I am SO EXCITED today! Last week, KingsIsle, developers of the wonderful MMO, Wizard 101, asked if I would be interested in participating in a little contest to help promote their new player housing. Players will be able to buy homes based on themes from each of the five worlds in game — Wizard City, Krokotopia, Marleybone, Moo Shu and Dragonspyre. The vendors for these homes are going to be industrious builder turtles, who will exchange piles of gold for the keys to your new home. The names of these turtles will be determined by the players, and the readers of West Karana who also play Wizard 101 will be naming the turtle for Marleybone, which is my personal favorite world.

I couldn’t be more thrilled! If my blog works correctly, you should see a post with the contest details appear magically at around 11AM EST. The contest will run for ten days, so you have plenty of time, but get your votes in early :) Everyone who chooses the eventual winning name gets a prize, and the first one to send in the name that eventually gets chosen gets something even cooler!

Must be something in the air, because suddenly, everyone is talking about — FONTS. Yesterday, Todd Klein told us about the dangers of using Microsoft’s Comic Sans MS font face, today, Bryzon at Bryzon’s Blurbs points at some videos of cartoons translated to animated text, and science fiction problog io9 takes us through a baker’s dozen fonts for alien languages.

Words are GOOD. MBP over at Mind Bending Puzzles wonders if today’s kids could get excited about the sort of text adventures we all used to play in the 80s — and finds that they can!

Russian-American mathematician Tanya Khovanova examines how the major prizes in the field of mathematics are stacked against woman. Tanya’s blog is an inspiration and often quite a lot of fun besides.

Syp over at Bio Break, whose every post I love, has a theory why gamers just don’t pick a MMO and stick with it! Seven theories, in fact. Beau at Spouse Aggro wonders if it’s just because we’re really bored. TERMINALLY bored.

That’s it for today. Check back later and enter the W101 contest — turtle isn’t going to name itself!

Rumor has it that The Middleman, probably the best SF/comedy on TV this season, is in danger! Not of cancellation, but of being restricted to just one season. Creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach writes on The Middleblog that despite stellar network support, ratings haven’t been great, and they have decided to end The Middleman at episode 12, and to go out with a bang.

If you don”t watch The Middleman, you should. And if you DO watch, but via torrent or something, well, watch it on TV (I do, now), or watch it online — ABC Family streams each show after it airs, and people watching via the web in that way definitely support the show.

It’s way better to support these shows while they are still on the air, than to discover them on DVD years later and ask, plaintively, why they don’t make shows like THAT anymore! Just what I have to say about Firefly…

If you actually CAN watch this, then I guess their servers have managed to recover from yesterday’s crush. After trying for awhile, I just got the first episode of Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” through a torrent.

Neil Patrick Harris is Dr. Horrible, a struggling mad scientist hoping one day to join the supervillain group, “The Evil Society of Evil”. He occasionally does a video blog where he discusses problems like how his transmat ray is going, what his nemesis Captain Hammer (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) did to him last week that really hurt, how his evil laugh is coming along (he has just gotten a vocal coach), and how nervous he is about talking to a girl he sees at the laundromat, Penny, played by Buffy’s Felicia Day.

This leads into the song “Freeze Ray”, about a gun he wants to invent that will freeze time, so it would be easier to talk to her. He’s interrupted by his friend Moist, who has the power to make stuff damp. He’d been on a date last night with the super-villainess Bait and Switch. At the end of the night, he’d been hoping to go home with Bait, but… oh well.

Among the sopping wet pieces of mail he delivers is a letter from Bad Horse, the evil equine leader of the Evil Society of Evil, which leads right into the song, “Bad Horse” (and where did those cowboys with the painfully fake mustaches come from?).

The thing is hilarious. It’s short, has four fantastically funny songs (the other two are the one Penny sings as she tries to get signatures on her petition to convert an old building to a homeless center, and the song that ends in a three-part harmony between Dr. Horrible, Captain Hammer, and Penny, “A Man’s Gotta Do”).

I won’t spoil anything — but watch it. There will be two other “webisodes”, and even though all three together will likely be only half an hour — I’d buy the DVD.

edit — link to Joss Whedon’s post about Dr. Horrible, how it came to be, and what will become of it. Next episode is up THURSDAY and after July 20 they will no longer be free to watch, though it’s well worth paying.

Just discovered the blog of Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator, writer and artist for “The Middleman” comics and the new TV series of the same name. Monday nights. ABC Family. Lots of inside info about upcoming episodes and behind the scenes stuff. Yeah, I know YOU’RE already watching the best comedy SF show on television right now, but I’m just letting those other people who are too good and hip to watch television know about it.

I mean, I just can’t believe where you (not you, those other people) get off always telling me TV is crap. Every single season I have to come back and say, look at this, this, and this. Now my preggers (but not for long) sister has just revealed she has just started getting into Battlestar Galactica. Welcome to three years ago, Hillary :) Finally, though!

So anyway. The Middleman. You’ll love it. You overseas people, it’s just now starting to hit the torrents.