Dang… We all in the same boat. Even here in Japan shit is getting too expensive. I'm gonna have to go back to working 6 days a week. But I refuse to quit drawing. I gotta pull another 12 hour day from the time I leave house to when I get home. I got up early to spend about 45 min drawing and managed to pencil 1 page. My goal is to get about 2 hours a day at my desk. I do most off my writing and thumbnailing on the train. My schedule is gruelling but in the last 5 years I've drawn about 1,500 pages of sketchbooks. My point is, don't give up.

Unka John wrote:
I'm right there with you J. Looks like my retirement lasted only a year.

Unfortunately for my late dad, he could never retire. Not because he didn't want to (believe me, he was well into his 70s, he wanted to), but because in his line of work, he was always a sub-contractor, he was never a company employee, therefore, he never had anything that he could pay into that would provide him with retirement, like a 401K or anything of the sort. He grew up on a farm as well, so he practically worked literally almost all of his life, up until his last few years as his health began to deteriorate.

sleeping_gorilla wrote:
I lost my dog Pan a few months ago. We were walking and he turned right when I turned left and then he was just gone. I searched for him all night, and for months afterward and there has been no sign of him. He was 15 years old and already a few years beyond his life expectancy, he was mostly deaf and blind. I believe he was holding on for my sake. It is very likely a Coyote killed him, they are everywhere where I live. Or that he was in his favorite place to walk and decided to lay down somewhere and die.


On a more positive note, I started a good job and bought a new jazz guitar to celebrate/compensate. One of my favorite musicians, Shakey Graves, plays a Gibson ES-175. This is the same body style but it is an Ibanez.

Sorry to hear that, perhaps you could christen the guitar Pan in has memory? Nice looking florentine cutaway, Ibanez make some great archtops.

And here I am having to use up all the PTO time I have before my work anniversary in May. I can only carry over 40 hours amd I accumulate time very fast. So use it or loose it.

I've had times in my life with forced inactivity so I know what retirement would mean and I'm not doing it. I don't get anything done and I eat too much. My mother worked until 83, my sister has put off retirement twice because she loves what she does.

I found a job where there is lots of down time that I'm free to fill as I want so long as I remain vigilant. So I can still work on my comic while getting paid. I've worked very long and hard at getting things right.

I know I'm always on a razor's edge. That's what having biologically based depression and anxiety is like. I am very good at catastrophizing. That's an actual medical term for anxiety where you just sit and worry about everything that can go wrong.

You ever wake up and think “ fuck! Another day where I gotta do a bunch of boring shit until I'm exhausted” ?

Doesn't everybody?

Oh yeah! Rich people don't!

lothar wrote:
You ever wake up and think “ fuck! Another day where I gotta do a bunch of boring shit until I'm exhausted” ?

I love boring. I've come to hate it when stuff gets interesting. In my job “interesting ” equals paper work. “Interesting” means I actually have to do stuff.

“May you live in interesting times” is definitely a curse.

bravo1102 wrote:

lothar wrote:
You ever wake up and think “ fuck! Another day where I gotta do a bunch of boring shit until I'm exhausted” ?

I love boring. I've come to hate it when stuff gets interesting. In my job “interesting ” equals paper work. “Interesting” means I actually have to do stuff.

“May you live in interesting times” is definitely a curse.

Yup, boring days are good. When things are regular and predicable you can get a lot more done. Chaotic days are harder to deal with.

When my dad retired he went right back to work. He's never really stopped. Though now I think he's actually starting to think about retiring for real.
He had a good job back in the day so he had enough money and resources to fully retire the first time, but he goes crazy if he's not doing something. He HAS to be going out and doing things, he was never able to be happy staying at home for any length of time.
But now he wants to have more time to go out and do stuff with his partner.

I read the dumbest thing of the year in the news today but also bloody hilarious and very apropos:

TWENTY SEVEN teenage girls were taken to hospital because they had anxiety attacks after playing with a Ouija board at a school. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

So not only did these imbeciles panic over made up ghosty demons on their Milton Bradley idiomatic board game, they all had FAKE anxiety attackst too. Silly monkey-see monkey-do teens. Maybe a single one might have had a real attack and the rest just copied her.

But can you imagine the needless hospital bills because of that? 🤪
Thousands of dollars wasted on stupid kids. That's insane

Madness of crowds. That many it's really easy to whip them up into very real anxiety about very fake things.


