Kathleen Roberts, poetry: “American Dream,” “The Fisherman” and “The Soldier”

Jill Hinners, short-short fiction: “Tending”

Jim Brakken, creative nonfiction: “Justice.” Also, Brakken is the author of The Treasure of Namakagon, a fact-based 1883 lumberjack adventure available at badgervalley.com, amazon.com, and many museums and shops in the northland.

Lake Superior Writers would like to thank all the writers in this region who submitted their work to this year’s contest. The writing submitted was plentiful and wonderful. Our judges had a great time reading all manuscripts and were very proud to select this year’s winners.

Kathleen Roberts, Jill Hinners and Jim Brakken will be reading from their winning works at Lake Superior Writers Annual Meeting and Contest Celebration and Reading on Sunday, May 19, 1 to 3 p.m., at Beaner’s Central Concert Coffeehouse, 324 Central Ave. N., Duluth.

If you love chainmaille as much as we do you can check out my new ETSY online shoppe. For instant gratification, we have several items available in EG steel at the moment.

If you secretly harbor chainmaille desires, send me a PM and we’ll do what we can to fulfill your chainmaille fantasies. Thanks for exploring this project!

Great event, fun ride and good job to Healthy Duluth for making it happen!

It was great to see former Congressman Oberstar, Mayor Ness and a whole pack of cyclists rolling down to Valentini’s!

This week we installed a new plugin for Recent Comments that we hoped would be better, but unfortunately it isn’t.

The old version tended to work perfectly for people who were logged in and had their browsers set to accept cookies galore. For everyone else, which would be a vast majority, it worked poorly.

The new version works the same for everybody — as far as we can tell — but it works poorly for everybody. The two problems with the new version are:

1) It won’t tell you specifically that there are comments you haven’t read, it just lists the posts that have most recently been commented on, whether you’ve read the comments or not.

2) For some reason, if there is a new comment to a post that isn’t one of the 60 most recently posted items, the Recent Comments list won’t highlight it.

Issue #1 is just the way this plugin works, and we accepted that as maybe the best we can do for now, but issue #2 was unexpected, majorly sucks, and makes us think we’ll go back to the previous junky plugin if we can’t fix this issue.

So there you go. We just wanted to let you know why things are stupid right now.

Where for 10 points; why so worn out for 50 points.

If I had to complain (and as a nerd, I must), I would say that the Shining Presentation (coincidentally connected to the Zinema showing this weekend) appeared to be reporting on other people’s passions, rather than the passions of the presenters.  (Go back to My Little Pony, John, or better yet, Gojira — you shimmered in those presentations.)

…but most worth it for the Max Headroom presentation.  Some Max Memories:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzxHDqUz8Sk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYdpOjletnc

And almost-Max:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cycVTXtm0U0

The Underground space (new host of Nerd Nite) will host the Steampunk event, include a lecture by Ed Newman and yours truly.  See you there.

Video by students at the Bethany Lutheran College Media Arts department in Mankato.