Monthly Archives: August 2016

Superkids

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No adults were irrevocably scarred in the making of this webcomic.

Pop Quiz!

You are in your house. An adult is in the kitchen, cooking dinner. There are 3 burners lit on the stove, which is 5 steps away, in various directions, from the 3 separate counters where the ingredients have been prepared and the utensils are stored. You feel the need to wash your hands for a full 60 seconds, for the 4th time in 2 hours. Do you use:

A) The bathroom sink

B) The sink in the perfectly functional 2nd bathroom that you decided 7 years ago was creepy even though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, but you still refuse to you use it and have only ever set foot in its vicinity under extreme duress

C) The kitchen sink where the adult is attempting to drain a boiling pasta pot into a colander

If you answered C, congratulations! You may possess one of the myriad superpowers of childhood. You likely have the ability to look directly at a person who is holding a knife in one hand, a spatula in the other, and stirring a pot over a gas flame while walking back and forth between multiple points in the kitchen, and decide that that very best place for you to observe the action is the mathematical center of the room. You may even develop the extreme power of not having any idea that your actions are inconvenient or dangerous, despite having been told as much repeatedly over the entire span of your conscious life, including 3 times in the previous 3 minutes.

Ha ha. I exaggerate. But aren’t they so adorable when they’re asleep?

Cooperation

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Anything besides time-sensitive tasks on which my future depends.

Yeah, my focus sucks lately. What can you do? I don’t tolerate caffeine or other stimulants at all, so I’m very much at the whim of my container. My poor, badly engineered, increasingly dysfunctional container, with its many worn-out parts. At least we’re all on good speaking terms. They’re not afraid to let me know when they’re unhappy. But according to the Facebook discussion from which I adapted this comic, everyone has these problems. Being easily distracted is universal.

Then again, the not easily distracted among us probably aren’t on Facebook.

This comic took forever because the Wacom tablet is getting wonky again. The power cable is touchy, and the pen keeps getting glitchy, and tonight something froze the entire keyboard and I had to do a hard reboot and lost some part of my work. How fortunate that I remembered to save as I was going along tonight. Sometimes I don’t. But in fact, it was the cable repeatedly disconnecting and the pen constantly increasing its sensitivity to the point of uselessness that reminded me to save.

Open Hearted Mandala

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Love is the answer.

Normally, I like to think of myself as proactive and focused, but those words do not describe the me of recent months. Sleep deprived and foggy, more like. I don’t know how many days in a row it’s possible to lay out lists of imperative tasks for yourself and accomplish none of them, but I decided not to find out. I assigned myself only 1 task: clean the kitchen. It took 3 hours, and didn’t include most of the floor, but it got checked off. Then I made 2 quiches and a peach cobbler, which is more proactive than reading 8 years’ worth webcomics in 3 days.

Last night it was sort of getting to me, all the unfinished tasks, my own abysmal sense of potential and achievement. Just before bed, I looked at my Kindle page and found that I had sold a few more books and gotten a 4th review on my Amazon page. So really, I need to let go of my own issues and just worry about the important things. Much work to do on that front.

BTW, if you’d like to write me an Amazon review but can’t afford $4.99 for the book, let me know and I’ll send the ms. I’m totally cool with review copies for people who intend to actually review it.

If you do have $4.99  and want to help me along, please consider buying my book, supporting my Patreon,  or ordering my merch.

End of the Line

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You may have started out as unremarkable composites of nickel and iron, cast out from your birthplaces and sent hurtling through the cosmos like so much space detritus casually tossed into predictable orbit, but today you are all shooting stars!

Obviously, we went out into the desert to observe last night’s meteor shower, which explains why this comic is nearly 14 hours late, in case anyone actually noticed. It was a really nice display, although being way out in the desert on the other side of the mountains (so that they blocked a lot of the city light) and not even starting to look up until after midnight probably improved the viewing. We have a place we go on BLM land and no one ever goes there. It’s weird that no one goes there, because it’s the best place for a lot of nighttime in the desert activities, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone else there.

Someone joked about what meteors might be thinking, if meteors could think, and I maintained that it would be “AAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Because if you can think, we assume you can feel, and if you can feel, I can’t imagine the process of being ablated while tearing through the earth’s atmosphere is a pleasant one. After a thousand years of hanging around, smashing into anything at high velocity would be a shock. Although maybe being ejected from a comet is heartbreaking enough. Maybe they’re happy to burn up and fall to earth as perhaps a tiny granule of iron. Maybe it’s nice to be grounded again, even if you lose a huge part of yourself in the process.

I need to stop anthropomorphizing space rocks and go acquire food.

Silver Bullet

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I gave up yearning for normalcy decades ago, but sleeping at night would be nice. 

It’s been a weird week.

Yesterday I went to the store to buy my favorite kind of chocolate–organic, fair trade, sustainable, yadda, yadda, yadda–and some angel had left a coupon for my brand tucked into the shelf display! Hooray! But then I ate all the, and that made me sad. Contemplating the absence of chocolate pushed me over the edge. And that’s where this comic came from.