And several other girls had to be hospitalized with head injuries from all the face palming they did while the others panicked each other with nonsense they'd seen in some movie. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

Another girl had to be treated for eye strain from rolling her eyes so much.

bravo1102 wrote: Another girl had to be treated for eye strain from rolling her eyes so much.

Now that is hysterical. Another bravo line I gotta steal at some point…

After the little girls are out of the hospital their parents should lock them in a room with The Evil Dead film playing. Tough them up a bit. Build up their creativity.

Jason Moon wrote:
After the little girls are out of the hospital their parents should lock them in a room with The Evil Dead film playing. Tough them up a bit. Build up their creativity.

Hahaha! Good idea XD
It's actually that form of teenage creativity that created the myth of the poltergeist.
Today it's miss-remembered as a “true” story of teen girls haunted by viscous spirits who moved furniture and threw things but the reality is that when all the cases were investigated by people with actual brains in their heads it was just naughty teenage girls playing pranks on their parents and loving the attention.

The kids were not the stupid ones in THAT instance, it was the patents and the ghost believers.

In a case of STUPID teens though similar to the fake anxiety attack girls, French teens think they can catch Tourettes from watching Instagram videos. Seriously -_-
One French teen who really does have the condition made some videos about it and the dumb kids who watched it started exhibiting the same sort of thing.
These idiots believed they had it so hard that it even convinced a terrible psychologist to name a syndrome after them.
Stupid people believing stupid things.

This is the world we live in.

Reminds me of when I was a young teen…
There was this kid in school with something wrong badly with his leg so he walked with this rolling, twisted limp all the time. It gave him a real swagger to his movements. I thought it looked cool, so I'd almost unconsciously walk with the same sort of limp.

If that idiot psychologist say that he'd probably imagine I acquired a leg injury by looking at that other boy XD

At least that case of mass hysteria only resulted in hefty hospital bills. If memory serves me correctly, I believe that the Salem witch trials of 1692 were catalyzed by a similar kind of mass hysteria.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
At least that case of mass hysteria only resulted in hefty hospital bills. If memory serves me correctly, I believe that the Salem witch trials of 1692 were catalyzed by a similar kind of mass hysteria.

And that was not an isolated case though fortunately it was among the last in the witch craze. Cotton Mather wrote extensively on witchcraft and it is obvious in the light of modern psychology it was mass hysteria and some of the girls were just plain horny. Reading in book Devil in Massachusetts that one girls symptoms of possession and convulsions went away after having her breast massaged. 🤣 (Remember she was an extremely repressed Puritan. Puritans by and large gave no advice to adolescents in puberty but plenty of beatings if they didn't abstain from everything even thought before marriage)

These girls with the ouija board just might need to start dating and finding more healthy outlets for their adolescent passions.
At least none of them were double jointed and good at cracking their joints in order to fake a poltergeist.

Once again, as has been the case every single year since 2007, because I hate DST so much, and G.W. Bush really had no reason to extend it in North America as he had, I will not be springing forward tonight, because I do not want start prolonging daylight and delaying night yet; I will wait until April to spring forward like we used to before Dubya extended DST (and likewise, I will be falling back in October instead of November like we used to).

And Pluto is STILL a planet

Wanna know something cool (or dorky, depending on who you're asking)? Right now, I am browsing DrunkDuck, and by extension typing this forum post, through a terminal browser called w3m. It's text only (although I can open images using a keystroke), and sites using javascript don't work in it at all, but it's neat to try something different. Also, I'm using a terminal emulator called cool-retro-term as well, so it's almost like I'm accessing the internet back in 1986.

elektro wrote:
I'm using a terminal emulator called cool-retro-term as well, so it's almost like I'm accessing the internet back in 1986.

Were you on the Internet back in 1986?

I thought I was an early adapter when I first used mIRC in 1993-ish, back when websites were infinite pages of hyperlinks that led to different websites with more links. The early days of web browsing was a scary, dangerous game of web-peek-a-boo.

kawaiidaigakusei wrote:

elektro wrote:
I'm using a terminal emulator called cool-retro-term as well, so it's almost like I'm accessing the internet back in 1986.

Were you on the Internet back in 1986?

