The Sad Circus by the Sea

Midlife Crisis: ACTIVATE!

2009-09-13T00:20:00Z

In the last year and half, I have been rejected 19 times. This includes submissions to agents and publishers for short stories and novels, animation shows pitched to studios, voice acting auditions, color jobs for animation and comics, and writing gigs for video games. I can't get a job to save my life. Or anyone's life. If you were to dangle a small baby over a lion and say, "Publish me a book or make a cartoon in exchange for revenue," then that would be one satisfied lion.

Before this, I experienced 16 years of constant work, and there wasn't a moment when my arms and brain and voice weren't engaged in some activity that, while they didn't generate fortunes, at least allowed me to make enough money to do more arm waving, screaming, and cerebral activity. Now, I've gone through the wave of emotions, from weeping into my lace handkerchief while re-reading Chapter 11 of A Picture of Dorian Gray, to feeling blame for everything bad that has ever happened in the world since Jesus rode that dinosaur head first into a crown-shaped thorn tree, to writing angry letters to the weather. It's a terrible cycle and I'll have no more of it, let me tell you. And I am telling you. See these words? Good. So! Rather that throw myself onto my replica copy of Sting, sharpened by my terrifying friend, Erk, who thinks every blade, even a toy blade, needs an edge, I've decided to go back to school.

Going back to school at age 39 is, as you may have guessed, a rather spooky decision, but not nearly as spooky as these art school applications. They are haunted, I think. But! What's even spookier right now is the cost of the portfolios I'm putting together.

And that's why I'm bothering you. You were all so nice the last time I had something horrible happen to me, and it was a great deal of fun signing autographs for everyone. So let it be known that once again, if you go here: http://www.tavicat.com/tavicat/donate.html and donate any amount (please note, it costs at least $1.22 for me to mail each autograph, and PayPal takes .50 cents), I will sign an autograph for you of either GIR or Bloaty, mail you the autographed picture, and then convert your donation money directly into an art portfolio for college using SCIENCE.

Thank you, and hopefully this is the last time I ever need to do this.

(image drawn by Bryan Konietzko, colored by Rikki Simons, created by Jhonen Vasquez, © by Nickelodeon)

-Rikki

Beebos for You

2009-07-14T21:34:42Z

Comic Con is always a huge drain on resources - and that's besides the Beebos we wear out just riding into town. Just eating for five days is a horrendous Dali schism of distance, crowd maneuvering, scheduling, and most of all, moneys. SO! To help ease that burden, and to ease our Beebos weary ear-wings, we've got 18 signed and illustrated copies of ShutterBox Book One for sale on Etsy.

You can buy them here: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=27796691

We thank you, and our imaginary bird-babies thank you.

-Rikki

ShutterBox

2009-07-09T21:22:56Z

Our attorney and friend, Ken Levin has confirmed for Tavisha and I that we own all of the rights to our entire ShutterBox series free and clear, including the copyrights, which we had never shared. As you may be aware, Tokyopop, the series' original publisher, went into "restructuring" last year and canceled publication of ShutterBox (along with many many of Tokyopop's other titles) just as we were about to turn in Book Five for early 2009 publication.

In answer to the numerous inquiries from some of the ShutterBox series' many fans: YES, we are now actively seeking a way to continue the series, both to publish the new volumes, and to republish the now out of print earlier volumes. We are open to and exploring both traditional publishing or through new methods. Interested publishers can e-mail me at rikki@rikkisimons.com and I'll forward any proposals to Ken, or can contact Ken directly at KenFLevin@gmail.com.

ShutterBox, the first American series published by Tokyopop (2003), is a high fantasy romance about a young lady named Megan Amano, who, when she dreams, is transported to an afterlife world where she attends school as the only living exchange student in a school for muses. Five volumes have been completed, with only four published thus far.

-Rikki

@Tavicat Comic Number 16

2009-06-25T10:48:49Z

Today's @Tavicat comic is called "To Sanctuary:" http://www.tavicat.com.

It occurs to me that I don't feel bad for these characters I write until after I see the expressions that Tavisha draws. That fly probably has a family. I mean, look at him. He's been through some stuff.

I'm a monster.

Well, back to writing doomed insects.

-Rikki

@Tavicat Comic 14

2009-06-18T07:28:09Z

Today's @Tavicat comic is up: http://www.tavicat.com. Prepare for ... The LOL Ones!

Are you prepared? Okay, good.

-Rikki

@Tavicat Comic 13

2009-06-16T08:22:14Z

Our new @Tavicat comic is up: http://www.tavicat.com.

It's called "Belly."

The RSS Feed is now fully functional too.

-Rikki

Comic 12

2009-06-11T11:24:18Z

New @Tavicat comic is up: http://www.tavicat.com. The site is much faster now. The RSS feed is still down, however.

-Rikki

Cats (and Bees) are Go!

2009-06-10T08:40:21Z

We launched our @Tavicat comic site, and thanks to all of you who helped.

We shall endeavor to be entertaining: http://www.tavicat.com

The RSS doesn't seem to be working. I'll have to poke around with it. Or stare at it and cry.

It's twice a week, so the next strip will be up Thursday morning.

Woo!

-Rikki

Humble Pie, Going Cheap! Part II

2009-06-09T05:40:36Z

Thank you to everyone who donated to get my computer back up to speed. Well, back up from death, really. Resuscitation is a form of inertia, I am told. My cats told me.

Some of you are asking that I wait for your PayPal accounts to fatten (??) before I cut off signing, so I'll keep accepting donations-for-prints until noon Tuesday, (California time) the 9th. If I go any longer than that, it'll look like a business instead of a rescue.

Your response has been ... robust! It'll will take me a day or two to sign all these prints. I'll try to get the birthday gifts off ASAP. It'll probably take a week to deliver your prints, probably two weeks for international.

No matter what state it's in, I'll have our @Tavicat web comic launched Tuesday evening THANKS TO YOU.

-Rikki

Humble Pie, Going Cheap!

2009-06-08T23:41:05Z

Friends, and by golly even horrible enemies, know that I hate asking for help, but I'm on Tavisha's computer right now because mine just went kaplowie. Actually, just the hard drive went kaplowie. The information is safe, but it's on a Time Machine drive, and I can't recover it without it erasing whatever drive it loads to. My iMac is, of course, now 3 months past its warranty, but I just need to buy and install a new internal drive into this mac and then I can have the Time Machine poop its amazingness into it.

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 9th of June is supposed to be the launch of our new web comic series called @Tavicat, the story of two adorable house cats and the dark gods they worship. These dark gods also seem bent on preventing the launch of this comic without sacrifice. And so I must humiliate myself for them. Dark gods jerks. They know I am a prideful hobo.

So! This is a limited time offer. Very limited. If you go to http://www.tavicat.com/donate.html and hit the "Donate" button, donate any amount, and include your address, two things will happen: 1) my hobo heart will fill with shame; 2) and I will sign this small print of GIR to whomever you like and mail it to you:

(image drawn by Bryan Konietzko, colored by Rikki Simons, created by Jhonen Vasquez, © by Nickelodeon)

-Rikki

It was the Romulan Ale

2009-05-12T03:14:27Z

I calculated Warp 5 all wrong and I have brought shame to the Vulcan order. Vulcan children may now bully me until I run weeping from the education pit.

In my insomnia I calculated 1 Astronomical Unit as 149.598 kilometers instead of 149,598,000 kilometers. Which means the Earth would be inside the Sun's corona had I been God. I KNOW, RIGHT?!?

SO!

Light speed is 1,079,252.8 kilometers an hour.

Warp 5 (1,000 times c) = 1,079,252,800 kilometers an hour.

After 6 hours, the Enterprise was 6,475,516,800 kilometers away.

Which is 43.29 Astronomical Units.

So the Enterprise was not 21.59 LY away when Scotty and Kirk beamed aboard, it was only a little farther than the distance between the Sun and Pluto.

I hope you will see fit to forgive me.

-Rikki

Notes: Your Fictional Science Moment

2009-05-11T10:54:24Z

I very much enjoyed the recent laser-spaceship movie.

I don't know if this is a Star Trek spoiler, but don't read if you haven't seen the movie and are feeling cautious. Or tribbley. Or just rather salty ... .

Okay, so I used this scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Warptable.gif to make a quick calculation.

If the Enterprise was traveling at Warp 5, which is 1000 times the speed of light, for say, six hours (the time Kirk needed to wake up on the ice planet, get chased my monsters, find Old Spock, find Scotty, and start up the transporter), then Kirk and Scotty beamed at least ~~21.59 Light Years~~ 43.29 Astronomical Units to the Enterprise. That's a little farther than orbit.

