Since the foul fiend Insomnia continues to maul me in its batrachian* paws and slobber down my neck, many thanks and a tip of the hat to kate_nepveu, who pointed out to me that there is a new Submachine installment: Submachine 6: the edge.

N.b., the game will make marginally more sense if you have a passing acquaintance with the previous Submachine games. But only marginally. Nevertheless, for your point-and-click pleasure:

• Submachine 1: the Basement
  
• Submachine 2: the Lighthouse
  
• Submachine 3: the Loop
  
• Submachine 4: the Lab
  
• Submachine 5: the root

There are also two side games:

• Submachine 0: the Ancient Adventure
  
• Submachine: Future Loop Foundation

And now, having once again interrupted your Very Serious Business, I'm going to see if I can find those secret areas I missed the first time around.

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*I did have to look up batrachian to be sure I was spelling it right. Which, by the happy serendipity of the alphabet, has led me to a question. Batophobia, it turns out, is the fear of being next to a very tall object, like a skyscraper or a mountain. Does anyone know, then, what's the word for fear of bats?**

**To make this less utterly irrelevant to everything ever, I shall inform you that mirrorthaw and I had another bat in our attic last weekend. Once again, the lovely lovely people from Bat Conservation of Wisconsin came out--at 7 P.M. on a Friday no less--and identified, assessed, sexed, and conserved the bat. Healthy female Big Brown Bat (which, as I remarked later to matociquala, looks to the casual observer like any little brown bat, but in fact Little Brown Bats are a different species). The bat-lady also told us something which I think might possibly be of interest to other people: bats like to burrow into or under laid insulation (the stuff that looks like cotton candy) to hibernate. So if, like us, you have a house where the previous owners thought it was a good idea to lay the insulation on the attic floor like a carpet . . . well, be careful, is all I'm saying.

ObPSA: Do not touch any bats you may find. For your sake and theirs. Bat World has a very helpful page on what to do if you find a bat and also links to local rescue organizations. Our local rescue organization is awesome; I hope others are the same.

1. My (rather pathetic) Storytellers Unplugged column for August is here.

2. WATERLOG (yesterday)
TIME: 41 min.
DISTANCE: 5 mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 258.1 mi.
DISTRACTION: The Dead Zone, "Enemy Mind"
SHIRE RECKONING: In thickets

3. This Dead Zone episode gets points for giving the girl agency. She has hard-earned knowledge that Johnny doesn't; she is an active participant in saving herself. My worst problem with the episode, which is purely my problem, is that the cougar is so beautiful I keep forgetting it's symbolically the bad guy.

4. Shift, Shift 2, Shift 3, and Shift 4 are flash games that make brilliant, and frequently fiendish, use of their medium.

5. I will have more to say about Anna Katharine Green when I've finished reading The Leavenworth Case, but if you're going to be near Milwaukee anytime before the twenty-third, I highly recommend the Milwaukee Art Museum's current exhibition, "American Originals," on Charles Rohlfs' furniture and the paintings of the Eight (Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice B. Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan).

(Anna Katharine Green, whom I had heard of as the first American woman mystery writer, was Charles Rohlfs' wife; the exhibition and the accompanying book, The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs by Joseph Cunningham, are concerned to emphasize her collaboration with her husband, and the exhibition store made me very happy by having copies of one of Green's books: The Leavenworth Case, as mentioned above.)

OneClickDog Games has come out with a flash game called Little Wheel. It's a very short game, and very simple (I'd guess it took me about five minutes), but as with Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine games, what delights me is the art and the world-building--and, for Little Wheel, the animation.

It was a lovely palate cleanser before I run errands this afternoon, and I commend it to your attention.

Via oursin, a lovely, thoughtful article on craftsmanship, by Richard Sennett. "Innocent confidence is weak," may need to join "Perfection is death" on my monitor.

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The wolf book gets three positive reviews, all of which are thoughtful, and all of which are engaging with different aspects of the novel. That's just . . . nifty.

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I don't even know how to explain what I love about Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine games. They're point-and-click flash games, focused on puzzle-solving--not unlike, in their different medium, the Infocom text-adventure games I loved as a teenager. It isn't the Submachine games qua games I find compelling--I inevitably resort to the walkthroughs sooner or later because I am (a.) lazy and (b.) playing Submachine when I should be, oh for instance, writing a novel--nor the story, such as it is. It's the art (I also love the visible learning curve from The Basement to, for example, The Future Loop Foundation), and the way the art builds the world. There's a sort of steampunkish, Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson ethos to the Submachines, and yet the undertones are not of whimsy, but of fear. There is an intrinsic, pervasive creepiness to this abandoned world, and I think that's what draws me back in with each new installment.

Bur first, a PSA: elisem is having one heck of a sale.

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I work--through the end of this week anyway--in an Industrial-Ugly concrete block of a building, clearly designed by someone who played Colossal Cave one too many times. (Yes, this is almost certainly an anachronism. I claim poetic license, because, yes, you ARE in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, and it might as well be a cave, since outside windows are one of the privileges of rank, and I have it not. Just add fluorescent lights for that special Post-Industrial Hell mood lighting effect.) My office is on the seventh floor; the vending machines are on the fifth floor. Since the elevators are (a.) exponentially over-worked and therefore (b.) slow and (c.) sometimes unreliable, I take the stairs when I need a snack food, as for example the animal crackers I'm eating right now. The concrete Industrial-Ugly motif continues in the stairwells, all echoing concrete and metal, including pipes and grates and the occasional sad flyer for a department event. (Bear with me; my point is rapidly approaching.) Normally, I don't even notice these things; I've worked in this building, on and off, since 1996. Background noise. Today, however, as I came down the stairs, I noticed that the grate on the fifth floor landing was askew. When I came back into the stairwell after getting my animal crackers, I noticed that one of the screws was all the way across the landing, against the riser of the first stair.

I have an active and wayward imagination.

I think I know where grues live.

I think one of them got out.