Wot, No Title!

Jordan Gibson  and myself made you this bootleg Star Trek comic to enjoy. Yes, his art is terrific and yes, you probably want to commission him to draw something for you or buy one of his prints, which will enhance any home.

Why “The Right Stuff?”  I recently re-read Tom Wolfe’s not-quite-nonfiction account of the Mercury 7 of the same name  (and re-watched the excellent movie version) and while there’s a certain amount of waxing poetic about the masculinity of those first Americans into space, it’s easy to draw parallels between the confident way in which those men stepped up to the task and the steely-eyed professionalism that our favorite starship crew displays on a regular basis. 

Or, as Gordon Cooper says: “Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Well, uh, you’re lookin’ at ‘im.”

Every now and then a difficult period like this comes along: so it's time to request some assistance.

I've kind of been neglecting my vision for the past year or so, aware that I needed new glasses (and to go have a consult for possible eye-related surgery), but putting it off... and now the situation has, as it were, come home to roost.

The other day, when I was typing something and then (to check it before posting) had to pick up the Mac and hold it up to my nose to see what I'd typed... I realized that if this went on much longer, even with dictation (because after you dictate, you still have to edit...), I wouldn't be able to write.

That would be bad.

I need to go see my Eye Lady, get examined, and get both sets of glasses re-fitted with new prescriptions. This—as usual, each time it needs to be done every year and a half or two years, due to Weird Eyes—is going to run into a low-four-figure-ish kind of money. And due to other recent unexpected medical expenses, right now there's not enough dosh around (or spondoolicks or whatever term you prefer...) to get things sorted.

Therefore: can I get people interested in keeping a writer, you know, writing (as I've got three novels working at once at the moment...), to consider doing one of these things?

(a) Go over to Ebooks Direct and buy a book. (Or a bundle. Or a gift card for somebody else who might like my work.) And if you do: thanks so much!

(b) Stop by my Ko-Fi and drop a little something in the pot. It'll be most appreciated.

And if you can't do either of the above:

(c) Reblog this and let other people see it?

My latest Guardian Books cartoon.

Those of you who notice such things will know that in a little less than two weeks, it's going to be a year since @petermorwood departed this plane of existence.

As the date's been getting closer, I'm becoming increasingly clear (due to mood swings and sleep disturbances and other such stuff) that it would be a really good thing for me if I don't have to live through this first anniversary of his loss anywhere near the house where he breathed his last.

For that day, and ideally a couple/few days on either side of it, I really need to get away from here.

So that's my plan, if I can get all this to come together (with everybody's help). ...It's not like any brief escape will get the pain to stop, you know? That's years away... if ever. But at least this move will prevent a short-term crisis, and allow me (after the really painful day has passed) to start getting back to what around here now passes for "standard operating procedure"—meaning writing, and doing other work, and getting on with the rest of the current form of life—as quickly as possible.

What I have in mind is to spend the days on either side of May 9th—and the day itself—as far away from the cottage as physical issues will allow me to travel. Let's think of it as a long weekend, an hour or two's flight away. To manage that, though, I need to boost sales at the Ebooks Direct store over the days to come. If the necessary funds manifest themselves over the course of this week, I'll have time to make the necessary arrangements.

So can I get those of you who see this post to reblog it, and bring the Ebooks Direct store to people's notice as widely as possible? ...As numerous ebook bundles are available at discount prices. (There are more than show in the slide below: that's just a snapshot of how the front-page carousel looks.)

...And if none of these appeal (or if you've got them already and want to give them to somebody else): hey, there are gift cards! (I finally managed to get these things organized correctly...) 😅 They come in per-bundle versions, or in a number of cash values to suit your preference.

Finally: if you've already got too many ebooks, or otherwise just prefer to drop a little something into the kitty to help me escape for a few-ish days, here's my Ko-Fi.

...So let's see if this can be pulled off. And for all your past help, and assistance to come: thanks, friends. I appreciate you so much... as your voices, heard daily, are pretty much all that makes the local silence bearable.

FIRST:

The easiest way to get rid of the majority of the bullshit that Windows is forcing on us, as of October 2025, is this one-stop-one-click debloat solution from a modern day hero:

It's very easy, even if you're not tech savvy or get scared of pop up windows saying "ARE YOU SURE?" Yes, you are sure, I promise. This program takes maybe two minutes and will save you SO MUCH pain, time, and money (and exploitation).

Now that you've done that, here's the cleanup, to catch the little shit that the debloat might have missed (most of this will already be done by debloat, but hey, it's good to double check).

Even just reading about some of these features makes me angry. Fucking Copilot and "Discover" AI scrapers are in Notepad. NOTEPAD. And then there's this uncanny valley garbage:

No uncanny valley video calls for me, thanks! (Also, what else is it doing while it scans your face and listens to your calls? What else, microsoft? Because there was a lot of memory being assigned to this program for a simple "smooths your skin" add on).

The truly insane number of places they have stuck ads on your own home computer is sickening. Become Unmarketable.

Bonus:

Some background programs you probably don't need that are taking up space and how to remove them (Microsoft forums, 2024)

Your Samsung Galaxy Phone comes with 22 apps you don't need (Android Police, 2025)

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

Then when they showed the animation to their lead/producer/whoever, they were told it's great but "just lose the duck".

"The debut episodes of Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor were directed by the prolific Ben Wheatley, a filmmaker whose credits now range from the black-and-white English Civil War psychedelia of A Field In England to the half-a-billion-dollars grossing Jason Statham aquatic actioner Meg 2: The Trench. At the start of production, Wheatley approached the art department with an unusual request. He wanted them to build an exact replica of the snow globe from the final episode of St. Elsewhere, an American medical drama from the 1980s. There was no reference to it in the script, but the art department dutifully built it anyway."

The Discworld

Folded by Annalisa for my brother Jeff in memory of Terry Pratchett.

“…The Discworld–flat, circular, and carried through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of Great A’Tuin, the only turtle ever to feature on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram, a turtle ten thousand miles long, dusted with the frost of dead comets, meteor-pocked, albedo-eyed. No one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum.

Much that is weird could happen on a world on the back of a turtle like that.

It’s happening already.”

–from Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

Starring: Riccardo Foschi’s “Sea Turtle” as Great A’Tuin Fumiaki Kawahata’s “Elephant” as Berilia, Great T’Phon, Jerakeen, and Tubul cahoonas‘s “Red Blood Cell” (modified) as the Discworld itself

I did a lot of mods, however. I went to the Behind The Scenes post for the diagrams to the figures, but of the three I only ended up using one of the recommended designs. 

For the turtle, it’s a beautiful turtle but I didn’t care for the video (it was very hard to follow) so instead I used the Origami Club’s turtle here. 

I did use the recommended elephant figure with video by Leyla Torres; I think it’s one of the more adorable elephant figures out there. It’s not easy to fold but I had a really good time folding it anyway. 

The elephants are also remarkably stable, which is good because cramming them onto A’Tuin took some doing. No wonder the fifth one fell off. 

The original post recommends a modified version of @cahoonas‘s Red Blood Cell figure for the Discworld; they were playing with coloring and paper so I get why they’d choose it. I love that figure, it’s an interesting combination of complexity and simplicity and it’s really satisfying to fold. But for this purpose I found it a little too uniform; I wanted more texture for the surface of the Disc. 

So I went back to Origami Club and dug up the Ferris Wheel, which had the additional advantage of a blue rim for the oceans with a white center for the landmass, and central tips that could be folded up to create the mountain ranges at the Disc’s hub.