 

Real Smooth

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All I’m saying here is that, if I decided that I needed to shave a substantial portion of my head, I would at least mention it to the person who has to look at my head the most first. 

So The Man stated the other day that, if I wanted to draw comics about more personal issues relating to him, I had his permission. Granted, I’m 100 percent sure this isn’t what he was talking about, but this is what I drew.

It’s not even like I’ve never seen him without a beard–he was beardless when I met him–but it’s been a long time since he’s shaved. It was a rather conservative beard by any standard, but he refused to grow a more preposterous one, and I had grown used to his facial hair, and rather fond of it. And apparently the look on my face when he walked in like that really expressed my feelings wordlessly.

I would like to point out that panels 2-4 demonstrate Kübler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, and bargaining in panel 2, depression in panel 3, and acceptance in panel 4.

Anyway, he promises he’s growing it back out, and the beard will return before I have a chance to get used to its absence.

Purr or Scratch?

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The dilemma is real, the struggle eternal. Fortunately, the kitty flow chart is a simple one.

Apparently, my genius cat, whose terrible behavior has been documented elsewhere in this blog, decided to swipe at The Man because–get this–he stopped petting her. You can’t win with cats. And yet, just as I’m sitting here writing this, she politely tapped on my hip to signify that she wanted to sit on my lap. So I should change my posture to accommodate that fleeting desire. Which lasted all of 25 seconds. Now she’s sitting on the desk looking suspiciously like she’s going to knock a mirror on the floor. I should take care of that.

In the meantime, you can consider buying my book, supporting my Patreon,  or ordering my merch.

5 Tomatoes Mandala

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And then those are olives on the outside, I guess? And some kind of columbine flowers. 

Per usual, my weekend consisted of me compiling long lists of imperative tasks and then not doing them while I messed around on the internet, hung out in other people’s houses, went swimming, and played Pokemon Go. Also spent most of Friday night sitting in a bean bag with Misses Kitty, playing the ukulele and singing.

I’m also reading the Owl’s book, which was just released last week, although I probably read 4 complete and 12 partial drafts of the manuscript before its publication. It wasn’t fresh enough in my mind to write a book review. Soon I hope to write that review, and then there may be a little news regarding where that review will be published, but I’m not supposed to talk about it just yet, and I don’t have all the details anyway.

This mandala is nice and cheerful and juicy, probably hailing from a time in my life where I didn’t neglect my plants for days at a time and instead took good care of them so they remained healthy and bore fruit. Not this year. This year I murdered two tomato plants and sorely abused a couple of peppers.

Should try and take another stab at that logo design. My first was rejected for being too cute. But I thought the original design was too ugly. So we’re shooting for something in between.

Goth Mom Knows How to Suffer

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You don’t understand me! You’re probably not even my real mom! You probably kidnapped me from my real mom! My real mom is probably Marilyn Manson! Or Bela Lugosi!

It’s slightly troublesome to me that I really have no clue where this comic came from. Usually there’s some gamete of an idea–an event, an action, a memory–that spawns each comic. Yeah, there was the sort of goth PTA mom in last week’s cannibalism comic, but that connection came to me afterward. First was just the idea of a goth mom offering an upset kid absinthe and laudanum (the eyeliner idea came later, too, on the realization that even goth mom wouldn’t start with the hard stuff). Then the thought of how the kid of a goth mom would respond (exactly like the kid of any other mom) and then the Taylor Swift thing (her music is just so joyful, even when she’s petty or angry) and finally goth dad, who, naturally, will always assume the worst. Maybe that was a line out of an Addams Family movie or something like that. But what could be worse for goth parents than a kid who listens to upbeat pop?

Not sure what they’ll do now that they assume the worst. Search the kid’s computer for evidence of a Pinterest account? Arrange an intervention? An exorcism?

I happen to know a fair number of goth parents and they all seem to be doing a pretty good job of it. They can dress their kids in skulls and pentacles until they’re about 5, and then the kid turns around and only wants to wear polo shirts or pink tutus or something like that. It’s hard to rebel against goth mom. But goth mom expects your betrayal. She’ll love you even if you become an investment banker or a priest. Goth mom understands that the world is cruel and nobody understands you. Goth mom understands that better than anybody.

Dragon Comics 140

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Or unmelted cheese, I would imagine. Any cheese, really.

Another little slice of life here in Dragon’s Cave.

By the way, the trick to homemade mozzarella sticks is to freeze the cheese after you’ve breaded it but before you fry it. Otherwise, it melts before the outside gets crispy and loses its shape and leaks out everywhere. Of course, some people like that sort of thing.

The experimental breading is basically just pakora batter without the spices: garbanzo flour, water, and salt. Very tasty. Makes light and fluffy mozzarella sticks. Pleasing to children and other cheese-eating organisms.