I thought I was an early adapter when I first used mIRC in 1993-ish, back when websites were infinite pages of hyperlinks that led to different websites with more links. The early days of web browsing was a scary, dangerous game of web-peek-a-boo.

I was born in 1986, but I used to know someone that was on the internet back then. It was basically all Unix commands and text, and no graphics whatsoever. GUIs for internet didn't exist until World Wide Web came out in the early 90s.

ThrisbyDude wrote:
Quit Discord again. Figured I had nothing to do while on spring break (besides work), so t'was fun to see some of my friends during it and catch up with everything, like cartoons, webcomics, all that stuff.

…
Alright, that's all. :)

How has the grocery life been? There are few better places to people-watch than watching hungry people shop for food.

Discord’s two-key verification system is the reason I have been locked out of the app since the start of the last DD Awards. The app’s security is so good, it even locks out end users.

Honestly, I find it very difficult to get into Discord, but then again, I think it may possibly be a generational thing. As a Gen Y'er (I hate that I'm lumped in with Millennials), I grew up during a time on the internet when forums and message boards were the prominent platforms for connecting with other people in discourse and what have you, and it was great way to have some really meaningful discussions with people about certain topics or subjects - and plus, with discussion threads automatically being archived, it was also fairly easy to be able to go back and reference what had been said and by whom. The closest thing we had to Discord back in those days were IM services like AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and the like . . . and those were cool, it was always fun to be able to actually chat with your friends in real time like that, but I personally always found group chats to be difficult to follow to keep up with, which is one of my main problems with Discord - particularly really active servers that have a lot of members who chat at once; I've been on one such server where you could literally just step away from the computer for just a minute, come back, and find 50+ unread messages from nearly a dozen other members just while you were gone, and then you have to keep scrolling and scrolling back to see what was said and what you missed. Just not my thing.

I mean, I can appreciate what Discord aims to provide for people, again, it's sort of like what IM was back in the day, but taken to the next level . . . still, like I said, the bigger, more populated, and more active the server, the harder it is to really stay on top of.

I'm trying to set up my first website and Google wastes no time in telling me I have a soft 404.
Not quite sure how to feel about that.

The older Jim Gaffigan gets, the more he's starting to look like Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Honestly, I find it very difficult to get into Discord, but then again, I think it may possibly be a generational thing. As a Gen Y'er (I hate that I'm lumped in with Millennials), I grew up during a time on the internet when forums and message boards were the prominent platforms for connecting with other people in discourse and what have you, and it was great way to have some really meaningful discussions with people about certain topics or subjects - and plus, with discussion threads automatically being archived, it was also fairly easy to be able to go back and reference what had been said and by whom. The closest thing we had to Discord back in those days were IM services like AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and the like . . . and those were cool, it was always fun to be able to actually chat with your friends in real time like that, but I personally always found group chats to be difficult to follow to keep up with, which is one of my main problems with Discord - particularly really active servers that have a lot of members who chat at once; I've been on one such server where you could literally just step away from the computer for just a minute, come back, and find 50+ unread messages from nearly a dozen other members just while you were gone, and then you have to keep scrolling and scrolling back to see what was said and what you missed. Just not my thing.

I mean, I can appreciate what Discord aims to provide for people, again, it's sort of like what IM was back in the day, but taken to the next level . . . still, like I said, the bigger, more populated, and more active the server, the harder it is to really stay on top of.

I concur. I'm a Gen-Xer, but forums have always been my jam. I never liked group chat. It was too chaotic. Discord is like that.

Though I WILL say that when forums were really super active, like in the Top Drawer days, the posts moved Soooo fast and the collaboration and creativity hammered along. Maybe Discord could be like that? I'm not sure, I'm too used to the slow speed of conventional forums now to go back to that.

Jim Gafagan is indeed now Seymour Hoffman, haha!

@Ironscarf- making websites is not a job I like… that's why I pay Alexey :D

I hate huge servers on discord for the same reason. Sometimes a server is dead but still hundreds are lurking, other times you can hardly keep up. But here's the thing: you want a server where your friends (I assume not some rando who liked your post once on the internet) can have a discourse and you wanna keep it managable? Well, you can make your own server and invite people you know aren't spamming when they're bored and aren't inviting everyone they see and if they are like-minded enough, you can just provide a few themes and they'll occasionally talk. Bigger servers are useful to find the ones who you could connect with on a more personal level, but yeah, basically if you want a server where the active people aren't making things insufferable for you, you can't just let anyone in and let them do whatever they want. It's quality over quantity, you want the people there who wouldn't make you cringe IRL in person either and you want to want them to enjoy each others' company. You don't want the people there who join a 100 servers because they are bored and they end up not reading 98 of them at all and you don't want the people there who spam and meme in every ****ng convo. That's how I'd do it.

