*Giggle*

One thing I don't do well is comedy. I can do humor, in fact it's an absolute necessity that I get in something that'll make the reader smile or giggle in the first thousand words or so: if I don't, I can't promise that I'll do so well later.

I have bad habits, and one of which is that I tend to think of writing as Serious Business. Madcap Marx Brothers humor is hard to write, and harder to take seriously. But I'm trying.

A short while ago I mentioned I had had an idea for a lightweight series of heterosexual robot stories. I had three plots, but I was looking for a fourth before I started to flesh out the ideas.

I had an inspiration. You can blame Thomas Dolby for this one. This is completely the rough draft, no polish, no nothing. I wrote it straight into the browser as you see it here. "He's a gruff backwater cop with an embarassing secret working a dead-end beat. She's a recently orphaned airheaded fuckbot. Are they perfect for each other? Probably not!"

( Work in progress. You've been warned. )

p.s.: New Alizee' album! Yay! I am a happy Elf.

The slow march to maturity continues

Yesterday, Hef announced who his Playmate of the Year was going to be. It's been all over Yahoo, one of the "top stories" of the day. I see that it's dropped off by now, although the Australian swimsuit model with the serious case of cameltoe is still there. She's Sara Jean Underwood, Miss July 2006. There's a publicity photo of her at Fleshbot, but the site is probably not safe for work.

My reaction to seeing her was "Eww, she's too young to be a playmate, and I feel icky just being asked to think about her that way." It's a good thing Hef's too old to have sex (by his own admission), or I'd feel even more icked than usual.

I've been having a similar reaction to a lot of manga recently. I've gotten to the point where if an anthology's opening story features scat, assault, underage characters, stupid characters, absurdly enormous breasts, or bad art, it immediately gets rejected.

You know what else I can't stand about manga? The total paucity of positive gay male characters. It's as if the gay male manga artists have to set themselves apart from the rest of the manga universe by drawing all of their characters as Tom O' Finland bodies with enough hair to be gorillas.

Unfortunately, all that just about leaves me with Ishoku Dougen, who under the nom de plum Saigado has published a ton of great stuff. The man doesn't do rape, loli, or guro, but he does do straight stuff, gay stuff, bondage stuff, all with a light touch and with all the characters enjoying themselves. My favorite is still Chris Maniax, which has two cute characters from the video game King of Fighters boinking like mad, much to the regret of the female character who was hoping to bed one or the other.

Okay, so maybe I'm not that mature yet.

May Day!

The Maypole!
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

Last Tuesday (yes, I'm catching up), Omaha and I went to the May Day celebration at Woodland Park. It was a bit overcast and cool and it threatened to rain all afternoon, but other than a brief sprinkling of drops nothing came of it. We were there with the rest of Omaha's coven, having dinner together and cavorting under the maypole.

Being on a baking kick, I made more bread. This time, in a strange way: the night before I mixed all of the ingredients together, kneaded it briefly (I mean, really briefly, no more than six minutes and it started to stretch up beautifully), dumped it into a ziplock bag and put it in the refrigerator. The next day I had Omaha take it out after lunch and let it rise. I was worried that it wouldn't come up, but it turned out very nice. I wonder if some of that was the amaranth I put in. I did the entire recipe by memory.

( More photos, behind the cut )