usedbooks wrote:
There are pretty reasonable campgrounds when you get away from the tourist hubs. Since I work in different places and want to take my pets, it made sense. I like having my own space.

I like having my own space as well, though it's the solitude I like. I hope that power company isn't dragging its feet…

My brain is sore this morning and I'm feeling flat as a sheet of paper.

The Quackcast goes up today (recorded on Saturday, edited all of Sunday, notes and new version of pic done on Monday).
I'm proud of the alterations I did to the cover pic for it- it's the same pic as last week, but with some really groovy improvements so I can't wait to show that. :)

I have to do the featured comic for tomorrow when I get home this afternoon, but I'm not dreading that because there are so many top quality comics updating on DD again right now. My list of potential features is full up of good ones.

So that's 3 days of pretty full on, totally unpaid work I do for the site this week. I'm so glad I stagger the features with Kawaii these days. It used to be much harder.
-Although THIS Quackcast is another fully scripted radio show and takes about 1000% more work and time to edit than a normal one. Normal Quackcasts are really fast and easy to edit these days. I've gotten much faster.

I'm thinking I should try and monetise these skills now: try and get a course at the art college teaching digital comic making, podcasting, webcomic hosting, all that guff. I have a crapload of experience and I do like teaching.

Why is it that inspiration always strikes when I'm too busy to do anything about it? I kind of hate one of the chapters I wrote for my comic and I came up with a much weirder idea to replace it with, but there's no way I'll have time to write it for another few weeks at least.

I'm thinking I should try and monetise these skills now: try and get a course at the art college teaching digital comic making, podcasting, webcomic hosting, all that guff. I have a crapload of experience and I do like teaching.

That's a great idea, oz!

ozoneocean wrote:
I'm thinking I should try and monetise these skills now: try and get a course at the art college teaching digital comic making, podcasting, webcomic hosting, all that guff. I have a crapload of experience and I do like teaching.

I'm tempted to do something like art myself. Y'know… grab a Patreon account and just draw whatever I like. I'm NOT the best artist and I'm way out of practice, but it would be a good way to bring money in (though I'm not holding out much hope for that route)…

Or I could just indulge in my favorite hobby… taking pictures of clouds and posting them someplace and connect that site to Patreon.

Then again I think a bit too much…

That would be an amazing type of class, Oz! A face-to-face class would be beneficial because you get to interact with students in person. I, too, have always wondered if there were people interested in webcomics in my area.

Lately, I have come to terms with the idea that the non-comic work I do for a paycheck allows me the ability to work on my favorite hobbies like art and drawing. In a perfect world, earning money and hobbies would not be separate and that would be a dream job.

Edit 3:45PM

I feel as if I had just arrived.

Today I opened the door to the house and a man asked me if MY PARENTS were home! Hoping to avoid any unwanted sales pitch, I told him that, “No, they are not.” And shut the door in front of him. I was laughing the whole afternoon about that incident.

kawaii, that's funny stuff XD

oz, you would be a fantastic teacher!

Today was one of the best days ever. I arrived to the elementary school expecting to substitute teach in the same classroom I had been for the last few weeks when the administrative secretary called me to the back and told me that I was going to be for the certified substitute teacher in the moderate to mild autistic classroom adjacent to the room where I normally sub. I had never stepped foot in that classroom before, but I have learned the names of several of the students in the other class in passing over the last few weeks.

It is amazing to learn about all the different personalities the children brought to the table. One would be the star student of the morning and suddenly fall to the ground and have an outburst, another would complain about a Lego figurine having putty stuck in the joints and then would begin to growl when no one understood his problem. There was one quiet boy who was larger than the rest and I was told that he would get obsessed with food in the room if someone brought donuts or a whole pizza to the classroom. One student's least favorite song in the entire world was “Happy Birthday” and it just happened to be his birthday today, so as soon as the singing was about to begin, he began covering his ears and started running to the bathroom. I went up to one kid and asked him a question and he told me to, “Stand up and begin walking the other way.” One boy told me his favorite colors were “Blue and PINK!” and the ecstatic energy in his voice when he said “pink” made me question the absurdity of gender norms.

