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A few notes on assorted topics:

• If you receive a piece of email that tells you that the US is going to start drafting people in June of 2005, don't panic. Instead, go read the Snopes page about the alleged draft, and (even better) the factcheck.org page on the same topic. More generally, any time you receive any piece of email that tells you "PANIC NOW!" and/or "FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!", Snopes should be the first place you look. I think in the past fifteen years or so of receiving such emails, I've seen maybe one or two that had more than a grain of truth in them.
• Another entertaining Flash game from the makers of Grow and Vanilla (only this new one is faster-paced, more arcade-like): Tontie. Thanks to nj, who described it as "Whack-a-Mole on steroids."
• Mike Ward has been posting his WisCon 2004 photos; there's one set still to come, but a bunch are up already. If you're in a photo, he'll provide you with a higher-resolution verson on request.
• I forgot to mention the other day when I was whining about my week that it was also the sort of week when I tried to buy some music from the iTunes Music Store to cheer myself up Thursday evening, and received an error message that basically said "We've charged your credit card, but due to an unknown error you can't actually download the music." I spent some time on Apple's customer-service pages and found the form to ask for help; they told me they'd get back to me "within 24 business hours," which I interpreted as meaning "sometime Friday" but perhaps it means "within 3 business days," I dunno. They didn't contact me Friday; I'm guessing they will on Monday.
• On the other hand, there were some good things last week, too, including a nice lunch outdoors with co-workers in the sunshine (which would've had a soporific effect even if I'd had enough sleep), and Kam's and my watching the end of Season 2 of Alias. Yikes. I still hope to write up a long discussion of Alias sometime soon, but for now suffice it to say it's my current favorite show; it has moments of goofiness and annoyance now and then, and you have to be willing to accept certain over-the-top genre elements, but for the most part it's extraordinarily well done. And David Carradine's guest appearance in one of those last few episodes was priceless.
• Night Shade Books is having a 50%-off sale for the next couple days, if you order three or more books from them. You might, for example, pick up Leviathan 4: Cities, or an Iain M. Banks short-story collection (formerly, I think, available only in the UK), or some Jack Cady or Lord Dunsany or M. John Harrison, or Nick's Move Under Ground, or works by Lucius Shepard, John Shirley, Clark Ashton Smith, or S. P. Somtow, or the critically acclaimed Veniss Underground and Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, or a five-volume set of Manly Wade Wellman short story collections (I'm eyeing volume 5, which contains the complete Silver John stories), or a Liz Williams collection, or Zoran Zivkovic's first novel. Most are hardcovers, but the 50%-off sale puts them into the price range of small-press trade paperbacks, which makes several of them pretty tempting to me even though I don't normally buy hardcovers these days.
• Got a fair bit of sleep last night, for once. Unusually odd/vivid/temporarily-memorable dreams lately, including playing a roleplaying game based on the Bhagavad-Gita (it turns out my subconscious didn't really know what that was; the game was basically steampunk set in Victorian India).

Today: reading subs; replying to subs; lazing around the house; editing; relaxing a little.