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24 Hour Comic Day Begins

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SO once again I'm participating in 24 hour comics day, the insane attempt to complete a new 24 page comic from scratch in 24 hours. Add to that that I've gotten less than 8 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours because of food poisoning, fully expect the food poisoning to kick back in in about 12 hours, and the fact I need to go back to my church and set up some tables, I think this is more likely going to be a 4 hour comics day. :-( However, I'm not going to bail too early: my buddy Nathan Vargas has shanghaied me up to Noisebridge in San Francisco, a great shared hacker space you can see below. So here goes nothing! TRANSNEWTONIAN OVERDRIVE: The Front begins now...

They’re just getting BETTER…

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rush time machine tour rocks So, I'm thinking that they should use that time machine to go back to when they were struggling to record La Villa Strangiato and tell themselves: "You know, dudes, this song that it's taking you like, 40 takes to record? When you're like, old, and pushing sixty, you'll play this live ... in concert ... at the end of a difficult set that involves playing one of your most technically challenging albums in its entirety ... and you'll do it uptempo, playing it faster and rocking it harder than you ever have before. In one take. So take heart." More later... -the Centaur

We Heed Not Flatterers…

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... especially the spammy kind. Let's do a little naturalistic analysis, a little data collecting, shall we?
  • Maintain up the beneficial work mate. This website publish shows how well you comprehend and know this subject.
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  • I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success.
    -Mrs. "How Men Date"
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    -Mr. "Ads Classifieds"
  • This is a really good read for me, Must admit that you are one of the best bloggers I ever saw.Thanks for posting this informative article.
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  • Unbelievable, that’s exactly what I was seeking for! You just saved me alot of work
    -Sir "Miles the Car Guy"
  • I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success.
    -Ms. "Refinance Loan"
What are the keys? Lack of grammatical or logical sense, not apropos to the articles, text repeated over and over again from different posters, names that are obvious commercial scams, sites that are obvious commercial scams ... and some that are bizarre cries for help from deep within The Algorithm:
Why did you remove my post… My post was actually useful unlike most of these comments. Ill post it again. Hiya guys, I spottet a great way to make a lot of money online creating blogs. I expect this is primaraly for the website admin but there are probably alot more bloggers reading this. I have already made thousands using the techniques detailed in the product and it has only been 2 months.
Now, there are some that aren't bad ... almost close enough to get you ... again, if they didn't show up again and again, and weren't posted by "Mister Cheap Free Viagra Guy" at iscamu@suckers.com. Sigh. Fortunately a friend of mine out here for the Rush concert is a WordPress blogger and keyed me in that I hadn't enabled Akismet, WordPress's built in comment spam fighting plugin. Doing that now... -the Centaur P.S. What really gets me is that these spam comments are arriving at the blog of someone who actually studies spam. I know The Algorithm doesn't know that, but still...

Starcraft II Is Here…

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... God help us: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/4/ And thank goodness, it's available for the Mac. Which means the moment I hit that icon ... well, the funny thing would be that I'd say I'd disappear. But, sadly, as my friends know ... if I have a choice between playing a computer game I love and have been waiting for for years and writing ... I'd rather be writing. So Starcraft 2 will wait, probably until the weekend. -the Centaur

Hester Furey’s Little Fish

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Finishing Line Press is about to publish a chapbook of my friend Hester Furey's poems, titled Little Fish. Little Fish is available for pre-order at $12 with $3 shipping through September 1st. After October 29, it will be available on Amazon, but production is based on what people order now, so if you order now, it will help her and her publisher.
Hm. They don't make it easy to include a link to buy the book, do they? You can find it if you scroll down the page, but in case you miss it ... let's see, Google Chrome has a nice element inspector ... doop de doo ... grabbing the HTML ... OK. Let's try this: you can preorder Little Fish here: That should send you directly to the Finishing Line Press PayPal page where you can preorder Little Fish. Hopefully that will work! So please, check her work out, and support Finishing Line Press!
-the Centaur P.S. You can also find some of Hester Furey's earlier scholarly work via Project Muse and JSTOR. P.P.S. Me saying something nice about Finishing Line Press does not mean I don't also want you to go check out the many fine books available from Bell Bridge Books. Yes, yes, yes, I know they don't even remotely compete, I'm trying to show support, work with me here.

Guest Posting for Blogathon at A Novel Friend

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My friend from the DragonWriters, Trisha Wooldridge, is participating in the Blogathon - sort of the 24 Hour Comic Day for bloggers - and I'm sponsoring one slot with a donation to Bay State Equine Rescue and a guest post on "Greed and Charity". A teaser:
At the beginnings of their careers, a lot of authors and other creative types are obsessed with making money off what they produce and are deathly afraid of people stealing it. I've seen people charging their friends for copies of short stories printed in magazines, putting their artwork on the web behind passwords or with huge watermarks, or pricing their software out of reach of the people who want to buy it. But this doesn't help them - in fact, it hurts. And I'm here to tell you to give stuff away for free.
If you want to read the whole post, please check it out at her blog, A Novel Friend - it should go up sometime this weekend. -the Centaur

Comments … STILL Moderated

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Um, automatic robot gang, I just have to tell you: the following scheme doesn't work well for comment spam:
Hi! Just checkd out your site! Keep up teh good information. Very nice work? Do it youself?! Very relevant to me, we also have a community with theme similar on similar information. Is Blogger the WordPress? Ima Spammer http://cheapfreeviagra.malware.org/
Especially if there's no relationship between the salsa of text and the post. I mean, come on, if you're going to comment on my WordPress theme don't do it on the Pound Cake Alchemy post. 8 more spammy comments ... marked as spam. -the Centaur

Comic-con @ an end again

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Some issues with lines but ... not the zoo it was last year. Maybe I am better at navigating it; maybe they're working out the kinks. Regardless, a great con this year - the highlights for me were the urban fantasy and ya panels and the bigscreen finale of Doctor Who.

Recommended!