Even as I helped assemble the magazine, I avoided reading the poetry. I wanted my first impression to be when my head was in a poetic place, that elusive region where metaphor is reality. Turns out in my current day-to-day life that doesn’t happen as often as I’d like. At last, a couple of days ago, I quit waiting to stumble into that place and just picked up the damn magazine and cleared my head.

And it was good.

I knew already that there were some amazing photographs. I’m happy to report that there are some good words as well. I have to be honest, there were some poems that left me flat, but come on, it’s poetry. Given something like 30 poems, there’s no way I’m going to agree with Harlean on all of them. But, dang. There’s some good shit here. If you read it, you will agree, although you might choose different poems.

And then there’s the photographic work. Dang. I’ve got a long way to go.

Looking at the final product, a few lessons emerge.

Lesson one: There are typesetting errors in one of the poems. One of my favorites, in fact. My “I don’t want to read until the time is right” attitude robbed the publication of a crucial proofreading step. Just know that I love bundt cakes but I don’t know why. (Note: if we order more of the first issue, we will fix the error. If you’re of an ‘I knew them when” frame of mind, you want to get in on the first printing.)

Lesson two: Putting your magazine on maximally heavy paper affects the way the middle pages are trimmed. They’re cropped closer to make the magazine pages line up when it’s closed. On a side note, heavy paper feels great.

Lesson three: When two poem/photo combos share a spread, pairing up similar pages leads to ambiguity.

Lesson four: Trust yourself more than you trust the Canadian Post. This is the biggest lesson of all. Don’t put out what you think people want, stand true to your vision and put out something you love. I can hold up a (surprisingly heavy) object that I helped make real. I flip through the pages and I’m both inspired and humbled. This is a singular vision, the kind of thing the corporate fashion monkeys dream of creating.

Lesson five: Don’t trust the Canadian Post.

While you guys have been great, my efforts to drum up support in my workplace have not been as successful. It’s a different medium, and by the time I realized that the poster I put up outside my cube failed to emphasize the fundraiserness of the endeavor, it was too late. People had learned not to see the sign.

But I work at a technology company, by jing, and technology can help. Starting Monday I will have my iPad hanging outside my cube, with the following sequence of images running in a continuous loop, using the ‘picture frame’ feature. (That way I can let the pictures run without unlocking the iPad itself.)

I’m not putting the images up here at full size, and I may go back and change the font and the size of the text, but I thought I’d share my handiwork to date.

A couple of notes: Yes, I’ve fixed the error with the chopped-off line of text. I’ve got the cycle time set at ten seconds per picture here; I may lengthen the time for each image in the actual presentation. And finally, this thing looks great on an iPad screen.

If you haven’t donated yet, well, it’s not too late!

• Drive down a ski slope and do a barrel roll on a big jump.
• Erect an enormous structure with a narrow track and drive through flamethrowers high above the desert floor.
• Eat while lying on my back.
• Pull a trailer.
• Drive on Highway 1 at a reasonable speed on a sunny day.
• Drive in an empty warehouse.
• Drive on a city street at night.

Some of those things would be pretty stupid (and expensive) to attempt. Yet if I were to take all the automotive admonitions seriously, I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, ever. The sum of the auto warnings is, “Don’t use our product.”

Last night an ad reminded me not to drive very fast in a straight line on an unused runway, but oddly neglected to admonish me not to release a wild cheetah without taking measures to protect myself.

The ski slope barrel roll warning was actually phrased playfully, with the implied “yeah, we know this is ridiculous, but we’re going to do it anyway.”

People will blame our litigious culture for these silly admonitions, but except for a few well-publicized (and usually misrepresented) cases, I don’t think someone sliding a pickup truck down a ski slope has much hope of suing Toyota, warning or not. I think there’s a culture of fear that makes boardrooms timid, just as parents drive their kids to school despite ample evidence that the kids are better off walking. It’s all about worst-case thinking.

Who benefits from that fear? Some guy on retainer to Mazda who gets paid five thousand bucks to look at the latest ad and say, “Put ‘Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt.’ at the bottom.” Based on Mazda’s lawyer not altering the text to mention angry carnivores, I wonder if he even watched the ad before submitting his careful analysis. What does Mazda get in return? The VP of marketing can tell the board “we asked a lawyer” if someone gets upset.

My strongest argument for why this is corporate cowardice rather than a reflection of our litigious society lies in Hollywood. There are no disclaimers in movies. Stupid people have died replicating stunts in movies. There was a movie where people lay on the double-yellow in the middle of a road. When a kid died replicating that stunt, the studio was not sued out of existence.

In the face of ample evidence that disclaimers are unnecessary and not even that useful when things do go wrong, advertisers still tell me not to operate my car in any circumstances. Hollywood is simply braver than Madison Avenue, as hard as that is to believe.

I’m getting the hang of this podcast thing, I think. Despite the fact this is a longer story the recording and editing went quickly. Cowboy Bob’s voice softens over the course of the reading, reflecting that my voice was getting a little tired, but other than that I’m pretty pleased with the results.

