My giant red-eyed doggy. In a choice of outfits!

• Basaltine, NUDE
• Basaltine in his 'doom beast' costume, stage I
• Basaltine in his 'doom beast' costume, stage II

WAHOO (~50KB, 760×551px)

Quick-ish sketches of my Bazzletazzle. From these reference pics: Pic 1/Pic 2/Pic 3

Up at 06:30 for Neopets giveaway, lulz. I got the spooky site theme for me and the brother-creatures. Seem to have got in before the massive site-laggage, too. *dances* Now I can go back to bed.

I think Piper has an injury to his white eye. There's lots of gunk underneath, which I keep cleaning away, even though there's no cut visible. There's also a little dirty patch on the edge of his white ear (same side), which I suspect is a small injury too. Piper is clearly a menace to society with his hard-drinking, roustabouting, bar-brawling ways.

Since I'm awake anyway, a poem. Amphibrachic tetrameter because I can.

Country Road Meeting

An Anglian roadway in whistling November.
No sign of the taxi; no signal, no money,
A cardie from Primark 'tween her and the weather,
Suspecting she'll come to regret the stilettos.
Some headlights: the taxi? She moves to the hedgerow
And hopes she'll be visible. Funny, no engine.

It comes round the corner; she shivers. What is it?
It looks like a calf but it's burly and shaggy
And looking at her with those luminous eyeballs!
Its claws make no clicking, no noise on the roadway;
No steam from its muzzle. It's not even breathing.
"If this is a pisstake," she mumbles, "it's working."

It passes her swiftly, the muscular creature,
So close she could touch it. You're kidding. She doesn't.
Intent on its business, it wholly ignores her.
A roar from behind makes her jump. A Fiesta
With spoiler and skirts and a strip light beneath it.
A hundred and fifty or more, never slowing,
It bombs down the roadway, so close it could touch her.

The dog—was it hit? Where's it gone? Shit, she's blinded.
She rubs at the afterglow, loses a contact.
The car's disappeared and, it seems, so's the creature.
No body. No impact. No blood. Must have dodged it.
Her sobs become mist as she turns and examines
The tracks of the tyres in the place she was walking.

A few minutes later, the cab driver finds her.

(I don't like the whole "servants" bit. That's monkeycentrist spin. We're partners.)

The Gwyllgi will haunt your dreams. It, and its Dark Age cousin Cwn Anwn (the old Welsh underworld hounds) and Bythead y Fall (the Evil Hound), are all part of ancient Welsh myth and legend: but are more than myth - they are FACT! Look 'em up in the Sources. The Mabinogi relate tales about them going back 1,500 years. They are part of our Celtic heritage going back 3,000 years, long before Christ was born. They are our pagan deities, the servants of Rhiannon, Epona, Cornunos and the other true Welsh pagan gods. Our streams, lakes and woodland are their homes, the craggy mountains of Eryri and the broad open ranges of Hiraethog their spiritual homelands. Stone circles and menhirs, forsaken by our new Christianity forsook them; relegated them into the darkness of civilisation. But they remain, worshipped by their servants; adored by their handmaidens and revered by their true believers. Their day will come. The true religion of our forefathers will return and stand proud over the ruins of Christianity, Islam, and all other modern religions. Behold; the day of GWYLLGI will come!
Pen Dafad, Denbigh, Thu Nov 29 08:34:04 2007

From this page.

"Mediums and spiritualists fear changes to laws regulating the industry could leave them open to malicious civil action by sceptics."

You say "malicious civil action", I say "challenging you to prove your juju isn't fraudulent"...

Yes, hard luck for any hypothetical people who honestly think what they're doing is helping people in some way. Perhaps if any such hypothetical whitelighters had paid greater attention to weeding out the frauds who prey on the grieving, the whole industry—sorry, religion—wouldn't need regulating. Honestly though, I think it's shocking that anything should think it's above regulation because it's Mystick™. If I buy paint thinner, it had better do what it says on the tin. If I buy a ghost interview, likewise.

Truth in advertising, people! Why not bill it as "a bit of a laugh, and I'll cold-read you and may come up with something you construe as meaningful"? Hell, I'd go for that.

Nun with opera glasses, deacons playing baseball. ("So Josef, how about those Cardinals?")

Happenings at Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh, Suffolk tend to make any Shuckfan prick up its ears, but unfortunately it's nothing to do with our favourite straunge and terrible Wunder. (Unless he's started emplying hoodies, which is arguably exactly Shuck's style.)

Sniffer dogs on nightclub doors with a very silly and awful illustration, do not say you were not warned of the spanielity.