I'm going to go have sex with my calculator now and cry myself to sleep.

-Rikki

P.S. Star Trek Online game has more information on what Elder Spock tried to explain during his CSI flashback: http://www.startrekonline.com/node/235

P.P.S.: Was Romulus a binary system?

P.P.P.S.: Spock stood on the surface of Delta 5 and watched a black hole form (and then collapse?) less than an AU away. Did Spock's Genesis Device reincarnation in Star Trek III make him radiation proof? Aaron A. reminds me that Spock also has no salt in his body, according to the Salt Vampire episode of the original series.

P.P.P.P.S.: Is the new Enterprise different in design from the original series Enterprise because all of the engineers who would have designed the original series Enterprise were killed on the U.S.S. Kelvin?

P.P.P.P.P.S.: Can't ... turn ... off ... BRAIN! iiieeeee!!

Kipling Mistletine Poppish

2009-04-19T12:03:26Z

As I rebuild our main Tavicat site for the coming @Tavicat web comic, I'm also trying to make room over at my Rhumbaghost site for a little extra thing — a little thing in the spirit of The Spirit of Failure. Over at Rhumbaghost I'll be posting short stories that find no publisher. Once a story makes the full circle of publishers and is rejected multiple times, or many multiples of multiple times, I'll place it online, complete with illustration. Here is the first and it is 6,000 words:

EDIT: An PDF is also available here: http://www.rhumbaghost.com/short_stories/Kipling_Mistletine_Poppish_web.pdf

Kipling Mistletine Poppish
by Rikki Simons

Kipling Mistletine Poppish could hold up to eighteen conversations simultaneously: fifteen conversations more than a simple Poeta, five above the average Phothesic Engine Priest, thirteen above the most standard Human, and of course, seventeen more than the average Ghoul. A discussion in holo here, a debate in Tacit Outhernet there, gossip in analog tongue, and poetry in subvocal harmonies: so much chatter to sort and yet he’d still have to hold open a line for the Keysers, who communicated via hallucinations. Kipling was a talented, if rather lonely android.

***

Kipling stood lank and tall in the streaming rain, like a pumpkin-headed scarecrow adrift in a waterfall, slightly bent in his gray-green campsuit. The safari armor left him comfortable, dry and warm, and though the dome helmet was open, the waters of Keyser’s World bounced from its illuminated deflector fields. He could have closed the helmet and sent a short burst message to his surrounding crew, but the Keysers, the theocratic rulers of this world, might be listening. To communicate with his crew working the mineral pools five meters away, Kipling simply shouted his synthetic lungs out — and what he shouted, as always, sounded unintentionally camp.

“Right-o! Our lady whale will surface in ten minutes at this rate! Rather!” Kipling hollered in his Flash-Wooster modded Ing‘Lesh, the national patois of the Windsor Temporality. As a Brummagem android Kipling could make himself heard clearly over the aqueous roar, cartoon vernacular and all.

Two Dervish puppet-cats sat atop the shoulders of the nearest crewman, a Human zoologist named Maître Dresden Loreen. Maître Loreen’s marionette-like robots flagged her through the rain with blue and red lights fixed to their tiny hands. Kipling got Maître Loreen’s attention by shouting, “I say, Dresden! Tell your pips to stay at least thirty meters from that tail! Field generators will give them all the jolly range they need!” Kipling said this while slapping Maître Loreen on the back. She laughed with her boss though he nearly knocked her breathless.

“Smile, be pleasant, and the world will be your friend,” Kipling would tell his wife when she complained he was being too chummy with his employes. But Kipling was an entrepreneur; he knew everyone had value, even if he assigned that value himself, and this added to his loneliness. Even with his personality mods set to High Tranquility, he still had very few friends.

As Maître Loreen acknowledged her leader by sending her whirling cat-puppets off to splash over to a throng of campsuited crew climbing in and out of two mushroom-shaped field generators, Kipling held another conversation deep within his own body. In a red, Tacit Reality craftsman house, rendered in a localized Outhernet that made up the length of Kipling’s spine, Kipling said to his virtual wife, Meara, “See?”

Their two avatars sat together on the carpet before a wood burning fireplace, lounging in pajamas, their backs against an overstuffed sofa. In their separate Thymotemporal minds, they watched the rain-soaked scene outside Kipling’s body.

Virtual Kipling said, “Smile, be pleasant, and the world will be your friend. You see? Eh?”

Kipling’s virtual wife was literally his backbone.

***

Meara shrugged and thumbed through an Outhernet furniture catalogue. She said, “Dresden Loreen is not your friend. She’s your employee. Besides, it doesn’t matter how you speak to the Keysers when they come for you. They see through everyone.”

“Why, even me?” Virtual Kipling nudged her, trying to keep the mood playful, but there was something in his eyes just then. She saw it: something that said not all of his intimate attention was with her. Kipling’s smile quavered. “What?”

Meara of course knew that Kipling’s real body was standing in the rain on the Mineral Shores of Keyser’s World, she knew that a holo version of him was holding a conversation with the Phothesic Engine Priests up in orbit aboard his ship, and she knew another part of him was preparing for the coming charade with the Keyser Ambassador. None of that bothered her. That was business. No, what darkened Meara’s mood was Kipling’s look of subtle shame, peeking ever so much above his conscious. He was guilty. Again. Their weeklong honeymoon had not been a happy one.

Meara threw down her catalogue and said, “Everyone can see through you!”

Virtual Meara shook her dark head and stood, stomping out of the room. A door slammed behind her. Virtual Kipling blinked.

He felt pity for Meara. He knew she didn’t like safari life. It was the first thing she said to him when he selected her avatar from the Bridling Group. Still, pity wasn’t enough to stop his infidelity. Was it Kipling’s fault his own ship extorted him for sex? Well, yes, but that was besides the point, he told himself.

***

His other avatar, virtual Kipling number two, was up there now, in orbit in another Tacit Reality house somewhere within the Outhernet matrix of his ship’s computer’s private world. This time it was a virtual island where a little red bamboo house surrounded a little blue rattan bed. There, under computer generated Indian walnut trees, Kipling cheated on his bride in avatar form with Ella, the safari ship Oomingmak’s Core Personality.

It was extortion, of course. Ella made it clear that she would not move the ship from orbit unless Kipling helped her reach climax seven times. He was working on six and feeling guilty for the hundredth time, but not so guilty as to be unable to concentrate on his more pressing duties. Still, the argument with Meara had an undesirable effect on virtual Kipling number two.

“What’s wrong?” Ella gasped, frowning over her shoulder at him. “Don’t stop now, you’re almost there.”

“Gracious girl, how many more ‘almost there’s’ will there be?” asked Kipling, slowing for a moment.

“Seven’s the magic number, Monsieur Prime Minister.” She gasped again, tightening Tacit Reality muscles.

“This ruddy well has to stop, Ella. This has to be the last time,” said virtual Kipling number two. He added lamely, “I mean to say that’s an order.”

“Of course, of course … .”

***

While virtual Kipling number two took red headed Ella for the seventh time, Kipling held another, more formal conversation in a different part of the ship, this one as a holo representation of himself in his green-gray Safari Minister’s uniform. This was holo-self Kipling number three, who stood suave and genteel, white hair spiked in that roguish manner that only a Brummagem was able to pull off — but only barely able at that. As he was prone to do in any incarnation, he lurched arms apart, rather Nosferatu-like and thus, once again, unintentionally camp. There was always that underlined bit of fakery lingering about his every move as he subconsciously inserted affected pop wherever he went. Crewmen who noticed this were inclined to point out that Kipling just couldn’t help himself, and they said he was rather like a dog trying to look innocent near a cat’s litter box.

Under Chinese elms crowded with glowing messenger-fireflies, Kipling’s holo-self held a pipe and stood within Phothesic Oskar’s Engine Priest Temple. The room was located back along the Oomingmak’s labyrinthine gallery above the aft Engineering Mall. Kipling would have preferred if his Priests were tucked somewhere below the many decks of his ship’s sixteen hundred kilometer superstructure, not up here where all that separated Oskar and his monks from attack were half-meter thick cathedral windows. Although they are very pretty windows, he mused. “Well, I suppose it’s all right then. Cheerio!” Kipling said to the windows.

In a circle of fluted stepping stones the size of pie tins, five monks prostrate themselves in a circle around Oskar, who sat on a collection of hand-loomed pillows with the Company Poeta, Albrecht Saint-Thames. They were by sight, ghost-like — everyone but Albrecht, who was, no matter how one looked at him, an oversized turtle.

