Yesterday’s Kung Fu demonstration (pics and story soon at sifulee.com) was flawless, and the crowd appreciative.

I am sunburned. My scalp is pink like cotton candy.

Today, I think I will work on my Flash adventure game. It is still in the nebulous stage, but I can tell you this: It will be isometric-view, square tiles, the game engine in Flash and all of the configuration information and game variables in XML. Eventually it will be something like Winkelman’s Infinitely Extensible Universal Adventure Game Platform. But you know, at least half the fun in is figuring out how to build the thing. After that, actually building it seems like kind of a let-down.

Back in the bookstore days I was the Special Orders manager. It was my job to hunt down and procure all of the books which weren’t on the shelves when the customers needed them. Given the generally dismal state of published books, and the generally banal tastes of the majority of the readers, it was seldom a particularly exciting job.

In every retail job there are, for better and for worse, regular customers. I like to think ours were a cut above the usual, simply because all of them could read. The majority were decent people, although some were quirky to the point of being unable to function well in public.

One in particular, who I will refer to hereafter as Cat Lady, was a thorn in my side for several years, and finally I pushed her off onto my replacement when I left the retail world.

Cat Lady was a Wiccan. She was in her (I think) forties and had the most tenuous grasp of reality I had encountered outside of my college philosophy classes. Judging from what and how often she ordered she must have had the largest Occult library in West Michigan. She liked to cast spells. She had friends who liked to cast spells. They would get together on Thursdays.

I like to imagine that they were trying to destroy the world.

There was one book which I was never able to procure for her: the Witches Bible Compleat; a tome which supposedly contained all the Majickal Wisdome of the Worlde. She must have ordered the thing ten times. The Publisher, Magical Childe, was difficult in the extreme to contact, and as often as not my inquiries were returned, unopened.

In between attempts at the WBC Cat Lady snapped up pretty much every other book on majic, magic, magick, majyq and madjich. She avoided the Satanic goofballs like Anton LaVey, and had no real interest in the Necronomicon. She dug Crowley. She was all about numerology.

But for all the trying, I was never able to get my/her hands on the Witches Bible Compleat.

Finally I just told her it was out of print, and to stop ordering it. She responded by sending a check to a local liquor establishment instead of to the bookstore, then yelling at me for a half hour because I didn’t have it in my hands the day she put it in the mail.

A great deal of stress caused by a book which may never have existed.

Earlier today I was browsing around on Fark and I came across this story which, in the process of debunking the existence of the Necronomicon, solved the mystery of What Happened to Magical Childe.

So then, there is a sort of symmetry in the universe.

Cat Lady, I hope this helps. For the rest of you, the article is a great read.

Slashdot has a good conversation going on about the proposed Public Domain Enhancement Act. More information can be found at the Eric Eldred Act website.

Some things. One, thanks to my job I am feeling pretty burned out about the whole internet thing. I will recover. I always do.

Two, Thursday, June 5 is my birthday! W00t!!1!1!1

Three, in my more than ample free time I am attempting to put together a Flash/XML-based adventure game, reminiscent of the early Ultima games.

More later.

If thou beest borne to strange sights, Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand daies and nights,
Till age snow white haires on thee,
Thou, when thou retorn’st, wilt tell mee
All strange wonders that befell thee…

Marc Joseph Oettinger
September 28, 1975 – May 23, 2003
Godspeed

Off to the kung fu tournament. Details tomorrow.

A couple of eagerly awaited packages from Amazon.com arrived today. First was the DVD of Equilibrium, a terribly under-appreciated movie when it hit the theaters. Watching it again…wow. It could be called derivative, but then again, name one movie in the past ten years which wasn’t.

Second, Cages, by Dave McKean. Cages is a 500-page, hardcover graphic novel. McKean both wrote and illustrated it. In a couple of weeks, when I have finished reading it, I will post a review. For right now, again…wow.

So tell me: what have you been doing lately?