Finally, your bit of non-newsy wacky religious goodness for the day: Revelation. Being a continuation of my gradual prettification of some of our longer, less-well-illustrated articles. There's some great apocalyptic art out there. Check out the mighty angel with the millstone (which I think is actually supposed to be a stone the size of a millstone according to the version I read, but anyway). And yes, Vespers and 'Tivo, horsies. :)

edit: In pictures: Lion King musical (I must see this sometime. I can already sing all the songs.)

New webcomic find. Archive binge! What do we find? Psychic girls... eh. Fox demons... oh, nice. Coyote... mixing our mythoi there, but it's always pleasant to see Hir. Ysengrim... aww, puppy.

The mo'flocking MODDEY DHOO— can we say "very promising indeed"? No, because we are too busy saying "Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!" Because we are a lovably eccentric Briton and therefore we like vengeful, deathly dread black dogs. Yes, we do.

No RSS feed, though, and only 'pending' on Comic Alert. Comic Alert's good, by the way, for keeping track of any reasonably popular webcomics that don't have feeds. Such as Wapsi Square, EOI, Zebra Girl and VG Animals. Of those, EOI is particularly recommended in its early days pre-MMORPG setting, and VG Things has its moments of brilliance... funnier if you've played the game it's parodying, naturally.

How about you, friendslist? Any webcomics, feeded or non, you'd recommend to each other and/or to me?

(Bonus points if it contains mythological dogs, unless the author completely misses the point and makes them angstbuckets, anthropomorphic¹ or scary-faced for a total of one panel before turning out to be friendly and cute thereafter in a hilaaaaaaarious twist. I consider all such travesties to be drawn by cats.)

¹ For the sake of drama avoidance, anthros in general are fine. I read Jack regularly. A badly-drawn animal is better than a badly-drawn human. But anthros are not fine for ratchet dogs. You cannot be anthro and still be Old Shock. Sorry. Them's the rules. If your barghest walks on two legs (as some do. It's canon!) it'd better still be an actual dog or the karma stormtroopers will savage you.

Squee, my Xmas pressies arrived! I now have Explore Phantom Black Dogs by Bob Trubshaw, upon which I've been perving in the virtual shop windows for ages. Hellhounds ROCK. So hard. *hugs it* This is a slim volume, sparsely illustrated, but it does have the woodcut from A straunge and terrible wunder in Bongay, plus pics of the Blythburgh church door (of The Darkness fame, among others) and Bungay weathervane, the obligatory quote from Robert Johnson, a list of sightings by year and even a list of motifs (at crossroads, wearing chains, leaving no footprints, etc). Did I mention I love spectral black dogs? WOOF!

Slen also got me Spider-Man 3, which I never got round to seeing in the cine (you wait ages for your brothers to come along and see it with you, and then they say "oh, I saw it the other day with so-and-so"...). And Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch — which I don't remember asking for, but will probably be good, judging by the second one.

New Iain M Banks out soon. Squeeeeee.

Some friends of Slen's (and mine, to a lesser extent) from secondary school are coming round this evening. I get to entertain them for an hour before Slen gets home from work. *twitch* (Probably fine; if nothing else, we've got a ton of new DVDs to watch.) So I shall go and bathe and put some laundry on and generally stop sitting around in a dressing gown playing Neopets and happily contemplating my roleplay partners and injokes about mages in wet shirts.

Mum's away at a friend's house in the Lakes for New Year. For those of you I don't see later this evening, since oddly enough I have nothing in particular planned in the way of wild parties, have a good one and stay safe on the roads.

With the SEO stuff I've been reading at work unanimously proclaiming that, when you get down to it, there's no substitute for good content, I realised that I need to add some actual stuff about hellhounds to HHnet.

Well, it's a bit of a gyp to register hellhound.net and not mention hellhounds on it except for my own fictional ones; it would be courteous to add some resources on classical ones. I've had the intention lurking in the back of my mind for a while, and what with my other commitments taking priority it'll be another while until I act on it, but in the meantime I put up a really really brief thing with a couple of the links I've found particularly useful.

And of course there are millions of sites out there with brief descriptions of Cerb and lots that mention the spectral dogs of the British isles (most of them, I suspect, more or less copied and pasted from Trubshaw), so as usual I've been wondering "what can I provide that that lot doesn't?".

So far, I'm not sure. Visiting Bungay and Blythburgh etc. with a camera and collecting some memorabilia would be fun, but other folks have done that and it's just as easy to link out.

I don't particularly want to do reviews of the various Baskervilles adaptations, because I am no cinema critic and by no means impartial about Sherlock or phosphorous wolfhounds; and while it would be nice to acquire Zoltan, Hound of Dracula and put up some stills or clips from it, it would also be major copyvio.

I'm not widely read in Bangsian fantasy, so have nothing original to say about hellhounds in general fiction. I have no interest in manga, so will not be providing any material about all those "angul & deemun bishiez yey!" titles. And I'm no artist either! So, hmm...