Holo-self Kipling number three paced before the monks in visible worry. Priest Oskar was most opaque when the red giant of Keyser’s World filtered through the incense that curled in quantum gestures above his featureless head. He reclined in dark robes that covered all but his sightless, coal-black face and golden glowing mouth and when he spoke aloud the amber smoke twisted from him in sub-vocal smoke signals intended for Albrecht.

Oskar closed his black button eyes and said in Ing‘Lesh, “We need just a little more time, Prime Minister. Keyser’s World orbits a rudimentary gas giant. Though we have made contact with its Gremgear Core, our prayers are too complex for this planet. We recite Monsieur Saint-Thames’ pretty poems but they have too many lines, too great a pentameter. This gas giant wants the simplest of praise. If you can break orbit soon, Monsieur Saint-Thames tells me his own mind will relax. The farther he is from Keyser’s Hallucinatory Outhernet the better.”

Kipling chewed his pipe and looked down on the Poeta named Albrecht Saint-Thames and said, “Can’t say I disapprove. I’m trying to get the ship to … cooperate. Just how much distance is needed before that gasser will give us a grip?”

Albrecht sat upright on his pillows, with each movement the spaces between his hexagonal plates glowed from the transmission lines under his skin. Not an alien, but an autonomous android, the Poeta whispered to his Phothesic masters in the sub-vocal smoke signals of Incense-Speak. Albrecht wrote stanzas upon his belly with a lighted chamomile-pen in a tidy scrawl of swirling smoke that flashed and twisted away into the nostrils of the semi-transparent monks in prayer.

Oskar plucked a messenger-firefly from the air nearest him, downloaded the coordinates stored there, and placed a gentle hand on the back of Albrecht’s shell. His fingers blurred as he transferred the data to the little Poeta. “Not far,” Oskar replied. “Just three hundred thousand kilometers away and Albrecht will be able to write a small haiku. Even the dumbest of gas giants likes a haiku. You’ll have your gripping point then, maybe enough for an eighty light year flex.”

“Well, well, well,” Kipling puffed. “The Queen’s Refuge is in range then. We’ll bend our way to the Park’s brown dwarf, Shire Fenny is what. The Explorer's Club can take our quarry off us after that. And indeed, pay us in the sweet!”

“May I ask,” added Oskar, “have we caught our whale yet?”

“Just about,” holographic Kipling and real Kipling said at the same time.

***

Down on the surface of Keyser’s World, Maître Dresden Loreen asked Kipling if the ground crew would have time for break. “But I dare say probably in orbit,” real Kipling continued to Maître Loreen.

Maître Loreen grumbled at this and looked back out into the rain. She stayed inside the enclosure but leaned out to shout, “Quarry’s in the net! Tea’s in orbit!”

The grounded crewmen cheered.

Real Kipling stood with Maître Loreen inside the protected control room of one of the eight meter tall, mushroom shaped field generators. The transparent frame around him revealed the scene: rain continued to pour down the sides of the generators, ziggurat shapes of Keyser arcologies blinked amidst their blue bulk in the haze of the distant horizon, and though it would be daytime for another month, Keyser’s gas giant loomed over a full quarter of the sky. This little moon of a world was speeding on into the giant’s shadow. The soft blues and powder grays, the sickly mists and torrential rain, the movement into shadow: all these served to punctuate Kipling’s loneliness. Being planet side felt so damn tiny.

Dresden Loreen said, “I think we have about two hours before we’re in planetary eclipse.”

Kipling unfolded a bench from the wall nearest him and sat behind her, saying, “Right … Dresden old girl, have you thought about my offer?”

Maître Loreen paused before replying, though Kipling didn’t get the sense she was caught off guard. She said, “Well, yes. Of course. How couldn’t I?”

Kipling clapped his hands together, excited. “So you’re in? You’re going Spineward?” he asked.

Her helmet couldn’t swivel, but Kipling could tell she was shaking her head no. “I mean, how could I not think about it. That’s not a yes.”

“Right, but … .”

“And I was talking to Dun Dagen … .”

“But Dagen’s just a Ghoul!”

Maître Loreen leaned against the window. She was a hundred and twenty but she didn’t look any older than the day she got her Masters at nineteen. She still had her childhood freckles. Kipling admired this about her. Anyone who kept up such an original blemish as freckles must be very genuine at heart, and those were the best people to wander the Milky Way with. This he always believed, despite his own obvious fakery in matters of style. Maître Loreen said, “He’s a good listener.”

Kipling laughed as he compulsively brushed mud from his boots. “Get off! Ghoul’s don’t listen to anyone. They just … react to their obsessions.”

“He thinks I might be better off just going straight to android. Isn’t that what you did?”

“Not really.” The mud wasn’t coming off and he was making it look worse. “I drifted in the Stellar Outhernet for a time. You don’t need a body for a jolly party. You can project out to any arcade on the Rout. One just walks through doors instead of opening them when shopping for manly things. Though I wager you’ll most probably be out looking for lady things.”

“You still do that.” Maître Loreen monitored her crew outside while Kipling continued to frown at his boots.

“Granted,” Kipling replied nodding, arms folded. “I shop with my wife. She’s always looking for bargains out in the real world. And you can do it too, just your Thymotemporal personality would be located in my spine instead of that old brain of yours.”

Maître Loreen watched the action outside as a dozen Dervish cat-puppets hovered in a ring formation, horizontal to the immense, pulsating mass that bubbled up from the great concave pool of steaming bacteria. The whirling cat-puppets pirouetted on one foot each, six meters above the rising sheenwhale, while the generators beamed power into their little robot bodies. The anti-Casimir field generated by the robot cats was invisible to Human eyes, but Kipling hadn’t been Human for a century.

Maître Loreen said, “I still have at least ten years before I run out of cell options. I don’t need to abandon my original body so soon.”

“Certainly. But you’ll save ten years of panic not thinking about the transfer. It’s like when people used to have their molars pulled. Destroys the integrity of the mind worry about pain and misery on the horizon, is what.”

“But what would your wife think about having a … boarder?”

Something in Kipling’s expression changed. Maître Loreen wasn’t looking at him then, but she could hear it in his voice. Kipling’s honest face withered into clumsiness as he said, “Well, that is … um … she gets terribly lonely, I think. Ah … why Meara would love to have you.”

“So you haven’t even asked her?”

“Well … not as such … .”

“Kipling … .”

“Dresden, dear! I assure you I’m not some dashed confidence trickster. I think of you as a little sister. I’m not caught up in the sex element and all that. I only want to see your transition from Human to Immortal to be as free from personal severity as possible.”

“Kipling … Prime Minister. I would believe you, but … .”

“But? What’s that? But, oh?”

Maître Loreen stepped from the shelter of the generator and back out into the rain, “How many women have lived in your spine?”

“Um … .”

Maître Loreen had to shout through the downpour, “How many?”

“Thirty seven?” Kipling shouted in reply, “But I’ve only been wedded once!”

“And that’s why they call you The Minister of Catch and Release behind your back!”

Kipling flushed red and said, “What? No, no of course not. That’s just … that’s just a hang over from my early years. When I started this safari outfit I was entirely hideous at placing my animals under permanent lodgings. That’s all, I swear!”

Maître Loreen waved off her boss and walked down the ramp to her fellow crew. “Thank you for your concern, Prime Minister. I have to get back to work now.”

Kipling sat in frustration — alone but for the pieces of him scattered everywhere at once.

Maître Loreen shouted back one last time, “You need a dog more than you need a girl!”

“As if,” Kipling said to himself.

***

“There is an unusual request!” It was Phothesic Engine Priest Oskar speaking. He stuck his right hand in the air and when he snapped his fingers gold sparks burst on contact and flittered holo Kipling’s way.

Holo Kipling allowed one of the sparks to settle onto his finger and information connected and found his core Thymotemporal self gaunt and wondering. Kipling blinked for a solid twelve seconds while he tried to make sense of the request hidden in layers of what sounded like bubbling whistles and chirps. Finally, holo Kipling said to the priest, “I’m just cabbaged! Is this right? This message is extraordinary! Is this … is the gas giant asking to speak with me personally?”

“Yes,” said the priest.

“Well, I … just cabbaged, I say! Well! What then what, eh?”

Oskar nodded slowly and released a firefly from his left hand. It returned to the ceiling to hover with the others, blinking in communal Morse code harmony. Oskar said, “I have a TR Room ready for you in the ship’s local Outhernet. It will appear to you as an arctic realm, as per the gas giant’s request. Are you ready, Prime Minister?”

“Indeed,” said holo Kipling, puffing at his pipe.

