If There's a Unifying Theme Here, It's That The Internet Never Forgets
I'll be attending and presenting at the LDStorymakers conference this weekend, so my head is full of interesting concepts and my heart is pounding with that heady anxiety that tells my inner introvert that it is showtime, and we need to let the extrovert take over for the next 36 hours or so. 
One of the interesting concepts comes from the cruel-but-necessary piece I wrote a few weeks back in which I said that ideas have no value. Go ahead, take that out of context. I'm sure I'll spend the next ten years explaining myself, since the Internet Never Forgets. A reader and friend, Jessica Douglas, was struck by what she felt to be a particularly evocative phrase in the piece, "leafy green brain," and asked permission to use the idea in a picture. I have an original Jessica Douglas on the wall of my office. How could I say no? Gorgeous, yes? She is not yet selling prints of this piece, but if you pester her enough I bet she will. I'm sure you want one. I know I do. Jessica's work is itself richly evocative. Tour her whole site, please. 
On a completely unrelated note, some error or another threw digital caltrops all over the boot sector of drive C: on Saturday evening, and I disappeared from the internet. I blogged about it over on Live Journal, and then blogged AGAIN when I realized that in just a week I'll be going to Penguicon, where Linux is King, and I just announced to the world that to fix my little crashy-trashy problem I installed (and am in love with) Windows 7. (Aside: That's badge art for Penguicon, drawn by me and colored by Chris Hallbeck of The Book of Biff.) Again, the Internet Never Forgets. Say something once, and you find yourself saying it forever even after (as is often the case) you've changed your mind and embraced a completely different opinion. Post something mean about an employer, and every subsequent job interview you have may include an unearthing of phrases like "really love to see him boiled in his own excrement" along with questions about your moral fiber. This is fresh on my mind because I was recently linked to the blog of an author who, fed up with rejections from agents, decided to burn all her bridges by performing the blog equivalent of calling in an airstrike on her own position... and asking for that MOAB daisy-cutter thing. It's one thing to kvetch and complain while sitting in the dark recesses of the pub. It's another thing entirely to do it onstage during amateur night at the comedy club on that one evening when the local news crew is looking to fill three minutes on a Slow News Day. (Note: that previous paragraph has no link to the blog in question because I'd rather not throw a box of razor-blades to the person committing career suicide.) My own presentation at LDStorymakers focuses on social media, and how these tools can be appropriately and inappropriately used by authors and artists. I'll probably at least touch on the logical fallacy of Affirming the Consequent and how it applies to things like trying to score Facebook friends and Twitter followers in order to become a famous author. I think there's an actual psychological disorder along those lines, but I can't remember the name. 
Speaking of names, a member of the local SF&F community created an actual Wikipedia page for me, Howard Tayler, author, cartoonist, blogger, and podcaster, which is separate from the page for Schlock Mercenary, which is inarguably the most well-known of my works. In this article he used the only picture he had Wikimedia-approved rights for, which is one from a rather more obese time of my life. I need to grant him full rights to this new picture, because while the Internet Never Forgets, it's this picture of me in a tux I currently want the Internet to remember. Also speaking of names, as I was bookmarking the tools I use to post to this blog, I decided to shorten the bookmark name to an abbreviation. Only then did I realize (4 years late?) that "Blógünder Schlock" abbreviates to B.S. Naturally I twittered about this, because that's the sort of potentially scatological thing my tweets are for (follow me at your peril.) I should have twittered it from the toilet because a) I can, and b) as long as we're talking about how the Internet Never Forgets, I might as well say something really embarrassing.