Calling in to post some recent pictures. Please feel free to invent your own captions/storyline.

Oh, and I also tweet about politics. Stuff like this:

The problem for the hardcore GOP voter

is that they know they hate Obama,

but if the economy booms back,

they're out of easy reasons why.

I mean: he fixes a staggering economy,

nails Osama (which Bush didn't do cos he was hard for Saddam),

and has a mess of foreign policy wins.

Or this:

House GOP holds hearing on birth control,

decline to include anyone capable of giving birth:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/contraception-hearing-house-democrats-walk-out_n_1281730.html

A part of me believes that speaking out politically isn’t just a right; it may even, to a degree, be an obligation, part of what makes democracy work. Certainly in New England, the (very old) tradition of the public meeting, where anyone is free to get up and spout off for a couple minutes, is one that seems to have led to an engaged public, a citizenry that feels (rightly) their voice matters. (Small point of pride: in the New England states, voter turnout typically hovers around 70% in Presidential election years… a rate very few states in the rest of the Union come close to matching)

Lots of people don’t agree with my take on things. That don’t confront me none. I even kind of like it when people disagree. You don’t use your voice every now and then, you might forget you have one.

I say all that, though, to say this: anyone looking to scrap with me politically on twitter, is gonna be disappointed… because for the most part I just won’t do it.

If I decline to argue – and 95% of the time that’s how it’s going to be – it’s not because I am afraid I’m wrong and you’re right and I can’t bear it; it’s not because I lack confidence in my beliefs; it’s not because confrontation makes me sad.

The reason I won’t fight with you is two-fold. Firstly: I simply don’t have the time. If I take a half an hour one day to engage with someone who fiercely disagrees with me about, say, evolution, or contraception, it’s possible I’ll come away feeling it was time well spent. Maybe I’ll feel entertained or vindicated or have learned something. But if I take a half hour every day to engage with someone who fiercely disagrees with me about some damn thing, it will detract from more necessary work: my writing, my reading, and being a dad.

But there’s another, more important reason, why I won’t argue with you by way of tweet. Twitter is not a message board. While it is a wonderful place to toss off a one-liner, an observation, a link, or an opinion, it’s an atrocious place to attempt an argument (a point actually first made by a pal of mine in a private email – he knows who he is).

Marshaling a successful argument or counter-argument typically involves presenting facts to support your point-of-view, and criticism of the other person’s facts, or at least an attempt to explain how they’re misinterpreting the evidence. None of that is easily done within the 140-character limit that Twitter sets on individual tweets. Perfectly reasonable lines of debate, run through Twitter’s magical shrinky-dink engine, become agonizingly simplistic: if u r so against contraception cos gOd don’t want u to waste spurm why r u such a jerk off all teh time? Or: nobamas policies have been an obamanation lol hope his obama-scare death panels will put me out of my misery soon lol.

Twitter is less like a message board, more like texting a friend… and anyone who has ever tried to have an argument by way of text message already knows how frustrating and futile that experience can be. I mean, OMG: #fail. :-p Right?

So here’s the deal: I imagine I’ll go right on mouthing off politically over on Twitter – I’ve always kind of liked mouthing off – and if you disagree with me, feel free to go ahead. It won’t bother me – I might even like it – and as an added bonus, there’s an outstanding chance I’ll be letting you have the last word.

That would be the first issue of their new series, Road Rage, an adaptation of two short stories: “Throttle,” which I wrote with my father, and Richard Matheson’s classic, “Duel” (without which, “Throttle” wouldn’t exist). Chris Ryall handled the scripting duties, and Nelson Daniel executed the kinetic visuals… there are a lot of guys eating highway at high speed in this mother, and Nelson got every spray of flying gravel and pulverized bone on the page.

Look fer it in your local comic store, and online through the ComiXology Comics app.

For those of you who aren’t big comics readers, you can also listen to “Throttle” and “Duel” in their original incarnations, as short stories; the audiobook (also titled Road Rage) is available on the iTunes stores, and through a variety of other online retailers. “Throttle” in short story form will also be available in the near future as an eBook… stay tuned.

