whatever you like. Otherwise though you're on your own.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend! And if you're going to be at DragonCon too, drop me a line and maybe we can say howdy.

Or at least, helps the local coppers nail a bad guy:

This fellow then proceeded to say something to the girl behind the counter that persuaded her to hand over loads of money.

Yes! It was a robbery!

By the time I realised what was happening he'd escaped with the loot. I gave my contact details to the bank and then ran like the wind back to my studio and set about hastlily drawing some pictures of the robber. I'd studied this guy quite intensely and could remember every detail of his likeness and clothes.

See, we don't just draw people fighting crime, we actually fight crime with our drawings! So keep your eyes open out there, people, and if you find yourself in the middle of a robbery, remember the details and rush home to draw the perp in HeroMachine. The life you save might be ... ok, there's not really a life to save here, but at least you'd have a good story to tell.

(Hat tip to Ye Olde Bunche. Link is safe for work and kids, but his site overall is definitely not, so be warned.)

Wow, the "Beauty And The Beast: Wolverine" possibilities alone are staggering, as the Walt Disney Corporation moves to purchase Marvel Entertainment. I can't wait to see Spider-Man kick Mickey Mouse's butt. That punk totally has it coming.