this post will self-destruct† in 8 days

† Assuming that I both remember and bother to do so¹.

Here is a thing:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/parsecink/bad-romance-an-anthology-of-trash-couples

One story is a formal experiment of an in-joke for the crayon-eaters² that accidentally morphed into an homage to… a(n — I’m assuming —) USENET post reprinted in the November 1998 issue of White Dwarf?

1. I’m fully aware that the asterisk (*) is the conventional symbol for the first footnote, the obelus or dagger (†), the second, but I’m also more used to seeing the asterisk used to indicate a correction. Also, apropos of entirely nothing other than how cool typography and/or punctuation can be, I spent… several years chuckling over the “sic dagger”, where you would place a dagger next to a misspelling, solecism, or flat-wrong ‘fact’ as shorthand for sic — no need to belabor or scare-quote it, just shank ’em in the mistake and move on like nothing had happened like a good sīcārius should.
   It seems I was somehow confusing the Latin for ‘dagger’, sīca (whence sīcārius) with sīc.
   Dammit, I still like the idea, though. ↩︎
2. Of course, I have a meme prepped and ready for when I finally hit 10k books in my library (“Cheevo Unlocked: CALL SIGN CHAOS”), so I’mma assume-don’t-@-me that the crayon-eater thing is due to PFC Crayons Georg.
   (Every source I’ve found lists Mattis’s library with a peak of 6-7,000 volumes; I have absolutely no idea where I got the 10k figure from other than OOH BIG ROUND NUMBER, but… stet.) ↩︎