20 years of whut?

I don't remember anything about what happened 20 years ago. This whole Berlin Wall deal everybody's talking about, I remember hearing about it in my first year of college, but it doesn't resonate with me like the news tells me it's supposed to. It was this thing that went on in a place.

What else happened 20 years ago that I forgot?

• The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska
• Tiananmen Square massacre
• Soviet forces pull out of Afghanistan (glad that Afghanistan issue is solved!)
  
• 6.9 earthquake hits San Fransisco

I remember all that stuff, but none of it clearly. It's like I stored it all on a 5 1/4" floppy.

Kiva: complex transactions continue to be complex

Remember a while back when I tried to get you to join my Kiva team? Well you still can, but a story in today's New York Times reveals that the money may not be hand-delivered by trained monkeys riding rhinoeroses straight into the wilderlands as I had hoped!

More likely, it goes to a microfinancer, who then throws our money into a big pile that funds a bunch of people:

Mr. Ogden goes so far as to question Kiva’s role in the lending process. “Kiva’s new documentation explains, if you read it, that Kiva is a connector not of individual lenders to individual donors, but of individual lenders to microfinance institutions,” he said. “If Kiva’s users want to be connected to an individual borrower, Kiva doesn’t do that, and so the big question is, do Kiva’s users want to be connected to a microfinance institution — in which case, why do they need Kiva?”

This is disheartening, because you to like to feel you're giving your $25 straight to Mr. Abubakari to help expand his grocery business, when you're really giving it to Sinapi Aba Trust, who, for all you know, might have given the cash to him six months ago, and now SAT has used your money for some other purpose altogether.

Ultimately, Kiva still appears on the level, and the funding you want to get done is still happening. It just appears to be less direct than the fiction we want to spin. I can live with that. Maybe you can too when you join the Quickstart group and we fund some other charitable microfinance group?

A day of rest from blogging

No, not really. Freelance deadlines, Art Shop in less than a month, and relationships to maintain every day. Doesn't leave a man as much time for blogging as he'd like. I'm selling a few RPG books again on eBay. Perhaps you'd like to look at those?

The Celebrity Normalization Plan

I was thinking about little Blanket Jackson today, about how those kids will basically never have a normal life. I can’t save them.

But there are thousands of celebrities in the world I can help. People who might have had a kernel of normalcy at one point, but now are so far into their loopy celebrity lives that they don’t know...

• Who to trust?
• Who to listen to?
• Who will say things that approximate reality, instead of what they want to hear?

I’m Jeff Quick, and I’d like to talk with you about my groundbreaking new Celebrity Normalization Plan. Here’s how it works:

You are a celebrity, who has realized that your coterie of sycophants won’t help you understand reality.

You leave them behind and come live at my house for an intensive two-week training course in how real people live their lives. We’ll cover:

• Budgeting
• Conversation
• Parking
• Reasonable clothing options
• Making your own meals
• Not getting what you want all the time
• Responding well to criticism
• Manners
• And much, MUCH MORE!
  

You may be wondering, "Jeff, why should I join your CNP instead of the thousands, perhaps millions of other normal people in the world who can help me?"

The answer may surprise you... I am not normal. I've never been normal, nor have I received any formal degrees or normalcy certifications.

What I do have is a lifetime studying normal people -- how they live, how they talk to each other, how they behave in public. And after a life of study, I have developed a totally convincing approximation of normality! I'm so seemingly ordinary that many of my closest friends would tell you that I am "normal."

I can do it for you too!

Get in touch with me through the following address: CNP +@+ q u i c k t h i n k i n g . n e t (please remove all spaces and plus signs before you send—this is actually fairly normal) and I'll get you started on the road to normalcy. Just imagine:

• Having realistic expectations
• Drinking in moderation
  
• Keeping romantic matters private

The normal life can be yours with my revolutionary Celebrity Normalization Plan!

Email today!

Self-check

Been reading a biography of Warren Buffet, and man, does that guy think differently from me.

On reflection, I decided today that writers get hired because of the specific, different, and useful ways they think. Writing is not the hard part. The act of writing is actually so easy, you get fat from inaction. Thinking is the hard part.

So I thought about my thinking, and I think I'm an undisciplined thinker for purposes of making a profit. I've never bent my brain in one direction long enough to have a unique, salable topicality.

