June 1st, 2009: This weekend I helped build a grappling hook and used it to steal back from Poseidon.

May 28th, 2009: I'm a big fan of what Posterchild is doing over at bladediary.com: he's taking the old abandoned newspaper boxes that litter Toronto and turning them into planter boxes. Flower pots! The result is beautiful and a great addition to the city.

May 27th, 2009: I got a bunch of emails yesterday from people confused about the calorie! It is a super-dumb form of measurement that we all still use for some reason. Here's a bit more that I wrote about the calorie and why it's super dumb!

May 21st, 2009: Braid is a platforming puzzle game that came out last year to high acclaim, but I only played it yesterday when I realized the PC version was out! It's a fantastic game in which you manipulate time in a variety of ways to collect literal pieces of a puzzle. The art is done by David Hellman, who you may recall as the artist on the late great A Lesson Is Learned, But The Damage Is Irreversible, one of my all-time favourite comics. The game sings with David's art, which is perfectly matched to the story. The last level (unlocked when you solve all the puzzles) is the perfect coda to the game, and is the best ending to a game I've seen since Portal. Highly recommended! There's a free demo available on Steam and the full game is only $15. :0

April 9th, 2009: Many times I have complained to those near to me that if I were sent back in time I would be pretty useless. I am pretty handy with a computer, but it's not like I can build something functional from scratch. And if I found myself sent back in time, what could I tell people about the future except "It'll be fun" and "Your great-great grandkids are gonna love it"?

WITH THAT IN MIND, I have been researching all of the low-hanging fruit of civilization: stuff that doesn't take that much to describe once it's invented, but still produces a useful payoff. The basics of electricity. Radio. Modern medicine. That sort of thing! And I've put it on a shirt, which I am calling "the Time Traveler Essentials shirt".

This amazing garment has illustrations, how-tos and easy-to-understand information on how to recreate all the low-hanging fruit of the past 200 years! Don't worry about having to remember what penicillin looks like: it's right on your friggin' shirt.

This is how it's gonna go down:

Oh dang dang dang I'm trapped in the past! OHHH SHIIIIII-

oh wait I forgot about my shirt!!

While you can't read all the text clearly in that image, everything is perfectly crystal clear on the shirt - it's really gorgeous. And if you ARE the kind of person who likes to read what their things say before they buy them, click here for a larger version!

I hope you like it! And if you don't wear clothes these days, it's also available as a totally sweet museum-quality poster:

Note: this shirt was totally awesome to research.

HELPING PEOPLE: The Kiva webcomics team allows you to lend money to people who can use it to make their worlds better. It's pretty good, you guys! If you don't have extra money, you can sign up for the Dino Comics distributed computing team, which allows your computer to work on curing AIDS and cancer in its spare time. Sounds good to me! We've done over 400 years of worth of disease-curing computing, and the Dinosaur Comics team is one of the biggest teams on the network - larger than those of many actual nations.