Category: Uncategorized

Take a look at this new video game idea! I would play it!

I don’t remember if I mentioned it here or not, but for a while there I was thinking of submitting New Comic to Modern Tales. See, Modern Tales has a ‘vacancy’ of sorts because Jon and MT agreed that he would do Patent Pending on goats.com instead of Modern Tales. So they put out a call for submissions for comics that could perhaps fill this vacancy. And I thought New Comic would be a good submission. I consider it my best comics work to date. I don’t know whether it fits with what Modern Tales is looking for, but I’m sure that if I said I would, I could pretty easily keep up an every-other-week update schedule for it.

*changes tracks in mid-stream*

If you ask most people who do web comics (that are aware of the print-comics industry) what their reasons for doing a webcomic are, not facing the editorial control of a syndicate will likely be among the reasons. They want to be able to write what they want, to have storylines be as banal or controvercial as it behooves them to create, and to not have to answer to corporate america about it. To have long-running stories or one-a-day jokes about playing video games, and not to have to worry about whether some executive thinks they appeal to a broad enough audience. To be able to use profanity, or whatever they want. But really, so that they don’t have to answer to anybody byt themselves (and maybe their audience) about their comic.

*Clank-clank! Tracks changing again*

So, MT was asking for stuff like a description of the path the comic was to take, of the characters and settings of the comic, the themes, all normal stuff. They asked for a link to the comic if it exists, or to drawings/sketches if it didn’t exist yet. I thought, no problem. I have an idea of where New Comic is going, and I could easily get a 4th episode of it online before the April 15th deadline, so there’d be plenty to look at, and an interesting and complicated story to look forward to. Up until about a week ago, this is what I planned to do. And I didn’t post anything when I changed my mind, because I was giving myself leeway to change it back.

Except that as of right now I haven’t drawn line one of the fourth installment on paper, and to keep the quality level where I want it, and because I’m going to be in Phoenix Monday and Tuesday (the 15th) and unable to work on it I’d have to get the whole thing done tonight, I’m not going to try to get a fourth installment done before the deadline.

There’s something else though, other than procrastination. There’s this weird feeling at the back of my creative drive that keeps telling me not to sign on with Modern Tales because “they’re just another syndicate.” (Plus, they obviously are trading on the name of Modern Evil…) My mind tried to convince me otherwise – they’re in it for the creators, not for themselves. They don’t own the rights to the comics and you can stop at any time – as evidenced by Jon stopping. They don’t take editorial control or censor people – there was an entire comic on their site about a rabbit’s hardon! But that nagging feeling kept nagging and I decided that I could just keep doing New Comic, just keep posting it here on Modern Evil. The potential for income that Modern Tales represents will not exist here, but that’s not Why I Do Online Comics, is it?

e-sheep

read it.

I don’t care if you love it or hate it, just read it.

I admit it, I should have figured this out and rigged it up a while ago… it isn’t particularly complicated… but something about having figured it out still feels good. What a neat thing I’ve just done.

So, as you may know, I heat the room I live in here in Pine via wood stove. If you’ve ever run a wood stove, you know that you periodically have to put more wood in it, or it will stop functioning as a heat-provider. I have a relatively small wood stove, so I have to put wood in it pretty frequently to keep it giving off heat. Which is a problem when I’m sleeping, as I do not tend to wake every half hour and get up out of bed to put wood in the stove. Most nights I sleep straight through to morning.

Except that then in the morning, my room is unconscionably cold. Like, generally lately it’s been mid-40’s cold in my room when I wake up. Obviously, if I get out of bed and light a fire, the room will warm up, but if I’m going to brave the cold long enough to get a fire started and the room warmed, I may as well just get dressed and get the day started. Which is what I’ve been doing lately.

What I did tonight was to set up and test a system for starting a fire in the stove across the room (~25 feet away) without getting out of bed. As soon as it occurred to me, it seemed obvious, it’s so simple. I happened to have an old starter and a few igniters (plus a few engines not used today) for model rockets. I attached a few matches to the igniter, and gerry-rigged the electric starter to work without the ‘safety key’ I lost countless years go. I put together the workings for a fire in the stove, carefully placed the igniter/matches at the bottom next to some carefully placed newspaper (all just inside the stove), and ran the line across the room from the stove to my bedside table. Voila! Instant, makeshift stove-lighter! I tested it, and now have a nice fire going.

Anyway, small victory for warm-bed-loving me. I don’t think it’ll get cold enough tonight to worry about using it, but it’s supposed to get back down to unbearable coldnesses next week, and barring running out of igniters, I’m set.

