Just FYI, No Holds Barred Radio is doing their telethon, starting… twenty minutes ago, I think. If you like NHB, head on over and listen in, donate, and be entertained. If you’ve never listened to NHB, head on over and listen in, donate, and be entertained. If you don’t like NHB, donate to the red cross. In fact, do that anyway, lord knows it’s more important than NHB.

On the off chance anyone’s still waiting for TNP to come out (wow, the ego on this guy…), I have a progress update. In the last few months, we saw the progress bar inch its way up as high as 1%. Well, it’s back to 0%. Because I have a fear of commitment or some shit, I guess. I basically decided to go in a different direction, as I could think of no reason for the story to exist as it was. So I dropped the “serious drama OMG” angle and am working on a new tack, which is pretty wildly different from a lot of the stuff I’ve done in the past. Hopefully “sucked hard” is one of the things that will change this time around. Between that and other various tweaks, what little script I had written is more or less useless. Alas, that page and a half.

See, this is why I wanted a complete script in hand before starting TNP. I have a bad habit of revising shit. Repeatedly. Ergo, I want to work out a decent script, and then draw the script as written, no exceptions. (Well, some exceptions.)

The good news is that I reread TA Pratt’s Marla Mason books, and the shift in tone will be very effective in halting TNP’s gradual trend toward being “Marla Mason: The Plagiarist Comic.” Not that such a thing wouldn’t be awesome. (Also, Amazon’d and sequel’d. Good books. You read them.)

If, for some odd reason, you’ve never looked at Schlock Mercenary, I think Friday’s strip will sell you on it. Then again, maybe not. If you’ve seen anything I’ve written here and haven’t at least looked at Schlock by now, I doubt you trust in my good taste anyhow.

And thanks to the “right there” nature of Blógünder Schlock, I seem to have associated Squishable stuffed animals with the last panel in that strip. I think I’ll probably earmark $40 for one of them in the near future. (Much like Musician’s Friend catalogs, Howard Taylor seems to know exactly when I’ve gotten bills in the mail.) Sadly, I’m looking at the alligator not because it’s the most Schlock-like, but because I’m also a huge Something Positive fan.

Come to think of it, I’d pay good money to see them do a comic together. Which makes me wonder why anyone would ever trust in my good taste. Hence, I’ve just rendered this whole post moot. (Continuing this thoroughly derailed train of thought, wouldn’t it be awesome if the Squishable people did a Branmoot?)

Went to EB to pick up something to keep me busy until Disgaea DS comes out, and got Izuna 2 and (finally) Yoshi’s Island DS. Izuna is a lot better than I expected, pretty much a weird combination of a roguelike (without anywhere near as much depth), the original Zelda (without the complete inability to hold my attention), and a Naruto doujin (without Naruto, thank god). A nice diversion.

I’ve only just started checking out Yoshi’s Island DS, but thus far, it’s more Yoshi’s Island, which is awesome. Though I’ve yet to see the promised switching of babies. That probably happens sometime after 1-1, though. >_>

EEEE!

Also, pretty much the second I crossed Littleton Blvd¹ it started pouring rain. My car was such a worthwhile investment. And rain makes any event 90% more awesome, it’s a scientific fact.

¹ On those rare occasions when I buy physical CDs, I hit Angelo’s. Googlemap! I live north of there. Yay for useless information! (Clearly, I like this fucking CD and am in a good mood. I’m often silly when in a good mood and listening to a new CD of a band I love. Yay!)

I didn’t notice this until Penny Arcade mentioned it, as i was too busy not giving a shit, but seriously.

(Altenative title: Diablo III, as designed by the Halo 3 team.)

EDIT: Now that I look at it again, if I’d gone easier on the light bloom it would look like something out of Myst IV. (AKA Myst IV: The Prettiest Unsolvable Puzzles.)

I dug my keyboard out from under the massive pile of papers and other bullshit I’d been storing on it, and attempted to play a little. Fun fact: When your right hand already hurts, don’t try playing a Dresden Dolls song. It just makes things worse. (He typed with that selfsame hand. You’d think that I would learn by now.) Anyhow, despite being nowhere near as good as Amanda Palmer (seriously, nowhere near as good), I figured I’d try and figure out the bridge to Coin-Operated Boy. (If you don’t play piano and / or don’t listen to the Dresden Dolls [deeplinked to save you from the mind-boggling layout], Slide and Coin-Operated Boy have the easiest verses in the world to play. The bridges, not so much.) And I was reminded just how much better Amanda Palmer is at the piano than I am. And also that she’s a jerk. A jerk with a third hand or trained pet tarantula. I defy to you play that C9 with a hurt hand and tell me different.

Or in other words, I tried to play a song on the piano, and I failed. The end.

After poking around the MySpace for a bit (what a fucking cesspool, but usually the quickest way to find out X about Y band. WHY MUST THIS BE!?) and it turns out the Dolls have a new album out. So, grand, now I have to add a trip to the record store to my to-do list this week. Some things are just too important for the usual iTunes + CD-R ritual. (And always iTunes, because I certainly don’t use BitTorrent for music I don’t like enough to pay for. And you know it has to be true because you read it on teh intar-webs.)

Shit, that reminds me, I still have to finish watching Dr. Horrible. I could’ve used the website, for free, but nooo, I had to procrastinate and now I’m stuck watching it with iTunes, the preferred video player of idiots and suckers alike.