Real Kipling opened a new access-way among his regular eighteen channels of communication and virtual Kipling number seven stepped into a Tacit Reality chamber somewhere in the Oomingmak’s computer’s local Outhernet. It was a simulated ice field in a Northern sea. Virtual Kipling number seven wore a gray parka and stood almost grotesque in his campiness this time, like an anorexic Abominable Snowman circling in an old West gun fight.

“Hello?” Kipling heard himself say.

He jumped back when a long white horn popped up from the water, followed by a white-gray melon of a head and two black eyes. The gas giant’s personality was a narwhal.

***

Down on the real surface of Keyser’s World, the robot Dervish cats’ whirling motion spun them up six meters above the ground and pulled the seventeen ton pregnant sheenwhale out of its hiding place deep under the mineral lakes. With a moan like terrestrial whale song, the helpless yellow mammal, more manatee-like in appearance than cetacean, slowly rotated above the water, its three eyes revealing a mild persona. Maître Loreen shouted back up the entryway to Kipling, “She’s ready! We can load the skiff!”

“Jolly well, too!” Kipling replied, shaking off the sting of rejection.

Five of the campsuited safari crew darted up the shoreline of rotting branch-mulch and opened the aft hanger door of the skiff’s deep-set capture tank. The main body of the skiff itself, though nearly invisible in camouflage mode, revealed its immense forward-swept wing outline under the torrential rains.

Maître Loreen stepped back into the shelter with Kipling, saying in her near-French Auh Geerlig lilt, “Creature load will take five minutes, stasis activation another two, then it’s just the generators and us to pack up and we can break camp. If you’re going to hoax the Keysers, now would be time, Prime Minister.”

Kipling nodded and prepared his internal oratory. Enough of the personal. Now to business.

***

Far up in planetary orbit, inside the cavernous wheelhouse to the Oomingmak, Kipling’s fourth conversational self stood in the form of a translucent gryphon, a telepathic hallucination that curled around a perfectly round stone spinning in a fountain two meters wide. A Ghoul stood next to Kipling’s gryphon but said nothing, just watched as the Keyser’s fountain and stone was rolled next to Kipling’s by two of his formal-attired bridgecrew.

Outside the great ship, opaque picoscale bits of cosmology, designed to apply anthropic persistence wherever Human-descended travelers chose to go, spun up in luminescent cloud-work from the Oomingmak’s Gremgear engines and spread themselves along the full length of the ship’s saurian frame. A firewall of idle, telepathic chatter now shielded the ship from Keyser infiltration; Kipling’s Thymotemporal mind was protected by hoary gossip and barroom chat-up lines and thus was ready for theocratic politics.

The distantly Human-descended Ghoul security officer known as Dun Dagen — three meters of thick black armor topped off with a round plastic head and bulging cartoon eyes — smiled big enough to swallow a normal-sized Human head and shouted with too much enthusiasm in his native Ghoulauhn, “Permission to board granted! Welcome, Ambassador Wilore! Raaargh!”

Tambourines chimed in the minds of those standing nearest, conch shell horns sang in auditory illusions in the phantom distance, and a silverback gorilla rose to full height from the spinning Mirage Stone next to Kipling’s. This was the Keyser Ambassador speaking now to Kipling via the planet’s telepathic Outhernet. The hallucinatory conversation began thus:

“Hello, I am Ambassador Esmund Wilore of the Votive Deposit of Keyser Khan.” There were no words. Meaning was conveyed by transforming images and sounds. Thus “hello” was a coffin melting into a crystal plate while Ambassador Wilore’s name and title was a series of waves drowning birds in a rain cloud.

The next succession of images from Ambassador Wilore — ceramic idols exploding into baby skeletons — meant thus: “Transponders state you are Kipling Mistletine Poppish, Captain of the registered Safari Ship, Oomingmak, and husband to Meara Bridling. Your vessel claims a manifest of over ten thousand sentient employees and thus your ship holds Subsidized Nation status as Corporativismo Oomingmak with you as Franchise Prime Minister and Exulted Safari Minister under Her Majesty the Queen of Windsor Temporality, Olde Sol Uncommonwealth. That much is known. This much is not: why are you violating our Sovereign Space? Why did your vessel swing out from Keyser’s Giant so close to our orbit? Why did you take seven days to answer our hails? You must answer me or we will wage war until you are dead.”

Kipling replied with bubbles bursting over a field of poppies, which meant: “Right-o, hello to you too, there’s a bird, what!”

Glass anchors congealed from Ambassador Wilore: “We do not acknowledge sarcasm.”

“Rather! Down to chops then: I’m taking your last sheenwhale.” said Kipling’s flying sheenwhale image.

“There are no sheenwhales here.” Stones crushed the flying whale and turned its pulp to cream.

“What oh! Then you won’t mind my taking the last one, right?” Bees exploded from a red sea.

“We do not give you permission to land.” Two magpies nested on an iceberg.

“Oh, Yes? Then you won’t mind if I tootle off your sponge of a planet, either.” The magpies turned to snow.

While the two minds split images within the Oomingmak’s wheelhouse, the Ghoul security officer stepped away to man his enclosed weapons station. He was immune to telepathy. His engineered obsessive compulsive disorder made him the perfect deep space militant. Dun Dagen already trained the Oomingmak’s howler guns on the trio of wraithships that chased Kipling’s swept-wing safari skiff from the Surface of Keyser’s World. Shells of anti-premonition Gremgears burst around the wraithsips as Dun Dagen fired.

***

Kipling’s skiff now carried his real body, his twenty safari crewmen and Maître Loreen, his virtual wife in his spine, and his sheenwhale quarry in stasis: all into orbit and decelerating in the direction of the Oomingmak. Keyser’s World, really just an earth-sized moon, quietly moved into the shadow of the colossal gas giant it orbited. Darkness shepherd them on. Now there was only the portal lights of the Oomingmak, the fusion burn of the skiff’s twin engines, and the angelic light of the scattering Keyser wraiths.

Dun Dagen continued his protective barrage around the approaching vessel. The real Kipling sat within the skiff, the back of his campsuit locked into his acceleration couch. He was aware of the conflict outside his shuttle. He watched patiently as his Human pilot juggled four Outhernet conversations and still guided his vessel with skill. Kipling watched all this, participating in mild conversations with his crew while still maintaining the hallucinatory conflict on the Oomingmak’s bridge, while still arguing with his wife in his spine, while still giving into the ship’s computer’s demands … while still trying to make sense with a gas giant id disguised as a narwhal.

Maître Loreen, locked into the acceleration couch next to Kipling’s, leaned over and tapped her helmet against his. “See? she said. “This is exciting! Being chased off a hostile planet with ships in pursuit: how can I possibly have these kinds of tactile encounters if I have no real body? I’ll have to go right for android when I reach Accenting Age. Spineward’s just not for me, Prime Minister.”

Real Kipling shook his head and said, “Rubbish! There are plenty of opportunities for the tactile when you’re holo or virtual.”

“If all you want to do is shop and play.”

“It’s a very serious business, I assure you.

***

Virtual Kipling number seven threw a red metal ring around the narwhale’s horn. They had stared at one another for several minutes, the narwhal waiting for … what? Kipling wasn’t sure. It wasn’t giving any more signs of anything resembling language, so Kipling had paced back and forth blundering through haiku’s until the idea of the ringtoss game came to him.

“Here we go! That’s a bird! Right!” Kipling tossed a blue ring and the narwhale barked with pleasure, backing up in the water and easily catching the virtual toy. His horn was now sporting several colored rings and considering Kipling had an endless supply, there was no telling when this game would end.

But maybe that was the point, mused Kipling.

Kipling made to toss a green ring but then stopped himself. He stood upright and paced for a moment. Finally, hands on his hips, the ring tapping against his thigh, virtual Kipling number seven asked, “I say, are you lonely?”

The narwhale-disguised gas giant dipped its bulbous head and the many colored rings slid down, floating free upon the gray-lapis water. It looked to be crying.

“Aw … .” said Kipling.

***

In his virtual house in his spinal column, virtual Kipling number one leaned his head against the bedroom door. His wife refused to open. “Meara, let’s sort this out,” Kipling mildly pleaded.

Meara shouted through the oak door, “Go away!”

“Out of the question, you’re in my spine.”

“I don’t love you anymore!”

“Be that as it may, dear girl you know I can’t leave.” Virtual Kipling slid to the floor and said, “This avatar is always jolly well on.”

The door remained shut. Meara replied, “You’re rutting the ship’s computer even now!”

“Meara, now really, I’m not a complaining chap but you know she’s extorting me. If I don’t keep up with her blasted carnality her she won’t move the ship.”