Here’s what I’m listening to right now, ordered by intensity of obsession:

That would be “Gold on the Ceiling” by The Black Keys. The Keys are having their Bruce Springsteen moment right now, as they make the leap from beloved cult objects to stadium superstars. As far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t have happened to a more right buncha guys. They’ve taken what they learned from Led Zeppelin, Motown, and yes, The White Stripes, and expanded on that musical vision by bringing in hooky organs and crunchy Our-Team-Is-Gonna-Win rhythms. All that, and a drummer who is an undead ringer for Johnny from Night of the Living Dead. How can you reasonably ask for more?

Did someone say Bruuuuuuuuuce?

Moments of national urgency and tension always seem to bring out the best in Bruce Springsteen’s music – odd, but true – and “We Take Care Of Our Own” is the proof: an anthem about the difference between America’s promise and America’s reality that is very much of a piece with “Born in the U.S.A.”

Speaking of Jersey boys:

Here’s a little “Sugar” from The Horrible Crowes, Brian Fallon’s other band, when he’s taking a break from his day job as the frontman of The Gaslight Anthem. This song is like a ’65 Mustang: sleek, sexy, full of dreamy lazy power, and plenty of muscle under the hood. Pretty much exactly the thing to listen to at 3 AM when you’re too wired to sleep, and too exhausted to move.

One more? Well, there’s this…

… tell you what, after you’ve heard this song once, you’ll find it devilishly difficult to get it out of your head. Whether that is a blessing or a curse is a whole ‘nother question.

What about you? What’s gettin’ you off, in a musical sense, right now? Go ahead and post it in the comments thread. Include links if you want… you may get briefly held up by my spam-guard, but I’ll check in now and then, to set your comments free.

What can I say? It looked good next to the bookcases.

Booth constructed by Israel Skelton. Pictures by Shane Leonard:

OhmiGod it’s full of stars… !

And this photo came out a bit wibbly-wobbly, sorry:

Just a reminder that on Saturday, February 4th (uh, that would be tomorrow), I’ll be at Jetpack Comics in Rochester, New Hampshire, from 2 – 5 PM, to play the Locke & Key card game with anyone who shows up and wants in. It’s not hard to pick up, it’s relatively fast to play (30 minutes a game), and stands well on its own… no knowledge of the comic is necessary. That said, if you are a faithful Locke & Key reader, I think you’ll find gameplay an entertaining look at life in Keyhouse. The game isn’t officially out yet, so this is the very first place to play.

While I’m hanging around, I’ll also be signing whatever Jetpack has in stock for me, including the latest issue of Locke & Key, and copies of the über-sexy leather-bound luxe edition of Welcome to Lovecraft. Can’t make it, but want a signed goodie? Give Jetpack a call: 603 330-XMEN. They’re happy to ship your stuff, and I’m happy to scribble on it.

There’s lots more info at the Jetpack Comics link. Hope to see you there.

Your local comic shop will have a whole heap of new Locke & Key items on their shelves tomorrow (if they’re cool, that is…). First and foremost, there’s this:

Issue 4 of Clockworks drops tomorrow, and continues the story of the Tamers of the Tempest on their trip to the Black Door, in the lowest reaches of the Drowning Cave. Gabe and I have raised a lot of questions in the first 24 issues of Locke & Key, but by the time Clockworks is over, there should be only one important question left to answer: how is this thing going to end?

Then there’s this, a reprint of Locke & Key: Guide to the Known Keys, with its standalone story, “Open the Moon.” For those of you who aren’t already reading Locke & Key – or who maybe don’t much care for comics at all – this is a great place to test the waters. For those of you who are already fans of the series, and who missed it on its last printing, I think you might enjoy this standalone, and the expanded guide in the back pages offers a lot of interesting key related trivia.

Last – but definitely not least – there’s this:

For real: this is the sexiest edition of any of my stories ever. Couldn’t be more happy about it, or pleased that IDW decided to do it. It’s a luxe edition of Welcome to Lovecraft, with the art printed full-size… that is, at the same size as Gabe’s original pages.

All the original scripts are included as well, for people who are interested in what the story looks like before Gabe rolls up his sleeves and brings these characters to life:

Aspring comic writers might also find them of interest; I work in a format I learned from Warren Ellis, and which is so clear-headed and well-thought out, it’s hard even for a klutz like me to fuck it up.

All that, and oh Christ, it smells good, too. It smells like the library in Keyhouse: leather, fine paper, ghosts.

