The commandos herded the men into a school and the women and children into a church. The violence began before dawn. One of the soldiers, César Ibañez, heard the screams of girls begging for help. Several soldiers watched as Lt. César Adán Rosales Batres raped a girl in front of her family. Following their superior officer, other commandos started raping girls and women. ...

The commandos brought the villagers one by one to the center of the hamlet, near a dry well about 40 feet deep. Favio Pinzón Jerez, the squad's cook, and other soldiers reassured the captives that everything would be all right. They were going to be vaccinated. It was a routine health precaution, nothing to worry about.

Commando Gilberto Jordán drew first blood. He carried a baby to the well and hurled it to its death. Jordán wept as he killed the infant. Yet he and another soldier, Manuel Pop Sun, kept throwing children down the well.

The commandos blindfolded the adults and made them kneel, one at a time. They interrogated them about the rifles, aliases, guerrilla leaders. When the villagers protested that they knew nothing, soldiers hit them on the head with a metal sledgehammer. Then they threw them into the well. ... By the end of the afternoon, the well overflowed with corpses.

• Fri, 20:50: @cadigan Here's a trilogy for you: Lord Towel's Bane, The Towel War, The Towel That Preserves, #BookTowel #towelday
• Fri, 20:52: @cadigan Although, now that I look at it, Lord Foul's Towel might be the better title #BookTowel #towelday
• Fri, 23:14: RT @NREL: Sci-Fi No Longer, NREL Engineers Smart Homes - http://t.co/GHH3XyOK
• Sat, 00:30: I'm at Battelle Memorial Institute w/ @johnkuczek http://t.co/z0uQ4AUM

http://penny-arcade.com/2012/05/25/disruptive-technology

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2012-05-25&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/25

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/quick-useful-sandman-slipcase-post.html

A hasty post...

There's a slipcased set of Sandman on the way. It's going to be published in November. I'm so happy. This is something that I have been asking DC to make for a very long time, and I am genuinely thrilled it's going to exist. It will look almost like this. (If you look carefully you'll notice that the final book in the box shown here is not The Wake. That's because that edition of SANDMAN: The Wake has not been published yet.)

(Here's the Amazon listing for it -- they've dropped it from $200 to $125. And I'm sure there are other such deals elsewhere on the web.)

DC are also going to be selling the Slipcase with some copies of The Wake. So if you have the rest of the  books already, you can simply put them into the slipcase.

According to Bleeding Cool, retailers have until this weekend to get their orders in for November to guarantee that they'll get them. So if you want one, either if you want a copy of The Wake with a Slipcase, or the set of all the books, you should talk to your Local Comic Shop now. (How do you find your local comic shop? You could always use http://www.comicshoplocator.com/)

(The current edition of paperbacks contains the same colouring as the Absolute editions, although, obviously not all the extra material in each of the Absolutes. If you already bought the Absolute Sandmans 1-4, feel proud of yourself. You are not required to buy the books again. You are never required to buy again what you already have.)

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2012-05-25

Cthulhu Dice Metäl

• Bronze with no ink – Stock #131328A
• Pewter with no ink – Stock #131328B
• Nickel with Neon Green ink – Stock #131328C

Munchkin Zombies 3 – Hideous Hideouts

Nowhere Is Safe . . . From YOU!

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20120525

• Fri, 01:10: Tough problem, which is why we're working on it // Battelle Engineers Work on Fix at Chernobyl http://t.co/pQkojhJs
• Fri, 04:41: This is a great example of how customer service is done correctly in a networked environment. http://t.co/jt5BOniO

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp05242012.shtml

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2012-05-24&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2012-05-24

• Castellan (English Edition) rules PDF.
• Castellan (International Edition) rules PDF.

• The PDFs say "DRAFT" across the pages. This is on purpose and will not appear in the final rules.
• The playtester list is not yet included in the rules. We will add the list before the game goes to print.

• Thu, 01:20: RT @Battelle: Battelle's improved icing spray system to certify helicopters examined by G Warwick of Aviation Week http://t.co/wjnUwqUU ...

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wwdn/~3/e5vpBn4hDGw/in-which-i-have-a-realization-and-i-am-grateful.html

In the precious few moments I had today between work-related responsibilities, I stopped into my comic shop, and I saw this:

I made this!

I've been so busy, and I finished my part of this project so long ago, I wasn't prepared for how proud and excited I was when I saw a book that I had written in my own comic shop, right there down the shelf from Brubaker, Wood, Willingham, Fraction, Waid, and other comic book authors I respect and admire.

When I bought some copies, Amy (who some of you know from Tabletop) held it up and said, "Is this your first published work as a comic author?"

I thought for a second and said, "I've written manga before, but this is my first comic book."

And that's when it hit me: Today, I am a published comic book author. A real one, and if I work really hard, and have a little bit of luck, it's only the beginning.

