I haven’t had a lot of time to be online this week. In between meetings, dealing with non-specific evening issues, not feeling all that great, and the beginning of NaNoWriMo (giving it another shot, this time with…an outline!), I just haven’t had much blogging inclination.

I have seen/heard a couple of things worth passing on that amused, entertained, or enlightened me, which I shall pass along now.

♦ – Amanda Marcotte draws a nice big shiny circle around the particular hypocracy surrounding the fact that the folks who will be starting up their annual “War on Christmas” whining any day now have just finished up another year of trying to wage war on Halloween.

♦ – Through links from both wil wheaton and the Pope of France, I was introduced to an animated adaptation of the greatest of all Chick Tracts, Dark Dungeons

♦ – Over the weekend, I became a patron of the arts, throwing a few bucks at the Kickstarter page for “Unconditional: A Teddy Bear’s Tale”, an in-production children’s book by Nick Davis, featuring illustrations by artist and con acquaintance Dan Nokes. It looks like a fun project, largely through the enthusiasm with which Dan talked about it this weekend, and some of the artwork, which looks great.

♦ – It’s stories like this report from the set of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit by Eric “Quint” Vespe that remind me why I’ve been dutifully visiting Ain’t It Cool News for movie gossip and rumor since the late 90s. Even if the quality of current reporting isn’t what it used to be, it’s stuff like this that put it on the map in the first place.

♦ – Here’s an, um, acknowledgement of the tenth birthday of Transportation Safety Administration! Thanks for a full decade of making the act of getting on a plane to go somewhere progressively more unpleasant by the day!

♦ – Author Carrie Vaughn highlights the staying power and genral awesomeness of Ghostbusters by showing how tightly plotted the whole project is by outlining it according to the standard plot structure we all learned about in middle school.