As if that wasn’t enough, this will be out in just a few more days:

I’m working on a plan now to do some appearances where those who are interested can turn up and play Cryptozoic’s card game with me; with luck we should be able to host a couple matches at Wondercon in Anaheim as well. More on this in the near future.

UPDATE: The very near future, as it turns out.

I’ll be at Jetpack Comics, in Rochester, NH, this Saturday (February 4th), from 2-5. They have some advance copies of the game, so we’ll be breaking them open and playing a few matches. And I’ll be signing any and all Locke & Key goodies people have on hand. Many more details here.

I’ll be playing Locke & Key at Wondercon in Anaheim this March, for sure, and it’s possible IDW & Cryptozoic might set up some more, unh, playdates for me on the East Coast, so stay tuned. I will be for sure writing more about the game when it officially drops, next week.

How do I definite habitual gamer? If you spend an hour a day fiddling with Farmville or Words with Friends or flinging pissed-off birds at towers, that’s a habit… and it’s a habit I think more people my age have than not.

Nor do I necessarily think the game habit is inherently bad in-and-of-itself, just as I don’t assume an hour spent reading every day is inherently good. For example: there’s a huge difference between spending an hour reading political blogs, and getting yourself worked up in a lather over people who disagree with you, and spending an hour with your feet up, reading Adam Smith’s the Wealth of Nations, or David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas, or Elmore Leonard’s Raylan.

So too, as Ben’s article, “The Zynga Abyss,” suggests, not all games are equal: some are as intellectually refreshing as a good hard jog, while others amount to the mental equivalent of eating Doritoes in your underwear in front of reality TV… a sad, maybe even vaguely destructive waste of your limited time on the planet.

“The Zynga Abyss,” did get me thinking about what games I play, and their impact on my life and imagination, so I thought I’d run down my big digital time sucks, and rate them on their relative “evil”-ness. These all refer to iPhone/iPad games, which is where I do 98% of my gaming these days.

1) Considering that Ben Jackson singles out Zynga as the main offender when it comes to creating “evil” games, it’s worth a snicker to note that my own favorite game is a Zynga creation: Words with Friends.

I play Words with Friends the way Nickelback plays power chords: pretty much all the time, everywhere I go, to the point of forehead-smacking monotony. But while I agree with Ben’s criticism of Zynga games like Farmville, I’m inclined to feel Words is one of the good guys. It is, at bottom, a reinvention of Scrabble, just different enough to keep Zynga safe from Hasbro’s copyright lawyers. The chat-feature is lurvely – a great way to connect with a friend or family member – and the game itself involves a lot of wrestling with vocabulary and tactics. And because it can be played in short little bites – a few minutes here, a few minutes there – it isn’t intrusive, but is available when you need to take a break from work or the household chores. Zynga can go and feel guilty about making people Farmville junkies, but they done good here.

Rating? Not-evil. Also very fun.

2) Samurai: Bloodshow is a weird Franken-game for iOS… part-tower defense like Plants vs. Zombies, part chess match, part card trading game like that staple of the early 90s, Magic: The Gathering.

The object is simple enough: build an army (using different kinds of soldiers drawn from the legends of feudal Japan), and battle to overwhelm your enemy on a grid-like board. Gameplay allows for both single-player and online matches. Within these tightly constricted limits, the game allows for a lot of creativity, as you build different armies with different abilities and different methods of assault and defense.

There are deficiencies, however. Because the game offers no way to chat with your friends during play, you might as well be playing the computer’s AI; for a social game, it isn’t very social. Also, you win cards by defeating opponents online, or by conquering levels in single-player mode. But anyone with a few bucks burning a hole in their wallet can just buy the cards they want, and I’ve often run into dudes online who obviously built their mercenary armies the old fashioned way: they paid for ‘em. It can be a bummer to get trampled by someone who clobbered you not by virtue of their winning strategy, but by way of their momma’s credit card.

Rating? Maybe a little evil, actually, but only if you feel the need to buy your way to the top. Oh, and probably playing an hour of Samurai: Bloodshow online is not as great for you as, say, playing an hour of rummy with an actual friend who can talk to you.

3) Then there’s Tilt to Live.