I've been traveling and working so much the past few months, I haven't been able to slow down and look around very often (life moves as fast as Ferris Beuller warned us), so I haven't been able to just stop, reflect, and be grateful for what I have. I don't mean to suggest that I'm taking things for granted, or under the delusion that I'm some kind of big deal or anything stupid like that, I just mean that I can't think about more than what is immediately in front of me until it's done, and there's been a long list of somethings in front of me for most of this year (which is awesome; it's great to be busy making a living doing what I love.)

But it's all too easy to get so overwhelmed with all the responsibility, we forget to take a moment to be grateful for the opportunities we have.

Today, I am grateful.

And now I am going back to work.

http://penny-arcade.com/2012/05/23/the-foxtrot-papa-of-bravo-alpha

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wwdn/~3/HIBXmfaQhFA/something-stirs-and-something-tries-and-starts-to-climb-toward-the-light.html

I worked on [REDACTED] today, and had more fun than I thought possible. I can't say anything more until July.

Tomorrow, I work on [REDACTED], which is different from [REDACTED], but should be really awesome, too. I can't believe I get to spend two days working with [ACTORS].

(It was a lot easier to talk about my job before the studios became obsessed with secrecy.)

So a couple of quick things before I get back to preparing for [REDACTED]:

• I'm going to the Phoenix Comicon this weekend. I'll be on a few panels, and I'm doing a special show on Saturday night.
• Next week, Felicia and I are going to Origins in Columbus, to play games and talk about Tabletop.
• My testing of the theory that it is not possible to have too many gaming dice continues, so if you're coming to either one of these cons and want to give me dice that I can add to my ever-growing collection, I'd love to have them.
• Today, the comic I wrote with Felicia for The Guild comes out. It's called FAWKES, and it is about what happens between the end of Season 4 and [SPOILER] in Season 5. It's getting generally good reviews, which delights me. The only negative is that I didn't spend several pages filling in people who don't watch The Guild why they should care about the story and who everyone is, which is a little silly, because I didn't write it for those people (who aren't going to buy it, anyway.)I'm especially happy with the artwork and both covers, and super-grateful to Dark Horse for supporting it.

Finally, my beloved Los Angeles Kings are in the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time since 1993. This is what I looked like last night after they won in overtime:

 

Not actually taken last night, but I do this whenever the Kings win.

 

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/23

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2012-05-23&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2012-05-23

• Particularly long comment threads now collapse with the alert “...and [#] more comments.” Just click on that alert to see the rest of the comments. Here’s what this looks like:


• Notification emails now hide any content that was already placed inside an lj-cut instead of displaying the entire entry.


• Social Capital is now displayed for all communities on the profile page.


• You can now embed the Spotify player into your journal or community style.


• Personal userheads are now available for purchase. A personal userhead is of your own design and is unique to you, unavailable to anyone else. Purchase as many personal userheads as you like; each costs 5,000 LJ FunBux™, and is good for five years. Learn more.

• Scheduled entries should no longer return errors or double-post.


• Domain mapping should no longer force redirection to the LiveJournal login page.


• The format=light URL modifier works on entry pages again.


• Comment notification emails will send even if the entry has a poll.


• The "Music" section on the edit entries page will let you delete the entire text field.


• The help link next to “Do not add to friends pages and RSS” on the update page now links to the correct FAQ.


• The list of journals and communities added by default for new users has changed to news and lj_releases for non-Cyrillic users.


• Missing navigation items in the Classic journal style have re-appeared.


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• The bold/italic/strikethrough buttons in the site default commenting scheme should no longer cause cursor positioning problems in Chrome.


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frank

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20120523

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp05182012.shtml

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2012-05-22&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wwdn/~3/SFzv2mokFaM/this-is-how-i-know-tabletop-has-arrived.html

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2012-05-22

Munchkin The Guild

Munchkin'd!

Munchkin Cthulhu Kill-O-Meter

Back In Print

GURPS Basic Set: Characters

Illuminati

Munchkin 2 - Unnatural Axe

Please check my latest pic up for auction on Ebay!

please click image to go to auction.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/preamble-to-photograph.html

This is a very long preamble to a photograph.


When Amanda and I were first going out together we would spend a lot of time on the phone, talking about big real things. We don't talk on the phone anywhere nearly as much any more, and when we do talk on the phone we're more likely to be trying to figure out the logistics of where we are in the world and how we can warp space and time in order to be in the same place relatively soon than about our hearts or our lives. That's just the way things are, and when we're together, late at night, in bed, we still talk about all the big real things. 

But we used to talk on the phone. One night I said something to Amanda about my life, and beds, and the sizes of beds, and she got very quiet. I thought she was crying on the phone, which seemed odd, as I'd not said anything (to my mind) about hearts.

A week or so later, she announced on Twitter that she was writing a song. She posted photos of herself after each verse. It seemed like the whole of Twitter was cheering her on.

