My aunts threw a party for my dad's birthday this weekend. This is what he looked like in 1952. I see a bit of my daughter in that smile.

When I was a kid, 60 seemed impossibly old. It still sounds older to my ears than what I see when I look at my dad. I'm glad I got to be with him for his birthday.

My grandfather, along with the other members of the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, was recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Unfortunately, he didn't live to see it—he died in 2007 at the age of 90. I think it would have made him happy.

Even though we'd been assured that he wasn't contagious, when it was time to pick up Eva I still thought it was best to leave Jason in the lobby with his daycare's director. (Don't worry, this is the last of the pinkeye pictures.)

The doctor said it wasn't pinkeye. And, as it turned out, the next day it was completely gone.

We thought Jason had pink eye, so I took him to the doctor. As it happened, we were wrong. In this case, I didn't mind.

It was really important to Jason that Buzz and Zurg be able to watch the parade. He kind of flipped out when they fell over; fortunately, that was easy enough to rectify.

A friend of mine started an interesting project recently, a sort of multimedia horror dime novel for the web—he calls the format "digital pulp."  The project is called Turnskin, and through a series of blog posts, video diaries, "found" footage, tweets, and Facebook posts it follows the story of a young LA woman after a strange encounter she has with what she describes as a "serpent creature."

Thus far there are about 20 or so entries at the blog site, and there's enough going on (and hinted at) that I'm interested to read more. I can see a strong connection to the modern New Weird movement, and to the older weird fiction pulps that were its precursors. I get the impression that there will be some sort of Gaiman-esque secret world revealed in forthcoming installments, and I'm looking forward to finding out more.

The prospect of using the web as a medium for narrative is something that a lot of people have explored over the past decade or so, to varying degrees of success. I think that the ones that tend to work well are ones where the author is familiar with web culture and how the medium is consumed and interpreted by its audience, and can execute on that knowledge. In some ways, you can see the idea of a blog-based story as the modern take on the epistolary novel, and that comparison works in a lot of ways. But at the root, blogs are consumed and understood by their readers in a very different way from letters, and that difference in tone has to be taken into account for a web-based story to work well.

I have to admit, I wasn't convinced at first that Turnskin was going to work well. There's a certain "writerliness" to the blog posts that struck me as inauthentic. But what I failed to take into account was the way that the different platforms that the project encompasses all work together. My "aha" moment came when I popped open the protagonist's Twitter feed. Right there at the top of the page—just like every other Twitter feed—is the description that the girl chose for herself: "I am an artist, writer, daydreamer and reluctant barista." Reading that, it clicked for me: this is exactly how the sort of person who would use expensive adjectives in her personal blog would describe herself. And, man, I know that person.

In that light, I really have to give my friend credit for a well-thought-out, layered, deep characterization. Kudos, dude. Kudos.

So, if you're in the mood for some pulpy, weird fiction goodness, you might give Turnskin a look. You can subscribe to the blog directly via RSS, or you can follow on Facebook or Twitter.

I don't know if all little girls are made of sugar and spice. But this one? She is.

When Jason was a baby and the sun got in his eyes, he would cry in pain and frustration. He would thrash around, straining against the straps of his car seat—usually this happened in the car, you see—and shout things like "No, sun! Ahhh! That hurts my eyes!" Juliette and I would explain, again and again, that he should close his eyes and look the other way, but he would stubbornly refuse.

"Just look the other way, buddy.  It won't hurt if you don't look at it."

"No!"

"Just look the othe way."

"No, it won't feel better! No!"

At which point we would calmly inform him that we were done talking about that.

After over three years of coaxing and explaining, and praising him whenever he did look away, he finally got it, and now it's not a problem anymore. Usually.

The first time I looked into my rearview and noticed the sun in Eva's eyes, she closed her eyes and turned her head. She was less than two months old.

I'd say that about sums it  up, right there.

I've been sitting on a bunch of pictures from the trip home I took over Christmas, mostly because I couldn't decide which to post. Ultimately, I came to the realization that they work better as a set than they do individually, and thus this post.