It's February! Whoo-hoo. We survived the bleakest month of the year. The days are longer and there's sunshine. Spring is coming.

And I just might have stumbled across an ending for my comic.

If you knew what I survived the past couple of weeks. Just screwing up all over amd getting yelled at a lot. Not good. The way is forward though.

February is usually the hottest month here but things got an early start with January… I hope THAT was the hottest month this year.
very shortly Mouse will be out of his cast and no longer confined to a single room and I won't have to sleep in there looking after him night and day anymore like a newborn baby.
That will be amazing!
Just two more weekssssssss… Cast off this week and then one last week confined.

January has been VERY hard and very expensive. :(
I haven't even been able to exercise or sleep in my own bed for a month.

Once again, spring has arrived way too early this year, and once again, I am royally pissed off about that. I am so fed up to here with my favorite seasons and favorite months always being raped by Climate Change. We pretty much only had less than a month of actual fall, we lost about a week's worth of December to springlike conditions, and now this. I'm so mad, I just want to run into a fine china shop and go all bull in there.

I would be happy if spring came early. It's cold and the snow has damaged a bunch of things. I almost got hit by an RV careening out off control on the icy road and slamming into the sidewalk.

Did you know they now have a surgical foam made from porcine cells that adhere to a wound to seal it if there's like nothing to sew up?
Say, you slice a piece of your finger print clean off with an X-acto knife when creating cool stuff.
It went flying. I'm really good at direct pressure and went to Urgent Care and had it taken care of. It happened on a Sunday so like it either there or the ER and this was closer and faster. I was getting tired applying the direct pressure.
I shed blood for my art.

And people ask what were you doing and it was enlarging the slot for the tab to fit the tail on a model of a B-25C (Mitchell bomber) . (RAF version I found online that served in Burma in overall PRU blue.)

OUCH! Bravo :(
You've been through the wringer!

bravo1102 wrote:
Did you know they now have a surgical foam made from porcine cells that adhere to a wound to seal it if there's like nothing to sew up?

Wow!

HA!
When I was at he vet the other day on an appointment for Mouse there was a woman with a big golden retriever dog. It was bigger than her.
It had a tiny cut under one eye, the kind you see boxers have all the time.
The vet quoted her $800 to fix it! o_o

She said they'd need to clean it, shave around, give antibiotics, anathematise the dog, and then stitch it.

$800 for something that in the wild would scab over and the dog wouldn't notice.
You could give it a cursory wash with betadine and sterile water and then superglue it up…

But no.
$800 o_o

The woman agreed to it like right away. O_O

Sure Mouse has cost $25000 and counting, but that was literal life and death, not a papercut.

Soon I will be embarking on the adventure of covering the back of my house in cat netting… It's going to be interesting. Like living in an aviary.

Speaking of which- since my cat has not been outside in a couple of months there has been way LESS bird activity. WAAAAY less.
This goes against the popular mythology that cats negate birds. And there's a likely reason for that…

Commonly bronze-wing doves, mudlarks, ravens, rainbow lorikeets, sparrows, magpies, willy wagtails, and many other birds were common. Currently they aren't.

The animals that have increased are rats. I hear them in the bushes and trees at night.
Contrary to popular belief, birds are hard for cats to cat because they have WINGS and can FLY, rats on the other hand are easy for them. Mouse used to catch and eat rats all the time, any size, from huge to tiny. Most of his feed was from eating them.
The rats feed on whatever they can get and without left over catfood that's baby birds as well as adult birds in their nests… Rats are much better at climbing branches and getting those birds while they're sleeping in nests or on twigs.

There has also been an increase in butcher birds and kookaburras - they eat other birds but are scared off by a cat laying around.

The Ravens have gone because there's no left over catfood for them to eat. They don't worry about predator birds, rats, or cats, they can beat or outsmart anything, but without easy food they can't be bothered.

The rats also eat up all the bugs in the garden so there's nothing for the magpies to come and eat… Magpies like the ravens aren't bothered by cats or rats or predator birds as much, but without food they're nothing for them.

