I can’t make anything for a while so I have been crawling a webcomic archive

Seriously, I’m creatively blocked for the moment so I figured why not research someone else’s creativity? The webcomic in question is Questionable Content. He has been publishing for over 15 years and more than 4000 comics, so an archive crawl is a prodigious undertaking. I have been at it for a couple of days now and I’m only up to 1995 and the current comic is 4069. Also it’s a good chance to see art and writing evolution in action without cringing through my archives. Seriously, my attempts at viewpoint journalism ranged from awful to terrible, with flashes of brilliance. It was those flashes that both kept me going and eventually made me give it up, along with the nightmares and flashbacks caused by the links I had to read before I put them in the blog. I didn’t write much about it at the time, but after a while doing the blog was a serious impediment to my mental stability. Like depression and flashbacks and PTSD triggers impediment, but I was getting so much positive feedback about how this blog was helping I felt like that I couldn’t quit doing it, until I had to quit doing it. Seriously when you go to a regional planning meeting and your blog is mentioned in the presentation, it’s like a huge “Like” thumbs up ego stroke that you’re doing something right, even though doing the right thing for other people is the wrong thing for you.

Anyway one of the things that has been blocking my creativity is I have to make some of my tools and fixtures, and I have been trying to wrap my head around doing that, specifically how to get the outside-to-outside distance between two bending posts within a few thousandths of an inch tolerance when I can’t even mark the stock for the tool to that tolerance. Sure I can CAD two holes where the holes need to be, but going from a picture on my laptop to holes drilled in a piece of wood with stainless steel bolts screwed into them is another thing entirely. It’s not like I can just put the raw stock into a computer controlled milling machine and get perfectly spaced bending posts like some people can. I found the board sitting on the curb on trash day and the posts are some bolts that happen to be the same size as the tube bending die except in ¹/₂₅th scale and cost less than a buck for everything. I’m the cheap guy, not the rich guy. Hold on a second, let me open another tab and check my Lotto numbers, I might be A rich guy (I’ll never be THE rich guy). I mean I always get the annuity so I’ll never be actually rich unless I hit one of those billion dollar jackpots that have annual payments larger than the jackpot for the Texas Lotto.

OK I’m back and I’m not rich, I basically had a draw. There is a thing with the Texas Lotto called Extra that gets you more money if you don’t win the jackpot, and because I spent the money for Extra I essentially got a Free Play or a “push”. I got my money back and that’s it. So I will use the money to buy another Lotto ticket for Saturday’s drawing, because “You can’t win if you don’t play.” And at this point I won’t be financially secure if I don’t win. I’m OK right now, it’s not like we are looking at living off beans and rice until we die, but if we get another bout of inflation like we got back in Nixon’s first term, even with social security things are looking grim around Casa de El Poeta.

Just dropping this in because it was brought up in a QC comic, but I’m 1,921,741,954 seconds old as of the composing of this post. Almost 2 trillion seconds, wow. And that seems like a pretty good place to end this.

Advertisement

Insert Monty Python reference here but there is still not going to be a post

You know the bit I’m talking about from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and I’m not talking about the grail-shaped beacon, nor “enormous tracts of land”. That last one is a meme all by itself.

“I’m not dead yet”

Basically I spent most of the day looking for my files to get the joints tighter with smaller gaps, which are not where they used to be after I bought them, so I still can’t do the next round of test joints. And I’m tired, my back hurts, and I’m frustrated at my lack of progress.

So, end result is no post today. Sorry.

This might be a little short

I’m beset by Writer’s Block. See?

Seriously, there’s nothing going down lately. I have been eating a lot of popsicles to keep cool, hydrating regularly, listening to music on my phone, reading webcomics, eating ramen with veggies and sometimes with boiled eggs. Just nothing worth writing about more than once. My life has become repetitious like that book by Solzhenitsyn, where he told the entire life story of a political prisoner by relating just a single day, because one day was pretty much identical to every other day.

There’s nothing to relate on the T-bucket either. No new ideas, no new parts, and as always no money. Well, nothing big, but I have been thinking about the details, like where to route fuel lines to prevent them from dragging off over speedbumps, ditto brake lines and wiring, keeping everything neat and tidy and away from possible damage. As you do when you build hotrods.

Annnnnd I’m just babbling at this point, so this is a good spot to stop.

The annual Yule fight has begun, on Wreck-Free Sunday

One of the byproducts of the over-commercialization of Christmas has been the pushback of the acceptable decoration dates for both the first and last “acceptable” decorations going up. And as the “last” date moves closer to September the intensity of the annual fight over putting up the Yule decorations in Casa de El Poeta also increases, because my date hasn’t changed from what it has always been (12/20). I have been accused of many things because of this with “Grinch” being one of the kinder things. I’m sorry, but I’m firmly of the opinion that the “specialness” of a holiday gets less so as the dates of the holiday get moved further apart, and for me “Yule” starts 12/21 and ends 1/1 the next year. So, the decorations go up 12/20 and come down 1/2 AFAIAC. If that makes me a Grinch, then I’m a Grinch. Grinch, grinch, grinch, I’m being all grinchy. I still haven’t gotten the hang of being green and covered with fur like Oscar the Grouch, but I am embracing my grinchyness. When does Festivus begin?…

I really should be promoting my new hat some more. Not just because I really like it but because I have come to the realization that the magicks I placed on the first hat need to be stopped. I publicly declared the first hat as a double bird flipped at the guy that hit me and a “return to sender” of his intentions, and within a few months of making this public, the guy was dead by his own hand. Thing is I didn’t know that, so I subconsciously kept the spell going until the hat wore out completely, then bought another one that was almost identical and kept it until it wore out declaring it as “the replacement” for the first hat, which literally transferred the spell to it. So I have this spell working like mad with no target left alive, which is not good. So, very soon I will do a public ceremony where I burn the old hats and declare that spell at an end, and declare a new spell for the public good. The new spell will target the powers-that-be to generate some real (Dutch CROW manual) bicycle infrastructure for the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell.

New hat.

Old hat.

There is a debate (of sorts) on the use of HiViz by cyclists. What do you think? Encouraging high-vis gear I think this is one step removed from victim blaming, but what do you think?

Today is one of those days that I have a concept running around in my head, but no words to attach to that concept. This is one of the facets of aphasia, the worst of them. Most of the time I just have a word or two that I have to track down inside my head and eventually I do that and finish the sentence and then the rest of the blog post. This time I lost the whole shooting match, a whole paragraph or more. And if you don’t think that’s frustrating, then you have never written for a living…

So, to save what is left of my dignity and sanity, I will cut it off right here rather than continue to beat my head against the biggest writer’s block in the world.

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet