On this day, we remember the time that the reporter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles successfully deceived the organization known as the Despotic Army of Yemen.

As the old saying goes, it takes a pillage to raze a village.

Oh god. IT even took me a moment. The acrconym didn't hit.

This is a quote from a post I wrote just over five years ago (which is crazy to think about, but there it is). I came across it while looking for something else, and I thought I would just post it here, since it's been pretty quiet lately.

So, yeah... hi!

I think I've been radio silent on this front probably too much. I feel bad, because I have a ton of ideas for storylines for the M:EM including a large-scale event, but... my creative cycles have largely either gone to novelling or review work I'm always tempted at times like this to post the outline and pitch for how the big arc is set to go down, but I also tell myself that I'm going to come back to full M:EMber activity and write it.

Speaking of those other fronts, though, one might notice that there's a new link in my Sig, because my second novel is live on Amazon. I know that location was a subject of some contention last time, but from where I have to stand as an author who wants to self publish it's got the tools to do finishing and then a place on the largest market so I just sort of swallow any distaste I may have for the venue :-\

I'll be honest, It's the first of a trilogy because I wrote the thing and it came out to over 300k words and that might be okay for the project I'm currently working on, which is hard Sci-fi aimed at a higher average age bracket (it annoys me that there's no way to say "not YA, aiming past that" without it sounding prurient. "Adult" , "Mature", "Mature audiences", "Adult Oriented"... all sound like it's X rated which is not accurate), but for the weight of this material that's more of a fun shonen-anime-inspired adventure? I took the advice of my test readers and found places to split the massive thing into three, so parts 2 and 3 should come with... far less lag than between my last book and this one (honestly I'll hopefully be able to publish at pace since I have at least two other unrelated manuscripts "in the can" looking for that test-reader feedback and polish).

But it has felt kind of awkward to come out and post that here. I know we're all friends, but I can't shake the feeling that unprompted self-promotion is sort of saying "That thing we all do for fun! Look at me I monetized it for myself and that's why I haven't been around!" like I'm the douchey antagonist of Twister (1996), and I don't want to be that guy. Maybe it would be different if I'd kept a consistent M:EM output but it seems like I'm not awesome at multitasking creative writing projects.

So I guess it's... what doi people want to see? I could talk about my projects both current and future, or my M:EM prospective projects, or just try to small talk but by Yawgmoth I seem to be bad at small talk.

We love you too buddy.

And I'm sorry there's been so few new posts on my part. I think I've gotten to the point where there's so little going on in my life that is I have anything to say or find a way to respond, I just put it off longer and longer and either further about it, or find it awkward to try to come back to.

I guess I'll try to make a little nominal update.
I finished turning over the army I had been commissioned to paint, and my client ultimately decided not to retain my services to paint a larger piece, claiming he was working on trying to get comfortable enough to do it himself.
He, however, still paid me for the army with what we'd negotiated I was going to do the next piece for.
I'm not sure if I should feel appreciated or snubbed.

But it does mean I can move in to working on my own next project painting, which is too create a chess set or of 40k figures.
Making an overture, however, I find I have not the wherewithal to try to make the pieces white. (White paint suuuuuuuuuuuuucks) Instead, I'm having to pivot to red. It, however, has also shaken my faith in my works and now I'm finding it massively difficult to even put brush to paint for fear of ruining the model.

In deck building projects, I finally gave up trying to make one of them work and have collapsed it back into the deck it splintered from. And now THAT one has problems since the mana skews hard upwards now.

Lastly, because of the fiasco going on in the actual storyline, I've been tempted to spitefully write a series of vignettes of the supposed invasion of our planes by the Phyrexians where they collectively get stomped into an oily smudge and no damage or fatalities happen to any of our worlds because ours are better than the garbage wizards is coughing up these days and the Phyrexians can suck ****.

I'll be honest, I actually like Phyrexians.

Or at least, I liked Old Phyrexians. They were the baddies when I first got involved in the storyline as a teenager who naturally loves the baddies, and I played their side for years and years in the old forums Wargame.

