After years of waiting, teasing, opaque answers to the question What’s it about?¹, we have a date for the release of Scott McCloud’s next book, his first since the comprehensive ZOT! omnibus in 2008, his first new work Making Comics in 2006, his first original fiction since The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln² in 1998. Okay, there have been some Superman Adventures titles in there, but they aren’t his, right?

So we had a title some time back — The Sculptor — and now we have a date: 3 February 2015³. The breaking of the news (in the New York Times ArtsBeat blog, no less) is kind of brief, and it’s got an unfortunate title, but man — what a place to launch the news. Publishers Weekly and Heidi Mac followed up with more details and two pages, and everybody with sense and a calendar has marked Saint Groundhog’s Day 2015 as The Sculptor Eve.

And lest anybody wonder if it’s really coming out, given that it’s been five years and McCloud may have mentioned a target release date of 2014 way back in 2010⁴, consider the following:

• :01 Books does not blow deadlines, ever
• He just doesn’t have time to put any more work in — as Ivy McCloud has shared, every spare second before the very busy month of May is doing the last minute tweaks before he sends off his labor of love to become a book:
  

  I keep saying the Scott is done with the book. Again. It’s a running joke. And it’s true. The book is done. And it’s almost finished. Right now, Scott is going though the book and correcting things. Finding continuity problems (oh look, she’s wearing a coat in this panel, but it’s mysteriously gone in the next), making sure characters look the same in the beginning of the book as they do in the end, that sort of thing. He is also working on the cover (I got to help with that!). I’m really liking the cover so far, it’s not done, but it’s really cool.

There’s going to be some busy times for McCloud in the next couple of weeks, then more busy times as he tries to put out of mind the million little things — invisible to anybody else — that he thinks could have been better. Then The Sculptor will release and we can all tell him exactly how much it was worth the wait. And if I know Scott, he’s already cooking ideas for the next book, and the one after that.

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¹ When I asked, the answer was About 400 pages, but that was two or three years ago and apparently it’s grown in the telling.

² Which a lot of people never liked, but I always did. In fact, when I first met McCloud back in Aught-Six or so, that came up in conversation pretty quickly: I’m the guy that liked The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln I said. He laughed; Oh, you’re the one?

³ Talking with :01 Books consigliere Gina Gagliano at MoCCA Fest a couple weekends ago, I begged for any info about The Sculptor’s release date that was more specific than “next year”. She was not letting anything slip other than to say that decisions would be made shortly, which apparently they were.

Similarly cagey was :01 Books designer Collen AF Venable, who allowed that it was a thrill to be doing the book design for The Sculptor, but likewise let nothing of substance slip. This is because Venable, Gagliano, and everybody at :01 are disciplined professionals that know when to keep quiet and I respect the hell out of them for it.

I will, however, continue to badger them for details I know I’ll never get because I am an optimist out of all rational scale. One may recall Santayana’s definition of a fanatic, if one wishes.

⁴ Apparently, as recently as last year, some people thought The Sculptor had already been out for two years.

Ah, webcomics. You have mysterious ways, rules that are unique to your world, rules which are not always apparent even to you. Sometimes they work for you, sometimes they work against you.

• In the working for you domain, Kris Straub ran up against one of the fundamental rules of webcomics — the First Law of Fanart states that If you make something cool, other people will make new stuff inspired by you. Naturally, said new stuff is subject to Sturgeon’s Law, but even the ninety percent can give you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside: I inspired somebody! And that last ten percent? Sometimes it’s very, very good:
  

  Several months ago, David Graey, a composer/performer and fan of Broodhollow, let me listen to a piece he wrote for Curious Little Thing. I was really impressed, and even more impressed to learn he had an entire album in him. It’s now on sale — 33 minutes of soundtrack music for the first Broodhollow book! 13 tracks and a digital booklet of liner notes from David and myself!

  To sum: a musically-inclined person was inspired by Straub’s webcomic, and put together compositions good enough to make into a product with Straub’s blessing and cooperation. Graey and Straub¹ make a little money, we get to hear some scarily-appropriate music, and Graey may find himself the Patrick Doyle, Danny Elfman, Howard Shore, or James Horner of webcomics. Seriously, how great would it be for a very mood-specific soundtrack to be released with your favorite reprint collection? Say, Table Titans, Monster Pulse, Family Man, or Vattu? Just think about it, creators, okay?