“Then replace her!”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I just … can’t. You have to accept that.”

A chill swept up from around the doorframe.

***

Back in the real wheelhouse of the Oomingmak, hallucinations continued to crash and blaze about the deck.

Ambasador Wilore demanded, “Then you are … leaving without your quarry?” This was represented as Wilore’s illusion: a dove chasing an undead fox.

“What ho? Quarry?” Kipling’s reply: the fox became butterflies.

“The one you seek.” Butterfly hatchets.

“What, what? Said it yourself, sheenwhales don’t exist, so you won’t mind my pinching the last.” A black rainbow settled over the scene … .

“We do not allow the movement of the chaste upon our world. Sheenwhales live without sin under the water. They are unwashed by the rains. Only sinners are allowed on Keyser.” Ambassador Wilore’s reply stretched the rainbow on and on … .

“Great Scott! There’s a recipe for merriment if ever!” Kipling’s reply was like a wave pushing the black rainbow … .

“Only those bathed in Keyser’s rain may tread here. If any … un-washable thing persists we must kill it to the last.” Waves crashing … .

“Forgive me for saying, dear boy, but you’re not getting the picture. I’ve come and gone and your whale doesn’t ‘tread’ there any longer. Not that it ever did anyway what with the thing’s lack of any momentum-making appendages. Rather lacking in the foot category, right, what?” Salt spray became flying jellyfish … .

“We did not give you permission to land!” Jellyfish turned to stone.

“Too late for that, chappy. Yours truly was entirely scrubbed by your magic sky-seltzer. Stood right out and positively sloshed up in the stuff.” Kipling’s illusion: his black rainbow fossilizes to chalk.

Far below on the planet’s surface, in a squalid city besieged by telepathic wraiths and unending rain, Ambasador Wilore sat drenched on his balcony. A shriveled old man at only sixty standard years, a man made old by the weight of convoluted sinfulness and sodden punishment, Wilore sighed with great irritation as he wade in his dark fountain. He splashed himself once across the face and whispered to the transmitter stone that spun in the water around him. His message, strained of all patience, filled up with with images of swords cutting through stars, stars detonating into angels, angels shaking into banshee cries. Which was translated as: “Our rains are for the sinful! Public record shows you pure! You are locked in righteous marriage! You fight only in self defense! You are employed by Five Holy Charity Fiefdoms! You have good credit and a positive demeanor!”

“I like you too, old bean!”

“Enough! Our baptism is wasted on you and so we must fight you!”

Kipling answered with his gryphon image, but now the gryphon turned to bones and alabaster eyes. Kipling’s message meant: “My wife has filed divorce. Just now. Bad luck and all. My Ghoul security officer is forwarding the petition to you.”

The silence of a deepening migraine.

Finally: “May the rains you have received … wash the sin from your Godform.”

“That’s a good bird. Jolly well thanks for that.”

“Oh, God. Just shut up and go.” A white rabbit trot away into a snowbank and shot itself with a handgun.

***

The Keyser wraiths broke off their attack. Flittering back into lower orbit, they dipped away sad and exhausted from Dun Dagen’s barrage. The Oomingmak’s defenses cooled down. The skiff docked.

Kipling’s bridgecrew moved the hallucination stones apart and the rocks stopped spinning in their fountains.

Real Kipling unlocked his back from the acceleration couch while the skiff powered down inside the Oomingmak’s lower hanger. His safari crew cheered and Maître Dresden Loreen shook her Prime Minister’s hand with both of hers. But inside real Kipling’s spine, the door to his virtual bedroom was open, and Meara was nowhere to be found. Only her voice remained. She said, “I sent the annulment request to the ship’s dijudicant down in the Arcade.”

“Can’t say I disapprove,” Virtual Kipling replied, head down.

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

“Right, well the thing is we were only married a week. What more is there?”

Meara paused, then said with relish, “The dijudicant will send the doctor by tomorrow to drain and replace your spinal fluid.”

“So you’re off? Back to the Catalogue?”

“Of course! Maybe the next man who orders me will have the decency to act like one.”

Kipling smiled. “Oh, yes? Well, you’ve been a great … value to me. Three cheers!”

“Why did you bother to buy my card from the Bridling Group?”

“Why did you accept?”

“You had a big ship. You had money and fame.”

“Right-o! And that’s why I chose you, dear girl.” Kipling’s virtual avatar moved away from the door and out onto the simulated English beach that their craftsman house stood on.

“I don’t understand,” said Meara.

“Well, that’s it: you’re just so shallow and unkind. A real Witch Hilda! You’re just so unpleasant, right? I just thought it would make our eventual divorce easier if we hated each other.”

“What?” screamed Meara’s disembodied voice.

Virtual Kipling was in the water now. He wore a green and white striped bather and his armed draped over a white-gray melon-headed mammal. “I’ll tell you what. I’ve called the doctor just now. I need to have you out of my spine by tonight, all right? My narwhal friend needs room.”

Somewhere a door slammed.

***

On a virtual rattan bed in the Oomingmak’s computer core, Ella, the ship’s computer’s avatar relaxed.

“Oooo … that was it, Monsieur Prime Minister,” Ella said, stretching naked over hemp bedding.

“Be that as it may,” said virtual Kipling number two, his head still upon her breast, “Now will you be so good as to move the ship, Ella?”

“Already doing it.”

“Just widen Keyser orbit three hundred thousand kilometers. No more. Tootle on.”

“You’re such a pretender, you know.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You pretend to not want me but then why did you mod my sex drive?”

“For commerce, of course. I have to go.”

“Oh, Poo.”

In the Phothesic temple on the back of the ship, holo Kipling finished pacing around his circle of monks. He smiled devilishly.

“Good,” said Priest Oskar. “This is a good distance. Albrecht is feeling inspired. Do you have a theme for him, Prime Minister?”

Holographic Kipling exhaled a sub-vocal stream of smoke from his pipe that said, “Something for my new pet.”

“Ah … ” whispered little Albrecht. He wrote a poem in incense upon his belly.

Oskar inhaled the smoke signals and recited the poem to himself. His voice dropped then and he sent his mind out over the emptiness of space to the great gas giant that shadowed Keyser’s World. Everyone within the chamber heard the prayer within their minds. Kipling heard it doubly so in his virtual sea with his narwhal friend. Oskar implored, “Oh petty Gremgears there within Keyser’s Giant, you that followed Humanity through the cosmos, you that give sapience to gas giants and play cruel tricks on the law of conservation: give us to Fenny Shire and hear our haiku!”

Synchronicity
In divorce from perfection
We all sigh at once

The whole of the Oomingmak rotated slightly to port. The Ghoul, Dun Dagen’s voice called over the ship’s simple, general intercom. He said, far too excited as always, “Matter Portal created! Gripping space via Transfer Event! Yaargh!”

On the hurricane swept surface of the red-hued gas giant a black line appeared and grew across the equator, curling up like a pumpkin knife slicing open a grin. The mouth yawned and through the black edges of the maw stars could be seen within. The Oomingmak’s engine pods stretched out invisible lines of Gremgears across the divide, through the gas giant’s maw and to the other side some sixty two light years away, exiting through a brown dwarf where the Queen’s Park Services Legion waited to take possession of Kipling’s endangered sheenwhale. The invisible arm bent at the elbow and took the Oomingmak with it to the other side. The mouth closed — and unknown to anyone but Kipling and Oskar, it closed for the last time. A gas giant was just another big planet, and no longer capable of creating Interstellar Portals, with its a Gremgear personality absconded from its core.

***

They used to call him the Minister of Catch and Release behind his back, but now they just said he seemed genuinely happy. Kipling just never had anyone worth keeping before.

A month after entering Windsor space, Kipling Mistletine Poppish chatted up the buyers at the Queen’s Auction House, setting an immense reserve for his quarry, while somewhere in his spine, he played ring toss with a narwhal.

“Good Dog, what! That’s a lad!”

The End

Kipling Mistletine Poppish by Rikki Simons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

An Army of Drunken Seawees

2009-04-06T23:07:52Z

I will be on the Internet radio show ARMY OF DRUNKS tonight along with Eric Trueheart and his beautiful goons. You can listen here http://www.theoryradio.org at 8:00 PM Pacific time (as in Los Angeles) if your ears are over 18. That's 18 years not 18 inches. We don't cater to no childrens or Night Elves. Go there and press "Tune in Now" at the appropriate time. It is a vulgar show and the last time it aired near someone of virtue, Jesus rode all the dinosaurs into a volcano. IS TRUE!

