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Experimenting with the macro setting on my camera:

Butterfly and white flowers

I cut across a vacant lot on my way to lunch last Friday. Most of it is just dirt and flattened stalks of of dry grass, but there are some plants that have sprung up since it was last mowed (probably sometime in spring) or have managed to hang on past then. (There’s a 2-foot-tall palm tree elsewhere on the lot.)

This was a cluster, maybe 3 feet long and 2 feet wide, of little white flowers about 1″–1½” wide. I put the camera as close to ground level as I could without setting it down, and aimed as best as I could from that angle. I took about a dozen photos, and lucked out: halfway through the shoot, a butterfly fluttered into the cluster.

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After a year, DM of the Rings is finished. The comic recast Lord of the Rings as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, using stills (sometimes brilliantly chosen) from the Peter Jackson–directed movie trilogy in a comic-strip format.

The series poked fun at RPG tropes and player types, with the players’ dialog given to the LOTR characters. Every once in a while, someone would speak in character. But mostly, they’d be asking about the Cheetos, or why there wasn’t enough loot. And speaking of loot, it also pointed out where the story would fall down as a game.

Anyway, cartoonist Shamus Young has already started his next project, this time with artist Shawn Gaston: The webcomic Chainmail Bikini: The Nightmare Legend of Deuce Baaj started today. From the first strip, it looks to be covering the same territory—foibles of role-playing games—this time explored through an original story. It’s not clear where the title comes in, though.

Chainmail Bikini

Update Dec. 2008: Chainmail Bikini ended in May 2008, and seems to have been taken down. Sorry to all of the people looking for it and landing on this page.

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Tumbleweeds tend to collect along roadsides and fences in Orange County, dropping their seeds for the next year. This can lead to some spectacular clusters of car-sized puffballs of plant.

6 or more large, green tumbleweeds by the side of a freeway ramp.
SR-55 off-ramp at Edinger

In a few weeks*, these will dry out, turn brown, and get picked up by the Santa Ana winds. They’ll roll along the road until they hit a fence, or perhaps fetch up against another cluster, and the cycle will start all over again.

* Or possibly already — I took this photo about 3 weeks ago, and with this past week’s heat wave, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

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Saw this truck on the road a while back, a possible case of branding gone awry:

Truck: Blue Ice Vodka

The problem is, when I see the words, “blue ice,” I don’t think of glaciers, I think of this:

Blue Ice block for coolers

And I seriously don’t want to drink the contents of a re-freezable block for portable coolers.

Ah, well, Google disagrees with me, returning the vodka as #1. (For the record, it’s hard to go wrong with Grey Goose.)

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I finally got out to see Transformers today. Yes, I grew up with the cartoons, the toys and the comics. Yes, I even collected every comic book from the original Marvel series through the Generation 2 series (including the prologue in G.I. Joe) through the first round from DreamWave. But somewhere along the line I just lost interest, and ultimately sold off my entire collection. (On eBay, actually.)

But still, there’s some sort of primal thrill—at least for anyone who grew up as a boy in 1980s America—in seeing giant robots fighting each other. So I finally decided to catch it while it was still in theaters.

It was better constructed than I expected. They had a plausible reason for the Autobots and Decepticons to be on Earth, and they were very good about following up on exposition. Every gun that appeared on the wall was eventually fired, down to Sam’s eBay auctions, with one exception: I really expected them to blow up Hoover Dam.

Which brings me to the biggest gap in logic. SPOILERS follow, for anyone who, like me, has been living in a cave. Continue reading →