• In the didn’t even know it was there domain, hidden metadata regarding your site, which affects the advertising you might be able to obtain for your screen real estate. Jennie Breeden and her husband Obby saw a sudden and unexplained drop-off in the advertising rates for The Devil’s Panties and it took some digging to find out why. Bottom line: a seven-part score of the — let’s say respectability — of the site decided that on the Adult Content scale, Breeden’s autobio was judged as unsavory as hardcore streaming porn.

  The process of finding out that these scores exist, correlating them to advertising efforts, and the possibility of getting them adjusted to reflect reality are the subject of a technical writeup at Medium that you need to see if you ever use (or may in the future use) advertising on your site. The (so far) rather opaque nature of the TRAQ (for that’s what it’s called) scores and the not-terribly-well-defined process for getting bad scores re-evaluated underscore the importance of a fundamental rule: the First Law of Your Website’s Reputation states that nobody will care about your site as much as you do, and you ignore attempts of others to characterize you and your content on their terms at your peril.

• In the nothing is ever static domain, a reminder that the infrastructure of the modern internet is always changing — Kickstarter announced that in addition to their project categories, there will now be subcategories. The oft-used (at least by readers of this page) Comics category now has five subsidiaries, Anthologies, Comic Books, Events, Graphic Novels, and Webcomics.

  The greater granularity may make it easier to avoid ill-fated projects like the guy who has the greatest comic book idea ever but has never actually made a comic book and those that look at Kickstarter as the magic money machine. I have a feeling that these doomed projects will tend fall into the Comic Books category, with some spilling over into Graphic Novels. Webcomics, I have a feeling, will be for people that have a body of work you can look at and judge, and Anthologies the same thing writ large, as there will be multiple people whose work you can judge. Events will most likely remain a wildcard.

  I know that you’re expecting a fundamental rule at this point, and I have to go back more than 30 years to cite something I heard that I’ve since come to think of as the First Law of Ubiquity: don’t reference anything (in entertainment or advertising or business) you’d have to explain to your audience. Kickstarter’s audience may be somewhat more internet-savvy than the general population, but not by a tremendous amount. Yet there it is: Webcomics, without further explanation. I’d say that’s only a good thing.

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¹ Himself no slouch in the musical realm.

It has long been an unstated policy of this blog that certain things will always get a mention; some may argue that the list of qualifying items constantly changes to prevent people from gaming the system, and that I’m merely trying to make a system of whim and caprice sound all official. Fine. But right now I am stating that I will always highlight Erika Moen laughing like a supervillain. Always.

In other news:

• Called it. Six days ago I predicted that the Smut Peddler 2014 Kickstarter would clear US$100,000, provide US$1000 bonuses for creators and eclipse the totals of the 2012 edition. As of this writing, the totals of SP2014 are sitting at US$117K (or 588% of goal); the thousand-dollar bonuses were achieved at US$115K, and by any measure I’d say that the first book’s take of US$83K is well and truly eclipsed, having been exceeded by nearly 50%. Oh, and there’s still twelve days to go. Time for the traditional end-campaign uptick to kick in.

  I didn’t calculate the FFF at project launch, but going by the standard formula it appears that the very strong start (some US$30,000 in the first day) results in a high target: somewhere in the US$133 — 266K range, which seems entirely plausible. The real question is, can those creator bonuses hit fifteen hundred apiece (at US$165K)? At this point, I’m giving it a 50/50 chance.

• TCAF alert: depending on the presence of ocean monsters and the cooperation of Customs, there may be two more debut books for those swarming TopatoCo’s table in Toronto:
  

  Ok! Questionable Content Vol. 4 and Three Panel Soul Vol. 2 are now both on boats winding their way across the kraken-strewn Pacific Ocean.

  As we all know, squid love them some comics, and there exists a precedent for boats carrying webomics-related materiel to have to turn back. Here’s hoping the briny deep doesn’t decide to get greedy.

Ah, Easter weekend, when the come out. I gather that there’s an outrageous nomination or two, which judging by the backlash should sink pretty quickly before the World Science Fiction Convention (this year at LonCon) comes around in August. But that is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the Best Graphic Story category, now in its sixth year.

• For the first year, Howard Tayler¹ will not appear on the ballot in this particular category. Not for lack of quality, mind you, but because the storyline that ran throughout 2013 (starting, in fact, on the first of January) didn’t finish until March of this year and was thus ineligible. No doubt Tayler will be back next year (and if he’d be a little more compact in his storylines, the year after that as well).

