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.)
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
2016 Rant/Share/General Discussion Thread
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.
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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.
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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.
There are some who say that Mr. Crowley was all a fraud very good at selling an image and idea. A sort of turn of the century Anton LaVey. Disappointed with Theosophy and other pagan pursuits Aleister Crowley took it a few steps further. Just like in a later generation Anton LaVey decided to take the self-centered "Me" movement to an absurd level with his Church of Satan and people took it seriously and he made a pile of money and had lots of fun.
The question is did he really believe in it, or was he just very good at making others believe in it? Con man or deluded crank?
My Call of Cthulhu group did some adventures based on Crowley's forays into the occult and of course we discovered he was a tool being used by THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW. My character as usual got killed but plenty of dynamite and Tommy guns took care of the rest.
My student group did a super awesome pub trivia night yesterday! We usually do an N64 tournament at the end of the year, but the student union has been so crap that we thought it would be easier to do our final event off campus. I genuinely thought that it would be the few of us who show up to meetings and a couple of profs, but we ended up selling about 45 tickets. And it was so much fun! My team lost to the profs' team by half a point.
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My one-on-one directed reading course is so great. It's a lot of work because I have to be prepared to talk for a couple of hours about every book we read rather than being able to rely on my classmates to fill the time, but I'm getting a lot out of it too.
Sounds like you finally got things to work out Hippie!
bravo1102 wrote:I can't say from a direct source, but from the 3rd hand accounts I've read it sounds like he was utterly genuine- More like a cross between Byron and Andie Warholl: a very arty sort of guy who was very invested in his self indulgence.
There are some who say that Mr. Crowley was all a fraud very good at selling an image and idea.
Though he didn't use his beliefs as a justifications for that, rather it was more of an explanation, a reason.
It was a time when people thought that their ideas were cleverer than they were, more universal than they were… Witness Sigmund Freud with his silly dream imagery.
In the end Alistair is the perfect prototype for the modern conceptual artist- With all the stupid silly niavite, the clever leaps in creative insight, the mashing up and synthesis of styles, the deluded self belief… He was all of that, doing his live shows, rituals, performances etc before modern art was a thing.
In the end Alistair is the perfect prototype for the modern conceptual artist- With all the stupid silly naivete, the clever leaps in creative insight, the mashing up and synthesis of styles, the deluded self belief… He was all of that, doing his live shows, rituals, performances etc before modern art was a thing.
Madame Blavatsky and Harry Houdini were contemporaries. Nothing really modern or unusual when you consider the performance art in theosophy, spiritualism and stage magic. Reading all the accounts of seances what Crowley did was nothing extraordinary and in fact was quite typical of the more gifted spiritualists and probably all just as fake. Very creative and probably self-delusional but still fake just needing an experienced skeptic like a stage magician to show up the showmen for the artists they were and nothing supernatural at all.
That wasn't really Crowley's deal at all, he was a very different character. He was all about self beleif and cult of personality, not a cynical ordinary man out to fool people.
The way be wrote, the things he beleived and the way he did it- was like a mixture of a rock star, Lord Byron, Tony Robbins, and a cult leader.
The only way Crowley would knowingly con people would be to fund further occult experiments.
I think he mainly earned his money as a writer anyway.
In a lot of ways he was a pretty admirable guy, a self made man who followed his goals and banged anything with a pulse, with enough self belief to float a Zeppelin…
But his other beleifs diverged from reality by a wide margin and he was way too self indulgent.
He was born into his money being the scion of a wealthy family. In fact some of his detractors consideted him an example of British upper class decadence . Intelligent, capable, charismatic and cruel he was more than able to make up and con people about all kinds of things. But like James Randi or Martin Gardner I treat this with a healthy dose of skepticism and cynicism. And a smile and a wink that people actually fall for this rot.
I've always meant to research him a bit, I've heard the basics but never got round to digging for a more accurate view.
Seems I have heart disease, bit of a bugger that. Hopefully not too bad but awaiting scans to see how bad it is. I've always had low blood pressure and cholesterol but somewhere in the last year that's gone belly up. Beta blockers ahoy.
Scepticism and cynicism aren't quite the same things Bravo. Close but there is a diff!
Bravo- I read an article in stupid Gizmodo where they think it's ridiculous that one of the bug fixes on the new F-35 fighters is for the pilot to reboot the radar occasionally. Maybe you could offer some perspective on that: I have red about more than a few weapons systems that have been active in war, very successful and have needed things like that regularly and have worked fine. Phantom Penguin when he was driving the newer Abrams in Iraq told us about how they had a hammer hanging in the turret to whack the targeting computer to get it working when it messed up (everyone had one). I've read about anti-aircraft systems on ships where the recommended fix would be to pull out all the computer boards to reboot the machine, even in combat…
So it Doesn't seem an unusual problem or a drastic fix on the F-35s at all in that respect.
