This is the obligatory “wow, look at all that darned snow” entry. You’ve been warned. My driveway is snowed in so I can’t go anywhere so I have nothing better to do than to take pictures of the white stuff on the ground. I am comforted in the knowledge that various and sundry back in California will go “Wow, it must really suck to live out there.” Ha! I have a fireplace and a roaring fire going. Shows what they know. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Thumbnails follow, they link to bigger pictures, you know the drill.

As you have no doubt noticed, I’ve done a bit of a redesign, mostly based on this skin (original). I added the sidebar. Realizing that if I painstakingly redid each template before relaunching, I’d be here till April, I took a deep breath and jumped in and kicked it off, so things are gonna be a bit rough for a while.

And then I wonder: how did we go from [this](http://web.archive.org/web/20110726202231/http://web.archive.org/web/20110726202231/http://people.delphiforums.com/andybeals/thankyou.htm (original) “9-11-2001”) (original) to this?

Joe Clark is annotating Pattern Recognition, bit by bit. This has the potential to be truly cool if he gets traction. (Via Boing Boing.)

I’m all about the public service announcements this long weekend. Today, I note that the new edition of Swordspoint includes several short stories set in the nameless city. And I’m sure you already knew there’s a sequel out.

Daniel Keys Moran is sharing his current novel in progress, The Sheriff of Shokes, on his forums (original). (If that link fails, try this.) You’ll have to register to read it. The Sheriff of Shokes is not set in the Continuing Time, but it is related. DKM explained this once (original). Who is this Moran person? He wrote four pretty good novels back in the late 80s and early 90s. You can get them today via QuietVision, and I recommend them. He’s one of the most graceful writers I’ve ever read, blessed and cursed with epic wit. Occasionally it gets in the way, but he’s just so much fun to read. ...

CafePress has pre-announced (original) their CD and book print on demand services. They’re hoping to get ‘em online in March. Man, that’s like less than a month away. The prelim specs (original) for books are pretty decent. They’re gonna be taking PDF files. They’ll probably support a range of sizes for both perfect bound and saddle stitched. Hopefully they’ll support standard book rack paperback sizes. ...

Google just bought Pyra. Or, to put it in clearer terms, Google just bought Blogger. I, um, yeah. The bad speculation is that Blogger posts will get indexed in more or less real time. I suspect that won’t happen, because there are certain technological barriers in the way, but it might. It seems more than likely that Blogger will at least be used for page discovery. ...

Feeling pretty traumatized. The Claremont/Davis Excalibur is good, and the Davis sans Claremont stuff is all kinds of fun if you like that kind of thing, which I do. But eventually Davis goes away and it becomes all fill in authors and lousy art and X-Men crossovers. Conveniently, you can tell where the really horrendous stuff begins, because there are hologram covers. No kidding. I’ve never owned a comic with a hologram cover before. I feel kind of unclean.

[WISH 34: Non-Standard Characters](http://web.archive.org/web/20060924230238/http://web.archive.org/web/20060924230238/http://www.whiterose.org/pam/archives/002924.html (original) “Perverse Access Memory: WISH 34: Non-Standard Characters”) (original): Do you prefer to build a character with a unique concept, or do you prefer a simple or more standard concept to start with? I’m pretty prone to the unique concept. I like characters with an odd angle, or with weird hooks. The most “normal” character I’ve played in the last couple of years has been a half-orc barbarian, and even he was a trifle strange. He was on a quest to prove that half-orcs were a people, just like elves or dwarves or gnomes. Despite his unattractiveness, he might have wound up founding a church or something. I’m not the kind of guy who delights in bringing out the unique aspects of the standard character types, although I respect that tendency. ...