  One might feel bad that Tayler was unable to keep his unstoppable juggernautery going for a sixth year, but he’s still nominated for his work with Writing Excuses, which won the Best Related Work last year and thus has the potential to repeat. Regarding his inevitable return to the Best Graphic Story, rest assured that it will still be some time before there is another five-time nominee in this category, and there may never be another five-times-in-a-row nominee.

• For the fourth time in six years, the Foglios are back on the ballot, having swept the first three years and taken some time off to give others a chance. But now they’re back with Girl Genius Volume 13, and even if they lose, they’ll still have as many awards in the category as everybody else ever put together. I’d say that they were pretty damn unstoppable.
• But then you have to consider who won last year: Brian K Vaughn and Fiona Staples for Saga Volume 1, which (rightly) dominated a hell of a lot of awards programs. They’re back this year with Saga Volume 2 which — to my reading — was even better than Volume 1 and which is (rightly) dominating a hell of a lot of awards programs this year. They’ve got a lot of momentum behind them, and they may prove to be — dare I say it? — an unstoppable juggernaut.
• I am not familiar with two other nominees, The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who, and The Meathouse Man; but consider that the former was written by Paul Cornell (who wrote perhaps the best, most beloved story of the modern Doctor Who era, the two parter Human Nature/The Family of Blood) and the latter by George RR Martin (perhaps the most-anticipated writer in SF/F), and it would be tough to count either of them out. Each of these two would easily qualify as both unstoppable and a juggernaut.
• Then there’s the last nomination, which is perhaps (due to its form) the most challenging work up for consideration, and which practically defines the term unstoppable juggernaut. xkcd #1190, titled Time, caused a sensation when it was released in March of last year — it played out one static image (call it a frame) per hour, over the course of 3100 hours, or a mind-boggling eighteen and a half weeks². Its scope is tremendous, the pace audacious³, and as often happens with the wildest installments of xkcd, people have built ways of navigating the story.

These are the nominees. Whatever happens, there’s two in five chance that the winner of the category will be — for the fifth time in six happenings — a webcomic. And that is our last unstoppable juggernaut for today.

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¹ My evil twin, etc, etc.

² One might argue in fact that it’s actually a Dramatic Presentation, but which one? The total number of frames makes it Short Form, but its runtime exceeds even the longest of Long Form entries.

³ Just consider the effect if Randall Munroe had up and quit cartooning somewhere in the middle — it would have kept running for perhaps months after he’d otherwise stopped.

There’s so much idiocy and stupidity in the world of comics these days, so many people who can’t look beyond their own noses and find a minimum degree of empathy for another. Those who think it’s wrong can — rightfully! — rail against it until they turn blue, and somebody else will pop up being just as big a jerk thirty-seven seconds later. It’s like the world is overrun with assholes.

That thought put me in mind of the famous dictum that you can replace the caption of any New Yorker cartoon with Christ, what an asshole and the gag will still work. That thought made me wonder if you could do the same for webcomics, so I went looking for examples where it would work. In fact, it’s pretty applicable to a wide variety of situations.

I’m only including comics that are new today, and in some cases I’ve only included a portion of the comic. Where you see a word balloon empty, that’s where you insert the magic phrase; otherwise, treat it as a caption after reading the whole thing. Clicking any of the images will take you to the original (most likely better) joke; in the case of Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary, you’ll probably want to click through to be able to read all the text.

In no particular order:

Evil, Inc.

Three Word Phrase

Schlock Mercenary

The Devil’s Panties

Dumbing of Age

Surviving The World

Girl Genius

Gunshow

Wondermark

Monster of the Week

And, because I’m nothing if not fair, here’s a counter-example where the substitution absolutely does not work, unless you’re a horrible person. It’s pretty!

Okay, I know that I asked for things to start happening, but I didn’t mean these kinds of things.

We at Fleen would like to send our very best wishes to two of the finest people in the world: Jenn Klug and Ryan North are, as near as I can tell (including from personal experience) universally beloved. If they have a fault, it is that they are, jointly and severally, too awesome. They had kind of a rough 2012 due to Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but they took the most positive approach to such a diagnosis as ever I’ve seen:

We were lucky and caught it pretty early though! This sort of thing generally responds pretty well to treatment. Wikipedia has a pretty great summary about Hodgkin’s if you’d like to learn more!

