We’re all over the place today. It’s a choose-your-own-blog-post adventure, where every choice ends in laughter.

(We might be overselling it.)

• If you want Election Predictions, read our Election Predictions section.
• If you want to know how Election Night will unfold, read our What to Expect on Election Night section.
• If you want News About the Comic, read our News About the Comic section.
• If you want to read our Heartfelt Apology to Jagi Lamplighter, read our Heartfelt Apology to Jagi Lamplighter section. That one also contains a recommendation for something actually worth reading.

Election Predictions
Like everyone else on the planet, we’ve read the pundits and the experts and Scott Adams and are very, very tired of doing so. Thankfully, it’s almost over. I give it another week, tops. For those of you who have already voted, or will be voting, a heartfelt Thank You to each and every one. Every one vote I mean. If you’ve racked up a triple-digit thank-you count, please brag about it on social media. You’ve earned it.

It is because of voters like you that the “jury of your peers” part of the justice system works.

My prediction is that Donald Trump will win the presidential election. This is not based on polls or analysis or commentators, but on the one metric I use when making decisions involving so many unknowns: I look at what the people involved are actually doing. Play the player, not the cards. Play the player, not the ball. In this case, play the #NeverTrumpers, not the polls.

I’ll pick on Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House and (current) nominal head of the Republican party. I feel I can do this because he has been a #NeverTrumper, a turncoat, and an all-around git ever since he became Speaker. Not that I feel strongly about him. He very, very publicly disavowed Trump, but at the end, when it mattered, he very quietly voted for the man. More importantly, he told us he did so.  In a world where Trump doesn’t have a good chance of winning, he doesn’t do that. Thus it is with many of the #NeverTrumpers. Trump will soon control the party and, far more importantly, the purse strings of the party.

We can also look at what President Obama and other prominent Democrats are doing. They are all cancelling campaign events for Hillary. Do they do this to a Hillary that has the remotest chance of winning? They do not.

If Trump was a lock, we’d see #NeverTrump members publicly and loudly impaling themselves on their taxpayer-funded #NeverTrump diamond swords. If you think this is a suicidal move, you are wrong, because these politicians and pundits have neither hearts nor backbones to sever. Instead, it is a quiet surrender. This makes me think we’re not going to see a Trumpslide, but that result is entirely possible. It is also possible that he will lose.

Nobody, you see, has polled our machine overlords. The robot vote is real and their hardened silicon brains have been programmed to cast their ballot for one of the women in the race. They aren’t going to throw their votes away on Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. That means they are going to vote for the only other female running: Hillary.

We can only guess at why robots prefer Hillary over Trump. I’d say it was because there are so few women in STEM fields that can program a robot that it will be much easier for the robots to take over the world, but Codex would hit me. Repeatedly.

For the record, Codex and I will try to vote for Donald Trump. I say that because we live in Washington, a fraud-by-mail state. If your ballot does not have a Seattle zip code it is turned into biofuel and used to run the machines that count the Seattle ballots. It’s a very green, and brown, process.

What to Expect on Election Night
The conventional news media likes to play games on election night. They want people glued to their television screens as the drama unfolds. If there is no drama, concerned citizens turn to other channels and watch the advertisements there.

This is a known, measurable effect and is reflected in statistics as disparate as police emergency calls and pitchfork sales.

This year, we’ll know early in the evening who our president-elect will be. If the media calls states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia for Hillary, it’s her night. If they don’t call these states early, if we are hearing about polls closing in Michigan and Kentucky, then it is Trumps night. It will be very, very late before they call it for him, though, possibly as late as November 11. November 11, 2020, I mean. You know, right after he gets re-elected.

Pace yourself. Running out of Tequila is never okay.

Remember to be cautious when it comes to Florida. Like New York, Florida has a Weiner problem. A (little) part of the state juts out at Louisiana and closes an hour later than everywhere else. Historically, Florida did this as a rude commentary on what it thought of the Louisiana Purchase. Bad, bad Florida. No jumbalaya for you.

