Entry by Chris Reid. This entry needs artwork!

My name is Dexter Jared Peterson. I am 26 years old and I live in New York City. In the last seven years I have lived as 11,577 different people.

I had the sensation of falling again, but this time in the dark. I tried to flail my arms to reach out for something, but resistance told me right away that I was in the water. A gasp of breath filled my lungs with sweet air, and I realized I was in a diving suit. I tried to calm myself. A wave of vertigo washed over me when I felt nothing under my feet but unknown fathoms of water. I was floating free save for the cable attached to me from the surface, a realm that was very far away judging by the stark absence of light.

A voice crackled in my head. “Dexter, you all right buddy?”

If I could hear them, then they could hear me. “Yeah, I’m fine, just… getting my bearings.”

“Ok. When you’re ready, just keep going along the hull. We’ll find it in soon. We have to.”

I peered through the thick glass in front of my face. A beam of light from my helmet lanced out tangibly in the murky water, and I saw a gray wall in front of me. I reached out to touch what must have been the hull of a large sunken ship. I could almost feel the cold through my thick diving glove. I began to move along the side of the ship, not sure where I was going nor even how fast thanks to the unchanging scenery. I heard the radio crackle again as my cable moved with me, and I hoped it didn’t go out. I had no idea how to get myself out of this without the help of those above me.

A hole in the ship faded into view; an ugly anchor port, its pulley a misshapen tongue belching its huge chain out into the sea. There was apparently a camera on me somewhere because it sparked some interest from the other end of my cable. I waited while they discussed the discovery, and soon I was given the order to proceed. As I left the anchor chain behind my hand touched the side of the ship, roaming along the hull as if the contact might help me find what I was looking for.

As I moved on in the mucky water, my mind drifted back to her. It was almost like I could feel her close by, just waiting for me to see her. Why I would feel this connection while I was alone at the bottom of some ocean, I couldn’t say. I tried to put her out of my mind to focus on the task at hand. The hull began to curve outward above me here, like it might at the bow of some of the large ships I’d seen before. I traced the contour upward, careful not to hit my head on the hard steel of the ship.

I felt like I was close to something, but I couldn’t say what. As I pushed onward I strangely began to enjoy my silent time with the ship as if we were old friends getting to know each other again. Then, as my hand brushed the hull, I saw a different color than the steel gray I was used to. I stopped and began to rub the grime from the steel. Letters began to fade into view before my eyes. I must have found the name of the ship! There was a D, an A, an I, and then I found an N, an E. Finally I’d exposed the whole word, and I took in a breath when I saw what it said.

“Oh my god.” The silence in my helmet was broken when my words reached the surface.

“Hey Dex? The camera’s on the fritz again, buddy. What’d you find?”

I stared at the letters for a moment, confused and surprised at the same time. I didn’t even try to say the name yet, for fear that I might wake up in some new reality and start all over again. Finally I made my mouth work enough to pronounce the name. “Alexandria!” Judging by the reaction, I’d obviously found what we’d been looking for. The words of my contact on the surface were drowned out by the cheering of those around him, but all I could do was stare.

I reached out again to touch the name, and took a deep breath as I shared the quiet deep with Alexandria.

Entry by Nathan Bedrick. This entry needs artwork!

My joints locked. My eyes itched. My hair bristled. For the first time, she was within reach, and I was me. The first sight I saw was Alex.

I grabbed the fabric tape railing to my side and tightened my throat muscles. My hand hurt. I was in the middle of a coffee shop line. Looked like about the time when I left. I spotted lemon squares- nothing compared to Betti’s cooking. I spied some miniature cupcakes at the end of a stick, and flashed back to one of my last memories before our lives. Seeing the pastry pops reminded me I had just walked in here and spotted the chocolate kind.

My throat was dry. I could use a lemonade, too. I was in the mood for some coffee-shop sweetness after eating Ugali for a week. I didn’t care about artificial ingredients, a lack of home-style love, or even the fact no expertise made it. It was then that I noticed they had a summer-flavored kind of cupcake bite. Didn’t they make that flavor right around when this all began? Did they make it again? Was I back? Was it over?

I restrained my quivering. Was it pain? Was it excitement? It’s been so long since I saw a familiar sight, and even longer since it was in English! I felt like me, I felt at home, and I felt like the chance to talk to Alex was right in front of me. I was certain it was Alexandria. She looked quite different without the burqa, and I’ve mixed her up a few times, but I wouldn’t forget how she held her Diane Goldfarb purse, just like the imitation-Coach bag she toted with her today. They all held their bags the same.

