Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

jonathanmoeller is staging a choose-your-adventure!  You can join the fun!  Check out the details here.

A few more Rules may fitly be given here, for correspondence that has unfortunately become controversial.

One is, don’t repeat yourself. When once you have said your say, fully and clearly, on a certain point, and have failed to convince your friend, drop that subject: to repeat your arguments, all over again, will simply lead to his doing the same; and so you will go on, like a Circulating Decimal. Did you ever know a Circulating Decimal come to an end?

Lewis Carroll

(from Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing)

If you build your world in certain ways, you can not introduce certain themes and have them work, aesthetically.  The world will lock you in.

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"Within the first week of my attendance, I began noticing a number of strange occurrences. The most prevalent of these oddities being the fact that I seemed to have obtained a second shadow."

Gunnerkrigg Court (here -- the story starts here) is a fantasy/SF cross-over webcomic, which involves a rather odd school and features the past of Antimony, our heroine, plus shadows, robots, birds, a class project involving Greek Mythology, robotic birds, things bigger inside than outside, stopping alien invasions, psychopomps, Coyote, and other stuff.

Usually when you do a fantasy/SF cross-over you have to segregate them, so the logics don't contaminate each other.  Or -- as Gunnerkrigg Court does, you can crank up all the tropes and make them run on being cool.

And it's an interesting sort of episodic.  You have stories, self-contained and well-plotted.  Except that sometimes they also are set-up for the future.  But you can't tell when they are stand-alone and when not.  Especially since the comic's still in progress so anything in the past that hasn't had an influence yet may yet.

It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.

G. K. Chesterton

On Winnie-the-Pooh:

Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne

and

New Directions in Pooh Studies

Then I've got the website for you.  Chock full of advice about how to go about this difficult task, even though

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

He also warns that he can not guarantee that any of the methods he suggests will wipe out mankind, so if that's your real aim, you should go straight for it and skip destroying the Earth.

But if destroying the earth is what you want, this is the place to go.

The  Bulwer-Lytton awards results are out.

I like this one:
And this one:
And this one:

Don't believe it?  Read all about here.

No, really, go read it.

Lots and lots of lists!!!  (Warning, may cause uncontrollable giggling.)

The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord, with Cellblock A and Cellblock B.  And advice for the Evil Empress.  Plus for all their henchmen -- not that the Evil Overlord wants them to read it.

But to keep them on their toes, the hero gets advice too.  And the sidekick, and the true love.  And the bystander.

And, of course, the good king: 

The Evil Overlord kills for fun and profit. The Good Overlord kills for the good of his nation. The "Pacifist Overlord" is more accurately described as "The Former-Overlord."

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