I got to Boston a few days later, and she played me her song, on the huge grand piano in her cramped apartment. She'd taken a tiny fragment of my life and made it into something else, a story about a couple, from joy to death, exhibited, as in a legal case or at an inquest, as a sequence of beds. I cried when she played it. 

She asked me to give it a title, because I had inspired it, and I didn't want to give it a clever title, and so I called it "The Bed Song", and the name stuck.

It's one of the songs on her new album.

She's asked a number of artists to make art to go along with the book, asked if I would do something for "The Bed Song". I thought about what I wanted to make, realised it was a sequence of five photographs, mirroring the five verses/exhibits in the song. And that, while I love taking photographs (my lomo cameras are some of my favourite possessions) I did not know how I would take these photographs...

Fortunately, a few days later there was a gathering in Barrington Illinois to honour Gene Wolfe, and my friend Kyle Cassidy was there with his beautiful actress wife Trillian. I asked Kyle if he'd like to collaborate on making art: I'd write a script, describing the images, as I would have done if I was writing a comics script. He'd take the photos. Kyle said yes. Then I told him the deadline we were on...

And that we'd need people of all ages, willing to be photographed, in couples (all but one), naked in a bed.

Kyle set off, undaunted.

Kyle is an amazing photographer. We found volunteers through friends and through Twitter. It was relatively easy to find people to pose in their twenties and thirties and forties... finding older models was harder. I was hugely pleased when my friends Samuel R. Delany and Mia Wolff agreed to pose for the last  photograph we needed. 

Many of the people who had their photos taken told Kyle that it was a life-changing experience for them, and I can believe it.

The photographs were beautiful. The sequence of photographs worked as a story. We were happy, about everything except...  Kyle had taken too many good photographs.

Each photograph was a piece of art. Amanda's doing an art book already, of the art that's been made for the album, but we desperately wanted to see Kyle's photos reproduced at the size and at the same quality as they'll be hung in the art galleries they'll be hanging in this summer, during Amanda's art tour. And we wanted the photos that weren't just part of the set of five, that would hang in the gallery and be part of the art book, to be seen.

And Amanda was putting together a Kickstarter (it's at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palmer-the-new-record-art-book-and-tour). It was going to need incentives at various levels. And if the incentive level was priced high enough then we could actually afford to make the kind of book we dreamed of -- something with the level of art and craft you'd find in the impressive oversized Taschen photo books. Although there would be significantly fewer photos than the $15,000 Helmut Newton SUMO book (but then, it also wouldn't need to come with its own display stand).

So that's what we're doing. We're making a maximum of 666 of them (to commemorate the % by which the Evening With Neil and Amanda Kickstarter exceeded its level). If the demand is less, we may make significantly less. We want copies for our models, and a few for ourselves. You'll get one if you support the Kickstarter at the $1000 level or above (so each of the 35 people hosting a house party, for example, will get a copy), and you also get all the goodies from lower levels as well.

Right now we're just finalising the specs -- Kyle wants a lock on the box (or slipcase) it comes in, for example, but we need to decide what kind of lock...

There will be photographs,  reproduced at the same size (HUGE -- the book is planned to be the same size as the recent oversized Little Nemo Sunday pages) and quality (amazing) as the actual prints. There will be an essay by me about the song, what inspired it and what it means to me. There will be the script for Kyle and the emails. There will be a reproduction of Amanda's handwritten lyrics. And we will sign it, and limit it, and I very much hope that each of the people who winds up with a copy is made very happy by it.

Of all of the things in the Kickstarter campaign, it's the most likely to ship last, because the production process of objects like this is always beset with nightmares. We want it fancy and beautiful and unique, but each fancy thing we add means there's something else that can go wrong or delay things, and that printers and bookbinders and boxmakers will simply not be able to do what we're asking, meaning we'll have to find someone who can, or wait, or send something back to be redone.

Right now, Kyle is taking the handful of last photographs for the book. And as we were talking about it, I realised, with a creeping horror, that the final photo had, inevitably, to be me and Amanda. Amanda has been in many photographs naked, has no nudity taboo that I've ever noticed. I'm English. I have a nudity taboo. 

Kyle took several shots of us in Philadelphia last week, in our hotel room. Some of them we had the covers over us, in others (the scary ones -- well, scary for me) we didn't.  I held Amanda and did my best to go to sleep and not to think about the camera on a stick far above us.

I've not seen any of the photos Kyle took of us without bedclothes, yet.  I'm nervous as hell about seeing them, but also certain that we'll find the one to be the final image, and glad it will only be in a very limited edition book. But the photo that Kyle just sent over showing Amanda and me together, under the covers, with me mostly asleep, is beautiful.

And this is it.

It's the only one of the photos that's in colour, too. I think we may use it as the image on the limitation page, the one we all sign.

And, with Kyle's permission, I'm putting it up here.