Several months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments followed; Ms Klug was heard to declare that if she was going to have to do this, she would be the best at chemotherapy, and made good on that goal. Hooray for modern medicine.

But cancer is a pernicious, nasty, mean-spirited son of a bitch that doesn’t know when to stay down or get its ass kicked again, so you’re always watching for it to poke up out of its hidey-hole:

What you do then is basically drink radioactive juice. The radioactive sugars get absorbed by tissues, and you look to see if there’s any growths absorbing them, which would indicate some cancer cells that made it through the first round of chemo. Unfortunately there was some uptake in that growth we were worried about and a few other places too, which means treatment has started again.

Cancer treatments have made tremendous strides; chemo and radiation therapies are far less scattered and debilitating than they used to be, but they are still no walk in the park. That hasn’t stopped North from approaching this challenge with a sense of wonder:

This is the hardcore round, where they throw everything they can at it. At one point the treatment will be so strong it’ll actually completely destroy Jenn’s immune system. But before they do that, they extract stem cells from her, and once her immune system is gone they’ll inject those stem cells back into her, which will restart her bone marrow and reboot her immune system. That’s kind of amazing. And it is a complete reboot: she’ll lose any acquired immunity she ever had. She’ll have to be re-vaccinated. She’ll be able to get chicken pox twice. You thought it wasn’t possible, but SCIENCE FOUND A WAY.

All of which is to say, for the very best of reasons, you won’t see Ryan North on the convention circuit this year, except for hometown show TCAF in a couple of weeks.

Here’s what I’d like those of you heading there to do: go over to the table where Ryan is (perhaps for abbreviated hours, which I think we all understand) and after whatever else you do there — get a book signed, buy some amazing comics, just give him high fives if you think you’ve got the necessary vertical leap — give him a card for Jenn. Make him take home a 30 or 40 liter tub of well wishes to her. Send her so many good thoughts that they will stretch through the trying times ahead and still have some to open when she’s through with treatment.

And if any of North’s projects are a little slower coming out than they would otherwise be, let’s all resolve to remember why that is and be grateful for the fact that modern medicine is able to reboot an immune system, and that Klug & North live in Canada, so they won’t be bankrupted in exchange for the privilege of not dying.

Jenn, Ryan, I’m so sorry about this. If the love of family, friends, minor acquaintances, and total strangers was enough to fix things, you’d already be nigh-immortal. We’re thinking of you and know that you’ll be best at showing that vicious little bastard clump of cells who’s boss.¹

There was other stuff today but it can wait until tomorrow.

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¹ It’s Jenn. Jenn is totally the boss.

Seriously, there was nothing going on today, and then she went and stirred up a discussion about the Eisner nominations from yesterday. Said discussion over at io9 takes the form of Okay Eisner nominating committee, you want longform? Here’s longform webcomics, 51 of ’em, that have never been recognized and should be. It’s not quite a call to the barricades, but it’s close and I love it. Thanks, Lauren!

In the absence of people gettin’ riled up, all I have to point you towards today are two comics that grabbed my attention in a good way:

• Evan Dahm, Vattu page #533: Oh shit somebody gonna get executed by the emperor. Crappity crap.
• Jeffrey Rowland, Overcompensating #1497: Shepherding the company that provides a living to so many creators, like a sort of commercial father to webcomics, has forced Jeffrey into the realm of dad jokes. But dad jokes or no, Rowland’s been making comics again on the regular, and I for one am thrilled. All hail.

That’s all I got — go do something, or send me an announcement, or make some noise. Clearly, I got nothing in the buffer.

So the 2014 Eisner Award nominations are out, and there are some things worth mentioning on the list. Things that jumped out at me in no particular order:

• Matt Inman’s nomination for Best Digital/Webcomic is less significant than his nomination for Best Short Story. As near as I can tell, this is the first time that an online offering has gone head-to-head with print offerings within a category.
• That said, it should have been two online offerings, as it is entirely inexplicable to me that Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible should have been a shoo-in; for that matter, its complete absence from any category is the most baffling thing about this year’s nominations.
• :01 Books continues to have the best hits-to-misses ratio in the industry, garnering four nominations on fewer than two dozen releases in 2013; they dominate Best Publication for Teens (13-17) with three of the six nominations¹.
• The requirements for Best Digital/Webcomic continue to keep much of the best creators locked out, with the emphasis on longform works only:
  

  For the Best Digital Comic category, works must be longform—that is, comparable to comic books or graphic novels in storytelling or length. Webcomics similar to daily newspaper strips, for example, would not be eligible. Digital comics should have a unique URL, be part of a webcomics site, or otherwise stand alone (not be part of a blog, for instance).

