[754] overnight sensations

console

< Piro >

"rising waters"

Wednesday - August 31, 2005

I figured my first return to dismal ranting would be getting my act together and posting some of the pictures and other material from Otakon, but before i do, i just wanted to talk a moment about the disaster folks are suffering from down in Louisiana, Mississippi, the gulf coast and everyone else effected by the Hurricane. Watching this storm bear down on the area was like watching someone watch themselves get shot in the face. It was a creepy feeling and all the typically over-hyped news aside, the breadth and scope of the disaster is hard to get your brain around.

There are a lot of stories out there, and some of them even extend into netspace. I have sort of a love/ hate/abhoration thing about Something Awful, a site where if they say something nice about you it's time to panic and watch your back :). I'm sure most SA readers are aware, but they are hosted in downtown New Orleans by ZIPA.com. Everything online takes up some physical space in the real world, and in SA's case, its a data center on the 10th floor of a building in New Orleans that is surrounded by rising flood waters. Yipes. One of the guys who works in the data center and is trapped there keeping things alive has a blog you can read that really give you a feel for what it's like in Downtown New Orleans right now. Kinda scary, it really is.

Just one of many, many stories playing out down there. Want to help? One thing you can do, of course, is do some research, figure out what you think is best to do, and do it. Or, you can donate directly to some of the following charities that are down there in the thick of things desperately working hard to help people in the midst of this growing disaster:

• There will be a great need for food and water - donate directly to America's Second Harvest, an excellent charity that Seraphim and I have supported for years, and they are already in motion to do what they can to help disaster victims and they need yr help.

• As always, the Red Cross is down there in full force helping out with Disaster Relief, and they can use your help. You can donate by going directly to the Red Cross website, but when I tried to access the website this morning, but it seems that they are somewhat overloaded. Sarah has been doing some research, and what she found is that you can donate directly to the Red Cross using Coinstar machines around the country. Gather up some of that spare change you have sitting around and find a Coinstar machine, then make sure it allows you to donate your change to charity (not all of them do! Some stores don't allow charity donations to be made on their property). You can check for machine locations on the Coinstar website. 100% of your donation goes to the charity, Coinstar doesn't take a fee for dations.

• You don't often think of animals during disasters, but the American Humane Society is, and this is as much a crisis for pets and other animals as well as their people. The Humane Society is also very much in need of your help!

• There are many others that are directly working down there, including AmeriCares, Operation Blessing, etc ( USAToday has a nice list of charities you can check out as well)

UPDATE: I received an email from a reader from Biloxi, Mississippi, who is also working as part of the disaster relief, and he wanted me to let everyone know that Lowe's Home Improvement stores are matching all in-store contributions to the Red Cross dollar for dollar up to 1 Million dollars. That's a pretty good way to double your donations. You can read about it here on Yahoo Businesswire. If there is a Lowes near you, you might want to look into donating to the Red Cross there. :) - Best of luck Beau and our thoughts are with you and everyone else in Biloxi.

Do your part, if you can. We know from experience that Megatokyo readers are a generous bunch (wait till you see what Seraphim has put together for the Pine Ridge Reservation kids with your help)

Kinda hard to gripe about comics and creativity with this stuff goin on, y'know? :P At any rate, i thank you for your patience as i sputter a little bit here at the start of Chapter 7. I think this is kinda normal for chapter starts, things smooth out as the threads become more firmly established. I'm not happy with how Kimiko looks in today's comic (some of my sketches of her with glasses are far cuter, i'll have to post one)

'We're almost recovered from our Otakon travels, and i'm just starting to pull material together so i can post some photographic goodness. Before the show, i actually looked into getting decent enough video and audio to produce either a podcast or a video torrent of the last Naze Nani show i think i'll ever do... but my 'preformance' was so lame that i don't think i will. ^^;;; It doesn't mean we didn't get some good pictures from the convention, i'm happy enough to share those :P

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< Dom >

"A return to the '80s"

Monday - August 29, 2005

[Dom] - 12:40:00 - [link here]

So my family rented a house up by the Russian River for the weekend, so we could throw our cousins a big birthday bash.

The house was one of those "I've only seen this in pictures of the front yard and back yard" deals, and it ended up being pretty creepy in person. At the end of the driveway was a plaster deer statue, which I wouldn't have remembered if it weren't for the fact that it had two heads, and one was screaming.

But this isn't a story about the house--even though the first floor was a horror story waiting to happen, with the crumbling brick fireplace, the single stake nailed to the ceiling of the bedroom, and the locks on the outside of the rooms.

No, this is about how I went to the bookshelf, which had a decent mix of literary classics to children's books.

And I saw George Orwell's 1984 there, and thought "hey, I can finally sit down and read this! It's kind of funny, given I know so much about the book, but I never sat down and read the thing, since it was never required for any classes."

Then I said "ooh, Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Case!" and dropped 1984 like it was hot.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I read the story of a 10-year-old detective instead of one of the classics of dystopian science fiction. And it's not like I've never read any Encyclopedia Brown before--I mean, I learned how to read on the stuff. So every book featuring Leroy Brown is etched into my memory after reading it about ten times.

If you want to bash me over the head with your copy of 1984 until I finally read it, get in line--apparently, I'm going to be ambushed some time over the next couple weeks by friends. With bats.