Naturally there are a few lines I think I could have done better, but my reading was helped by the fact that a couple of years ago I coached someone else through the words, and realized that Bob speaks staccato, while the narrator likes to roll with long vowels. I cleaned up the language just a touch, as I’m not sure just where “the line” is at the iTunes store.

Recently I linked to a fellow blogger’s post about the life cycle of blogs; I can see the same tendencies for podcasts. This is my fourth episode, and, well, according to the numbers from PowerPress (the plugin that simplifies publishing to iTunes), the popularity of the series is trending, if at all, downwards. Taking a two-month break didn’t help anything, I’m sure, but I think my expectations may have been a touch on the unrealistic side. So, more work than expected to produce plus no instant celebrity probably kills a lot of podcasts early in their careers.

Then I remind myself that I have a blog which I spend too much time coding on and hasn’t earned me any recognition either, even after nearly a decade, and I’m still plugging away here. Um… wait, was that supposed to be encouraging?

My sweetie and I will watch the occasional on-demand movie, and last night we decided to watch Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was relatively cheap and a critic liked it. I’d heard good things about it in the past.

It is very, very rare for my sweetie and me to be so wrapped up into a movie that we don’t make the occasional comment or at least exchange looks. Somewhere along the way in Hedwig, we were both sucked in completely. You really feel for Hedwig, and the music is pretty sweet.

It’s a strange omission in modern fantasy. Religion, that is. If religion does play a part in a modern fantasy, it’s because there’s some war between beings so powerful that we may as well call them gods. Sure there are angels and demons, but they’ve been stripped of their religious origins. The Soulkeepers, as well as scoring a refreshing two on the Fantasy Novelist’s Exam (the lowest score to date), allows that if you add magic to the modern world, then it only makes sense to acknowledge the belief systems already here.

Our main guy is Jacob, an Oahu boy, whose father was killed in Afghanistan. His mother disappears, and his dreams about the day she vanished are pretty strange. The result of his head being cracked open, obviously. Only the dreams don’t stop. Of course we know better than Jacob does that the memories and visions are real, and it’s a little annoying how long it takes him to accept the seriously weird stuff. But is that fair? We as readers know we’re holding a fantasy novel; Jacob has no such perspective. Wouldn’t you resist the truth? Still, I was ready for him to get it long before he did.

With his mother gone Jacob finds himself in a quiet midwestern town living with relatives he didn’t know he had, and doesn’t particularly like. He’s shoveled into a school that doesn’t welcome outsiders, complete with racist bullies (Jacob’s mom was Chinese) and to top it off the lady across the highway from where he lives is a (totally hot) spooky individual. Jacob’s anger puts him in her debt. You know that’s going to have repercussions.

Although Christianity (with a nod here and there to other belief systems) is a big part of this book, Jacob is not a spiritual guy; his new family’s weekly church expedition is tiresome and the family gathering that follows is worse. The only relief he has is his new best friend Malini, also an outsider. It is obvious to both kids that they are made for each other, and I thank the author for not teasing us along with a “will they/won’t they” plot line. Sure, the relationship has its bumps, but there are no contrived obstacles designed to milk suspense out of the situation. The bumps serve the plot.

There were a couple of times I thought the religion aspect was about to get heavy-handed. There are some Bible stories we’re asked to take literally, even while we meet a medicine woman in the rain forest. In the end though, the story avoids dogmatism and asks us only to believe in good and evil. To vaguely quote the book, “It’s not about who’s right, but about what’s right.”

We can root for Jacob to choose good but when he loses his cool it’s easy to understand why. He does some pretty bad things, bad enough to put him in a spot where the weight of those deeds promises to crush him. Only two things save him: The help of his friends, and, even more important, someone who needs his help. Jacob does a lot better when there’s someone who needs him.

That’s what I liked about this story. Jacob is far from perfect. He’s got some pretty nasty foes, but none that can destroy him the way he can destroy himself (…well, OK, eventually he meets some guys who could really mess him up, and he’s totally unprepared for the confrontation. But still…). Despite his ugly streak I was pulling for Jacob. When things go wrong, there’s no one else you’d rather have watching your back.

The lady across the street? In her words, “the closest thing to evil nearby”, and now his tutor. While the world may be black and white underneath, the people in it are lovely shades of gray.

Picture a guy skating into enemy territory, the puck on his stick. Two defenders close in on him. He skates on. Yet he knows he’s got a teammate behind him, so as he skates into the valley of death he leaves the puck behind. That’s a drop pass. The first guy skates ahead, drawing the defenders, leaving space behind him for his wingman to so some real damage.

Tonight I saw maybe the best drop pass ever. The first guy in didn’t just leave the puck for his buddy, he pulled back and swung as hard as he could — over the puck. Every defender reacted as if he was shooting, crashing toward the net. First Guy’s stick passed harmlessly over the puck and he drove to the net, and his trailer could have set up a picnic in the space left behind.