Okay, so… as some of you should know… actually, all of you should know, it’s just some of you who bothered paying attention… anyway, I have this whole, alternate calendar that I made up…

And as those of you who have known me since High School or before know, it has been counting down. Now, I lost my records at some point along the way, and when I tried recalculating it a few years ago from scratch, I ended up a little off. But then last year I figured out my miscalculation and adjusted everything. Thus the abbreviation “A.C.” I’ve been adding to my dates lately (see my webcam date on the right), which stands for “Adjusted Calendar”. To differentiate it not just from the old Farmer’s Calendar (what I call the calendar commonly used by the western world), but from the mis-calculated version I had used for about two years. And I’m counting down the final days now. The last day of the last year before the Zero year on the adjusted calendar is 5/4/2003.

Anyway, as I said, I’ve been counting down for quite some time now. This thing in the back of my mind has become a part of a lot of things I’ve done. My old ramblings are actually dated with the miscalcualted calendar. Anyway, I’ve held back on telling anyone what exactly is supposed to be happenning on 5/5/2003 for as long as I’ve been counting down, but that hasn’t stopped me from telling people about other future events, or incorporating them into my writing. Last year when I was trying to write a novel, I figured it was safe to have a paranoid character spout off about a similar countdown, and I actually included quite a bit of vague prescient information as he babbled on about the approaching doomsday. Except that I’ve been re-working some of that story into the novel I’m re-writing and re-structuring lately, and … well…

Examples include SETI@home. The paranoid character in my story told of how the SETI@home people had come across data not only indicating possible extra-terrestrial intelligence, but data that pointed toward a 5/5/2003 event. He spoke of how SETI@home had had to raise money to rent Aricebo time to capture new data from the points in space that had provided potential sources of ‘synthetic’ data, and that they were pushing to try to get the time in Feb. or March so they could analyze the data before the May deadline. He said that the data they already had laid out a line through space where this ‘synthetic’ data originated, and that outside this narrow band, no traces of ‘synthetic’ data had been found. I wrote all this early last year.

Then as I was re-writing it this week, I thought to myself “Hey, didn’t I get an email from SETI@home recently? I wonder if…” and in fact I did. it told me that SETI@home had raised money & rented the Aricebo telescope for 24 hours & had collected data about some potential ‘synthetic’ data points they wanted to verify. They did the collecting March 18-20. If you go to the official site, you can see a starmap of the data points they collected data for; all but one are in a narrow band of space. Everyone running SETI@home is now crunching the new data & nothing else – this is their priority, and they have emailed everyone who has ever used their distributed software at all, encouraging them to come help out with the new data. Anyone want to guess that they know they’re working under a deadline? They’ve rented time on some very powerful computers to help crunch the data independently of the @home program, too. That costs money. Which means someone knows something.

Anyway… what else? hmmm… i won’t mention the thing that was going on around the time I started counting down that’s also going on now, just 25 days before Zero Hour… Ooh! The Chinese!

I have warned several of my closest friends (you know who you are) and I warn the rest of you now, that China represents a real danger to the US. I will not go into detail here, but suffice it to say that I have given a few people a discreet countdown to that danger becoming a reality, and that the countdown should begin on the day that China successfully launches a human being into orbit. I recently learned that this schedule has been pushed up because of India. Did you know that India has a space program? Would you believe that the same political forces between the USSR and America that created the ‘Space Race’ now exist between China and India? When I explained the danger of China to my friends (the warning was adequate, despite the new timetable; they know what to look for) I set an expectation in their minds of China having a man in space within 1-3 years of now. My new information shows that China should have their first successful launch of humans into orbit right around the waning days of Year Zero on my calendar. Possibly on the first day of Year One, if they want to push the political and social punch of it. (For those of you who can do math & want to know what I’m talking about, a year in the Adjusted Calendar is 300 days long.)

I don’t even want to tell you what’s supposed to be happenning on the first day of Year Two, but I will remind you that I recently moved 100 miles from the nearest metropolitan area in any direction, and well out of the way of every major flight path to a small town most people have never heard of, and which does not appear on some maps. Oh, and I now spend my days trying to learn as much as I can from a sniper/demolitions expert who was highly respected by the military in the last World War, and served in the Pacific Theatre. (Wait, does that count as mentioning the war? Nah. Wrong war.) I think I’ll stop here. I’ve only gotten into the first of five pages of prophecies in the story, and at least two major ones have recently scrolled by unnoticed by most people at the bottom of the CNN broadcast, not worthy of being mentioned aloud, but predicted almost a year ago in this story.

And to think Dani is moving from Canada to the US right now… I’m not so sure that’s the best decision, politically. I guess time will tell.