steam-powered influenza, book projects, and employment

Oh my, I still have a blog. It didn't die while I was gone like my mint plant did.

I have been busy the past couple weeks with: going to DragonCon, having the flu, helping Adam Knave finish his new compilation of essays and fiction, getting a new job, quitting my old job, and blatantly ignoring this blog. Not necessarily in that order.

Details!

DragonCon: For those who've never been, it's basically Nerdi Gras in downtown Atlanta. Pop culture celebrities and fans attend, the latter dress up in elaborate costumes, and everyone dranks and giggles. The big trend o' the year was steampunk everything, and nothing quite working out how I wanted it to with the exception of some excellent peanut butter sandwiches. I have no pictures! Except of how someone modded the elevator buttons in the Marriott Marquis:



The flu: Is lame.

Adam's new book: I Slept With Your Imaginary Friend is a compilation of essays and fiction -- some from the Intarwebs and some written fresh for this publication -- that, like DragonCon, is all about the pop culture of our lives. But it's a lot more hygienic than DragonCon, and there are no German ladies named Ilka in it who will try to sell you corsets. This is what the cover will look like:



New job: Despite my dropping the f-bomb within the first 3 seconds of my first interview, these nice people hired me on to be a Writer/Strategist for their content team, which basically means that I'll be writing some blog copy, wrangling some freelancers, helping companies that don't know how to Internet Internet better, and, um, doin' some other stuff. It's a shiny-new position, so none of us are entirely sure what it'll entail aside from my generally making myself useful in a geeky way. Which is pretty much what I live to do, so, yay!

Old job: I've been editing rheumatology manuscripts for the past 4 years and I'm really not going to miss that part at all, but I will miss my coworkers. If you're one of them, you should comment/email and let me know how we can keep in touch! (And no, they're not letting me keep the lobster suit. NOT THAT I'VE ASKED.)

Blog: Holy whoa I just wrote some words and will now upload them. And I anticipate repeating the process in the near future! I bet it's what you never expected, which is, apparently, how the upstanding fellows in this video feel about being On A Blimp.

Mockingjay and Top Flr

Just picked up my long-awaited copy of Mockingjay, the third and final book in the YA Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins! Along with a keychain so's I can properly advertise my dorkiness (since Scholastic has, for some reason, decided not to cash in on the pins they're making but rather to offer them only as prizes and student incentives).*

Please note that I'm being responsible and doing the writing/editing I've promised to finish tonight and tomorrow, and that I'll bloody well put an arrow through the pig of anyone who spoils me before I get a chance to read this thing. ^____^




In quick food updates, I had dinner at Top Flr last night -- they do a $15 3-course prix fix on Mondays, and you should really go the next time you've got a Monday evening free.

Last night, the first course was a salad of peppery-green arugula with sweet slivers of dried fig, heat from slices of pepperocini, bright cherry tomato halves, creamy-sharp parmaggiano flakes, and a bare, tart lemony dressing to bind the lot together.

The second course was an option of a crumbled chorizo, jalapeño, onion, and arugula flatbread or a seared scallop with a warm, Asian-inspired salad of kale, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, celery, onion, and octopus. The flatbread was tasty in a distinctly late-night-college-snack sort of way, but the scallop dish was really delightful -- the sugared soy & sesame dressing playing against the bitter of the vegetables and the sweetness of the tomatoes and seafood, and both the scallop and octopus cooked to tender-chewy excellence.

The third course was an option of a chocolate ganache tart, which I didn't try, or a coconut bread pudding with a spiced sauce and carmelized sliced bananas. Though I didn't detect much coconut in the bread pudding, the dessert was warming and lovely, not too sweet and slightly strange for the Indian-inspired heat of the sauce. Fans of chilies + chocolate should be on the lookout for this one.

For $15 it was a light dinner (dessert doesn't count as filling. Hungry diners might want to order a pre-prix fix snack), but an excellent value for the experience of such playful flavors. Service was polite and attentive, but the kitchen didn't seem to be in a rush to get the courses out -- I would reserve Top Flr for a night that you don't have a schedule to keep. And I feel obligated to mention feeling a little foppish when the price of my dinner nearly doubled upon ordering a cocktail -- which was terrific, something they're calling A Sordid Affair: smoky Scorpion Blanco mezcal tequila, bittersweet Cynar artichoke liquor, spicy black peppercorn simple syrup, bright blackberries, and a squeeze of balancing citrus, served over ice with a straw for sipping and a pretty circle of lime set against the interior of the glass. But yeah, I'm just sayin' -- even with the prix fix in hand, Top Flr isn't tight-budget friendly. Which is okay sometimes! I'll definitely be back to try the regular menu and more of the cocktails. Let me know what's best there if you've been before.


* Scholastic, won't you please let me give you cash monies for a Mockingjay pin? I approve of ALSO using them as prizes and student incentives, and I'll make one myself out of the aforementioned keychain, but you're making fandom difficult, here.

an art commission for a grammarmonkey

Take a gander at my shiny new okay not new anymore but I keep forgetting to post about it, so old-but-still-newsworthy graphical representation of my grammarmonkey self:




It was drawn for me on commission by one Mr. Eric Clausen for just 30 bucks, careful shipping included, as part of his Drawings for 30 Bucks fundraiser for the surgery he needed after a bike accident earlier this year. Eric's all surgeried up now but still accepting commissions because, undaunted by mere physical injury and suffering, he's planning on biking and drawing his way across America and would like to be able to eat while he's doing it. And since commissioning a drawing is as simple as posting a request to his Facebook wall, I recommend doing that. (I was super unspecific about what he should draw for me and I heart what his imagination came up with, so I especially recommend just sorta setting him loose on a prompt.)

And if you've got any gandering left in you, take one at Eric's page on Kickstarter -- he's already met his goal (yay!) but could probably stand to have a few extra dollars sitting around, and his incentives include hand-drawn postcards from the road(side) and personal hangouts during which he'll draw your portrait and eat your food. So if you're looking to toss less or more than 30 bucks at him and still get something nifty in return, that is a highly possible thing.