greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Busy Vacation

    Day Two of Three:

    • Picked up a cheap memory stick reader so I don’t have to keep using my laptop as an intermediary to get files from the camera to my main workstation.
    • Completed my “trial balloon” entry for Quacked Panes, then discovered how badly I’d misunderstood the setup of Inkblot & Webcomic. Remedied those misunderstandings and successfully posted the “zeroth” comic, mainly so I could make sure that the layout basically works, and all that jazz.
    • Cleaned the downstairs toilet in anticipation of guests on Saturday.
    • Photographed, wrote, assembled, exported, uploaded and scheduled the first official QP comic. (You can see it Monday, folks.)
    • Realized how hot it is in my room (I blame my lack of awareness on the excitement from the creative process), looked at the weather reports, wiped the sweat from my brow and decided to just give up and put the A/C unit into the window. Three years of practice made this the easiest setup so far… which means I probably overlooked something. If there’s a loud crash in the middle of the night, we’ll know.

    It’s coming up on 4:30pm. I think I’m going to take part of the rest of the day to just goof off, then try cranking out one more comic tonight. Tomorrow I want to get at least two more done; that’ll bring me up to two weeks’ worth of content. I’m going for a Monday/Thursday release schedule, and while I’m still fine-tuning the process I want to make sure I’m working a bit ahead.

    I went through a bit of an anxious stretch this morning, hitting the “I can’t do this I’m not good enough I’ll run out of material in no time I suck everything sucks why do I do this to myself” wall. Luckily, knuckling down (after a brief pep-talk and some good advice from the lovely Kylanath) and forcing myself to finish the “trial balloon” comic seems to have worked out the worst of those preflight jitters. I even managed something of a punch line in a comic that wasn’t originally meant to have one. This afternoon’s efforts made me even happier, so right now? I’m feeling good.

    And cooler, now that the A/C is running. Ahhhhhhh…

  • As The Dust Settles

    I started my day with some cleaning. I emptied the garbage cans in my bedroom and bathroom, then started in with clearing off the main desk. Why? Because it just might make a workable set for photographing rubber ducks, of course! (As if anything else would motivate me to wading through years’ worth of paperwork and other detritus. Seriously!)

    Eager to show off the fruits of my labors, I reached for my camera.

    A clean desk

    Say, why don’t we get some ducks into that shot?

    Clean desk, with ducks

    It took five minutes for me to locate one of the nine, however. Turns out that he’d been forgotten in my backpack for a few weeks, since the last time I took the ducks out-and-about (intending to do some outdoor shooting which never quite happened). Oops. Adding injury to insult, he’s a bit the worse for wear:

    Score, with a damaged bill

    Some of the paint on his bill rubbed off from being jostled around in my bag all that time. You can imagine how delighted I am at the results of my own negligence.

    The show, however, must go on. We’ll deal with it. Now I just have to convince him not to eat my brains while I sleep by way of retaliation…

  • I May Have Overdone Relaxing In May

    I felt good about all that I accomplished in April, so I told myself not to worry so much about May. All I needed to do this month was get my stress levels under control and finish prepping for the webcomic launch.

    Well, I’ve accomplished one of those things! I’m remarkably stress-free right now!

    I haven’t completely slacked off on the other thing, either. Unfortunately it’s all background work up to this point, though with this coming Wednesday through Friday off from work, the words “principal” and “photography” are front-and-center on the To-Do list. The plan is to launch within the first week of June with at least three weeks’ worth of material (figuring on a two-comics-per-week schedule).

    Some of the background material may wind up on my wiki at some point. I’m weighing the benefit of having it on the web where I can get at it from anywhere versus the detriment of publicly giving away all of the secrets.

    Then again, it’s a webcomic about rubber ducks. I mean, seriously. How can there be spoilers, right? Let’s keep some perspective about this!

    On a related note: Another thing I’m trying not to stress about? How quickly I’m going to run out of jokes…

  • Feeling Old, Being Quiet, Giving Props

    I made one of my rare trips into the BurgerVille near work this morning. While there, I realized something which made me feel a bit old: My first job was located at the St. Johns BV in North Portland… 20 years ago this coming autumn.

    Well then.

    In other news of monumental importance, after a breakneck round of posting during April I seem to have suffered another round of ennui as regards the writing and photography output. I’m still doing background prep for the Quacked Panes launch, though, and I haven’t abandoned the project in the slightest. The work which needs doing now, though, isn’t terribly interesting or visible… thus, nothing to write about here.

    And since I’ve been feeling generally “blah” anyway, there hasn’t been much to say about much of anything else. Such is life.

    To end on an upbeat note: Nicole at Barberama is awesome, and while you’re in the neighborhood you must check out the Russell Street Bar-B-Que. The Little Grey Duck has spoken!

  • Quacked Panes

    Well, I’ve made the site presentable enough to let people know where it is, so…

    Ladies and Gentlemen, may I introduce Quacked Panes, future home of a webcomic centered on rubber ducks. It combines my desire to dabble in photography, my desire to dabble in website hosting, my desire to make people laugh at bad jokes, and my small (but ever-expanding) collection of ducks. It’s a dilettante’s dream project, I tell you.

    I know. There’s nothing there yet. I’ll post a more extravagant notice when the thing actually launches. So, why post anything now? Easy: I seem to work better when there’s an expectant audience. (Which is preferable to an expectorant audience, naturally.) Now that you know it’s there, and I know you know, I have that much more incentive to get this thing off the ground.

    Basically, yes, I’m using psychology on myself.

  • Stranger In A Strange Land

    Once again, the “classics” are leaving me cold.

    I’m not done with what is arguably Heinlein’s best-known work, and I’m not sure I’ll finish. Oh, the first two parts are interesting enough. V. M. Smith and his interactions with the people of Earth hold one’s attention well enough, covering a lot of the ground that the C.J. Cherryh “Foreigner” series would later examine in excruciating detail: “Aliens and humans don’t think alike!” Yep. We established that, alright. And let’s be honest, there’s vast and fertile storytelling ground in that concept.

    Too bad we’ve spent half the book so far centered on one word: Grok.

    All of these clever humans Michael ends up surrounded by, and they can’t find the words in English (or presumably any other language) to approximate this Martian term… that Heinlein conveyed moderately well several times in that same stretch of the book. In, you know, English. Ahem. Well, we wouldn’t want the characters to be as clever as the author, would we? Hey, let’s hit the readers over the head with “grok” a few more times! Some of the conversations late in the second section are interesting, but most are absurd from overuse of grok this, grok that, grok you.

    But that’s not where the book has lost me. I can roll my eyes and get past all of that, especially for the sake of the solid sociopolitical theater in the Jubal arc, but I’m perplexed at the Digby And Foster Show. I’m barely into the book’s third section and… all of a sudden, after all of Jubal’s ranting and railing about religion, now we’re peeking into the Heavenly Bureaucracy? For laughs? And the crazy love grokbirds have taken on a tattooed evangelist, and that’s going to be played seriously? Um.

    It was the second appearance of Digby And Foster: Angels In Heaven that pulled me out of the book completely. I looked at the time (a bit later than I should’ve been awake, but not too late), firmly closed the book and turned out the light.

    I don’t know if I’m going to finish this thing. So, dear readers, I ask you: Is it worth it?

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