studiofoglio

The reprints of Volumes Five and Six of Girl Genius have now mostly shipped.
And about time, too. There are a few stray orders that should be tidied up and shipped this week, but after that, we should be done with that particular circus. Huzzah! It really was a circus, too, so if we got your order wrong in any way, please do let us know. We'll fix it!

Girl Genius has been nominated for a Broken Frontier Award for Best Webcomic of 2009.
How nice! You can read about this, (and vote for us) at brokenfrontier.com.

We are finally updating our social networking sites...
So you can now find "Girl Genius Webcomic" and "Kaja & Phil Foglio" on Facebook; "girlgenius" and "Othar" on Twitter; "girlgeniuscomic" "studiofoglio" and "kajafoglio" on LiveJournal; and "girlgeniuscomic" at deviantART. Whew.

DriveThruComics is currently having a great big Holiday sale:
And our PDFs are part of it!

We're thrilled to be part of Seattle's annual Strangercrombie charity auction!
You can bid on a full run of Girl Genius softcovers, plus get your name in the background of the strip. See the details at the Stranger's site!

marrog

It kind of annoys me that way more people comment on my short and humourous posts than on my long and/or serious/thoughtful posts.

But then, I probably wouldn't have responded to this post if it was long or serious instead of a two-click poll.

Thing that annoyed me most about the Metro today:

shamenaught

• 13:42 thinks the main problem with google wave is that people are often on it with another address. I demand ubiquity! #

robin_d_laws

Whenever you find yourself lf stuck in a place running a continual news-loop with inescapably loud audio, the Esoterrorists put it it there, as an emitter of low-grade cognitive dissonance. They particularly target airports, where their installations play to a captive audience of the already anxious. Their client entities derive particular nourishment from those involuntarily exposed to the stock market segment. The mix of fear—of lost opportunities, of nosediving portfolios—combined with greed is greasy with psychic resonance. Since the economic downturn the yields have grown even stronger. Even those most knowledgeable about the financial world, once inured to this material by familiarity, are now prone to radiate rich waves of subconscious distress.

Airports in general provide a wider a playground for certain discreet entities of the Outer Dark. Old fashioned fear of flying admixes with new-century terrorism dread. Though not as strong as it was earlier in the decade, the latter still exerts a nourishing pull. Xenophobia provides its own heady psychic outflow. In airports people are forced to travel with others whose clothing, speech and appearance marks them as other.

Disguised Outer Dark Entities sometimes board planes, but the limited range of action while on an airliner proves isn't always an ultrademon's cup of tea. They prefer to lurk in the terminals themselves. Some of them mill about as eternal travelers who never depart. Others assume the forms of ticket agents, baggage handlers, and duty-free clerks. Where most airport employees adopt the glassy-eyed affect of the travel-weary patrons they service, ODEs can be recognized by the hunger in their eyes.

They must act with caution, as the Ordo Veritatis uses the international air system to shuttle its agents from case to case. The loosely affiliated bands of supernatural predators haunting the world's airports attend to the security flags that precede the arrival of OV agents. They spread the word, and know where to hide.

princeofcairo

As an example, [Senator Stuart] Symington once formally requested a report from military sources regarding the possible existence of subterranean superhumans, which one of his constituents had become concerned about after reading a fiction book and mistaking it for non-fiction. [Or so THEY say. -- kah] This and Symington's other senatorial correspondence and papers were donated to the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection (on the University of Missouri campus) in 2002 and are now available to the general public.

But Forrestal, not Truman, was the doomed man. His relationship with Symington went from bad to worse. For reasons still unclear, Symington embarked, in the words of one author, "upon a kind of personal guerilla warfare" against the Secretary of Defense. ... Friends commented on [Forrestal's] growing paranoia. He was convinced that "foreign-looking men" were following him, and that Symington was spying on him. ... Forrestal finally left office in a formal ceremony on March 28th, his last public appearance.

What followed after the ceremony remains mysterious. "There is something I would like to talk to you about," Symington told Forrestal, and accompanied him privately during the ride back to the Pentagon. What Symington said is not known, but Forrestal emerged from the ride deeply upset, even traumatized, upon arrival at his office. Friends of Forrestal implied that Symington said something that "shattered Forrestal’s last remaining defenses." When someone entered Forrestal’s office several hours later, the former Secretary of Defense did not notice. Instead, he sat rigidly at his desk, staring at the bare wall, incoherent, repeating the sentence, "you are a loyal fellow," for several hours.

shamenaught

• 10:36 No jury duty, Phew! #
• 23:26 Ban pink? Aerosmith won't be pleased... news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8402628.stm #

syleth

• 13:01 @ocultado thanks for your fish based suggestions - will keep in mind for next wedding. Now, get back to packing to come see us! :) :) :) #
• 13:06 @ocultado re milk an ok - we buy in litres rather than pints.... Although I still talk about going to the shop to pick up a pint of milk.... #

robin_d_laws

The false suspense of the premise threat is largely absent from RPGs. It's the rare series that carries the implicit promise that its main characters will never die or fundamentally change their natures. If a TV writer's room runs out of ideas for its series lead, a premise threat starts to look tempting. When a player gets bored with his character, she talks to the GM and generates a new one.

Also, RPG series are typically less oriented to a tight premise than to a central activity. It’s this activity that is exempt from change, with characters rotated in and out to perform it*. As long as the D&D characters are killing things and taking their stuff, your Traveller traders kicking around space getting into trouble, or the vamps engaged in intrigue with other bloodsucking power groups, the central activity and thus the series' sense of basic unity remains intact. To convincingly threaten the premise, the players have to believe that the entire activity would come to an end, or that all characters of their type will disappear. Traveller characters might face a threat that would stop interstellar travel. A mass vampire die-off could threaten the premise of a Vampire game. A non-absurd threat that would bring all D&D activity to a halt is hard to envision. A divine blessing that turns every entity in the universe into a communal pacifist?

Because GMs often start and stop games, players may respond to a premise threat with equanimity. It might not dismay them that the fantasy city they headquarter in could irrevocably drop into a time rift. They could easily assume that the series has reached its natural end and gird themselves excitedly for the big finish. An external threat to their characters' viability could elicit a shrug and thoughts of a new character, or the justifiable feeling that authorship rights are being unfairly poached upon.

*Certain long-running ensemble shows work sort of like this. You can’t threaten the premise of Law & Order, as there will always be cops and prosecutors doing their job in New York City. ER survived for an astounding fifteen seasons, with only one leading actor in common between the starting and ending casts.