  Which is why I’m surprised that Inman was included here; it doesn’t feel of a piece with the other nominees.

• I’m in favor of any awards list that permit Chip Zdarsky to be … well, Chip Zdarsky.
• Names that jumped out at me: Becky Cloonan, Faith Erin Hicks, Jeff Smith, Brian Fies, the late Kim Thompson, Fraction/DeConnick, Terry Moore, Steve Hamaker², Carla Speed McNeil.
• Seriously, nothing for Something Terrible?

In other news:

• Eric Colossal’s Rutabaga has been picked up by Amulet Books:
  

  I am currently coloring the ENTIRE BOOK and I think it’s going to look really amazing! Above is a sample of what the coloring might look like.

  I’m super excited and can’t wait for everyone to see it!

  The first book is due out in March next year, with a second to follow. Everybody be happy for Eric!

• The Cyanide & Happiness crüe have been picked up by Boom’s creator-owned division, Boom!Box, where one may also find Midas Flesh (by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb) and the just-launched (and wonderful) Lumberjanes (Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Shannon Watters and Brooke Allen).

  The rapid expansion of Boom!Box from zero to third announced property in — what, four months? — makes me think that they must be doing something very right. I’d love to get a good look at their creator-owned contract.

  The C&H collection, Punching Zoo, will drop in July, presumably just in time for SDCC.

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¹ Although I’d say that Boxers & Saints have as much to offer adults as teens.

² I’m guessing that Jenny Robb, 2014 Eisners judge, curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and Hamaker’s wife, recused herself from some catgories.

Where to start, where to start? Let’s grab a random story and … go!

• Readers of this page may recall that I stand second to nobody in my admiration of Minna Sundberg’s Stand Still, Stay Silent, and may also recall that immediately after discovering and devouring SSSS, I also archive-binged on Sundberg’s earlier story, A Red Tail’s Dream¹. Before SSSS launched, Sundberg had a very successful crowdfunding campaign to print ARTD, and the books left over from fulfillment are now up for grabs:
  

  First, without further ado, here’s the link to the simple little store that I opened (at Storenvy) for those of you who simply want to grab a copy right naoow: Linkity-link go here!

  I’ll keep the store open for two weeks, which means I’ll close it before the month is over and go back to Finland and start shipping out the orders.

  Okay, first, I have to start rearranging my bookshelves to make room for this, because it looks gorgeous on screen, and I imagine even better on paper. Second, I hope that Sundberg can find a way to keep it in print in future, because I’d hate to think that somebody discovering her work next month would get frozen out. If you’re interested, now’s the time to buy.

  Third, somebody with a distribution business on this side of the Atlantic, please contact Sundberg and get a bulk purchase in place, because international shipping on one copy (unsigned, un-arted) puts the price on the book at ninety dollars. Granted, it’s a great big huge hardcover, and there’s only a $15 differential between people getting the book within Finland/everywhere else, but I can’t help but wonder what US media mail rates would be.

• Homestuck! Canon! From different creators! Let’s just let Andrew Hussie explain this one himself:
  

  A young reader stands in a webcomic.
  April 13, 2014 by Andrew Hussie

  A brand new webcomic, to be exact. One that has launched on the 5th anniversary of Homestuck’s first page. If the thirteenth of April holds a magical place in your heart, then chances are, you are on pins and needles waiting for me to post the end of the story. It will still be quite some time before that happens. I’ve had too much else going on to be able to attack the remaining content with the ferocity that has been characteristic of my update schedule over the years. It is nothing short of The Greatest Tragedy that a beloved story is held hostage to the ability of a single artist to continue creating it. Which brings us to the website called Paradox Space, and the chapter it will represent in Homestuck’s extended life cycle.

  Those who like HS are extremely fond of the characters, yet those characters are trapped – “stuck” if you will – inside a very particular narrative, which itself has been at the mercy of my ability to produce it. So when I think about the future of Homestuck, I envision projects which liberate the things people love about it from the story itself, and most importantly, from my intensive personal effort.

