Douglas Adams was right¹ — there’s something about Thursdays that’s just off, and Dentarthurdent is not unique in that assessment. Today is probably the Thursdayiest Thursday in some time, too. Let’s see if there might be some news out there that will break through the doldrums.

• I had the good fortune to catch up with both Kate Beaton and Scott C last weekend at MoCCA Fest, and I take it as a sign that both have lots of things going on that neither specifically mentioned that they have a series of events coming up next week in Juneau, Alaska that you can totally attend if you have access to either a boat or a plane. Juneau, y’see, isn’t exactly what you’d call accessible by road unless you’re already there.

  It is, however, breathtakingly beautiful, almost entirely deceptive in its sense of scale², and a surprisingly comics-friendly town. At least, that’s what Scott McCloud and family discovered during the Alaska loop of their year-long book tour which was — goodness! — just about six years ago.

  Anyways, Ms Beaton and Mr C will be guests of Alaska Robotics, with lectures, signings, and workshops from Thursday to Saturday next week. Juneau’s not that large³, so if you can find your way out there, I imagine somebody can point you in the right direction.

• Looking a few weeks into the future, those of you (us) that backed the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter who might have been hoping to get your goods shipped in late April per the original estimates? You’ll be waiting a few weeks longer than originally planned as y’all swamped the foundry:
  

  Sadly, there will be a delay — we did, in fact, swamp the manufacturer. The full coin order will not arrive at Chez Tayler for another 40 days. From there it will take us at least a week to assemble bundles for shipping, and then, sometime in early June, we’ll have a shipping party in which 3,000 packages go out the door, and Sandra and I rack up $30,000 in expenses for postage.

  The delay means that your coins will ship in early June, not late April as previously promised.

  I’m thinking that on the grand spectrum reasons for Kickstarter delays, exhausting the manufacturing capacity of a specialized industry is waaaay over towards the Acceptable end, and I do hope that nobody will be bitching at Howard Tayler⁴ for blowing that particular deadline. We’re into you would only get it faster by violating the laws of physics territory here.

• Looking a little further out, we have a release date for the print collection of Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, namely 27 August. The news prompted a remembrance of something long forgot and a happy discovery: there’s a Delilah Dirk short story in the fifth Flight collection which is substantially the same as Chapter 3 of Turkish Lieutenant. Those of you with both in your collection (or will have, come the end of summer) can do a side-by-side comparison for changes, not that I am for a moment suggesting that you (I) might be a detail-obsessed completionist. Not at all.
• Speaking of detail-obsessed completionists, I’ve been digging deeper into the reconstructed archives of Lore Sjöberg’s Bad Gods, and found another long-forgotten favorite — within the collection of POKE/PEEK mini-animations are five perfectly formed arguments proving the most important collorary to Tyrrell’s First Law Of The Internet⁵: Also, don’t engage with anybody who would read the comments. It’s odd how little some things change in — goodness! — seven years.

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¹ About far more than just Thursdays, in fact.

² Starting out from a park building on what we’d assumed would be a 15 minute or so hike to the Mendenhall Glacier which was right there, we found ourselves turning back after two hours on account of the damn thing was no closer than when we’d started. There was simply no visual cue as to the actual distance, which was weird.

³ Actually, that depends on how you define “large”. The actual urban portion of Juneau is pretty small (about 12 square miles and 17,000 people, and chunks of that are university/state capital land), but if you include all of the “city and borough” land, you’re looking at more than 3200 square miles/32,000 residents (or a bit smaller than Rhode Island and Delaware put together). By contrast, my town runs a relatively compact 2.8 sqare miles, but manages to fit 13,500 people into that space.

⁴ My evil twin.

⁵ Namely, Never read the comments.