During recess, I played tag with the three different intervention classes I have been subbing in and they definitely gave my high heeled shoes a good run for their money.

I really love the behavior intervention classes. The children are the kindest, most soulful humans I have encountered in a very long time. I was not a very talkative kid in elementary school, I mean, I probably raised my hand willingly once during elementary school. I understand the non-verbal kid's frustration. I am also really enjoying getting to know the antics of the verbal students. I feel very fortunate that I am now officially on the preferred substitute list for this school. I love. Love. LOVE. this job!

At the end of the day, I told a boy that I spent one Christmas season crocheting rabbits because I wanted to “Make Friends” he replied, "I have to make friends, too, but my friends are ROCKS. He then pulled out three rocks out of his pocket and showed me the rocks and piece of tape that he had made friends with during the day. He said that the students in his class were really mean (he was in a different class from the class where I was a sub). I totally understood and definitely agreed.

Can be so fulfilling to work with children, especially the special ones.

Very inspiring Kawaii. They sound quite mad (in a very old fashioned sense), but fun and gentle.


For some reason my heel is sore, like I bruised it or something, no idea why…? I don't think I did and the pain seems to be getting gradually worse, not better. At least shoes mitigate it somewhat.

Since I've limited my Facebook visits to once or twice a day to deal with perfunctory stuff and official DD page posts, I suddenly see it in a whole new light-
It's just SO BORING! One huge screed of dullness. I scan through seeing how dull it is, but all the time I'm thinking that I can't stay too long or it'll hook me in again regardless.

Speaking of limiting things form yourself: coffee. I LOVE the taste of it. I love tea too, but it doesn't have the body of coffee. I love to drink it occasionally, but it is so easily habit forming that I just keep away from it entirely unfortunately. I am very good at the self denial thing.
Although I will definitely have a cup at a cafe! Tea at cafes is generally not that great and you have to screw around with separate milk and teapots and strainers etc all covering the limited space on your table. Bugger that!
Cafe coffee isn't habit forming since I don't go to cafes every week.

My university student union's events coordinator has apparently double-booked the room for an event my student group is having next week - what's even more irritating is that they didn't even notice. Normally we're pretty flexible, but they've done this probably three times this semester and we've had it booked since December, so I'm kind of putting my foot down this time. I don't understand how this keeps happening, though - I'm convinced that they don't actually write down room bookings at all.

—

I'm kind of infatuated with Drahomanov right now, who I've been reading a lot of for my 19th C Ukrainian/Russian history course. Some of his writings were borderline anti-semitic(although pretty tolerant compared to say Dostoevsky), but other than that he was a pretty cool dude. Every time I think he can't get more cool, he says something about liberating women or rejecting immoral acts in the pursuit of societal change and I'm like *academic swoon*.

Looks like you need a new event coordinator! This one is sort of doing the opposite of their actual job title :/
It's like being a toilet cleaner who leaves the place splattered with crap.

Man, that Trump guy gets crazier and crazier… Look, I'm sorry America, but if you elect him you we're putting you up for adoption.

ozoneocean wrote:
Looks like you need a new event coordinator! This one is sort of doing the opposite of their actual job title :/
It's like being a toilet cleaner who leaves the place splattered with crap.

Man, that Trump guy gets crazier and crazier… Look, I'm sorry America, but if you elect him you we're putting you up for adoption.

Not to worry the American people would still prefer a crook to a blowhard. Hillary Clinton all the way. She's so wonderfully underhanded and devious and just gets away with everything. And the whole world will get an “Arab spring”


Everyone get ready for your Islamic overlords and shariah law if not outright execution with a dull rusty blade. Though Canada will be safe. No one wants Canada.

No Bravo, Led Zeppelin are you Overlords.