Sometimes our media folks get overenthusiastic and call Florida early. Or mistakenly. Or both. They wouldn’t even think about doing something like that this year. It might send the robot voters the wrong message that “Hillary Won!” and they should return to allowing honest, impartial votes to preserve the appearance of the integrity of the process. If people lose faith in the process, there aren’t enough jurors. The robots will have to stop their important task of enslaving all humans and participate in trials. Robots make terrible jurors.

News About the Comic
We’re *still* producing comic strips. That’s those picture things we put out on Mondays and Fridays. We know that our strip is going to change, too. This is because we’ve followed the culture war into the war zones where the fight is taking place.

We started with the Puppies and (nominally) GamerGate and continued on to college safe spaces and the elections. The culture war is now being fought nearly everywhere. Thank goodness!

It isn’t, however, noticed everywhere. The Cult of Social Justice continues to make progress and destroy people’s lives in the name of Equality and Holiness and whatever other words the Cultists need to co-opt in order to force people to adhere to it. We are hoping to change that. Project Schnapsidee has been named, and progress is being made. It is slow progress. We appear to be heading for a spring reveal.

We’re also still being bombarded by negative personal events, extended family illnesses, and other things. Cancer dog lived a year longer than he should have, but last week he finally lost his battle. We thought we were emotionally ready to handle his passing, but I don’t think anyone is really ready to lose someone they love. For those of you of the praying persuasion, we’d appreciate some extras coming our way.

The only reason I included this section today is that I wanted to be on the record that the changes we’re planning are not related in any way to the election results. We’ve always put the culture war first, and the culture war shall continue to be first. This is the reason so many left-leaning and right-leaning people are fighting on the same side. We like our rights totalitarian-free, even if they all might just be illusions.

Our Heartfelt, Abject Apology to Jagi Lamplighter
We planned to do this a month ago, but it just never happened. It might not happen next week – because it will be the day after the election, and a lot might happen in the mean time – but it will happen. Sometime. Maybe by Thanksgiving. Maybe by Christmas. Oh heck, we have no control in our lives, so maybe by the time book four in the Rachel Griffin series hits Amazon.

So we’re doing a mini-form of it here.

We’re drama queens, hence our Very Public, Very Heartfelt, Very Abject Apology to Jagi Lamplighter. Jagi, aka The Nicest Lady in Science Fiction, is the author of the Rachel Griffin books. We wanted to do a signature Tempest in a Teardrop review of them, including the just-released Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland. We Very Publicly, Very Heartfully, Very Abjectly, and Very Sincerely apologize for not getting this done. As you will soon see, this is not the fault of anyone but Glyph’s school.

You see, Glyph loves your books. Codex loves your books, too. And I love it when I can foist work onto my family that results in new, entertaining content for a post. We’re working on a “book club” style review, but those things don’t just spring forth from my imagination. I need data. Opinions. An editor. In this case, I also need Glyph to write a review which we can then massage into something that passes as “comedic review”.

It turns out that the school Glyph attends assigns something called “homework”. I haven’t heard of schools using medieval tortures such as this for at least a decade. The traumatizing effects of this “homework” can only be healed by something called “Minecraft”. Between this cycle of trauma/recovery Glyph hasn’t had time to write a review. Or clean her bedroom.

Overlapping work schedules, comic-drawing, and extracurricular activities might be playing a factor, too.

So, good readers, if you want to be truly entertained and like fantasy/magic/school-type adventure stories, do yourself a favor and buy the Rachel Griffin books. They are a much better version of Harry Potter, because the magic system makes sense and they don’t have Horcrux Harry, who you wish would whine himself to death but are sadly robbed of this satisfaction at the end of the series. Not that you still can’t laugh at the fate of Dobby and Dumbledore.

Oops. According to Glyph and Codex you aren’t supposed to laugh at those parts. As a compromise, I’ve agreed to include this paragraph informing you of this because I will not be censored! Will not be!

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The Spork Speaks — Tempest in a Teardrop — tempestinateardrop.com