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@Genejoke- I've been on beta-blockers coming up on two years now to reduce the incidence of my migraines. They work pretty well.
Cats are weird sometimes. One of the tenants complained to me about a cat that keeps sitting outside her windowsill, growling and making aggressive noises… at her cat who sits there. Now the thing is made of glass so the cat outside can't get in, but it keeps trying to get in. It has tried unsuccessfully to open the window and it also tried to wait at the front door to try and get in (good thing there's a screen door in front). Apparently this cat wants to get in to fight her cat (which just sat there being mellow… either it's neutered, feels safe knowing the hostile cat can't get in, or both.
Well… hopefully when I come in to work tonight Animal Control will have collected that hostile cat… And maybe my nights will be a bit more peaceful…
ozoneocean wrote:
Scepticism and cynicism aren't quite the same things Bravo. Close but there is a diff!
I find that they feed on one another and that cynicism helps me deal with being a skeptic. But I am a curmudgeonly cynic with an eye for irony and always ready to laugh at our foolishness and have come to love every minute of the absurdity.
Now if only I could get working on a comic again.
As for hammers and tank ballistic computers, they can get dusty from running around across country. It helps to knock it loose and to relieve frustration because the damn thing don't work right. Sometimes in combat you'd see a helmet draped over the wind sensor mast. It was often less than useless.
Being an optimist usually serves you better in many things though.
Cynicism is best for expectations of outcomes, especially financial dealing or things that involve a lot of hope/risk/luck - you lower your expectations and expect the worst so if it happens you're not under-prepared.
Optimism is what you use in interpersonal relations, communication, expectations in social situations - this makes you a nicer, more pleasant person to deal with who people don't like to disappoint.
I've found that a lot of people reverse those and fare horribly.
We're doomed before we even start, but let's do our best with alacrity and a sense of purpose and have fun doing it. Everything will work out for the best, we may not be entirely satisfied with the results but we'll make it work. Be cynical in anticipation and optimistic in execution.
Philosophy for life right there.
Do you ever feel you're spread a bit too thin? From what I know of you guys here, most of you are like that in some way.
It's tricky… I'm a very straight forward, single direction sort of person, so to be pulled in many different directions is mentally disorienting to me- in a real way. Worst of all I have a hard time finding moments to do my comics in between the emails I have to write and respond to among other things.
I often feel spread too thin, but I tend to focus on one thing at a time. It often appears I've been massively productive when several weeks/months worth of work come to a close in short succession, but often it's been slow going with me moving from project to project and putting the finishing touches to two within a week of each other.
Right now I'm out of work and dealing with health issues and helping my mum and step dad move abroad. The thing is they've lived in the house nearly thirty years together and my stepdad was there over ten years before that. It has a lot of memories and even more junk. So much to do, hence I'm not updating comics very well at the moment. The issue I have after that is once I get my health back on track I'll need to get back to earning money.
I really don't know what to do in that regard. I have experience in various things but none I particularly want to do. My best option would be office work, there's plenty of it going and I can earn some fairly decent money. The problem is many of my health problems are not helped by being sat on my arse all day and working in stressful environments.
I'd love to be able to work for myself bit not sure how. Or rather I don't know what best to do that would be a worthwhile enterprise.
Genejoke wrote:
I often feel spread too thin, but I tend to focus on one thing at a time. It often appears I've been massively productive when several weeks/months worth of work come to a close in short succession, but often it's been slow going with me moving from project to project and putting the finishing touches to two within a week of each other.
Right now I'm out of work and dealing with health issues and helping my mum and step dad move abroad. The thing is they've lived in the house nearly thirty years together and my stepdad was there over ten years before that. It has a lot of memories and even more junk. So much to do, hence I'm not updating comics very well at the moment. The issue I have after that is once I get my health back on track I'll need to get back to earning money.
I really don't know what to do in that regard. I have experience in various things but none I particularly want to do. My best option would be office work, there's plenty of it going and I can earn some fairly decent money. The problem is many of my health problems are not helped by being sat on my arse all day and working in stressful environments.
I'd love to be able to work for myself bit not sure how. Or rather I don't know what best to do that would be a worthwhile enterprise.
Hello there everyone. I am sorry about your health. You are doing a noble deed helping out your family. :)
Hey everyone I am new here to this site.
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