Yep I’ve been inactive, creativity-wise…and actually reading the last thing I wrote here, whoo that’s a bit maudlin. Well, these days I’m a lot better, but instead of going the “okay! I’m going to create things again!” route, I appear to have gone the “you know, maybe it doesn’t bother me if I don’t create things” route.

I appreciate the concern and appreciation of those of you who had written things here. Thanks. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last few months thinking about…oh, the point of it all, I guess. Creatively I think I’ve historically been driven by a need to be heard, to be appreciated, and to get an audience; but I’m coming around to the question, do I really need to? And I’m kinda thinking no. Which for me, in terms of the typical turmoil in my head, is a good thing, because the turmoil’s been pretty calm lately, and I’m thinking of my life less as stresses I create to force myself in certain directions, and more as taking myself in directions because I feel like it.
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I just ripped a really rancid fart and I thought I’d write a post about it.
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I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering what’s going wrong with my podcast, and I think I have a hint. Which kind of sucks, because now I’ve had A Thought, and The Thought is getting in the way of my doing another one.
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By “C2E2″, I mean the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo. And by “appearing”, I mean moving boxes and things, because I’m volunteering to be an unpaid lackey for three days.

Not sure what I was thinking. I signed up four months ago when I was getting Scribs into swing and had some fanciful notion that I was going to get more involved in the comics community, but now I pretty much don’t care.

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I find this fascinating. Not the comic itself, but its existence and its self-perceived import.

I’m doing some ads for my sites, which is how I came to notice it, the referral logs said I got a few hits from it. I take a look, and okay, it’s of a certain class of comic where objects are put together and text is put around it which some people find entertaining. I scroll down to the associated blog post.

Two things about micro-story:
1 – Just because Devil can look like a red dot DOES NOT mean he was the red dot from when they went to Japan. it’s just coincidence.
2 – I think I could have done another two strips of just Baron taking off hats to reveal other ones. I have to move towards the end though. Ah well, maybe another day.

It just struck me as so self-important that I had to keep reading. Read the rest of this entry »

As I was walking on the treadmill Saturday, my legs were getting really tired, but then I hit my second wind. I don’t think I’ve ever even had a second wind until then.

I’ve done a lot of complaining about my weight over the last year or so, but despite my daily strenuous whining regimen and griping reps, the weight would still not come off. About a month ago that changed; I’ve seriously curtailed extranneous eating, somehow developed the willpower to disregard snacking during the workday, and have been taking advantage of our treadmill. People say things like “it’s easy to lose weight, you just have to decide to do it.” That’s true and false. Yes, making the decision is easy — but you have to get to a point where it’s possible to make that decision, and that’s not so much. I finally did, and now I am.

I was really pushing over the edge of “the heaviest I’ve ever been” and was getting grumpier because of it. And occasionally buying a self-hating bag of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups and finishing them off in three days. (Reese’s are my major junk food weakness. Well really, peanut butter is my weakness, but wrapping it in chocolate makes it a flavor delivery system that my body turns directly into dopamine.) But I kicked that habit through sheer willpower so far and haven’t had a Reese’s since. I had been in the habit of hitting the vending machine for a candy bar after lunch, but I haven’t done that, either.

The interesting part will be to see if I can maintain this down to my target weight. I’m 205 now, and throughout my life I’ve pretty much hovered around 200. I’d like to get down to 180, but the previous pattern has been that I lose weight until I get back down to the mental image I have of myself, and then lose interest. But I haven’t seen 190 for maybe a decade, and even then it was only temporarily. I’d like to try to see 180 once just to see if I can.

This all goes towards my longer-term goal: once I get to that weight, I figure it’ll be good to keep in the exercising habit. So when/if I hit 180, I’ll buy myself a bag of Reese’s mini peanut butter cups and spend the rest of the week working it off.

I am a little intrigued at my sudden ability to drop bad habits like a bad habit. Last week, not reading my usual political blogs, to stop the mountain of stupid that was crushing my soul; two weeks ago, going cold turkey on snacks at work, to stop my gut from crushing my pants. Both are things I assumed I would be powerless to affect, but I don’t even miss them very much. Sunday my PC’s video card died, rendering useless my game machine, and the replacement came today; I’m even wondering if I should bother installing the new one.

Talked to my therapist yesterday, and she suggests that I’m feeling overwhelmed. I think I’m getting along with that explanation. The whole health care debate has really been a big weight on me — not so much the health care issue itself, but seeing all these people who are so drastically mistaken, and angrily so. And it’s just…well, I’ve known for a long time that people are dumb, so in itself, people being dumb about health care is no big surprise. But I guess the rational part of me held the belief that, with proper discussion and reasoning, people can general be brought out of the ignorance and into the light. Or at least halfway out of the darkness, to a place where they understand that the only place “death panels” exist are in the minds of those who fear.
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Well, the one big one is using my own name and then having Fuck All from high school think I want to read about their kids’ bowel movements as updated at the 5′s, but I got that one covered, sorta, by cleverly not using my real and easily searchable name. But the other one is not wanting to write things of much import…well, more specifically, having an easy way to write about things of little import, and not wanting to spend time on the big ones because it’s a hassle.

That’s why I was able to knock out a few Scribs in the last few weeks: the comic existed at all because I wanted to do some visual humor but didn’t want to be slowed down with the foolishness of drawing something and get straight to the humor. But I got tired of my own programming, as I always do, and then continuing Scribs became yet another exercise in trying to deal with old programs I wrote, and hating them, and then wanting to rewrite them, and hating that. And thus Scribs, like so many other of my questionably bright ideas in the past, fell down the languish hole of my own lack of tenacity.
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With pictures! And commentary! In some places!
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I bought Guitar Hero over the weekend. I’m not that great at it—”easy” is just below my ability, and “medium” is slightly above, so I’m pretty much never gonna see the game on any level that I feel like I’ve mastered it.

Still, whatever, it’s kind of fun. I always liked the guitar in Sunshine Of Your Love, so I looked forward to that. A couple songs like Hit Me With Your Best Shot and Welcome To The Jungle are a lot more fun to play than they are to listen to. I am surprised to find I like more straight rock than I’d thought.

However, odd thing happened while I was going through Easy mode and got down to One by Metallica. I had like an emotional reaction to it—or hm, no, that’s how I described it at the time, but it’s not quite right. I had maybe a pride reaction. Or honor? Anyway, it just felt wrong to play it on easy. It deserved more. I just cancelled it mid-song and picked a different one.

I was having a difficult time with “medium”, and you have to get through a number of songs before you can get down to the part where One is available to you. But I bludgeoned my way through it just so I could get down to One again and put some effort into it that it deserves.

I don’t even like Metallica all that much. I am fascinated by this reaction in myself, and as self-analysis is my lifelong hobby, I expect to mull this over a fair bit.