Well, that's it for the supervillains. If the series seems anticlimactic -- that's sort of the point. I did have a lot of fun coloring the Demoness' hair, although I have decided, on account of my incipient carpal tunnel syndrome, that the next series is going to be light on coloring. It's tough being a modern person, when my day job, my freelance work, and even most of my hobbies involve the same limited set of hand and forearm muscles. Good thing I don't play video games.

So, one final thought about supervillains.

I saw a kid's "educational" program Saturday morning because it was the closest thing I could find to cartoons on broadcast TV (sigh. It's still not worth paying for cable though). Somebody's Factory -- Elmo's or Elgin's or something like that. It had kids dressed up in super-hero-ey uniforms as "the four forces", meaning, strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and gravity. They were constantly battling against Entropy, who was portrayed as a kind of slobby supervillain who talked a bit like Marlon Brando as the Godfather. They even tried to capture him, but he was released by the universe cops who informed the forces that he was protected by the second law of thermodynamics. Then the forces admitted that, well, without Entropy none of the others would be around either so maybe they kind of needed him.

And that's my thought about supervillains.

The update is late this fortnight. Even later than usual. I thought skipping a fortnight to run the Norwescon party would be sufficient time, but -- well -- the kitchen is still full of dirty party dishes waiting to be washed. I just today got around to tossing out the elderly tapenade.

I blame my job for this sorry state of affairs. Really, it would be quite simple to do all the dishes if I didn't have to be away from home for 10 or 11 hours every workday, 8 of which are spent actually doing a job that I find mentally tedious and emotionally draining, and the others are spent either traveling to and from this job, or eating lunch. You could regard eating lunch as time off, which technically it is. Except that this time off is exactly 1 hour, no more, no less, which means that it is more time than it actually takes to eat lunch, and yet, not really enough time to really do anything else. So it doesn't feel like freedom.

Is it retro-pre-feminist of me to wish that my husband made enough money that I could quit? Or is this truly the measure of equality, that men and women alike are free to recognize that most jobs, basically, suck, and to wish fervently that some force (rich spouse, lottery, stock market) would come along and save them from this hell?

Personally, I blame George W. Bush.

I have decided that, rather than trying to figure out which things are directly his fault, it is simpler to just blame him for everything -- from a job I hate (bad job = sucky economy = Bush's stupid and ineffective economic policy) to the sorry state of pop music (bad pop art = media consolidation = Bush administration policies) the fact that Miller is planning to discontinue Henry Weinhard's Dark beer (um... I'm going to have to go back to the sucky economy on that one). The list is endless -- reality TV, deforestation, gridlock, carpal tunnel syndrome -- the obesity epidemic, the failure of Joss Whedon's Firefly to find a network home, SARS -- try it, it's fun!

And for you Republican Party sympathizers out there (are there any right-wing readers of Goth House? It's so hard to tell . . .) who think this seems unfair, just remember -- when Clinton was president, you had your chance. In fact, many of you are still doing it.