Meanwhile on the subject of me

I recently posted a message on the Naga's Den Forum (Random Chat thread) asking for comments on my site design. As a result of some of those comments I removed all of the tiled backgrounds from my site (which was a long job as every page had them) to improve readability, and changed the red text to green because I was told bright contrasting colours can cause eyestrain. On the other hand, the green headings look a bit weird to me, so I might change it back again.

I recently completed a male story, now called Trophy, which I'd been working on under various titles for about four years. Feels weird to finally let it out into the big wide world after all that time. 8800 words in four years works out to just over 6 words per day.

Brian, who's illustrated some of my male stories, pointed out that I hadn't posted any new male stories since last summer, so to redress the balance the next couple of stories I complete will also be male. Apologies to my hordes of fans who were expecting more female action.

Call them irresponsible

I see that my pals at Studs in Stone are among the latest targets of Portal of Evil (which I'm not going to include a link to).

Portal of Evil is basically a site where members can list sites that strike them as misguided, irresponsible or wrong and then have a damn good sneer at them. They've already had a go at The Wotch, Naga's Den, Fragments and El Goonish Shive. Oh, yes - and me. Now some people may claim that POE is harmless fun - they direct a bit of traffic to their target sites, and some visitors may decide to return. They also forbid any direct contact between their correspondents and the target sites or their related messageboards or blogs. But what pisses me off about them is their cynical attitude - they lump webcomics and fetishes together with survivalists and white supremacists and have a damn good sneer at all of them. Come to think of it, that just seems misguided, irresponsible and wrong....

Speaking of irresponsible, I just happened to tune into Fox News and as usual wished I hadn't. They had some so-called terrorism expert on the show to talk about various types of nuclear weapon and how easy it would be to smuggle them into the United States. When asked how long he thought it would be before someone succeeded, he replied "a couple of years".

Now, I consider this slightly unlikely for one reason: nuclear materials are dangerous and difficult to handle. If a terrorist tries to build an atomic bomb in his basement he will quite definitely get radiation sickness and die, and good riddance. Building a bomb requires industrial facilities, and all of the places that could be used for such a purpose, in Iran or wherever, are already under close scrutiny by the US and its allies.

I just wish somebody would invent a bomb that only destroyed conservative journalists while leaving their money undamaged.