Some very cool things going on these days.

Item! So KC Green has apparently tapped a vein of discomfort and unease in the popular consciousness, the depths of which were only hinted at previously. In other words, the This Is Fine plush cleared two hundred thousand dollars in its first 24 hours,and if the FFF Mk2 is to be believed, is headed for approximately US$700K to a million damn dollars. Honestly, though, this one is going to be an outlier in terms of predicatability but I think we can all agree it’s about time Green made some money off it.

Item! I don’t know how she does it, I really don’t. The absolutely invaluable Gina Gagliano at :01 Books got home from SDCC and promptly went to work shipping out review copies. I received copies of fall releases Demon (volume 1) by Jason Shiga, Tetris by Box Brown, and Last Man: The Rescue (volume 6) by Balak, Sanlaville, and Vivès. Initial impressions:

• Demon is a lot of fun and sets up the remaining 65-70% of the story nicely; ironically, it’s just finished up as a serialized webcomic, with only the first (of 22!) chapters still online. The first collection will be one of four books, to be released over the next while.
• Tetris is about more than the terribly addictive casual game; it’s about the history and politics of the game industry, the wheeling-dealing that characterized fights between companies at the time (including a fair number that no longer exist), and topics as far afield as the Ziegarnik Effect.
• Last Man: The Rescue barrels along and throws us a last-minute switchup that is even bigger than the one at the end of volume 2. Never — and remember this well, children — never suspect that things are going well when they appear to be going well, and you know there are two more books to go in the series. This one is going to go down in the history of punctured false conclusions and is a gut-punch of Whedonian proportions.

Look for proper reviews closer to release time (October, October, and November, respectively).

Item! Speaking of books due in the fall, I’ve read and re-read my ARC of Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier obsessively, and I’m still thinking hard on it. I’ve said more than once on this page that Kazu Kibuishi would be the reincarnation of Hayao Miyazaki, except for the fact that Miyazaki’s still alive. I refer to Kibuishi’s own take on of one of Miyazaki’s key tropes: fantastical flying machines and an emphasis on the hugeness of the sky.

But there’s another side to Miyazaki, the side where young (usually) girls (usually) find themselves in a world that casually admits the existence of magic. It’s not remarked on, it’s perfectly ordinary in its treatment — and to be honest, that’s the Miyazaki I love best.

Telgemeier is fixin’ to dethrone Kibuishi. Ghosts is nothing less than her Totoro. I’ll have much more to say on this, but I’ll need another five or ten readings first.

Spam of the day:
Multiple spams, actually. They all come in different languages (Russian and Portuguese most commonly), all translate to roughly the same message, all have an untranslatable burst of Cyrillic characters near the end. All purport to be from a 37 year old woman named (variously) Beatrice/Dora/Tania/Marisela, who assures me

I am aware that the so-called MILF you relate positively. I have normal breasts, long legs, fuckable state. Without commitment, nothing. We are in conditional place, having sex

Indeed, Beatrice/Dora/Tania/Marisela: without commitment, we are nothing.