News Archive for: Oct 28, 2001 to Nov 1, 2001
Gonna do it. Be here.
I don't know- Should there be a comic tomorrow? I liked the one for today up until I scanned it in and saw what it really looked like. There probably should be one for Tuesday, but I'm not sure how I feel about getting one done. I'm tired and I think I'm coming down with something. I also watched "Ed Wood" this weekend and it made me question what I'm doing here. That alone probably wouldn't have been an issue if the next comic I'd drawn had been really very good, but it didn't turn out that way. I'm kind of just rambling at the moment, but that's what this space is for.
Three more comics before #200.
It's raining here in LA county for the first time since... oh, I don't know. I always like to see rain here because we get it so infrequently. And it keeps slipping my mind that there was a quake on Sunday. It's hard to say which happens with greater frequency- rain or quakes. A friend who's only recently moved here has yet to experience a quake, as the last one we had occurred while she was out of town. I was going to ask her how she found this one, but hadn't remembered to yet. The thing is, she's been ill, and so was probably asleep at the time and may not have felt it at all.
Expect comics on Wednesday and on Thursday this week. Those'll be #198 and #199, respectively, and I may need to take a little extra time for the big two-oh-oh. It may appear on Saturday, but I can't say just now.
#199 tomorrow. Things to like about today's comic- How Allen looks in panel 2 and how Kate looks in panel 6. Things to dislike- Ah, just figure that out on your own. As my own worst critic, I'd keep you here all day with that one. Win some, lose some, right? Though the writing was weaker in yesterday's comic, I think it was drawn better than today's.
Heard this on the radio last night while driving home. Today I found it on the 'net at the author's site. I don't know if it will be there forever, so I'm going to reproduce the entire thing here, because I happen to like it and I want to be able to read it again sometime:
Miracles happen all the time. In fact, they never not happen. To be even half awake is to know that what happens to you could not have happened if only the law of averages was operating, or if Chaos was purely chaotic. This world is ruled by Chaos and Eros, two entities that are not arbitrary. On the contrary, they are blindingly, powerfully sensical, symmetrical, magnetic, besotted with forms, rife with the improbable but inevitable, drenched in glorious necessity. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the operations of Chaos and Eros intend you personally.To be "drawn somewhere," as most people explain being where they feel that they should be, or to experience the migraine of a quadruple deja-vu in one quarter of an hour, or to find out that friends, movies stars, and your pet, all of which are named "Carl" share the same birthday, is nothing more than the obvious. All those congruences people like to call "fate," are what happens if you move through the world without an ideology or at least a system, borne aloft like a cork on the spumes of Chaos and Eros. The tensions you experience are not personal either, though they certainly feel that way; they are the interplay of the partly centrifugal Chaos meeting head-on the partly centripetal Eros. It?s something between them, you?re just an exchange switch inside the miracle-making machine.
Now the fact that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer belongs to a human-made order inside the grandeur of the gaming universe, and it partakes only partially of the great forces. There is a sub-world in the flows of necessity, which is the statistical reality most people believe is the only one. This actuarial, measurable, fairly predictable reality tracks the flows of wealth, keeps locks at critical points of the libidinal reservoir, and is generally useful in keeping the tri-partite structure of Law, Church, and Business in reasonable working order. In the interstices between institutions, in the gray areas between different jurisdictions, the wavering borders of incompatible forms, the stuff of Chaos and Eros flows like everywhere else, only (seemingly) a bit slower.
Man did not find herself at the center of the universe coincidentally. Certain men decided that it was impossible to live in a miraculous world, one in which words are deeds, sense is mocked, joy fuels cosmic collapses, and superstition grips everyone with a greedy hand. A world like that, even if inevitable, does nothing for hygiene and the food supply. They decided, quite rightly, to make a series of livable islands right in midst of the raging torrents of the self-propelled universals, and to live on them as if things made sense. These were the 18th century Illuminists, the men we owe democracy and individual rights to. Those highly cherished but artificial concepts do not concern the gods. Their job is miracles, ours is to live decently. The human world is incompatible with the miracle-making universe, which is why we must ignore Chaos, Eros, coincidence, symmetry, beauty without end, and the fireworks of criminal genius, at all times, except between the hours of two and five a.m. in the bloom of our youth. The rest of the time, sadly, we must act as if we live in a cute box.
My quote for tomorrow is from a Doc Searls article, but here's a slightly longer bit that I also found amusing:
"The only disappointment, but perhaps a fortuitous one, was the ship's Internet cafe, which presented the Net in 640x480 dimensions through a customized Microsoft Internet Explorer browser that cost $.75/minute or $99.95/week to use. Apparently some of us (myself included, I am sure) inadvertently insulted the uniformed professional assigned to assist guests normally far less Net-hip than our contingency. She was not happy with campers who insulted her system verbally- or worse, tried to crawl under the tables and hack into it physically."
Please forgive my complete ignorance of the French language. I'll be making the correction to today's image when I can.
But there IS an image there in its place. I could see that it wasn't going to be possible to get the actual comic #199 done today, so rather than leaving the site void of new material I opted to do this quick drawing instead. The good news is that it rather fits into continuity anyhow, and shows a moment that I would otherwise have been unable to spare the narrative space for in the context of the comic I had planned to post.
There is NOT likely to be a comic on Friday, but there may be on Saturday. Them's the breaks.