My sunglasses didn’t help, but my gut pushed me. I walked past the cashier and raced to her table. Would she recognize me? She sat beside the window, looking out. It was so quintessentially ‘Alexandria’. I paused, to relish that thoughtful look in this lady’s eyes. Then, I moved. I anxiously looked at her before pulling the seat back. I seemed a bit thin, as the bright, arm-length shirt and gloves didn’t help.

All I could yelp out first, was “Alex!” Her eyes widened, and I felt anxious for only a moment. She looked anxious, as if I solved Rumplestiltskin’s riddle without having been asked.

“Do I know you?” she replied. I felt overwhelming loss and anxiety. How could she forget me? Haven’t we been through this enough? Doesn’t she recognize me? Maybe it’s my hat? Or the sunglasses? Or the gloves? I hastily take them off, whispering a shout as well as I could.

“It’s me, Dexter! Dexter Peterson!” My heart stopped. Her eyes were fixed upon me.

She uttered a shuddering surprise, “That’s quite strange for a woman’s name.” I could feel fate’s cruelty chilling the back of my neck. I looked to my exposed hand… Burned, but feminine.

Coming down from the excitement, I notice pain all over my arms and back. My head was aflame. Pushing back my sleeve, I share with Alexandria a first sight. Burns. Everywhere. My body ignited, as if I was tossed back into the flames for a second roast. My eyes welled up as my strength left me.

I wasn’t me. I wasn’t Dexter today.

Seeing Alex shocked me away from this pain, and now it left. I was defenseless. I fell back into agony. My silent tears ran down to the table. A man whose warm, concerned smile touched me came over and asked about whom I sat down with. He asked why I took off my protection. He introduced himself to Alex, but she excused herself and left. He could see the worry in my eyes, and the pain. He could see the confusion and sadness. He reached out to my shoulder and touched me.

I felt his love, and I felt the scraping of my burn. He told me that fate was cruel, but he still loved me no matter what. I cried out a little bit. He was concerned, and he had a right to be. My gut tumbled, like a washing machine cleaning out the stains this experience left on me. It was then that I noticed me, walking down to take the A train outside the window. Cake pop in his hand.

Who were we?

This is a guest post by my talented artist friend Genesis Whitmore.

I powwow with artists sometime and during one discussion the subject of people’s characters came up. I’m altering the specifics just in case someone is afraid I’m singling them out, but basically it came down to someone loudly insisting their character was unique because they had different colored markings. Their cheetah had blue and purple spots while someone else’s cheetah had purple and blue spots.

I can almost discern the age and creation timeline of someone’s character by their appearance these days. A lot of the old guard represent themselves with fairly common characters that resemble their creators. As time went on people started picking more exotic creatures, then we ended up with characters that had wings, multiple tails, horns, then hybrid animals, then exotic colors and more horns and wings and tails and elaborate tattoos and jewelry, and they were no longer known by their creator names. Joe Fox became Steeltalon Dragonwolfen (And if there is a Steeltalon Dragonwolfen, I apologize for taking your name in vain).

All this is well and good, but one of the problems is that people are creating characters for the sole purpose of them being different with no thought to design. They just want MORE wings, MORE bright colors, MORE words in the name, MORE hybrid.

One thing I find in common with the really detailed and strange creations is that the creator always has the same complaint about their commissions, “Nobody ever gets my character right!” It’s amazing how few people consider that they just have a crazy design that needs to be simplified or changed instead of simply blaming the artist.

During a livestream I pulled my blotter sheet under the camera view so people could see the mad swatches of color that covered it from me testing the hundreds of colors I use as I work. Then I got a black marker and drew a simple black rectangle next to it. I asked the audience which was more memorable and the answer was the black marking.

Look at iconic characters from comics and consider how many have very simple color schemes. Their uniforms are 1-3 colors. Some have weird physical characteristics but not all of them. The thing that makes the character unique is what it does and how it acts.

People are losing sight of what makes a character unique and turning them into impressionist paintings rather than characters. Having spots that are six different colors isn’t the thing that will make you stand out, and in the long run it might, in fact, make you more of a complicated mess that nobody really finds that memorable as it gets lost in a sea of sparkledogs.

Weird colors are fine, wings and horns and other things are fine as well, but remember that more isn’t always better, or as memorable.

Here’s a little bit of web geekery for you that I once posted about Facebook, but it applies just as well to the new Google+ Pages and Profiles. I want to share links on Google+, but every time I do that I get the same link info no matter what blog post I’m linking to. How do I change that?

When you add a link to your Google+ posts, Google pulls that page’s Meta Description and adds it to the link. The problem is that, by default, WordPress uses your blog’s main description for its Meta Description on every single page. So this is what I get:

No Meta Description? Bad Birdie.