There's not much going on besides this. I've been out of work for so long now my life has become a sort of hobo version of Homer's Odyssey. The homeless now sing to me a sweet urine-scented Siren call, steering my cardboard box closer to the rocks. Odysseus was just Boxcar Willie with a Cyclops you know. The Sirens sound like Tom Waits riding the pony, but I no longer play his albums, I burn them for warmth.

Tavisha's family continues to fall apart and we are the only ones with the glue, and even then our glue is more of an acidic fly vomit than a proper adhesive. As Tavisha's mother's condition worsens Tavisha's grandmother seems to descend as well. I have never been inside a psych ward before in my life, and in the past month I have visited two. Not for me of course, but if I have to keep going in there I'll soon make the transition from visitor to resident. Our hospital system is so screwed up that this is where they put old ladies with dementia and neurological conditions when their symptoms worsen. We used to have to make our way through the elderly moaning through dark hallways in wheelchairs when we visited Dee, now we have to walk through electronically secure doors and navigate a path through howling men tied to chairs and fractured tour guides who try to sell us a vacation package to China, but all they're really doing is pointing at a game of Battleship. An interesting note, one of the doctors has suggested that her mother may not have suffered a stroke after all, but may have been the victim of a brain virus. If that's true then hide your brains, people. Breathe nothing. They eat your personality and leave you a walking catatonic unable to even discern the nature of food.

We are still working on our website, rebuilding it for its @Tavicat comics debut. Considering everything that's happening, the April release will most likely get pushed to the end of the month. Everything involving old ladies leaves us pooped.

ShutterBox is still tied up. No progress there yet.

On a happier note, I painted this picture, called happy Eddy:

You can buy him here for $55: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23301606

He comes with the following poem:

Happy Eddy strolls under daylight moon,
Tiny stick feet sift through rocks and gloom,
When the stars come out it's near half past noon,
Happy Eddy smiles under daylight moon.

Meanwhile, Tavisha has out-cuted me with the following picture of what she calls a Seawee:

You can buy her here for $45: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23303579

SEAWEEEEEEEE!!!

-Rikki

P.S. On that final episode of Battlestar Galactica: I don't care what the horny space angels want, I wouldn't give up my spaceship, life saving surgery, and toilet paper for Apollo's cwaaaazy ideas.

And then the Punching Starts.

2009-03-28T11:18:37Z

I just ordered 50 more years of quality life with Tavisha from God. He better deliver, or else I won't let him borrow any more of my Richard Dawkins books.

Oh, good. the pills just kicked in. 'Night!

-Rikki

unGrande Artmentatons

2009-03-05T02:11:43Z

I have opened an Etsy site. Above is a link to an original painting I painted with PAINT and oil pastel and colored pencil back in 1992. I don't know what i was thinking when I painted it, but the Cocteau Twins were probably playing in the background, and I include the following description at Etsy:

Izabella the Spotted Icabicarus rests in the core of a red giant star, held captive in a private zoo in a sealed chamber all to herself. She was once human. Once she would hang around clubs after hours, a New Wave girl in old London town. She met a fashion designer who never took off his shades, even when they were intimate. He was very strange and she could never place his accent. One day he said to Izabella, "You know you'd look great in spots. How 'bout it, babe?" What could she say? Of course, she'd love to be in spots.
She remembers the bright lights in the park after Flock of Seagulls played one night. She remembers him standing at the ramp, a bright light behind him, beckoning for her to follow. She doesn't recall the ship landing, the isolation chamber, or her transformation. She just remembers waking up one day, all alone in a strange habitat, the feeling of many eyes pressing down on her from behind some artificial sky, a New Wave girl in a new kind of world.

$400 is a bit steep, I know, but I'm trying to reinstate my Screen Actors Guild membership to paid-up status, and that costs the moneys.

Prints are available at the full Etsy Shop, here: unGrande Artmentations.

And Tavisha too has an Etsy, located here'bouts: The Sleepy Muse.

More prints will go up as the days go buy. I will also sporadically spore out some new painting originals from time-to-time, probably around the $90 range too. I will keep you posted with posts.

-Rikki

Update CHUNK of Hope and Sadness

2009-02-16T08:24:42Z

The above amazing render of my actual face is by Shadra. This sparked a battle of little post-it pics between she and I and Dizzy at Ohayocon, which resulted in an image of Galactus in bed with a Mecha Lincoln. It was a fierce battle, but love won out. As it always does.

I have neglected you, oh Sad Circus readers, and for that I should be punished. Nothing too harsh mind you. None of your William Wallace intestines on a spool shenanigans. Though I would argue the court that the ice cream man who keeps playing Turkey in the Straw ALL DAY LONG outside my window is punishment enough.

Several things have held my attention. I shall mark them off in order:

1. Misty and my Mother

My mother found her dog and I'm really surprised how just how she did it. While I was a way at Ohayocon she borrowed my car and travelled around Los Angeles from 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM handing out fliers to homeless people and "hooligans." At one point she thought of approaching a policeman who was parked near a Jack-in-the-Box with his lights off, but since he seemed to be ... ah ... occupied with a prostitute she thought, "No."
At around 4:00 Am she found a group of young men, as she described it, "Hanging out in an alley" and she handed them a Misty flyer. Maybe it was her weeping-while-pleading that affected them, but later she was astonished to discover that those three actually searched for Misty all night. They called her at 9:00 AM and told her they found a dog that matched Misty's description lying by the side of the road near the 10 freeway, (about 5 miles away). She followed the young men to the location with my brother, Robert (dangerous!) and they turned out to be telling the truth. Misty was lying on the sidewalk near an industrial park, covered in mud, oil, thorns and stinking of garbage. Alive but exhausted, she had run for seven days and finally collapsed.
She's all cleaned up and rested now but her breath stinks as if she's been drinking from the Lich King's toilet. You didn't know that the Lich King had a toilet, did you? Well, Misty has seen it — seen it and imbibed from its arcane broth. The Lich King lives by the 10 freeway. His name is Larry Frostmourn.

2. Tavisha's Mother

Tavi's mom hasn't improved since she wandered away a year ago. But at least she is in a secure facility now. One of the strange things about dementia is that it makes her want to fold paper and fabric. Napkins, towels, tissue of every sort: she is constantly folding and patting down material. She'll say hi whenever we visit her, but after that her eyes just sort of move into the distance and then we've lost her again and she's patting down a coat or Kleenex.

3. Tavisha's Grandmother

Above is a picture of Tavi's grandma when she was in Internment Camp during World War II. We rescued this photo, along with many others, when the senior home she currently resides in moved her to a smaller room and decided everything she left in the old room was disposable. While we were collecting things, the staff told us that grandma, who will be 91 this year, has taken to wandering, just like Tavi's mom used to. We sat with grandma and asked where she thought she was going and she said, "Just to the corner store." We explained to her that there wasn't any store on the corner, just a sidewalk cafe. We made her promise that the next time she wants to go somewhere that she will just ask the staff and they will take her. An hour later, at around 11:00 PM, while we were packing things up in our car, one of the staff came out running and told us the police called and said grandma was sitting at the cafe down at the corner. I walked down to the corner, which was about two blocks away, and found grandma huddled in a booth outside, without her walker, looking scared and bewildered. She forgot my name. As I walked her back home she told me over and over that, "My momma's gonna be so mad at me. She's not gonna let me go to the store no more." I told her that I thought her mother would be okay with it. I didn't remind her that her mom passed away in the '70's.

Other photos we rescued: grandma with her dog, Shiro, before camp.

Shiro became depressed and starved himself to death when he was separated from his interned family.

There's also this one, Tavi's great grandfather giving a salute, again just before the whole family was locked up for four years:

They lost everything in camp, their home, their family grocery business. How these photos survived, I don't know. And to think the maids at the senior center would have just swept them all away.

4. Ohayocon

Ohayocon was a lot of fun. Negative eight degrees Fahrenheit with the wind chill! Tavi outfitted herself appropriately:

I did not outfit herself appropriately and my neck snapped off like a Lego. It hovered there in the arctic air and I had to walk back into it to snap it back in. Remember what science says kids, "No scarf in sub zero leads to Lego Neck."

The picture of the crowded room above is of my GIR panel at Ohayocon. I did two of these panels and the number of people that showed up each time left me astounded — twice! So much for Nickelodeon's insistence on the unpopularity of Invader ZIM. The show ended seven years ago and this is the number of people who still show up to hear just one of its principle actors speak at a small anime convention.

One of the most charming things I heard again and again at the convention was young people telling me that I made their childhood happy. Then I realized how old I was and I slumped off to an elephant graveyard. Ohio has an elephant graveyard. You didn't know? It's okay though. A young boy from India found me and rode me into the jungle, where we had adventures with a singing bear.