Thanks to almost 4 years of blog-keeping, I've now got a record of the kinds of things I think about hard enough to put into non-paying words. Extrapolating from tag counts I see that I write about:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• games in general
• religion (American Christianity, mainly)
• writing
• creativity
• media

And in a meta sense:

• introspection
• vague ideas about making money

I'm not sure why I care so much about making money. I've always liked to think of myself as a person who didn't, but evidence refutes this fancy. I apparently want to be rich.

I just don't want to be a callous douchebag in the process. I don't want my life to get absorbed into a business. (Unless I love it. Then it's fine.)

So many small business owners talk about being exhausted from some marathon thing they just finished or some associate who just screwed them or something. Something stressful and draining. And man, I just want to be a hobbit, you know?

But I must not want it too bad, or I wouldn't keep wondering what's in Bree.

I'm beginning to think that a large part of a life well lived is learning the disparate set of tricks that circumvents your specific set of neuroses.

To do: Stay busy

I've got some freelance I need to be finishing, and I'm coming off a cold, but goddammit, today was the day my professional-painter next-door-neighbor had an open spot, and it wasn't raining, and it wasn't too cold, so today was the day he and I waterproofed the stucco on the side of our house.

Tonight I was seriously going to get something done, but tonight is the night that my friend with the new house and the brand new 2-weeks-early baby needs staples pulled because the floor sander comes on Friday and he doesn't have as much time to pull staples as he thought he would, and man, listen, regular Wednesday night Bible study is just going to get done later. My wife is taking them dinner, and I am about to go help pull staples out of the floor.

Other friends and acquaintances of mine are having problems which I will not go into here, and to the best of my limited ability, I am helping. I am being helped and I am helping.

Being busy is ok business. I like sloth, but basically busy is better. Jeff out.

Adult anxiety dream

You know that one dream where you show up for the final exam, and realize you haven't gone to class all semester and you're freaked out?

I had one of those a couple days ago, only with Art Shop. I dreamed I was setting up my booth, and I had almost nothing to sell.

As of now, at t-minus one month I've got:

• 7 big monsters done, 2 without faces.
• 2 mini monsters mostly done, with another 1 in process.
• 0 hats done, with 1 in process.
• 0 tetris magnet sets done, but all of them in process.
• 1 pillow done, 1 in process, raw materials for 2 more.
• probably 6 or 7 googly-eyed items done, with an unknown number coming. Depends on how many interesting objects I find in the trash in the next month.
  

The goal this year is to diversify offerings, both in product and price spread. Informal polling reveals that hats will likely be the big seller.

I'm not sure what conclusions I'll be able to draw. Realistically, I'm on schedule to have enough stuff done. I'm usually only comfortable though if I'm ahead of schedule. Tonight: magnets!

Review: Beasts of Burden

Let's get my bias out of the way: I like stories with talking animals. I was predisposed to like Beasts of Burden. I don't like scary stories, so I usually don't like horror comics.

But when I saw issue number 2 on sale at the comic store, with Evan Dorkin as writer, and Jill Thompson as illustrator, I immediately went to the back issue bin to find number 1. Bought them both, love them both.

The premise: A group of dogs and a cat band together to be the occultic protectors of a small town.

The review: Dorkin and Thompson do such a wonderful job of pulling you in. The characters are funny, and they have clear personalities based on their breeds, like a war movie. The art is a pleasant watercolor. There's banter, and then the horror clicks on. You can see the formula, but it's still so fresh.

Issue 1 was sort of weird, featuring a rain of frogs. A corgie. A character dies. Issue 2 was fantastically macabre. I was totally suckered by the horror of that story. I still think about it.

You can read the short stories where these characters debuted online at the Dark Horse Comics site. It's worth a few minutes to read.

you can also read the first 10 pages of issue 1 at the Dark Horse site.

Then go buy the comic to support this great thing.

Phil 'er up

I am willfully a Johnny-come-lately Phillies fan.

I care when a Philly team is doing well, and nod politely the rest of the time. This strikes me as just good citizenship.

This World Series makes it frustrating to be any kind of Phillies fan. Most of the Yankees' runs seem to be the Phillies' faults. Meanwhile, the Phillies are knocking balls out of the park, just not when any runners are on base. That's happened twice tonight (bottom of the eighth now.)