If anyone does this idea and happens to make a video of it, I would love to see it, so let me know.
And for anyone else, if you don’t already know, October 3 is Day Against DRM.
I’m movin’ slow today! Some things to note as I struggle to catch up with the stuff I’ve been missing…
The Al Dente Code Chapter 4!
This one fills in some history of the Pastafarian church, which I’ll do from time to time during the story. It does not necessarily (or at all) gel with what’s on the official FSM forums, but that’s okay. This is a heretical document after all.
The Suck on This was not intended to be anything official at all, as it turns out. Paolo had built his first ship, the Majesty, for Grand Chief Pirate Maximillian “Snakey Joe” Buttman for the sum of nine million pounds sterling. Upon word of completion, Snakey Joe sent word that he would dispatch his top navigator, Will Smart, to take possession. When a strange man showed up at Paolo’s door the next day, legend tells us he asked the man thus:“Will?”
And the man replied:
“Sure.”
Cubits WikiComic update
I’m dumb. The most important part of a wiki is that you always have to see the most recent revision. Updated the swf to match that theory. It’s hard not to keep working on that one… they’re so damn cute 
The Vector
I’m going to be taking a week off sometime in September to do massive rewrites to The Vector, but I will attempt to cover off my regularly-scheduled work before that starts. I really want to release that thing in the fall, but like the dear Mr Guppy said, I am drowning in my own cleverness. And by that he means I’m not clever.
Free Ze Update
I’m not giving up on this, but I’m going to give it a short rest for a bit while I regroup. It’s important that it work, but beating people over the head with a stick repeatedly only makes them resent the stick.
Lavender Update
It’s still running, but I will have to change deadlines soon because at the moment I’ve had about 700 emailed questions and only one person upload auditions. Traction is always a problem, but I think with more attention it could work out. If changes happen to dates, I’ll post them here.
That’s it for today. Work-work and chasing clients ensues.
Building MakeCubit is taking a lot more work than I first thought (feature creep!) so I’ve decided to take a slight detour and make this sucker. I call it a WikiComic, but really it’s not that wiki-ish. The wiki elements would be enhanced in the next iteration. The general idea is that you can look at anyone’s version, make changes to the speech bubbles, and then save it for yourself. There’s a function to let you embed your own special version which I may activate today if I can manage to embed the SWF in this page.
The characters here are named now: Patty and Neelo. I’ve got a few more Cubits worked out, but that’ll have to wait till next time. Oh, and this WikiComic is actually a prototype for by bigger goal… a WikiMovie, where you can use simple drag-and-drop actions to build a movie starring Cubits. But first things first…
In my quest to fill every available minute of every day with something to do, I think I’ve forgotten to write generally-useless blog posts. I have a backlog. Not an EXCITING backlog, but it’s there nonetheless. So here’s my attempt to categorize my thoughts:
Blue Flamingo!
I just started writing this a few days ago without warning, and haven’t mentioned what it is. See, what I do is open up my text editor every night at 10PM and start writing what I’ll call a chapterlet of this book that’s a bit of a prequel to another book I’ve already written (but will never release! ha!). So every week day I’ll post a new chapterlet, until such time as I finish the book, or die of exhaustion. I don’t precisely know where I’m going with it, but I’ve got a general idea. It’s completely unpolished, but it gives me proper, regular writing practice, which is nice.
The Pig!
Two bits of Pig news. First is that the Pig is now translated into Norwegian (I’m finishing the PDF and it should go up today), and it will be released in Norway by EFN, which is the EFF there. It’s so great to have my book in the hands of a group like that… makes me feel like I did something useful with my time.
And relatedly, I’ve just received the Portuguese translation of the Pig book, which I’ll stitch together today and put up as well. A big thanks to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves for that!
(I’m half-expecting a few more translations in the next few days, too. Icelandic! Cool!)
The Crow!
The crow is being translated into Hebrew at the moment, which will present me with my biggest challenge yet… right-to-left text! It’s probably not as hard as I think, but it keeps me up at night. Well, either that or the espresso.
Also up is the Chinese crow book, done by Wei Xie, which looks really cool.
Oh, and I managed to send out the first batch of printed copies of the Crow yesterday, so check for yours. It took a bit longer than expected, but they look REALLY nice. I only wish I’d printed enough to keep a copy for myself 
The Panda!
My next kid book, Panda Apples, is just finishing text revisions now. It’s more of a silly book like the Pig one, so I think kids will like it a lot. I’m hoping to have a sample of it up later this week, and then I’ll finish it and get it released by mid-September. I’ve got special plans for it, which will probably delay the launch a tiny bit.