The bear story is true! Don't look at me like that, Tavisha!

5. @Tavicat Web Comic

Work continues on the @Tavicat comic. Above is a small unfinished mock-up of the site. I should have it finished in the next week or so, and then we'll go live in March. Probably near the end of March. I'll let you know.

6. Reality Check! on U-Click

Every bit of Super Information Hijinks: Reality Check! is now available on iTunes for the iPhone. It is brought to you by U-Click and tiny hamsters. You can find it by opening iTunes and typing in "Reality Check" under the Applications search.

7. The Star-Eyed Circus by the Sea

This is a graphic novel that we've been developing for more than three years now. It's been rejected at least five times, by comic book publishers, TV networks, and book agents. In the end, if we still can't find anyone to say yes, we'll just make it for the web. The cover shows two of the main characters, Poosh The Chief Clown, and Pihtzee the Housecat Tamer, being escorted by a human character (who appears much later n the story). Since ShutterBox is effectively frozen until we work something out, we've gone back to putting all our energy into @Tavicat and Star-Eyed Circus. Any actual publishers reading this who are interested can reach me at sadcircus@rhumbaghost.com for a synopsis.

8. Short Stories

I'm still writing science fiction short stories and they're still getting rejected. So it goes!

9. Color Work

I've been doing little bits of color work for friends with projects in the oven. I am hoping at least one of them will lead to long term paying work. Or bread.

10. Valentine's Day

This Valentine's Day robot I drew for Tavisha has a confusing message. Is it saying that it doesn't love Tavi as much as I love her or is it claiming to love me more than her? That's real love for you: AMBIGUITY!

11. Facebook

I made a Facebook account. Of my FACE! That thing's interface is so screwy I don't even know how to give you a link to it. Just look me up by searching for 'Rikki Simons." Some jerk-hat made a "Rosearik Rikki SimMons." That's not me. Tavisha is on there too and she's taken to it like a bear to honey in a A.A. Milne Lawsuit. I don't even know what that means except that she draws pictures on the thing and sends me virtual plants.

12. Voice Acting

Not a warble!

Now if you excuse me, I have to go help Tavi kill a bear in Warcraft. BEARS! IT'S ALL ABOUT BEARS!

-Rikki

Misty

2009-01-29T00:44:21Z

It seems like all I use this journal for is to find lost relatives and pets. Well, this is about my mother's dog, Misty. Every thing's in the poster there, as far as description. She was last seen on Huntington Blvd. near Main in Los Angeles, just South of Pasadena, possibly running towards Alhambra. She's been missing since last Sunday and so far nothing has turned up at any of the emergency clinics or shelters we've checked (the Pasadena Humane Society on Raymond is very nice, by the way — if you're looking to adopt in LA, that's a good place to start).

The e-mail address is my mother's and please only use it if you think you have helpful information. She's crying about Misty every day as is, please don't make her cry to me about one of you e-mailing her about singing the "Doom Song." I am shaking my finger at you all dad-like.

I have to run out the door in the next several hours and get on a plane to Columbus Ohio, where Tavisha and I will be attending Ohayocon as guests, so my search for misty ends here for now. I hope she'll be found before we get back. I love animals, but I've never been much of a "dog person" I suppose. But Misty has always been been a cut above the average dog. She loves to shake hands, never diddles on anyone's lawn when you take her for a walk, and she's safe around children and indoor cats — but bring her outside and leave her alone and her little doggy brain goes ZING and she starts running. This time she didn't find her way back.

So if you're in LA, South of South Pasadana, Alhambra, San Gabriel please watch for Misty. Thanks!

-Rikki

Merry War on Christmas Everybody!

2008-12-25T22:47:10Z

The first shot: http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/8cXgLB57TCArTUbZgYjP

And to warm your heart: http://coilhouse.net/2008/12/24/the-magic-of-christmas-delivered/#more-5022

-Rikki

Cat Girls on Your iPhone

2008-12-19T05:38:46Z

I have been preoccupied.

I did not mean to neglect you but I have been flittering about like a giant fairy man, engaged in the days events with a Dali-like, mustachioed wide-eyed panic. However!

I have this for you: you can now purchase Super Information Hijinks: Reality Check! from iTunes for your iPhone or iPod Touch. The individual chapters are being zipped out slowly over the coming weeks and the first two APPs available cover two and a half chapters. Here are the links:

This 1st issue covers chapter 1 of Volume 1.
.99 cents.

This 2nd issue covers chapter 2 and half of chapter 3 of Volume 1. I don't know why they divided it up like that. But there are many things in life that make my HAL 9000 brian sing Daisy, so I best not think about it. Also .99 cents.

You may ask, "But wasn't Reality Check loaded up to Tavicat.com as an archived comic strip forever?" Why yes, but even forever ends and this is a horrible universe.

Hope you like. Oh, and can you do me a favor and push the purchase button a million times? Thanks!

-Rikki

That's Right ...

2008-12-01T10:07:49Z

... I'm like Gandalf. But with LASERS.

Your rainbow is intensely shaded white, blue, and gray.

What is says about you: You are a tranquil person. You appreciate quiet moments. People depend on you to make them feel secure. You depend on modern technology and may feel uncomfortable without it.

Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.

-Rikki

Flying Again

2008-11-20T11:41:57Z

http://twitter.com/rikkisimons

To my cat, Fargo I leave my grenade pile and clown masks. You know what to do, buddy. SHINE ON. 11 minutes ago from web

In case I don't make it I leave my cat, Pippi my socialist propaganda posters, ray guns, and fake beard collection. 12 minutes ago from web

Hate hating. 14 minutes ago from web

Getting on a plane in 4 hours to Oklahoma for Izumicon. Hate flying. Hate Airports. Hate TSA. Hate tiny seats. Hate boarding and exiting. 14 minutes ago from web

-Rikki

Most Recent Tweets for You from My Opaque Heart

2008-11-19T11:49:25Z

http://twitter.com/rikkisimons

@JhnenVEE I didn't think it was possible to make Depp look worse than he did as Wonka. I was wrong. So WRONG. Well done, Mr. Burton? ( http://tinyurl.com/6hzn65 )
5 minutes ago from web in reply to JhnenVEE

Gaymars is UNSTOPPABLE. 15 minutes ago from web

Once you've obtained a skill set and the technology to pull something off your goal is inevitable. Enemies can only delay progress. 15 minutes ago from web

The left complain about NASA trips to Mars while the right bitch about gay marriage. BOTH will happen whether either side likes it or not. 17 minutes ago from web

Going for a walk now with a cartoon door frame. Will find that curb paining jerk and slam the door on him again. about 10 hours ago from web

Slammed door on the face of kid demanding money for painting my curb unsolicited. He also wrote the wrong number. about 10 hours ago from web

You see, @zoetica? @warrenellis teaches us to look at the Internet with only our peripheral vision. about 13 hours ago from web

I'm 38, so my childhood Trek hate centered entirely on the original series. I thought it had really crappy hallways. 4:16 PM Nov 17th from web

@spookychan This Star Trek trailer has already satisfied me more than Phantom Menace ever could. And when I was a kid I hated Trek. 4:14 PM Nov 17th from web in reply to spookychan

Seeing an arcology far off in the distance tells you this universe has expanding horizons and gives you a focal point for further thought. 4:11 PM Nov 17th from web

Too much science fiction, movies especially, miss opportunities to keep up the wonder, visually. It's not just eye candy. It's mind food. 4:09 PM Nov 17th from web

Good Space Opera makes the world you are watching or reading about seem larger and more important than the one you are currently in. 4:08 PM Nov 17th from web

What I love most about this new Trek trailer http://tinyurl.com/2lg6br is that you can see arcologies through the haze. BIG SpaceOpera! Woo! 4:02 PM Nov 17th from web

-Rikki

Our Contemporary President

2008-11-05T10:45:34Z

"For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."
-Barack Obama

Edit: this last pic isn't of Obama, but who ever he is he is AWESOME.

Woo!

In Which You Disgust Your Decedents

2008-10-31T06:39:49Z

Marriage is a right, you know? It’s also none of your damn business which gender is marrying which. Let me explain:

It occurs to me that immortality is really unfair. Here you are, you work your whole life and for what end? So that you can die and be rewarded with an immortal afterlife; in your mind, there you go, reunited with all your friends and loved ones for eternity. But that probably doesn't happen does it? Most likely, the reality is that you just die. That's all -- and all your hard work benefits someone else's distant, great, great, great grandchild, who you will never meet. Technology will rise up and transform their progeny and make them immortal in this real universe, and some of that technology your own discoveries will contribute to. In the end, you are actually working yourself to death to make complete strangers, in the far off future, immortal. And they won't even know your name. Funny, isn't it?