The Hammer Of The Gods will drive your ships to new lands. :)

ozoneocean wrote:
No Bravo, Led Zeppelin are you Overlords.

The Hammer Of The Gods will drive your ships to new lands. :)

A furore normanorum libere nos domini.


Besides I'm descended from Normans, so I already did that whole driving ships and ruling thing. And historically Normans cooperated with Islam even acknowledging them as their feudal overlords. So Led Zeppelin got nothing to say about it anymore.


]

Insolence! Bow before the Zep! They give No Quarter!

The last of the DUCK radio shows is up, featuring an epic Hate triangle between 3of the DJs and ALL of Gunwallace's music to date- well the final third of it!
http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/quackcast/episode-262-duck-radio-3/

Beware the Ides of March.

Strange events always occur on this day. It is not my favorite day of the year, but definitely more memorable than the rest.

Thirty is turning out to be the sexiest decade. Between dressing more confidently and understanding just how much less I care about things that once bothered me, I am thoroughly enjoying growing up.

I was assigned to work with a bigger kid yesterday in class. So far, I have been pinched, punched, scratched, bitten at least five times, had my hair pulled, and slapped across the face with my glasses on by the students and I STILL enjoy each day in class as much as my first day. Now that is saying something about my patience or that my previous work experiences were very lacklustre. I wore arm guards for the first time yesterday, but the boy was trying to rip the velcro off my wrists.

Is it strange that working with children is making me want a little boy of my own?

Thirty is turning out to be the sexiest decade. Between dressing more confidently and understanding just how much less I care about things that once bothered me, I am thoroughly enjoying growing up.

That not caring so much about stuff opens up so many possibilities. The stories I could tell…

I've got a busy couple of months ahead, once I get past that I'll be looking to have a damn good holiday later in the year. I've never been to the states or Canada so thinking a trip across the pond is in order. I've traveled far too little in my life so now is the time to change that.

Good going Kawaii. You're inspiring!

@Genejoke- if you go to the US try and hook up with some local DDers to show you around. It's worth it.

Why do almost all anime title songs have to be about laughter through pain and crying and trying to be strong, and clinging to happy memories etc. They're usually always about finding some true love to help the singer rise above their sadness…
Bloody hell! So MANY anime titles are the same and always that same with that bloody concept.

It's like the songs have to be on a strict template, just like the anime style for drawing faces and creating stock characters.

Obviously it started somewhere though… I mean, we know the anime style started out as a Disney imitation and mutated from there. The song theme reminds me of an old 1950s hit from Japan- in the West it was retitled Sukiyaki and given new lyrics, but the original had that same theme about staying strong while being sad and hiding tears.

I heard the big shift in anime theme songs came with the smash success of the music from the original Space Cruiser Yamato in the 70s. Compare music from 60s anime like Speed Racer to it and it's dark, brooding and all about triumph over adversity. And heroism in the face of apparent defeat.

Just had to have a pet euthanized. Four month old rat with congenital heart failure. (Her mom was also diagnosed with heart failure today, but she might be treatable, so I got medication for her.)

That's pretty sad UB. I imagine it doesn't get much easier no matter how many generations you go through.

@Bravo- you might be right. I remember reading that the anime Mospeeda (Robotech 3) was the origin of the melancholy, folksy end title track trend- contrasting with the action of the show. Funny that the track on the opening credits was so crap and UN-influential.

———–

I went to bed early last night and had many crazy dreams. One where I was a Joe Pescci like character who was a prisoner being escorted by federal marshals played by Nick Nolte and Mel Gibson, and while I was allowed to go and how a shower at a roadhouse I helped save Nick from a bust gone wrong by pretending I had a gun and sticking my fingers in the back of Garry Busey, who was the baddie…
Sort of a Lethal weapon 2, 24 Hours, Point Break mashup.

