Proof that you've spent too much time working with a tablet: when penciling and inking in your sketchbook, your left hand is constantly searching for the CTRL+S command for fear of losing your file. (Additionally, a great deal of left hand navigation searching for CTRL+Z to undo a stupid move, then sighing as you reach for the eraser.)

I often wonder what it'd be like to hermetically seal myself away from the world for 15 years (alternatively, to be comatose) just to be blown away by changes that I discover upon re-entry into the waking world. It'd be sort of a cure-all for those days when you trudge through life feeling like there's nothing new under the sun, that we're all just gifted but irredeemably stupid apes with petty, lizard-brained lives.

But I don't have to do that, because I'm safe in the knowledge that every once in a while I'll wake up to a world that has taken the first crucial steps in creating CANNIBAL ROBOTS!!!! [link]

Commence your lurching, ecstatic dances of gleeful doom, as I did.

I'd hate to think that sheer pragmatism led to this design. I would much rather believe that, during their time off from the la-BOR-atory, some bright spark was eyeball-deep in some sci-fi crap when they suddenly jumped to their feet, spilling their cheetos and grape soda all over the floor while shouting "CORPSE HARVESTERS!" and furiously drawing schematics and formulas on post-it notes.

The world needs some mad science. Even if it's couched in the most analytical, layman-proof language, I rejoice every time I hear about atom-smashing and robotics, and hope against hope that in my lifetime some previously-shunned mad genius will be behind the podium at a press conference offering tasty morsels like "building the ultimate beast" or "SMASHER-DEVOURER MK.IV is NOT a flawed creation!" Those are news bites I can get behind.

You may be right to think I'm making too much of this, but the world needs dreamers, visionaries, and people to get excited about today's science fiction being tomorrow's boring reality.

Besides...if that doesn't have you hopping, there's always Cat Shit One: [link]

ja, mata