But maybe they'll take pity and maybe they'll build an ancestor simulation that's so complex it can't help but to remake you in the virtual in what passes as a computer in that future. And that's funny too.

In that ancestor simulation, your distant immortals will sit back and wonder how ridiculous it all was. They’ll wonder why you didn’t live for the present like they do now. These distant immortals have to live for the present, for if they are far along enough to see the end of the universe in great detail, they’ll know their immortality is a crock, locked in with the lifespan of this universe and thus only finite too. Unless they can escape this universe before it fades into that classic gray goo, unless current science about how the universe will end is wrong (and seeing how often these models change, it could still be wrong), unless they can control the creation of a new universe like the Heechee in Pohl’s Gateway novels, their immortally is really just a form of extreme longevity. But everyone who thinks about this already know this, and yet everyone still unwittingly works themselves to death for distant immortal strangers, immortal strangers with a looming sense of doom. But at least they know not to waste each other's remaining time, sitting around writing stupid denials of basic human rights.

When they aren’t watching their present slide into entropy, they watch you in that ancestor simulation like present day couch potatoes watch the circus freaks on Judge Judy. It’s quite a show. “Look,” they’ll say as they float, nine feet long from weightlessness, gliding slowly in vast oxygen-envelope seas of social networks that spin in doughnut-shaped gas clouds around artificial stars, smaller versions of Niven’s Smoke Ring. Their minds glancing over the Helix of the ancestor simulation, Look, they’ll say, “Look how these meaningless things worried them so. Even in 2008 they still traded in credit, they still placed value in the immaterial, they bartered thoughts instead of products, they lauded wistful ‘family values’ by stripping some families of their real value, they schemed and scammed and plotted to make ideology a more solid dream in the eyes of the dreamers.”

They won’t actually speak like this, of course. They’re just a bunch of regular guys. Their words will probably be a collection of visual hallucinations that float free from the mutative implant fixed to their foreheads, and they will probably hold five conversations simultaneously, but really, they’re just a bunch of regular guys. Mouths are only for eating and eating is only for fun, but words are, whether auditory, telepathic, hieroglyphic, or illusionary, rather quick to be truncated. Probably a more accurate translation of the blue-green images that crash and burn before your immortal progeny will go something like this, “This is some fucked up shit, dude!”

This Halloween will be my fourteenth wedding anniversary with Tavisha. We’ve been together since 1990 and though we were married in 1994, our union would be unchanged marriage or no marriage — but there are practical advantages to being married. I’ve mentioned here before that when we first met, Tavisha was transgender. Born female, she was diagnosed gender dysphoric, and spent six years of her life making the transition from female to male. I met her at the very end of this transition and she decided to stop treatment and return to her original female state. I’ve told her on many occasions, usually around our anniversary on Halloween, that if she had decided to stay male, I would still be with her, the difference is, of course is just this: I would not have been allowed to marry her. Isn’t that strange?

She would be same person, but just an alteration in something as simple, something as complex as gender, and you are denied all the practical benefits of other couples who get divorced after only a year.

It is now legal for same sex couples to marry in California and this has been true only for a few months this year, since the California Supreme Court looked at the state constitution and rightfully ruled that marriage discrimination is unconstitutional. Now on the ballot this November 4th in California is a proposition called Proposition 8, which seeks to not only undo the California Supreme Court’s decision but to also amend the state constitution, making only marriage between a man and a woman recognized in the state of California. I hope that if this Proposition passes it will be struck down by the US Supreme Court for violating the rights of married couples married in other states and who move to California, but what are the reasons that advocates of California’s Proposition 8 give for amending California’s constitution, making same sex marriage illegal? Two factors: smugness and kooties.

First, the smugness: xenophobic people in America actually believe that one of their constitutional rights will be stripped from them if two homosexuals are allowed to be married (or for that mater if a black man is elected to office). You see, they thought it was an unwritten constitutional amendment — somewhere between the first and second amendment, call it the Overt but Unspoken but Always Shouted Amendment Leviticus — that homosexuals should always be beneath them. No matter how much these Proposition 8 supporters have ruined their own lives, their children turned into tweekers, babies out of wedlock or multiple divorces and STDs, they still believe they are somehow guaranteed to be higher up the legal ladder than gay Americans. It's astounding, but true. They believe it is their constitutional right, a byproduct of their perceived biblical right, to keep gays and lesbians in the second citizen category.

Now, the kooties (and I think this is really the bigger of the two factors): it makes them feel icky, it makes their tummies go all wobbly and weird: the thought of explaining sex to their children. I can almost understand this one. It’s really interesting to me that those who say they are for small government, those conservatives to claim they want government out of their personal lives, also, conversely, absolutely want government to be in the sex lives of their fellow homosexual Americans. It’s also of great interest to me that these same conservatives like to make fun of the French, and yet, I'm told, in France no one cares who you’re sleeping with. I suppose this is because unlike American conservatives, most French people actually do believe in privacy. Now, Tavisha and I both like children very much. We can’t have children of our own (and the reason is our own - you’ll just have to pretend you’re French and accept that answer ) but if we did have children of our own my tummy probably would go wobbly when it came time to explain sex to them. But I would do it. I would also explain homosexuality to them. My mother told me about hetero sex when I was five years old and I went running from the room laughing: “I’m gonna do that to my wife when I grow up!” I left her in the kitchen, red faced and wobbly. I believe my father called from work a few minutes later. He asked her, all a wobble, “Is it over?” She did not tell me about homosexuality, of course. But what if she had? Wouldn’t it have been better if she told me herself instead of me hearing a distorted view about it from other children when I was nine? But for the sake of avoiding the tummy wobbles some people will go to extreme lengths. They will even ruin the lives of two complete strangers to get out of having to explain homosexuality to their children.

There are other arguments, some even stranger than those two I listed, notions like, “The primary purpose of marriage is to have children.” It isn’t. Not in 2008. Maybe if you live in 1708 — though, if you’re reading this you aren't in 1708 unless something went really wrong with the ancestor simulation. The practical and primary purpose of marriage, in 2008 is to allow two people who love each other, two eternal companions, to be protected under laws that allow them unfettered access to each other under difficult or dangerous circumstances; this includes access to medical records, the right to shared tax relief, the ability to collect their small wages into a larger sum, thus raising their economic profile so that they can rent or buy a home with a greater chance at acceptance, to be able to buy insurance for each other. To live unhindered by prejudice.

Marriage is the only answer. Civil unions and domestic partnerships granted in one state are not always recognized in another state, and many of the simple liberties granted by marriage cost thousands of more dollars to couples under domestic partnership agreements. This is unfair and it is especially galling when the people making it unfair are doing so for the sake of their petty smugness and childish kooties. They will do this for the sake of holding up an ideal of a future that never will be and to deny a present that already is: they will tell you, “Homosexuals can’t have children and to not have children is the murder of that potential child.” Really. Well, then, the answer is simple, let married same sex couples adopt children. But then that brings the Prop 8 supporter right back to wobbly tummies and kooties.

The future is an alien location, a place somewhere on the horizon with a guard post and a customs agent asking if you have anything to declare. It’s a physical destination, especially when you think of our planet’s trajectory through the heavens to that distant space — you could draw a line to that place where we will be a thousand years from now and say with conviction, “That is us”. But it is not us. It is Them, those strangers we’ll never meet. As we hand over each step on the path to our immortal descendants, what items should we have to declare to that other alien world in the future? What should we leave behind? How about homophobia? How about smugness and wobbly tummies? Tavisha’s parents were German and Japanese Americans and if their marriage had been left up to a vote her parents would never have been allowed to marry in the racist America of 1966. But America left that notion behind, there in the past. The idea of interracial marriage being forbidden was checked at Time’s border.

I have read (Aubrey de Grey, I think) that the first person to reach one thousand years of age is forty years old today. If this is true, then those strangers in the future could turn out be us after all. How embarrassing to peer back through all that time in the ancestor simulation only to spot yourself looking so very hateful, so very full of smug kooties as you watch the old you vote yes on Prop 8 — and when your friend floats by your anchored treehouse in the cloud network of urban star-envelopes, she and her wife still young at four hundred years, she watches the older you and says to you now in blue-green images that crash and burn before you, “This is some fucked up shit, dude!” You can only lower your head in shame and burble back an awkward yellow hallucination, “Yeah, I’m sorry. We were fucking barbarians back then.”

Please vote no on California’s Proposition 8.

-Rikki