If you're already bored with this site, by all means, go somewhere else. Here are a few arbitrarily categorized suggestions, based solely on my disinterested opinion of merit and the occasional exchange of a few buckskis and/or personal favors.

Commercial

Your Ad Here.  Some restrictions apply. It's not cheap, either. I despise most advertising, so if I'm going to sell out, I'm at least gonna set a reasonably high rate.  Consider, instead, making a donation to get my attention. If I approve of what you're selling you'll get a link somewhere on this page. If I make any money from people clicking on it, I'll be honest enough to let people know.

Better, consider publishing some of my stuff or even commission a piece. Any firm with the good taste and good judgment to pay me for the use of my undeniable talent is automatically worthy of mention here.

Stuff I Like

If you're anything remotely like me, seek therapy you kept up with what's going on in the world for the past two decades by reading "Doonesbury". In the same vein, I seek to support any venture that turns journalism, relevant social commentary, and sniggering at atrocity into pop-art.

Boondocks, by Aaron McGruder.  What else do I need to say?

Scott Bateman, editorial cartoonist, pictured left. I've seen previews of his soon-to-be-released Scan. Undersung and undersold. Hopefully not for too much longer. And he'd better come through on Scan. I've pre-ordered.

Go read Too Much Coffee Man. Once the title of a comic strip, now a full-fledged glossy with a comic-strip feature, all by Shannon Wheeler and his crew of hired thugs. Maybe one of these days they'll print one of the articles I periodically fling at them.

www.arXiv.org is how I stay on top of what people think is going on with the universe. It's a pre-print archive for physics and physics-related topics -- the first step in getting comments and advice before seeking peer-reviewed publication. Sturgeon's Law applies (90% of everything is crap. TMCM's addendum: -- except for crap. 100% of crap is crap), certainly, but that's science: suggest a hypothesis, prove experimentally how far off base you are, and move on. Peer-reviewed journals are much less raw, much less "out there" -- and much more expensive. The arXiv is free.

Oh yeah. Read Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling (it's not cyberpunk, trust me), whatever you can get your hands on by Jeff Noon, and absolutely everything by Tim Powers, starting with Declare. And I heartily disagree with Sterling when he says that Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is "bugcrushing" and "reads like fifty pounds of boiled radishes."  Although for some reason I keep a dozen or so five-leaf clovers harvested from my front yard pressed between the pages of Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Neal Stephenson and Terry Pratchett go without saying.

Personal

Pulse and his partner-in-crime PaperGirl are the reasons I have a continuing column on TwoHeadedCat. My biweekly column there, "Tales from the Third Lobe", is one of many reasons neither wants their real names to be used here. Pulse, pictured to the right, is co-owner and co-editor-in-chief, a fellow columnist, and an author of numerous other literary projects -- for some of which he has even been paid. They are both delighted that I haven't gotten them sued. Yet.

Raylene Taskoski, an excellent writer and fellow 2HC author, ex-high-school-headbanger, devoted wife, wholesome soccer-mom of three, health freak, business owner, and model. Despite the fact that she thinks I have a potty mouth, she is still an important cog in my own personal world-domination machine (i.e., she once gave me money for no good reason).
[In the interests of protecting innocent children from perverts on the web, I had an old gypsy acquaintance of mine put a curse, pro bono, on the links to Raylene's daughters' pages to discourage following the links for "inappropriate purposes."  The gypsy told me -- when pressed -- that the symptoms start out with similarities to acute amoebic dysentery and snowball disastrously from there.  Think Stephen King/Richard Bachman's Thinner -- only with profuse bleeding from the ass. Don't do it.]

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