September 26, 2005
Heading for Austinentry, September 26th, 2005
Sandra and I rented Man of the House on Saturday, and we were pleasantly surprised. The film was a lot of fun, and Tommy Lee Jones delivered the goods, as always. I think that his character was "Kay," from Men In Black, as channeled through a Texas Ranger.
The bonus features on the DVD were fun, too, and the best bit was that I learned that the film was shot mostly on location in Austin, Texas. You may have seen the Linucon banners here on the site... I'll be flying into Austin on Thursday afternoon, and flying back out Sunday evening. And now, thanks to the magic of Hollywood, I know that there are tough, deadpan Texas Rangers and perky U.T. Longhorn cheerleaders waiting there to make my stay both safe and, ummm... cheerful.
In semi-related news, Austin appears to have been altogether missed by the ravages of ravishing Rita, and while Houston took a roundhouse to the chin, schlockmercenary.com remained online throughout the worst of it. We lost two of the three name servers to power outtages, but the tertiary DNS, the webserver, and the secondary automation server all remained online. Kudos to Bookworm Computing and to Chalain of Agile Studios for their work in building something that would keep running in the rain. Thanks, guys!
Anyway, Linucon. I'll be there. I'll be on several panels, including at least one where you can ask me all kinds of questions about the Schlockiverse, my creative processes, and why I so closely identify with the character of General Xinchub. I'll talk about my year of unem-selfem-ployment. I'll gossip about other webcartoonists. I'll talk freely about my strategies for maximizing Adsense revenue. I'll put to rest forever the rumor a certain Nightstar miscreant started at Linucon 1.0, claiming that I'm going to use genetic uplift as a plot device to turn Schlock Mercenary into a Furry strip.
Oh, and I'll do free pencil sketches, inexpensive commissions, and I'll bring artwork available for sale.
Note also that Evil Stevie's Convention Chaos machine will be there. Believe me when I tell you that a few hours spent in the ball-thralling embrace of the Chaos Machine will be worth your admission fee all by itself. Grab some pipe and a handful of thingies, because we're firing up the chain drive and the balls will start falling. Only you can prevent packet loss.