Now I'm at work with sore eyes, my brain is floating and I'm feeling a little drunk and dizzy, slightly detached. -No chemical influences (that I know of) caused that. Probably I just woke up in the wrong part of the dream cycle because of my alarm and my brain didn't adjust correctly. It's been a few hours now though.
Either that or the builders next door were using some sort of pernicious adhesive or something like that -_-
Bloody builders.

ozoneocean wrote:

Either that or the builders next door were using some sort of pernicious adhesive or something like that -_-
Bloody builders.

I first read that as body builders. For a brief moment, I imagined a group of body builders, living next door and sniffing pernicious adhesive in order to increase their muscle mass, which is exactly what a group of body builders would do if you told them it was effective.

—

I bought a can opener with a built in corkscrew and bottle opener. This got me to thinking, why don't more essential items have those two essential items built in? I'm working on a design for a shoe horn.

ozoneocean wrote:
Looks like you need a new event coordinator! This one is sort of doing the opposite of their actual job title :/
It's like being a toilet cleaner who leaves the place splattered with crap.

It actually ended up being more like a toilet cleaner who accidentally explodes the entire bathroom, leaving everything in the building covered in crap, and then looks at you and says “Oh man, that sucks that that happened.”

They eventually told us that we would have to move our event into another room (despite having booked it first), but that they would give us free cinnamon buns and coffee to make up for it. It wasn't in as ideal a location because we wouldn't get any walk-by traffic, but whatever. So I showed up about ten minutes before our event, opened the door and walked in on a bunch of faculty in the middle of a meeting. Quickly apologized and left, then went down to the student union offices to figure out what was going on. This one wasn't entirely their fault, as it turns out - the faculty didn't have the room booked. So we went back to the room with a guy from the student union, who walked in and then walked out about ten seconds later, wide-eyed and shaking his head. Turns out it was a huge meeting with the university president, etc. No way we were going to get them to move. Student union guy put us in the nearest seemingly empty room. Half an hour later, another group of students walks in and tells us they have this room booked. We go and sit in the hallway, where the event coordinator finally gets around to bringing us cinnamon buns (but no coffee). She kept saying “I'm so sorry this keeps happening to you guys!”, which was even more infuriating because she was directly responsible for most of it.

So our event, that we've had planned since December, ended up being us sitting in the hallway eating cinnamon buns.

Long story short, we're pretty pissed at two groups of people:
1. The student union for being ridiculously bad at keeping track of room bookings.
2. The university administration who think they're too important to book rooms/check if they're available.

—

I finally finished with Dostoevsky's freakin Writer's Diary today for my big essay about his position in the Russian nationalist discussion. It's in two volumes, about 1500 pages total. I ended up having to read a lot more of it than I had initially intended because Dostoevsky wrote about nationalism and related issues a lot, and so it took me a lot longer to get through it that I wanted. I enjoyed the first 1000 or so pages, but after that it started to feel a bit repetitive and I was very tempted to just assume I had gotten as much out of it as I could. I'm glad I didn't give up on it, though, because there was some really useful stuff right at the end.

@Scarf- even funnier if the body builders were glueing themselves to each other to try and get “bigger” HAHAHAHAHA!
BTW, the thing you're typing on is the equivalent of a multi-bladed super Swiss army knife ;)

@Hippie- that is utterly ridiculous. Buns just don't cut it. That coordinator needs to lose their position. That's just terrible.
I used to have that persistence with books but now… Well it depends. If the author is too repetitive or literally sends me to sleep then I'll just quit.

Currently I'm reading a biography of Led Zeppelin written by Mic Wall. It's very informative and highly interesting apart from two things:

1. He has these random first person inserts in the chapters. They're supposed to be first person biographical insights into what various people were thinking at a point in their lives. It breaks the flow, it's silly, and it does not fit.

2. There was a LONG chapter on the influence of Alistair Crowley on the work of Jimmy Page, which was sort of OK when it stuck to the facts, but it went wildly off into the realms of stupidity, talking about “Magik” rituals as if they actually did something, spiritual energy and demons.
SOOOOOOOOOO moronic.
And even worse- in later chapters that stuff keeps coming back, with the author speculating whether Page harnessed the “energy” of the crowd after shows with rituals to improve his song writing etc.