It appears CF is in need of some financial support. I shared the thing on Bluesky, but now at least two people from that community posted it claiming it's “the last bastion for customisation for a free site to host your webcomic” or that “basically it's the last of the old-school webcomic hosting sites”. I'm starting to think users there are simply unaware of The Duck's existence.

Completely unaware of DD and others are willfully ignorant. They don't want to know about The Duck because this is where all the evils of the world came after they were banished from the paradise (last best hope for personalized comic posting) that is CF.

According to them some on DD make the National Socialists look like the Sunshine Welcoming committee.

DD is where bad comics go to die and horrible comic creators are in residence spreading the awfulness and hatred and -phobias that are not part of their world. The “other” in Tantz Aerine's news post.

There is some hyperbole in this post, but not as much as you would think or as much as many would ever admit to.

I am very proud to have myself and my comic buried in this grave site!

Let's nip that stuff in the bud shall we please? >:[

We are well aware that DD is the oldest still running and fully functioning free comic host and we have extremely tolerant and inclusive views and a very welcoming community. And we always have.

We do NOT need false comparisons or straw-man views mentioned.


If not as many people are aware of us now as they should be, that's down to me for not promoting the site enough, but also the fact that most people in comics these days are too young to have been around when webcomics started online.

1.3k likes? 1.3k reposts and that's just on one of at least four major posts on Bluesky.

Awfully big response. If 10% of the number pledge patreon at the lowest level that's still a few hundred dollars. Wow. Never realized how big it had gotten.

My previous post was meant to be facetious. But if nothing else we are deeply shrouded in CF's shadow.

I have some vacation time coming up. Time to just go on my account and post some mirrors of the comics I've done in the decade since I last posted over there. It actually has been that long. Another wow.

I work in a hotel. Not a great one, just an affordable one. Someone among my employers decided to give the reception a new look. BY HANGING BOSCH'S: THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS ON THE WALL! Of all paintings. They had to go with this one. :D I'm laughing my ass off.

InkyMoondrop wrote:
I work in a hotel. Not a great one, just an affordable one. Someone among my employers decided to give the reception a new look. BY HANGING BOSCH'S: THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS ON THE WALL! Of all paintings. They had to go with this one. :D I'm laughing my ass off.

LOL

InkyMoondrop wrote:
I work in a hotel. Not a great one, just an affordable one. Someone among my employers decided to give the reception a new look. BY HANGING BOSCH'S: THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS ON THE WALL! Of all paintings. They had to go with this one. :D I'm laughing my ass off.

Sexy!

InkyMoondrop wrote:
I work in a hotel. Not a great one, just an affordable one. Someone among my employers decided to give the reception a new look. BY HANGING BOSCH'S: THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS ON THE WALL! Of all paintings. They had to go with this one. :D I'm laughing my ass off.

Such an interesting piece. The first panel looks a lot like Adam Eve, but upon closer inspection, they are illuminated by a very bright light. There are out-of-this world objects surrounding the lake and albino giraffes.

The third panel of the triptych, Hell, is the most interesting Where’s Waldo collage. Let us say, Hieronymus knew where the fun was happening.

Such an interesting piece. The first panel looks a lot like Adam Eve, but upon closer inspection, they are illuminated by a very bright light. There are out-of-this world objects surrounding the lake and albino giraffes.

The third panel of the triptych, Hell, is the most interesting Where’s Waldo collage. Let us say, Hieronymus knew where the fun was happening.

I know very little about art, especially his art. But I have a feeling looking at it that I could sign up for a 50-hours long lecture on this single painting and I still wouldn't be closer to what it means and that's because it feels like it's meant to be chaotic, like it's meant to evoke a religious experience, some sensual nightmare and fearsome awe that is not to be explained by any intellect. I might be wrong though, but without knowing anything about the guy, my gut tells me that he was approaching religious experience through art like Rorschach approached the mind through ink blots.