But Old Phyrexians had a kind of infectious element to them. They converted some very notable characters, but by in large they were cyborg zombies who, if you were an enemy, would mostly just kill you (including with engineered plagues sometimes) and then maybe do freaky things with your corpse. Mostly. There were scattered examples like the short story "Phyrexian Creations" that dealt more with forcible conversion so I can't say the element wasn't there (I even used it myself in the M:EM), but at the same time it wasn't the disease not-quite-a-metaphor that NPH ran with and ONE/MOM pushed to the forefront extreme. Compleation of a non-phyrexian was a detailed surgical process.

To that end I kind of see Norn's Phyrexia as a degenerate Phyrexia, which is (somewhat ironically) called out in text with the jabs at her egoism and lack of devotion to Phyrexia rather than just herself. They went too hard to one corner of their identity and missed a lot of what was traditionally cool about the first run, being a threat with one angle that's horrifically overwhelming rather than a threat with all the angles.

Which is why if I were to contribute a vignette concept it would probably be for Shandrovol, where Ophelia's resistance never learns of the invasion because the local manifestation of Phyrexia violently gives Norn's goons the finger because they're running the Phyrexian equivalent of Linux and aren't compatible with her mindvirus. (Another, if going full comedy, would be Ellia having her current base of operations invaded and casually trying to decide which doomsday weapon to dust off with the energy of your average picking-clothing montage)

Congratulations! It's always rewarding to come to the end of a big project like that.


Naw, screw that, man. I don't think anybody can expect you to use your skill for free in something that cannot make you money instead of using it in a way that potentially can. I certainly don't blame anyone for spending their creative currency on non-fanfic projects.


Anything's good. I just like to know that people are doing alright. I get a little depressed when people don't come around for weeks or months or years...


Yeah, I get that. My life is usually fairly uneventful, so I definitively know what you mean.


The former, probably. I've had a couple of figures painted for me over the years, but I just don't have the disposable income to maintain that. I don't play Warhammer 40k, but I do know that that's WAY more figures, so I imagine that it might become cost-prohibitive after a while. And I do think people just, as you mentioned, want to get to the point where they can do it themselves. That makes sense to me, too.



I, conversely, have never cared for the Phyrexians, even the old ones, but I find the old ones vastly preferrable to the New Ones. Like Tevish points out here, the "conversion" is so ludicrously easy for New Phyrexia. It's weird, but it just feels like it cheapens all the stakes to have a side that is so nonsensically strong like that. So, you touch a small dab of this oil and there's about a 95% chance that your entire body and mind will be completely rewired with virtually no "saving throw," so to speak. And the oil seems to be self-replicating somehow. Realistically, how can a substance like that ever actually lose? It just feels cheap from a narrative standpoint, and leaves me completely disinvested from the story because the stakes seem so artificial. Add to that the fact that I am already predisposed to disliking Phyrexia due to personal preference, it just leaves me completely uninterested in the story.

Honestly, I've been out of Magic's storyline for a long time now, and this one just sort of solidifies it for me. I really can't see me ever getting back into it at this point.

The best part of being a werewolf is being extremely hard to kill.
Until you cheese off your significant other, because then you know how much punishment you can take.

Yeah, I sort of feel like it would be a bad idea to piss off Daneera, even as her significant other.

I suspect that after this conversations, Kerik is...

(puts on a pair of sunglasses )

... in the doghouse.

So, because our family Christmas last year for cancelled due to illness, we did a white elephant gift exchange when we got together at Easter. I consider myself the clear winner, as I walked away with the book "The Pun also Rises" by John Pollack.

As another writer who has turned one of Hemingway's titles into a pun title, I greatly approve!

Happy birthday to CKY. I hope everything is going well for you, wherever you are!

This is the most recent thing I finished painting, though I've actually been working on it for ages on and off, but I feel like I'm finally at a point I need to just stop messing with it.

@Barinellos: That's awesome. I really like the metal, particularly the copper (forgive me if I'm guessing the wrong metal) on the apparatus in the right hand. The juxtaposition between the metallic pieces and the green ooze (I know nothing about 40k lore, so forgive my ignorance) is really great, too.

Thanks for posting!

Hell yeah, looking good!