My time, as usual, is not my own. Far too much to do, and far too little time in which to do it. At last count, four friends are getting married this summer. Well, eight friends. Four weddings. This in addition to a martial arts tournament, a martial arts demonstration, a holiday, a vacation and a girlfriend. Suddenly it’s September, and where did the summer go?

On a positive note, my brother just proposed to his girlfriend.

On another positive note, yesterday I figured out how to properly pleat and wear a great-kilt (for a wedding this weekend).

And last but not least, we’re-here is back !

Julie over at the Skinny Daily has an excellent post up about scars . So I thought I would chime in on the subject.

Just above my right eyebrow I have a scar. It is about an inch long and runs at a perfect 45-degree angle up toward the center of my forehead. When people ask, I tell them that I got it saving a busload of wolverines from a ravening horde of schoolchildren. Or that it was part of a rite of passage to get into one of the local churches. Anything to keep the masses amused. The truth is infinitely more mundane.

Toward the end of my college career I worked as a prep cook for the local (I kid you not) Polish-Mexican restaurant. A year of making bratwurst burritos had removed any novelty which could be found in the job and I was looking to get out.

One September morning I was chopping up the fixings for the days tacos with a knife which probably hadn’t been sharpened since Easter. Parts of the blade were as sharp as a razor; others as sharp as a stick of butter. I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing, so when a dull section of the knife slid across the surface of a head of lettuce and a sharp section bit halfway through my thumb, I didn’t notice until I felt air where I had never before felt air: on a bone.

Several thoughts went through my head, “fuck” being the most prominent, closely followed by “I hate my job” and “sauerkraut and refried beans are a terrible combination”.

Running the wound under cold water was astonishingly painful so I wrapped it in a wash-cloth and sat down in the employee break area. A few seconds later I opened my eyes and thought “I don’t remember tiling my bedroom”, then “I don’t remember hanging cook jackets over my bed”. Then I watched a spray of blood arc gracefully from somewhere above my field of vision and hit the wall. The full horror of the situation hit: “No, seriously. A sausage-taco salad?”, and “I have a degree?”, and “what happened?”

Later the guy who worked the dishwasher – who might have worked me over while I was passed out on the ground – said he saw me walk back to the break area, sit down, stand up, and do a face-plant into the floor. He said I “fainted”. I preferred to think of it as “temporary stress-induced unconsciousness”.

So our new manager (her first day!) drove me to the med center, where I was by far the most interesting thing to appear that morning. The doc put me on a bed and numbed my head (shaddap!) and sewed me up, While watching the needle disappear and reappear from my field of vision I had a brief hallucination that he was tying pigeon feathers to me and was going to go fly-fishing when he was finished.

So I got the rest of the day off. When I finally looked at myself, covered in blood and stiched and unexplained bruises all over my face, I felt inexplicably proud. I still had little feeling in my head (i said shaddap!), so it seemed a grand idea to hang things from the stitches. Necklasses. Earrings. Safety pins.

That evening, still decorated, I drove out to Grand Valley to visit those unfortunate friends who had not yet graduated. This was the beginning of the semester and they were participating in a “Student Life Night” where everyone tries to recruit everyone else into their [club|frat|cult]. One of the booths was empty so I grabbed an enrollment sheet and made a sign, and the “Head Piercing Club” was open for business. I got about a dozen signatures, mostly from stoned freshmen in tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirts (made in Thailand). Then The Man shut me down. Said university insurance didn’t cover stupidity.

The next morning I went in to work with a safety pin through the stitches. One of the waitresses thought I had put it in because one of the stitches fell out. Yup. Not kidding. Others thought it was disgusting, what with me mocking myself by making fun of an injury. Didn’t I have any feelings for me? Didn’t I know I was part of an oppressed minority? Why, I could get the ACLU to sue me for a hate crime! (I kid. Most of my co-workers couldn’t spell ACLU).

A few days later I had both my stitches and my job removed and began a long career at a bookstore. One of these days I will tell you THAT injury story, which is at least as funny as this one.