Bigger than Lennon
Yearly Archives: 2005
Because we’re always what our situations hand us…
My sister had a concert that went rough tonight, strings sliding out of tune, missing orchestra members, just not a good time.
A man I knew in passing who couldn’t afford a lung transplant because his insurance wouldn’t cover it died this morning. And, y’know, even though I try not to get attached to every single person I meet on the lists, it bothers me.
A man whose writings I respect is feeling (rightfully so) attacked for writing what he feels like writing about on his own blog – which in this case, is his comic. So he’s stopped writing about his comic on his blog because he doesn’t feel comfortable doing it. If I did that, there’d be almost nothing on here. But I’ve pulled posts of this site myself, so I feel his pain.
I spent the entire day running around like a nut trying to do what was right, and I think I pissed some people off for doing so. I’m beyond caring at this point. Let them think of me what they want; I don’t have any regrets.
My husband’s asleep, my dog is snoring, and I’m waffling between the desire to work out and the desire to kill someone.
(In the novel. Calm down. Sheesh.)
…it’s either sadness or euphoria.
Good thing I was a day ahead.
The real power in working ahead is that it allows you to procrastinate effectively. For example, my NaNoWriMo novel is sitting around 4700 words if I remember correctly, which is almost 3 days’ worth.
And if I’d’ve been allowed to add the 1769 words I just wrote for my self-appraisal at work to that I’d still be a day ahead. And I could’ve really written some great stuff tonight, too, because the stress of having to get my appraisal done had the imagination running fast and the nerves running high all day.
But since I did work ahead yesterday, I had the ability to write my entire self-appraisal today, the night before it’s due, without fretting about my NaNo word count. (I used that extra energy to fret about absolutely everything else instead.)
Tomorrow I get to fret about NaNoWriMo again. But tomorrow I won’t have an entire freaking self-appraisal to write at the same time. Or rather, today I get to fret, because it’s well past midnight yet again. Yay for sleepless nights!
peh.
The Big Picture: DRM Crippled CD: A bizarre tale in 4 parts
Okay, so those of you who’ve been around for a long time know that I am totally absolutely for fair use of music and other content. Fair use means that I can listen to a CD on my iPod, especially since I legally purchased the CD. Fair use means that if you want to print one of my comics, you can go ahead and do that, then use it to decorate your cube or cheer up a friend.
Fair use also means not having to put up with corporate bullshit in order to use the content I legally purchased. I use the iTunes Music Store because it’s got really easy to use fair use content I can buy legally. (ArtistShare was equally easy to use and fair, so I had no qualms about purchasing Rick Moranis’s album through them – and I’ll keep half an eye on their other projects as well.
Sony, on the other hand, well, I’ve always felt they were full of bullshit. Their digital rights management (DRM – copy protection) policies have been whacko from the beginning. Had I not purged my archives about two years ago I’d link to how much bullshit now, but I’m not up to spelunking through my zipped archives tonight, what with NaNoWriMo being my major concern.
Speaking of which, what is so important that it dragged me away from my 600-word manuscript, you ask? I answer: a bizzare tale of DRM gone wrong, proving exactly how much bullshit Sony, as a consumer, is willing to put you through and how much everyone else, including the digital rights management companies themselves, are willing to circumvent those functions to keep you from going crazy.
The article itself is a little long (though if I keep babbling it’ll look short in comparison) but make sure you keep reading until you get to the phrase “If you think that this cannot get any dumber, you would be wrong” because the punchline of the whole article comes a mere three lines later.
All present and accounted for.
Well, by the time you read this it’ll be the beginning of National Novel Writer’s Month. And, as I’m planning to give it a shot this year, I set a goal back in early October to have all of November’s comics up by the beginning of NaNoWriMo, so I could concentrate on writing and not panic over comics.
They’re all done and uploaded. Mission accomplished.
That being said, if anyone has any fan art or comics they’d like to chuck my way to cover the beginning of December, I’m willing to post 2-3 reasonable (I define reasonable) comics or art, with a linkback to your website (assuming you have one) as a tradeoff. Just drop me a message with [GOMH] in the subject line if you’re interested. And heck, if I get more than 2-3 posts, I’ll post the others on off-days so you have something nifty to look at!
Wish me luck and patience and fast-paced ideas on the novel!
Halloween is so soothing
Hey, Hooters has planes. Why not Jiffy Pop?
Okay, story time!
Back in late January or early February, my cousin was in a car accident which resulted in the airbag deploying. (She was and is fine.) That event was the inspiration for today’s comic, which I finished drawing by oh, roughly the middle of February.
But I really felt that using a joke like this against my characters required some kind of background — what the hell would’ve happened that would have resulted in an airbag going off? Well, longtime readers know that I hit a deer back in November of ’04, and though the only thing that exploded in my case was the deer’s ass (it shat on my car. the nerve.), a slightly larger deer and a slightly heavier lead foot on my part may have caused an airback deployment… so around June I got enough fragmented pieces of a plan together to actually start this arc… which was somewhat inconvenient considering that I’d started a different arc back in May that still stands unfinished.
We’ll get back to that. I promise. But since it took Marin 140 days of our time to get through just over 12 hours of her time, I think it’s time we give the poor girl a rest.
Besides, I have a Halloween comic to run (a day early, on Monday, at that!), and maybe some Jesus-in-a-box stuff… you know, brain stretch for a bit.
Anyway, this may very well be one of the longest set-up-to-punchline time spans in horrible-amateur comics. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.