George Carlin has died. Gene Wolfe and Lawrence Lessig, please be extra careful for the remainder of June, k?

I was going to say something asinine here, like, “If anything I ever wrote was funny, it was because of him.” That’s the first thing one assumes of a comedian, right? That he informs and evolves your sense of humor.

But George Carlin affected me on a much more sociological level. I act like I do because of him. I take the chances I do because of him. I have the courage to call “bullshit” because of him. I’m a more thoughtful and involved citizen because of him.

He also taught me my love of words — for which the rest of the world may sigh in collective indifference, but for me is the greatest gift I’ve ever received.

For the majority of my adult life, it’s been true that “if it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press.” Now I’ve learned Tim Russert has died, and it’s unclear to me what I’ll do with my Sundays from here on out.

Here’s the thing about Russert: he’s irreplaceable. The man was an honest-to-god genius with an interview. It’s easy to overlook if you just see clips or sound bites of his work here or there, but he had a way of asking questions that, when taken in aggregate, revealed something about the interviewee regardless of whatever answer he or she might gave. As a result, politicians went home happy thinking they dodged the tough questions, and careful viewers were treated to golden moments of truth laid bare in their performances.

Tim Russert had this process down to an science. But no one else, I think, ever really mastered the “Russert Method”. At any rate, I can think of no one able to step up and fill his shoes. He was the gentle giant of the Sunday morning talk show, an authentic man everyone sought out and no one dared dissemble to. Now that he’s gone, I feel as though one of my senses has been blighted, and this ability I had taken for granted to see into the hearts of politicians may never be returned to me.

Seeing as I don’t have time to both write scripts and work on Bamf!, I figure it’s time to find some other script writing software to tide me over. I decided to give Scrivener a try, and ended up banging out a silly Love Bunny and Mr. Hell story as a result (Love Bunny and Mr. Hell created by, ©, ™, ®, etc. the handsome Tim Seely).

Overall, I found writing in Scrivener way more productive than writing in, say, Final Draft. Still, Scrivener could stand to enumerate more things. I constantly had to go back and count to discover what page/panel I was on. Very annoying. Also the formatting options leave something to be desired. You can see from the Love Bunny script that in many places the pagination just doesn’t make sense. Dialogs are split! Paragraphs are orphaned! The humanity!

I suppose I could always import these files into Final Draft which, actually, has great print and pagination settings. But this seems just too counterproductive to bear. If other comic writers out there have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Otherwise, I may have to start blocking out time for Bamf! again.

A quick note to anyone who’s thinking about installing WordPress on one or more of your webservers: save yourself some trouble and don’t. Unless you like manually updating your blog software every two weeks. Then knock yourself out.

But me? The longer I can go without committing SFTP against my servers, the better. WordPress makes this impossible. The third-party auto-update plugin neither updates nor plugs-in for me, and never has. It apparently can’t grok concepts as obscure and esoteric as /var/tmp. Whatever. I know there aren’t a lot of developers in my audience, but can you imagine the shame of having a hobbyist with a crappy website that makes broken plugins be the sole, sane, tenuous strand connecting your customers to the updates that that are their only protection from an army of crackers and spammers intent on their humiliation if not outright destruction?

I forget who first recommended WordPress to me, but I want to take up smoking just so I can stub my newly acquired habit out on their prefrontal cortex. WordPress may have a bunch of good things going for it, but who can tell with all the bullshit?

I submit that it is!

• Met up with Keron in the flesh. Nice to finally meet him outside of email!
• Caught up with old DDP friends and marveled at their Milo Ventimiglia announcement.
• Tim is writing and drawing a book for the first time since the adored Love Bunny and Mr. Hell. True, it’s a Suicide Girl tie-in, but I remain optimistically stoked.
• Had time to pester some poor Dark Horse representative about how ugly their submission format is. Sorry Dark Horse representative! I know you’re just doing your job. Still buds?
• Got a moment to speak with Mouse Guard creator David Petersen and ask him about his odd lettering choices. He wanted something seriffed so as to look more like a storybook. A VERY LOUD STORYBOOK.
• While at the ASP booth, I got a gander at the colors for Cursed Pirate Girl. I can’t wait for this book. I’m hoping it’s done by Chicago.
• Norton and I shared identical bewildered expressions over the choreographed fight scenes/dance numbers being performed on the main stage Saturday.
• Norton and I shared identical gleeful expressions over the eminent (and long overdue) release of a Jericho figure. They had one on display at the Previews booth.
• Kellynn, Courtney and I squee’d all over the Sok-o booth.
• Ate enough to make myself sick on three separate occasions (thanks to The Pink Teacup, Chat n Chew, and Norma’s).
• Saw many wonderful panels that shook the rust off and made me ask myself “What the hell have you been doing all winter?!”
• Hung out with many wonderful newyorkites that made me ask myself “Why don’t I come here ALL THE TIME?”

BEST. CON. EVAR. Thanks everyone!

Hey Twitterati:

Have a confession to get off your chest? Something you’ve never told anyone before? An item that, while on the surface embarrassing and gauche, deep down reveals your strong moral fiber? Then exercise your honesty muscles and tweet it to iadmit. An example:

“@iadmit that I hope setting up this twitter account will make me famous.”

See? It’s easy! And maybe a member of the opposite sex will see you and think that your straight-talk is ‘teh new hottnes’?

Frankly, I expected better of Canada.

I’m guessing it costs $100.

See: here and here.