InkyMoondrop wrote:
I might be wrong though, but without knowing anything about the guy, my gut tells me that he was approaching religious experience through art like Rorschach approached the mind through ink blots.

Based on my background in Art history (from like 30 years ago LOL)… At the time the purpose of art was pretty straightforward, he was literally depicting what those things were like, based on his own imagination, his sense from his readings, and what clergy had told him etc etc.
Thoughts about hell and demons and heaven and so on were very literal I believe.




It actually makes WAAAAAY more sense when you think about it in those terms :)

If you think about it as the modern surrealist nightmare it looks like, and try and second-guess intentions and what feeling the imagery was meant to symbolise and evoke it will drive you insane.

But when you realise that people thought that this stuff was literally, actually going to happen and these things are simply how he saw stuff really playing out: it ALL becomes completely rational and understandable.

There are any number of good books on images of hell and the apocalypse like Bart Ehrman's most recent works. It was an extension of the concept of “lord of misrule ” or “King of unreason ” custom in festivals where everything was turned upside down and inside out. Trips to hell was a popular genre at the time.. It was also a way for artists to totally unleash their imagination and not run afoul of Holy Mother Church.
Just sit back under the painting and read some Dante. Find a copy of the silent classicMaciste in Hell and watch
it.
(I have a couple of comic scripts set in hell so I have read up on it. Apocalyptic images are part of it because Revelation talks of hell on earth.)

Ozone: yeah, when it comes to Hell. Dante helped a lot with that too. The middle is a bit harder to interpret.

The interpretation I always liked is that this triptych is a sequel/prequel to the Last Judgement
The first panel is Adam being presented with Eve. In the Last Judgement it is the original sin with the apple.

The middle panel is the world of the anti-christ just before the apocalypse ends time and the Last Judgement begins as depicted in the middle panel of the other triptych.

And of course the last panel in both is hell. Payment for succumbing to the original sin or to earthly delights.

The wonderful Medieval mind presenting it all quite graphically so the viewer would never fail to get the message. And the artist was able to stretch his imagination as far as he could without fear of repercussions because there's hell with all its awfulness just waiting. There was always a certain schadenfreude in all depictions of hell going back to the first apocalypse gospels.

(Again there's a lot of literature on the historical and theological context of the hell vision genre. I also recommend the … In Hell science fiction/fantasy anthologies starting with Heroes in Hell

And I recommend the fun one can have with action figures and Apoxie Sculpt in creating all kinds of demons and monsters. . Mr. Bosch and I have that much in common.

bravo1102 wrote:
And I recommend the fun one can have with action figures and Apoxie Sculpt in creating all kinds of demons and monsters. . Mr. Bosch and I have that much in common.

The way medieval people thought of demons was way more interesting than the modern view, which is usually either a human with red eyes and horns or a red humanoid with big black horns, a long tongue, muscles and a tail. It's so unimaginative.


——

The latest actor to come out about Kevin Spacey is Australian Guy Pierce, but reading about it it's hard to see the issue :/

Is the controversy about Kevin Spacey mostly just “gay panic” by straight actors who were propositioned and didn't know what to do? That's really what most of it sounds like. He just acted like any oversexed straight guy, but happened to be gay and pursued men rather than women.

I can understand if there was a power imbalance and the guys felt cornered professionally so they were worried about their jobs because he was a producer or something (that's NOT on), or if the person was too young (also NOT on), but when the person is of age and there isn't that career issue then what's the issue? Just decline. You're not a “victim” if someone asks you out, even if they're insistent, just because you don't like them or don't swing that way.
That's happened to me many times in my life myself so I speak from experience.

I have a demonology text that quotes extensively from Medieval works. Demons still had a bit of the Greek concept of the daemon attached to them where they more a force of nature or concept. The Pan-like hooved and horned nature deity would become solidly entrenched in the 16th-17th century texts on witches.

