Yesterday went really well. I solved several computer issues and, gloriously, Mac OS X is running very well on my system these days. I also made some important progress on the Adepts chapter for UA2, and got some Avatar work underway as well.

Today I had the pleasure of commissioning some art from Dream Lord–otherwise known as Haroudo Xavier. He’s an amazing photomontage artist in Brazil who is a devoted fan of Unknown Armies. For the last year or so he’s been creating a series of graphics for use as desktop pictures on your computer, each based on a school of magick in UA. Now he’s doing nine original works for the UA2 rulebook. You can see a few of his existing UA-inspired works at his online gallery, along with many other creations. He’s done a lot more of these UA pieces than are on that page, but I haven’t found a directory of them all on his site. Gorgeous work in any event, and I’m pleased to have him in the book.

Today and tomorrow I’m working on the Delta Green computer game project. My task at present is prepping the second round of publicity for the game. I seem to be serving as de facto marketing director for the project, which is fine by me. This is the round where we release screenshots. Instead of just emailing screenshots to the news sites, I’m setting up a dossier of “found” documents from DG. So I’m writing a couple of field reports based on the screenshot images, and am dummying them up with handwritten annotations and so forth. I think I’ll also create some audio bits–wiretapped phone conversations and so forth. The point is to create a fun, bush-league Blair Witch-style little publicity project that’ll be more enjoyable and noteworthy than the usual press release + screenshots would be. It should all come together in the next three weeks.

I spent the evening in Karen’s studio while she was at woodworking class. I scanned eighteen of her Greece & Mongolia paintings tonight, which is good progress–though there are something like fifty works all together to get done. After her class we had mediocre Thai food for dinner.

That came about because for breakfast I’d had soup from QFC, the local grocery store chain. They have those big pots of soup steaming all day, and they’re actually not bad. The soup is supplied by a company near Snohomish called Stock Pot Soups. I drive by them every time I visit Jesper. This morning I saw one of their offerings in QFC described as “Coconut milk, curry, chicken with rice,” and I thought: Tom Kah Gai! That’s one of my favorite soups, a Thai preparation that is just delicious, and it is indeed coconut milk, curry, chicken, and spices. So I tried Stock Pot’s version and discovered that while yes, it was clearly inspired by Tom Kah Gai, they felt the need to put cheese in it.

That’s right. Coconut milk, curry, chicken, and cheese.

I can only guess that their thinking ran like this: “Well, Tom Kah Gai is kind of orange and creamy-looking, and when our customers see orange and creamy-looking they read that as a cheese soup, like cheddar broccoli. So let’s put cheese in it!”

The result wasn’t exactly terrible, but it wasn’t exactly Tom Kah Gai. Sadly, the Thai restaurant’s Tom Kah Gai wasn’t so hot either. It’s just been a day of soup failures.

Friday morning, bright and early, Karen and I and her studio partner Mary are blowing town for Mazama. This is some sort of little ski village on the eastern side of the Cascade mountains, and during the winter it’s about a four-hour drive since the passes are snowed in. Karen and her circle of friends have been going to Mazama for a weekend for several years now, but this is the first time I’m going. She keeps muttering darkly about me and cross-country skiing. I’ve always viewed a ski as the shortest distance between me and a broken leg, but we’ll see how it goes. Her housemate Noah is going and bringing his PowerBook, and since he’s not a big winter-sports person either we’ve made secret plans to bring an Ethernet crossover cable and play kill-crazy games of Aliens vs. Predator, no doubt to the disgust of the other ten hardy souls in the big cabin we’re staying in.

On the way we’re taking an extra hour to swing through a town called Omac, where Mary needs to do something or other. Every time they mention Omac I want to laugh. OMAC was a short-lived Jack Kirby comic book from DC in the early 1970s, around the time of his “New Gods” phase. (Those of you who understand that sentence, meet me by the chemical sheds.) It’s an acronym that stood for One Man Army Corps, and OMAC was some sort of cyborg warrior badass guy in a dystopian near-future. I’ve never actually read any issues of OMAC, but we had them at the comic-book store I worked at in high school and the name stuck with me because the cover to the first issue was so incredibly freaking weird. Don’t believe me? Here it is. OMAC is the guy with the mohawk.

And because it took me so much Google searching to find that graphic, here is an awesomely obsessive write-up of the entire series. And here is, and I shit you not, OMAC fan fiction.

So on Friday, I’m going to Omac. Oh yeah. Can’t wait.

Speaking of Thai food and obsessive internet presences, I love this web site. It’s for a Thai restaurant just down the street from my house. They opened about four or five years ago, and for ages I’d see the banner hanging outside that said: “VISIT US ON THE INTERNET! THAIDUSIT.NET!” And I couldn’t figure out why they had a web site. Then I finally went to it, and I still don’t know why they have a web site. But it’s fun to look at. Go straight for the Tour page, where you can see photos of the cool shrine outside the front door and, of course, read about the Thai Rock ‘n Roll of Chamawong Suriyachan, who was apparently the lead singer of a band called All Purpose Adhesive before coming to the U.S. It’s all too much. But the food is very good and their Thai ice tea is fantastic–that’s a potent tea made with sweetened condensed milk because, hey, why not?

OMAC!!!!! Let’s see that again!!!!!

Oh I crack myself up. OMAC!!!!!