Get­ting ready– small, agile lap­top. Online back­ups we hope we can access. Installing server on lap­top to run dev sites. Drink­ing water.

A quick post I should have fin­ished a while ago… while hik­ing through our won­der­ful mini-desert, almost in our back­yard, with Mr. Lushkin strapped firmly to the chest, we had the occa­sion to see some of the cooler, wilder wildlife of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. I won’t go into much detail, but the crown­ing moment was of course the beau­ti­ful adult South­ern Pacific Rat­tlesnake we saw on the 8th of August. Here’s a teaser:

…bul­let stopped dead, I sup­pose. Was that really my last post? I will spare you the details of that flight, a sleep­less zombie-walk overnight in Bal­ti­more, lost bag­gage… I will spare you.

So, it’s been a while. I might not have even tried this (this=Blogger), but I am a lit­tle Microsoft-Accessed-OUT at the moment, and left my inher­ited lap­top machine scry­ing through its own innards, look­ing for viral infec­tions and the like– if I am going to try to exer­cise reg­u­larly, I see no rea­son my com­put­ers shouldn’t suf­fer the dis­ci­plines of health too– and I fired up the old Linux box (psy­cho­naut, I have told you all before) and *that* reminds me of post­ing. For some reason.

But I dis­sem­ble, as I dis­as­sem­ble… I have been itch­ing to con­vert said Access data­base to MySQL and pump it over to psy­cho­naut and then prac­tice admin­is­ter­ing via the web. And all that involves get­ting some of the Linux chops back up, so…

And the itch goes fur­ther, I sup­pose… I have been map­ping out writing-thoughts in my head, of late, and real­ize that writ­ing, like draw­ing, is a per­ish­able skill and must be main­tained through prac­tice. Of some sorts.

Which brings us to this, here, now: some sort of attempt at writ­ing. An update, if you will.

I was, just this morn­ing, writ­ing out a bunch of lists, and as I am still in the blush of such an orderly mind­set, I will give you, gen­tle reader, one of your very own:

1. Plane ride. But you’ve already heard.
2. Data­base for the par­ents. Which is inter­est­ing in a way, for it sug­gests some inter­est­ing work­ings of the mind. For exam­ple– and this has hap­pened sev­eral times now– I will be totally stumped by some aspect, give up on it, and find that later– days, a week– I will be build­ing some­thing more com­plex, based on that very knowl­edge I aban­doned which has sur­rep­ti­tiously become so clear to me as to be ren­dered transparent.
3. Con­tin­u­ing pre­vi­ous thought: catch­ing myself in thought recur­sion + ReJon’s ideas about pro­gram­ming accent­ing cer­tain of his human traits, con­trary to pop­u­lar misconception
4. Run­ning 4 miles, right past Randall’s house, but I don’t know which one. I think it was the grey-blue one that I heard some Radio­head out of the other day. I run once every 2–3 days. Run­ning sucks.
5. I made some pup­pet heads, shame­lessly lift­ing tech­niques from Chris Sick­els and Scott Radke. I am cur­rently sum­mon­ing up the time, energy, and mood to foam-out their bod­ies and put them in endear­ing or creepy poses.
6. bought the domain name psychicradio.org for a tighter cou­pling of site & comics.
7. con­tin­u­a­tion: I sliced up the pan­els of all the old and most the new comic pages and put a semi-random link­age walk-thru of them… go to psychicradio.org and see. Then tell me if it is inter­est­ing, groovy, frus­trat­ing, and/or incon­se­quen­tial (those are your only options, so keep to them).
8. Went to the Comic-Con with the beau­ti­ful Iryna (who doesn’t have a web page any­more but should) and we had an insane comic-frenzy and a t-shirt buy­ing com­pe­ti­tion and she bought us both H.P. Love­craft plush Cthulu dolls. Peo­ple of the world, please curb your envy.
9. From K.J. Hays: “the aver­age comic con attendee was between the ages of 30 & 40″
10. Launched into an insane work-week, get­ting so much done that I almost for­got that I am a lazy-ish per­son. I have even had mild fan­tasies of re-stocking my old plan­ner with new cal­en­der pages… not that I have any press­ing engage­ments at present, but it’s like the base­ball field… if I have the blank pages, the appoint­ments will come.
11. Went to the library today, here’s what I got:
    • The Green Arrow, writ­ten by Kevin Smith
    • Y The Last Man. heard alot about it at Comic-Con
    • The Books of Magic: Girl in the Box. Liked Neil Gaiman’s issue, thought I would see how John Ney Reiber would do.
    • The Chron­i­cles of Conan, Vol­ume 2. a classic.
    • Bone. Jeff Smith. got to check it out.
    • The Bat­man Archives. After some heated con­ver­sa­tions with comic-sage John Mark, I decided to get the full scoop, from the begin­ning. This has all the Bob Kane ones from Detec­tive Comics. And what I find most inter­est­ing is that in the begin­ning (issues 1–5) Bat­man kills about 1 per­son per episode. Threw a jewel theif off a build­ing. Kicked an Indian thug– who was unwise enough to stick his head out the win­dow– and broke his neck. Poison-gassed another Indian thug.

So, I am try­ing to decide some things. Mostly, I am dig­ging deep down inside myself to see if I have the patience and for­ti­tude to actu­ally draw some comics. My draw­ing is rusty, and though some­times its cranky and twisted lines please me, more often than not I can­not draw what I see in my head. Not like I used to, when I was an avid pen­ciller. As I said before: per­ish­able. Since I have decided, by and large, to con­cen­trate on the comic-images for artis­tic pur­poses, this seems a lia­bil­ity. So you see, some soul-searching is in order.

Alright, that’s about all I can muster for the day. I am going to try my hand at hand-coding some Queries, and as that is a bor­ing task, I will spare you the numb­ing journey.

Good week­ends to you all.