Penguin publishing has a good anthology of primary sources on witchcraft. A woman I went to college with is an editor there and recommended it to me. She's big time into the whole “drawing down the moon” modern paganism as well as historical witchcraft, Robin Hood, pirates. Being in publishing, she has a Real great awareness of the books out there.

Today is the 80th anniversary of the US Marines landing on Iwo Jima. Its a thing in my family since the only fatality among the brothers who went to war was Vladimir Rusen on Iwo Jima. Whenever a family member goes to Hawaii we stop by the Punchbowl cemetery on Oahu to put flowers on his grave.

bravo1102 wrote:
Penguin publishing has a good anthology of primary sources on witchcraft.

Funny you should say that. A friend of mine is an avid book collector and dealer and he actually owns several extremely valuable original primary sources on demonology and witchcraft (as well as many reprints). He's been collecting that since before I met him 30 years ago. I've never had any interest in that stuff, I considered it a sort of historical cultural fantasy but he was always extremely proud.

Today is the 80th anniversary of the US Marines landing on Iwo Jima.

I hope you or one of your family will make it out there this year.

———–

Did anyone see what Trumpet bum has been saying about Volodymyr Zelenskyy?
It's embarrassing.
The idiot is basically parroting what Russian bots and Putin have been sating about him- for no reason and not context to justifying it, just blurting it out as meaningless rhetoric, like the way as Nazi says “Jews are ruining your life”.

SO it all starts to become clear I think- Trump really has been in Putin's pocket from the beginning and that's why he's leader now and everything he's doing probably really IS a plot by the Russians to mess up the USA XD

There you have it.
If they were smart his opposition and the pres would be taking that line, but none of them are that clever unfortunately :(

Trump's shall we say creative opinions about Zelensky are causing a lot of turmoil in italian politics, where both in the left and in the right there are parties that are for an involvement in the war in Ukraine and other that are against.
The current right wing premier, Meloni, was quite proud of her early anti-Putin stance and her pro-USA stance. Now that Trump has a pro-Putin stance she is a bit in chaos, it will be difficult for her to pivot to a pro-Putin stance (that, for clarity, would be a huge error for Italy) but it is also extremely difficult for her to take an anti-Trump stance (she is trying to sell herself as someone who can bridge the differences between Trump and the EU, it's evident that Trump couldn't care less).

Remember 1938 when Britain and France met with Germany and Italy to decide the fate of Czecheslovakia? And the Czechs were kept waiting out in the hall? This time the US meets with Russia to decide the fate of Ukraine and Ukraine isn't even invited, nor is the rest of Europe. Trump wants to delete Ukraine the same way he deleted the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali.
Satire is too close to reality with these idiots in power.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the only way Dictator Drumpf is going to “end” this war is by handing Ukraine over to Russia on a silver platter . . . before he sells the rest of us out as well. Meanwhile, Russian TV is already showing how they plan to nuke the U.S. by launching missiles from submarines out on the West Coast.

just read about ukraine getting strong armed out of mineral rights by president musk and co-president trump smh

The Russians are so lucky to have tRump in their pocket because if NATO really wanted to it'd be the Russo-Polish War of 1919-21 all over again. Come on Europe. You have the collective will to stand up to Putin and his puppet in the White House. The Russians are looking at the results of the last NATO tank Olympics and sh***ing their pants. They know if Europe was serious there's nothing to stop freaking Danish reservists from taking Moscow.

And no Russian sub has gotten within shooting range of the US West coast without a US Navy attack boat on its tail since the 1990s. It's like everyday training for the Pacific Fleet. Oh, there's a Russian sub within shooting range of San Diego – just park a couple of sonar equipped helicopters over it. Good training. Putin and the POTUS can be all buddy buddy but that doesn't mean you don't watch them very carefully.

Was sitting in a Starbucks when “Killing Me Softly” plays on the speakers just as I was scrolling through the BBC News website to read Roberta Flack's passing was reported six hours earlier. Coincidental song choice and the idea that the song has a literal reference to what killed her.