Happily the bad guys did not score. Still, I give them credit for the best drop pass I’ve ever seen.

I came across CrashPlan, the backup solution my employer uses. Turns out their software is free to chumps like me; they make their cash providing a place for you to put that valuable information.

There are two parts to any backup plan: you must gather your data together and you must put it somewhere safe that you can get to later. The CrashPlan software handles the gathering part, making it easy, for instance, to save all my stuff to the external hard drive sitting on my desk, but if the house burns down that won’t do me much good.

Happily CrashPlan also makes it easy to talk to remote computers, provided they have the software installed. I put CrashPlan on my server in a bunker somewhere in Nevada, and now this site and a couple of others are saved automatically to my drive in California as well. Easy peasy! Any computer signed up under my account can make backups to any other.

But wait! There’s more! The cool idea CrashPlan came up with was letting friends back each other up. I give you a special code and you can put backups of your stuff on my system. I can’t see what you saved, it’s all encrypted. But unless both our houses burn down at the same time, there’s always a safe copy.

Sure, if you pay you get more features and they will store your stuff in a safe place where you don’t have to wait if I happen to be on vacation, but for free that’s not bad at all. The idea of friends getting together and forming a backup community appeals to me as well. It’s a great way for geeks to look out for one another.

It is purely coincidental that the next two links are by the last two people to comment on this blog as of this writing.*

My favorite climate scientist has given us all reason to fight global warming: the supply of chocolate is threatened! This is a must-read, kids.

And earlier today I popped over to a blog and read an article about… blogs. It’s an interesting read about the blog life-cycle, how they grow and why they die, to which I can add a few musings. Muddled Ramblings is an outlier in blog taxonomy, I think; it lies outside the regular life-cycle, in a place where many blogs die. It’s a blog without any clear theme, and without any real growth in readership. The bloggcomm is small but strong; the comments provide a huge lift in value for everyone. But gone are the days of the Millennial Office Holder and similar hijinks, and no insider silliness has grown to replace them. Still I blog along, more than eight years and 1800 episodes worth. It’s a blog that will not die — a blog zombie!

After reading that article I’m pondering ways to better foster community here at MR&HBI. I don’t want to lose what we already have going, or to diminish in any way the contributions of the faithful, but it seems like there’s more stuff we could do together. I think the collaborative writing experiment It Goes Without Saying was on the right track, but the barrier to participation was a little too high – you had to know what was going on. Something collaborative that people could just drop by and toss in a contribution without too much effort would be really cool. (The Fantasy Novelist’s Scoreboard awaits your input!)

The writers of Web comics often have events where they write episodes for each others’ strips. That would be fun, to have guest posts from other bloggers here, while I blog there. Fun for me, certainly, but would it be compelling for readers? In the comic world, the guest artist borrows the characters from the strip and puts a new twist on them. It would be pretty hard for someone to take such an unfocussed forum as this one and put any sort of twist on it. Then again, since when has ‘not fun for the readers’ stopped me before?

I enjoy writing challenges; Elephants of Doom was the most elaborate response to one such challenge, and just a few days ago I cranked out The Secret Life of Sporks. That was a hoot, and I wouldn’t mind a bit if there were more challenges like that. I’d formalize something (“Wacky prompt Thursday!”) but I’m petrified that no one would suggest anything and the sound of crickets chirping would be embarrassing.

Also, I need to get the Muddled Calendar back up and running. Maybe we can finally name all the holidays.

But now I’m rambling far, far off the “post a few links” intent of this episode, staggering around the blogosphere like a drunken beachcomber with a broken metal detector, looking for answers but really too lazy to find them.

You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.

* Actually, that’s not strictly true.

Yes, I am aware that I just took the Post Office to task for encouraging the slaughter of trees. This is the kind of thing paper should be used for. It’s bold, sturdy, and carries the impact that only an 11×17-inch spread can. Some of the pages are simply awesome.

At least, I think they are. My contribution to the Revue was mainly technical, laying out the pages in Adobe Illustrator and for some images tweaking the color balance after converting from RGB to CMYK.

But… did I do it right? Should I have tweaked all the images, not just the ones that didn’t look right onscreen in the .pdf file? Black works a little funny in CMYK; will the images lose their richness and depth on the printed page? Is some awesome photographer out there going to cringe to see her own work poorly reproduced? Or, on the other hand, will the images be so beautifully rendered that we are flooded with submissions for the next issue? There’s really no way to know if I got the colors right until we see the actual magazine sprayed onto dead trees a few days from now.

The first print run had to be of a certain size to be cost-effective. That means each mistake is repeated that many times, but it also means that each gorgeous page will create a whole bunch of smiles and thoughtful expressions. Please, oh please, gods of ink and pulp, let them all be gorgeous.

No matter how it turns out, I’ll be letting you know here. For the lowdown on the magazine itself, swing on by PoeticPinupRevue.com.