CopyCamp!
A mentioned before I was possibly going to CopyCamp… well it now appears that I am DEFINITELY going! I’m on the list of attendees at any rate (plus I have plane tickets etc, but the list is what counts). I just want to say a very big thanks to everyone at CopyCamp for helping make it happen… I don’t think I’ve looked forward to something this much since my wedding day. That sounds really pathetic, doesn’t it?
Day Switching
I’ve decided to make a few tiny schedule changes, which nobody cares about but me. First of all, I’ll be doing The Al Dente Code on Thursdays instead of Fridays now, because I obviously can’t wait till Friday anyway. That moves Philosophy Day to Friday, where it tends to be anyway. Wednesday is still Cubit day (that’s coming later today) and Monday is still Push day, and Tuesday will officially be called Action day, meaning I’ll try and do something useful with my time, like making Ze Frank a professional web celebrity etc. If all goes well, Tuesday will be the highlight of my week in the new year, when I’ll have a special arsenal in my war against… er… mediocrity?
And that, at the moment, is all I’ve got. I have to chase some clients for a while, and then I’ll post my Cubits masterpiece! Or, well, something.
Gare landed in the limo so hard he was sure he’d broken a few ribs. It wasn’t that Fandetti was trying to beat him up anymore, he just didn’t seem to have a keen grasp of what “reasonable force” was like. He plunked himself down into the seat next to Gare and immediately grabbed a glass of scotch from the minibar.
“Want one?” he asked, taking a sip.
“No thanks,” said Gare, “I try not to drink heavily before nine thirty on Mondays.”
“Pansy,” said Fandetti, and swallowed the rest in one gulp. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and stared seriously at Gare. “So what’s your partner told you about Mr Fandetti’s problem?”
Gare wanted to make a crack about speaking about oneself in the third person, but decided against it. He was going to admit to knowing nothing at all about Mr Fandetti’s problem, but realized by the twitch in the heavy man’s eye that that would be a tragic mistake.
“We find that it works best if you start from the beginning,” he bluffed, “because sometimes important clues come out each time you tell it.”
Fandetti gritted his teeth a bit, then leaned forward and dumped another very full glass of scotch into the glass. He swallowed half of it in one go, and then rested his lolling head on his fist as he launched into the story.
“Mr Fandetti had a girl, okay? A real classy one. Eyes like sapphires and a body he killed for. He’d'a done anything for her. Hell, he probably did. She was that kinda girl, you know?”
Gare nodded, though he really didn’t know. For all he knew, Fandetti could have been talking about a chihuahua dressed in a tutu. It was generally hard to take him seriously.
“So one day,” Fandetti continued drunkenly, “one day the girl, Maggie, she comes to Mr Fandetti and says she wants a pet or she’s gonna leave him. Leave him! Just like that! Can you believe it? So anyway, Mr Fandetti, he knows a good thing when he’s got one, so he says to Maggie, he says ‘Listen, if you want a pet, you got it, babe. Ain’t no need to go threatening things over a pet’. So he says to her, what kinda pet do you want? And you know what she says?”
Gare knew it was his turn to speak, but he really didn’t want to.
“A puppy?” he offered.
Mr Fandetti slapped a hand down on Gare’s knee so fast it made his bones crack. He bit his lip to keep from squeaking, tried to smile as Fandetti broke into laughter.
“That’s a good one! That’s what Mr Fandetti figured, too! But you know…” and then his face went dead serious, and Gare stopped smiling immediately, “… you know, that’s not what she wanted. She wanted a flamingo.”
“A flamingo?”
“Yeah. Long neck and all that.”
“I don’t think that’d make a very good pet,” muttered Gare.
“Nah, and it didn’t either. But what made Mr Fandetti really crazy…” (Gare tried not to laugh at this) “… was that she didn’t want just none regular flamingo, she wanted a BLUE flamingo!”
Dead stare. Gare was having a hard time coming up with something to say.
“I’m not finding you a blue flamingo, am I?”
Mr Fandetti started laughing again, but this time he grabbed Gare by the ear and pulled him very close, the smell of scotch mixed with searing pain and the realization that this might be a better moment than he would have after he told Fandetti that there’s no such thing as a blue flamingo.
“You’re finding the blue flamingo,” Fandetti growled, “and you’re findin’ Maggie too. I didn’t get her that bird just to have her run off anyway. You’re gettin’ them both back. And fast.”
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