Journal

Monday, December 20, 2004

Scary Internet Magic etc

Right. I'm in Cork airport with Holly, on our way back to the UK and then home. Hurrah. The book is really fun and with luck and hard work will be finished in first draft by the end of the year. Cork Airport offers free Wireless Internet, which, after my three weeks on crackly dial-up is a bit like encountering a warlock. (Look! Pictures! And they move!)


Hi Neil,As you are no doubt aware, a lot of people are talking about Todd McFarlane filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Most people are assuming it is all of Todd's finances in every form going bankrupt, but I've seen it pointed it out that it is actually only one of his seven companies that filed for protection. I'm wondering is this one involved in the lawsuit you won?Hope the writing is going well and that you have a happy holiday season. Cal

My understanding is that it only marginally affects me, as the court judgment on the copyright violations was against both TMP and Todd personally, and he's not personally bankrupt, so that's where we would collect from. Now that Todd's primary appeal process is over (and he lost) we're waiting for the final accounting to figure out how much Todd owes, and for the judgment to then be made final. It may be the TMP bankruptcy will slow that up a bit, but, I'm told, probably not too much...

Hi Neil,Not sure you've seen Google Suggest: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=enYou may have read about it in the latest New Scientist (I think). It suggests search-terms as you type, giving 10 at a time in the order it presumably thinks is most likely. Your name appears in the list after n-e-i, and by n-e-i-l- -g you're on the top. By n-e-i-l- -g-a-i all the suggestions are for you, and it's interesting to see that two of them are misspellings. neil gaimen gets 6,340 results (vs an estimated 460,000 for the correct spelling)neil gaimon gets only 1,820 results...I was interested, so I tried neal gaimanand found it gets 374,000 results. I imagine Neal Gaiman would write humourous revisionist cyperpunk fairy tales, or perhaps a history of immigrants to America from various cultures, told from the perspective of their gadgets (and going on for three very very long volumes). Or was that Neil Stephenson?Cheers, Peter Hollo

One of the Joys of Google is the continuing feeling of "what will they come up with next?" (My favourite is still what happens if you type Gaiman and Pratchett into Google Sets at http://labs.google.com/sets.) (Oh, all right. For those who just want to click, you get this.)


Hi, Neil. Thought some of your readers might care to know:

Artist and Writer Richard Moore is currently doing a book called Boneyard published by NBM. He is on a quarterly schedule to allow him time to develop some of the other projects he hopes to get published in the coming years. Being a quarterly book and pretty far off the radar of the traditional comic buyer means he makes a startlingly small income from it and is reliant on his wife's job to keep the lights on.

The day before Thanksgiving, the family car was stolen. It has been recovered but the insurance company feels the thieves damaged the vehicle so much that it isn't worth repairing. The settlement they are offering isn't enough to buy a used motorcycle let alone a car that isn't a time bomb. His wife Jackie needed this car as she works quite a ways from home and can't rely on California's unfortunate public transportation system. They're really in quite a bad spot. We have set up a Paypal account to help assist them with getting into a used car before the rental car provided by the insurance company expires on Dec. 26.

We're hoping you might inform your readers that anyone with a Paypal account could contribute $1.00 toward keeping Rick and family going. The Paypal account is under richardmooreart@juno.com Even at just a buck each, if enough people responded it'd be enough to pull them out of the fire. He's a tremendous talent and just needs a bit of help to recover from this really nasty blow.

Thanks so much,
Dana


Richard's art can be seen on
www.richardmooreart.com and
http://www.nbmpub.com/humor/moore/bonehome.html, and of course he put up the collection of letters from Dave Sim to people getting Free Cerebuses at http://richardmooreart.com/sim/simgaiman.html. So we owe him one...

Well, we've all seen the magical powers of the Weeping Christmas Teapot (take a look at http://www.livejournal.com/users/stardustgirl/41180.html if you don't believe me), so this couldn't hurt.