In Tilt to Live, you play a chrome pointy thing, racing around avoiding red blobby things, and destroying them with zappy-explody-shooty things. It’s a twitch game, not a thinking game, and it is addictive – seriously addictive. Also, as far as I can see, it has no point beyond surviving as long as you can. It’s also repetitive, but not in a way that has ever led me to tire of it. I love this at least as much as I loved playing wallball when I was nine… dodging that fatal crushing blow is its own simple pleasure.

It may be stupid – it may be addictive – but I’m not sure it would meet Ben’s definition of evil… not, at least, if played in moderation (I usually have a dozen games a day, but given the rapid nature of game play, that’s still maybe only comes to twenty minutes). A “Good” game in Ben’s article would be a game that allows you to pursue your own agenda, building a skill set to achieve mastery, and accumulating satisfaction and happiness along the way; an “Evil” game is one that rewards you for pursuing the game-maker’s agenda, adding to their customer base, buying items for success, and playing the game on their schedule instead of your own.

With that in mind, I feel like Tilt to Live is only evil if you aren’t mainlining this mother. Oh, and it’s fun. It’s so fun.

When I started writing this, I wasn’t sure how my own gaming habit would rate. But I feel like maybe I’m not doing too badly… especially considering that I don’t give any one of these games more than twenty minutes a day (you may disagree – you may think I’m a hopeless slob – and if so you should use the comments thread to tell me. I can take it. Go on, lay it on me).

But my feelings about these games would shift radically, I think, if I felt compelled to play an hour of Tilt to Live a day, instead of just 20 minutes, or if I had spent $20 – 40 building my armies in Samurai: Bloodshow. My basic notion here is that your gaming should be a nice break from the daily struggle… it shouldn’t be the daily struggle itself. If that’s how you feel, you’re probably doing it wrong (Oh, and I’ve done it wrong, for sure – but my days of playing Contra until 2 AM are well, well behind me).

What about you, guys? What are you playing? What’s good? What’s to be avoided? Anything in your gaming lifestyle making you feel skeevy about yourself? Let me know in the comments thread. I’ll check back in a little while to see what you said. Right now I have to go and make a move in Words.

I spend a lot of time scribbling about ghosts and devils and inflatable children and lake monsters. When I’m writing I believe in all of it. How can I not? It’s happening right in front of me, and I’m just taking notes, like a sportswriter with a front row seat at a fight. When I’m writing, to be honest, belief doesn’t even come into it. It’s an act of concentrated dreaming while awake and for the most part, we don’t argue with our dreams, we go with them.

But I got wondering how much of this stuff I could actually buy into, when I’m not playing professional make-believe. More than that: I wanted something concrete, something tangible, some marker of how open-minded/gullible I really am. And thus… the Mulder Score.

To figure out your own personal Mulder Score, work your way down the following list of paranormal possibilities. When you believe in something, you get a Y. When you don’t, you get an N. When you think, “well, maaaaaybe,” you get a % (for 50-50). Go ahead, use the comments thread as a scratch pad to keep track of your results.

• Horoscopes

• Ghosts

• Auras

• Telekensis

• Telepathy

• Fortune-Telling

• Bigfoot

• Nessie

• UFOs

• Souls

For every Y you get 2 points. For every N you get 0. A % is worth 1 point. Add it up, and here’s what it means:

0 – Congratulations, you have less imagination than a turnip; you also have less nutritional value. I’m sure you will enjoy your life, even though you already know it is, in fact, a big meaningless jerkoff.

1 – 4 – You are Velma. If Bigfoot was roaring in your face, you would swipe off his rubber mask, and then shout, “Mr. Petersen!” Also you look both sensible and sort of hot in orange sweaters and pleated skirts.

5 – 8 – You are Scully. Find your Mulder and you find contentment, for at least 7 seasons.

9 – 11 – Skeptic by day, playing with the Ouija board in your pajamas by night. You know that crop circles are complete and utter horseshit… but those Stonehenge guys were up to some serious druid shit.

12 – 17 – You’re Mulder. Find your Scully and NEVER LET HER GO. Or him, if you happen to be a she.