  So this website is the first major step in that direction. Here is the idea:

  Paradox Space will feature many short comic stories involving literally any characters and settings from Homestuck. Any point in canon could be visited and elaborated on, whether it’s backstory, some scenes that were skipped over or alluded to, funny hypothetical scenarios which have nothing to do with canon events, or exploring things that could have happened in canon through the “doomed timeline” mechanic that is a defining trait of Homestuck’s multiverse-continuum known as “paradox space”. There is a WHOLE LOT of fun stuff we can do here; and we will!

  The idea is also to get a lot of different artists and writers involved. It’s going to be a major team effort. Occasionally I will write some comic scripts, particularly at the onset to help get this off the ground. But I’d like that to be the exception rather than the rule. I think it will be exciting to see how a talented pool of creators can work within the HS universe, and what they will bring to these characters.

  Never let it be said that Hussie doesn’t know how to keep his fans coming back for more.

  It’s a true group effort, too with Rachel Rocklin and Kory Bing listed as the managing editors, and updates scheduled daily (today was skipped so that yesterday’s anniversary launch could happen; next update is tomorrow). That sound you just heard was a thousand Homestucks polishing up their fanfic and desperately trying to find an established creator to partner with them.

• Now this sounds like a lot of fun:
  

  April 26! We’re live-tweeting @strippedfilm: Everyone hits “play” @ 7PM PST/10PM EST for Q&A, behind-the-scenes stories & more #strippedfilm

  Time to clear my schedule for the 26th.

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¹ No big, just 556 pages in both English and Finnish, which Sundberg created as a practice run to sharpen her skills before launching SSSS. Like you do.

Randall Munroe is not just terribly clever, he’s an absolute genius at explaining complex ideas simply. The Heartbleed bug has been all over the news for the past couple of days and almost nobody — either reporting on it or consuming the reports — really knew how it worked or why it was bad. For the definitive translation from geekspeek into human, I refer you to today’s xkcd.

• Speaking of computing, it appears that comiXology is getting bought up by Amazon; I don’t really have a dog in this fight in that I don’t buy through comiXology, but I have to wonder about a few things.

  Will Apple still get their cut of comiXology sales, or will Amazon (maker of the Kindle) sunset those contracts in favor of their own file formats and standards? If so, will we see fewer comics being rejected by Apple’s content police? After all, Amazon doesn’t appear to have a problem with smut, no matter how wacky. Most importantly, is it a good thing to go from a dominant player in a niche industry partnering with a (indeed, the) megacorporation to that dominant player in a niche industry being owned by a somewhat-smaller megacorporation while partnering (perhaps temporarily) with the other?

  Answers: Dunno, Very possibly, and Hard to say but I’m reflexively against media consolidation and concentration.

  For anybody that’s been selling through comiXology, your best strategy remains the same it was before yesterday’s announcement: get what you can from providers, but be ready to shift to another channel if you need to. I suspect that Gumroad and Sellfy may be accelerating any strategic plans they had to deal with this sudden shift in the centers of power.

• Speaking further (probably) of computing but who the heck knows, hotel reservations for SDCC went out yesterday, and a casual inspection of Twitter seems to indicate a lot fewer people getting in than usual. I was tweeting about being done with the process around three minutes after the rodeo opened, and I got my sixth (of six!) choice. I’ve seen reports of people in well under the three-minute mark being told nothing was available.

  For the past three or four years I’ve had no problems getting my first choice, which was a somewhat-smaller, somewhat-off-the-radar, and somewhat-pricey hotel conveniently located in the Gaslamp, even when not so fast on the draw as I was this year. Weirdest of all, my confirmation email tells me:

  You were booked into this hotel because you chose “Book me into any downtown hotel.” when asked what we should do if none of your 6 choices were available.

  … but the hotel I was booked into was one of my six choices.

  That makes me wonder if the choices I made (and the email confirming my request matches my prepared list) actually were the hotels the system looked for. It’s almost behaving like I requested hotels A B C D E F, and the system read my request as B C G M Q T, then just happened to have space at F. I suspect there’s no way to tell, and maybe it’s just some faulty logic on when that You were booked into this hotel because … message got generated. But still — damn peculiar.

• Speaking furthest of computing, those of you on WordPress, have you noticed that since the latest patch to version 3.8.2, the Quick Drafts feature doesn’t work? Just me?