The real challenge is finding these people and getting them to care enough if you're not super popular. I still struggle with that. Wrote my own discord bots with fun games that require conversing, with customizable profile with bios and favorites, with Hogwarts houses and point reward systems, even a gacha game (btw how cool would be a gacha game where you can collect characters from Duck comics? free ego boost for any creator). It was dope af, but since my goal was to get ppl there who would locally meet up occasionally not just talk to each other online if they have nothing better to do, it was doomed to failure, people who aren't introverts and prefer things online usually aren't relying on chat services either to enjoy themselves.

InkyMoondrop wrote:
I hate huge servers on discord for the same reason. Sometimes a server is dead but still hundreds are lurking, other times you can hardly keep up. But here's the thing: you want a server where your friends (I assume not some rando who liked your post once on the internet) can have a discourse and you wanna keep it managable? Well, you can make your own server and invite people you know aren't spamming when they're bored and aren't inviting everyone they see and if they are like-minded enough, you can just provide a few themes and they'll occasionally talk. Bigger servers are useful to find the ones who you could connect with on a more personal level, but yeah, basically if you want a server where the active people aren't making things insufferable for you, you can't just let anyone in and let them do whatever they want. It's quality over quantity, you want the people there who wouldn't make you cringe IRL in person either and you want to want them to enjoy each others' company. You don't want the people there who join a 100 servers because they are bored and they end up not reading 98 of them at all and you don't want the people there who spam and meme in every ****ng convo. That's how I'd do it.

The real challenge is finding these people and getting them to care enough if you're not super popular. I still struggle with that. Wrote my own discord bots with fun games that require conversing, with customizable profile with bios and favorites, with Hogwarts houses and point reward systems, even a gacha game (btw how cool would be a gacha game where you can collect characters from Duck comics? free ego boost for any creator). It was dope af, but since my goal was to get ppl there who would locally meet up occasionally not just talk to each other online if they have nothing better to do, it was doomed to failure, people who aren't introverts and prefer things online usually aren't relying on chat services either to enjoy themselves.

You sound pretty good at that stuff.
If the DD discord people need help maybe you could join the team who manage that?
I'm not sure how that all works though. XD

You sound pretty good at that stuff.
If the DD discord people need help maybe you could join the team who manage that?
I'm not sure how that all works though. XD

I'm not against lending a hand if needed, especially since the server is extra chill, so it wouldn't take up much time, could probably even write a bot for the Duck with some custom functions ppl want, eventually (but that would require a server with Windows to run it 24/7, since I myself just use another software to build bots). I'm around and somewhat available if they'll feel like it sometime.

InkyMoondrop wrote:

You sound pretty good at that stuff.
If the DD discord people need help maybe you could join the team who manage that?
I'm not sure how that all works though. XD

I'm not against lending a hand if needed, especially since the server is extra chill, so it wouldn't take up much time, could probably even write a bot for the Duck with some custom functions ppl want, eventually (but that would require a server with Windows to run it 24/7, since I myself just use another software to build bots). I'm around and somewhat available if they'll feel like it sometime.

OK, cool! Next to I email Pitface (I think she has some control over Discord now?) I'll ask her about adding you ^_^

——————————–


Here's something new I've just learned!
The name of “Hell” in Christian mythology comes from Norse myth.
I was shocked!
I thought it would have been the other way around or that “Hell” was some sort of Greek derived word (coming from Hellenic“ or Hellene etc), since the bible comes from that language.

I've long known about Hellheim and the goddess Hel with her half skull face who rules over that land, but I assumed that since Sturlson and Grammaticus wrote about Norse myths over a hundred years after their cultures were completely Christianised that they were just using terms that would be familiar to their fellow Christians.

But NO! It's completely the other way around:
”Hell" was used as the name for the underworld in translations of the bible because that was the word already in use for such realms in Germanic languages such as English.