18 – 19 – Ruh-ro… you’re Shaggy. You’re living in a van, subsisting on dog snacks, and sure that THE GHOST OF CAPTAIN CUTLER IS OUT THERE WATCHING YOU RIGHT NOW!!! I’d try and convince you that Nessie can’t possibly be real (there’d have to be 400+ of them in the loch to have a steady breeding population), but you’d think I was just a government agent spreading misinformation. And you’d be right.

20 – Dingdingding! You win the grand prize in today’s contest: it’s a psychic prophylactic, designed to protect your sensitive psyche from telepathic bombardment. No, no, ignore the fact that it looks like a large sheet of tinfoil. It is, in fact, a creation of ADVANCED SCIENCE. Total Area 51 stuff. Just wrap it around your head. Yeah, go on, make a hat out of it. Here. Have some extra sheets. They’ll look great taped into your windows.

Oh, what’d I score? Mm, turns out I’m a bit of a Scully-type. I made a 5. I’m a maybe on ghosts, telepathy, and UFOs, and a yes on souls.

Go ahead, use the comments thread to work out your own score. Gimme the full report. I want to know what kind of weirdos/hardassed skeptics frequent this site.

And be sure to tune in next week, when I’ll teach you how to calculate your Doctor Score.

The Book

What can I tell you about The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet? This motherfucker rocked my world; I read it twice last year, and I have a framed print of the book cover hung over my desk. David Mitchell is unsurpassed in his ability to craft (a) vivid, startling characters, (b) deliriously beautiful sentences, (c) narratives that charge ahead like a team of runaway horses. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that taught me so much about the art of writing (okay, I lie; I do remember; it was True Grit by Charles Portis; I have the cover of that one framed and hung over my desk as well).

If all that doesn’t sell you on it, then try this: it’s a horror novel. It is. The lead villain, Abbot Enomoto, is pretty clearly a wicked sorcerer, and maybe even a kind of vampire. Go get yourself a copy.

The Episode

Leave it to Neil Gaiman to write the smartest, scariest, funnest, and most emotionally satisfying episode of Doctor Who to come along in the last few years. “The Doctor’s Wife” is the story of a desperately lonely man in love with a magic blue box, and like a lot of Neil’s stories, it has the quiet, timeless simplicity of fable.

The Movie

I sat down to watch Let Me In predisposed to dislike it. This is, of course, the second adaptation of John Lindqvist’s novel, Let The Right One In; I thought the original Swedish-language adaptation of the novel was a staggering masterpiece, and that it couldn’t be improved upon, and that it was a mistake to try.

Wrong. Let Me In turned out to be great in every way a horror film can be great, and is a vampire story for people who are sick to death of vampire stories. Director Matt Reeves manages to make a film which recaptures everything that was wonderful about Spielberg’s early pictures: unbearable suspense and child-like wonder, grounded in the details of noisy, chaotic suburban life. But this is not just easy homage; it’s also an intensely scary and personal picture, about loneliness, and bravery, and feeling that you love someone enough to die for them. What a shame more people didn’t go see it when it was in theaters.

The Comic

Ah, fuckin’ Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Outfit was the comic of the year, no question. In the spirit of full disclosure, it should be noted here that Cooke and I both work for the same publisher, IDW. You’ll have to trust me when I say that didn’t influence my opinion; I’m just calling ‘em as I see ‘em.

The Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake) novels have been adapted, I dunno, probably a dozen times for the films. Leading men from Lee Marvin to Mel Gibson have done their bit as Stark’s bank robber with a heart of barbed wire. But no one until Cooke ever really captured the chilling, cruel, and seductive feel of Stark’s narratives: stories about bad men and women who use each other and are used in turn. Cooke writes and draws with the grim focus of a man with a blowtorch, cutting his way into a vault; there’s enough heat in these pages to melt steel.

The Album

I mentioned this in my last post as well… El Camino dropped in the last days of 2011, but it only takes a couple of listens to recognize a rock classic. The Black Keys rock out like Muddy Waters sitting in with T. Rex, with big stadium rocking beats, and sleazy-hot riffs. I don’t think it’s underselling it to say this is one of these albums that is going to hang around for decades, like Back in Black, or Sticky Fingers. There isn’t one track in the bunch you can skip over. Ask me what I’m listening to 12 months from now – I bet El Camino will still be a part of my mix.

What about you guys? There’s a comments thread here. Unload. Tell me what you loved. I COMMAND IT.