Telling The Short Story

So how do you get a concise excerpt to show up in G+ posts? Change that Meta Description tag to look like this:

<meta name='description' content='<?php
if ( is_single() ) {
the_excerpt_rss();
} else { ?>
THIS IS WHERE YOU'D TYPE IN WHAT YOU WANT TO DISPLAY OTHERWISE.
<?php } ?>'>

But here’s the kicker: The tag has to be moved inside the WordPress Loop. It’ll still work even if it’s not in the Header, so don’t worry about that. If you’re using a multi-loop theme, plant this code inside the loop that you use for your blog posts and page content. Once that’s in place, you’ll get this:

Clear, Concise, BETTER.

Telling The Short Story With Branding

If you’d like to add a sentence that precedes every description and will stand alone if necessary, Chris Penn suggested this as an alternative:

<meta name='description' content='THIS IS WHERE YOU'D TYPE IN WHAT YOU WANT TO DISPLAY OTHERWISE.<?php
if ( is_single() ) {
echo ' - ';
the_excerpt_rss();
} ?>'>

Controlling the Excerpt

WordPress, of course, gives you total control over what goes in this spot too. If you don’t type in a specific excerpt when writing a blog post, WordPress grabs the first few lines of the post instead. If you’d rather type your own excerpt, bear in mind that this could show up in an RSS feed, next to an image in a Facebook or Google+ post, or anywhere else.

Many SEO plugins will alter the excerpt further, but you’re probably using one of these plugins because they do this. For more information on the WordPress the_excerpt_rss() tag, read their documentation here.

Click to view full-sized image. Feel free to share this image, unaltered except for re-sizing, anywhere you see fit.

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And then, from out of nowhere, the snow came.  We hadn’t even cleaned up from the party yet when the flakes began collecting on the leaves.  Snow this early always makes the best snowmen- mushy heavy, and packable.  If the trees were bare we might’ve spent the evening outside throwing it at each other.  Or maybe we’d crank the music up, heat up the irons, and start waxing the boards and skis.

Shit, Killington is already open.

Instead, we watched and waited for limbs to begin snapping.  In my beloved Pacific Northwest the trees grow tall and straight, saving their limbs for only the uppermost portion of the trunk. They’re like me: tall, lanky, and flexible.  Here in New England the trees are more like a short fat man holding his arms out.  The leaves had just begun their annual ritual of attracting New Yorkers to come and leave insulating piles of trash everywhere. Instead, they grabbed piles of snow and started bringing the branches down.

When we lost power it came as little surprise.  New England blacks out the way cats throw up- it’s more like a hobby than an accident. The roofalanches rumbled the house as the piles of mush lost their purchase on the slate.  We anticipated the bass-heavy crunch of limbs severing from trunks and even the sirens that would inevitably ring out everywhere.

When the neighbor’s house caught fire, though, the storm lost its sense of humor.  This snow meant business and people’s lives were at stake.  I’ve never seen a 4-alarm blaze before and I certainly don’t want to see another.  It was four houses away, but we could see the flames over the treetops through our ground-floor windows.  We found out later that the house was for sale- totally vacant, thank God.

Thank God.  That’s a term I toss about with the ubiquity of LOL and WTF.  I really shouldn’t; it deserves more weight.

Our first mistake was going outside to see if we could help.  With four fire trucks and an army of trained professionals, they didn’t need nosy neighbors getting in the way.  We asked, they declined, and we kept our distance while the snow kept falling.  Personally I think I was there as much for a morbid fascination as I was to be useful.  Like I said, I’d never seen a house fire. Now I know why we go to great lengths to avoid them.

Then the tree next to us broke in half.  I will remember the sound of that crunch until the day I die.  The three of us looked up and saw the better portion of a 30-foot tree coming down on us.  I don’t remember much of what happened next, only running.  Running and shouting at each other to get to the garage.  I looked up and saw the power lines swinging over my head.  The branch hit the pavement without any of us beneath it, but the electric vines still threatened to fall at any second.

When we made it back to the house we were shaking.  I was giggling like Mark Hamill’s Joker from the adrenaline, even while I felt like throwing up.  Adrenaline is an unpredictable drug that I’ve never grown fond of.  I thought the closest I’d come to serious injury or death was under that shattered tree.  The next morning we saw what else broke:

We’re still without power, just like most of the gas stations in southern New Hampshire, but we’re safe.  Thank God we’re safe.

(And I’m still playing a show Friday night with Runtt at All Asia in Cambridge. Snow, blackouts, and panic ain’t keeping me from what I love to do.)