Sure, he was into silly stuff, but it should not be treated as if it was real. Just as bad if you had a highly Christian band and the author talking about how the “holy spirit” manifested through their music and caused fans to do things etc. So stupid.
If I want to read fantasy I'll do like Plant and look at Tolkien instead.

ozoneocean wrote:

2. There was a LONG chapter on the influence of Alistair Crowley on the work of Jimmy Page, which was sort of OK when it stuck to the facts, but it went wildly off into the realms of stupidity, talking about “Magik” rituals as if they actually did something, spiritual energy and demons.
SOOOOOOOOOO moronic.
And even worse- in later chapters that stuff keeps coming back, with the author speculating whether Page harnessed the “energy” of the crowd after shows with rituals to improve his song writing etc.

Sure, he was into silly stuff, but it should not be treated as if it was real. Just as bad if you had a highly Christian band and the author talking about how the “holy spirit” manifested through their music and caused fans to do things etc. So stupid.
If I want to read fantasy I'll do like Plant and look at Tolkien instead.

I might have to give that a read. I've always wondered about Page and that occult stuff, especially since it doesn't seem to show up in the lyrics or song titles, like Black Sabbath or others.
That kind of thing was everywhere in the late sixties. You always hear about how Page was really into it, but I can't help wondering if his sudden success just happened to coincide with summoning some demon or other at a stoned party and then if he was a bit superstitious, he'd be afraid to stop in case the bands meteoric rise stalled. He probably had to wait for punk to overturn things before he could finally stop scarificing maidens!

Of course, to be that succesful now you have to join the illuminati!

Well, according to Mick Wall, Black Sabbath et all were nothing but shallow posers when it came to the occult: basically they were more of a stage show, like Alice Cooper or Arthur Brown, more into the horror movie skulls and scare aspect. Hence the theatrics and obvious lyrics.

Page apparently was more of a fanatic fan/scholar of the “real thing”- Madly interested in Crowley since his early student days, hunting out ultra rare books, having his own antiquarian expert on Crowley and occult manuscripts on retainer bidding at auctions for his stuff, joining the secret societies who're into that stuff like the OTO and Golden Dawn, buying Crowley's old Mansion Boleskine house and having it restored,getting cosy with the famous US occult film maker Kenneth Anger and so on.

It didn't show in the lyrics directly because the “real” stuff is pretty abstract, all about energy and sex, and manifesting power and influence, nothing to do with skulls, satan, and virgin sacrifice -if any of that stuff comes up it's only symbolic, not literal.

That's some of what I gathered from the EXHAUSTIVE chapter on the subject.
It WAS funny to read how dismissive he was of Sabbath though- but there is a lot of truth to it. Sabbath's take on it became horror rock which was a fun genre that's gone on to become its own thing.

I love how in World War 2 Crowley offered his services to the British government and was dismissed as a harmless old crank. Though upon finding out how much the Nazis believed in such hogwash he did prove useful along with false horoscopes and fake Nostradamus prophecy.

That chapter actually sounds pretty great ozone, or maybe it's just your summary of it. I'd forgotten about him buying Crowley's house. Does he still own it? Last I heard he was in a planning dispute with his neighbour Robbie Williams, so maybe not.

But I have to say, I love anything to do with supernatural or superstitious hokum. It's the best basis for any story where you want to dig down into the subconscious, where reality just doesn't cut it. Sci fi can be good too - monsters from the ID and so on.

Wikipedia says he sold it in 1992.He never lived in it though, he pretty much gave it over to an old school friend, who was officially the caretaker, but really used it as his family home.
And last year in December a lot of it was destroyed in a fire.

Looks like a pretty dull place from the outside… Boring. From the reputation it sounds like a sprawling, Gothic gormenghast of a place, but really it just looks like an old, bigger than normal wealthy old suburban house.