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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Paleo-what-now?

    I can’t add anything to this, so just go read the whole darned thing: Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past

    Here’s a pull-quote, if that’s what floats your boat…

    To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works””namely, that rate matters. That evolution can be fast, slow, or in-between, and understanding what makes the difference is far more enlightening, and exciting, than holding our flabby modern selves up against a vision””accurate or not””of our well-muscled and harmoniously adapted ancestors.

    Seriously interesting stuff, I kid you not.

  • Tidying Up Loose Threads

    Yesterday’s Quacked Panes comic doesn’t include a punchline. It is, instead, the end of a nearly-four-year running joke which popped up from time to time: Roger, the glib and witty punster, is tongue-tied when it comes to the object of his affections, Rei.

    Early on I thought I’d be doing story-type things with the comic. That didn’t pan out, but I went back to the well of story ideas from time to time for humor value. With the four-year run coming to a close I realized that I wasn’t going to get a more appropriate time than Valentine’s Day to put that particular story thread away for good.

    I don’t have a lot of other loose ends to tidy up, mind you. (Maybe the Commandos need to make an appearance before it’s all over…)

     

  • One Flu Over

    At least, I sure hope it’s over.

    A nasty bug’s been going around the office, and I worked hard at avoiding it for as long as I could. I don’t know if I ended up with that one or something else entirely, but early Monday morning I started feeling moderately awful, escalated to fully awful by mid-afternoon. I had my wool coat on in the office, I was so cold. Yesterday morning the alarm went off and between the splitting headache and intense fever with chest congestion for extra fun, I decided to bail on work and go back to bed.

    I slept until eleven, when sunlight stabbed me right through the eyelids and insisted I get the hell outta bed.

    All that extra sleep screwed up my sleep schedule, though, since I just spent most of last night… awake. Wide awake. But the fever’s gone down and my head doesn’t hurt nearly as much, so back to the salt mines I go. Stuff’s gotta get done, I’ve gotta earn my keep.

  • One Saw Weak

    And this makes once a week every week in January of Twenty-thirteen that I’ve managed to crank out a post of some sort.

    I’ve set myself a few small goals and limitations for the time being. One, I need to get something posted here once per week, more if I can manage it, but no less barring catastrophe. Two, I’m allowed only one breakfast and one lunch “out” on working days per week to cut back on the huge monetary outlay that I’m sure the fast food places near my work are now sorry to be deprived of. And three, I only need to produce four more months’ worth of the webcomic before completing its official run at the end of May. (I might later do some one-off comics, events, that sort of thing… but twice-per-week-like-clockwork will be over.)

    Mind you, I don’t know what I’ll do for a creative outlet afterward. I’ll need to do something or I’ll go nuts.

    Okay, nuts-er.

    One idea I’m tossing around is that of a radio-play type thing, get a few people together to record dialog, insert some sound effects, something along those lines. If I do this, I’ll start small with a one-off half-hour episode and get a feel for whether I can make a story work and whether I can handle the workload involved.

    Anything’s possible, yes?

  • Dervish D.

    If I keep this up, January 2013 will see more posts here than any two months in 2012 put together…

    At any rate. The last song to come up in Poweramp on my tablet last night (why pay for a separate MP3 player when I have LG Tone headphones and a nice big tablet?) was… this:

    [audio:Vangelis-DervishD.mp3]

    And that got me thinking about how my musical tastes went from mostly-classic-rock to include so much electronica like Pet Shop Boys and BT. I have my great-granddad to thank, in this case.

    Great-Grandpa George was a tinkerer, a packrat, a storyteller, and a very strange sort of audiophile. Like many such folk in the early 1980s he believed that the LP was far superior to any new-fangled digital compact disc nonsense. Unlike anyone else I’ve ever met, however, he believed that cassette tapes were also superior to CDs. (He was also an Edgar Cayce fan. Ah, well.) Either way, he had multiple turntables and racks of tape decks and several open-reel rigs in the house, most of them in the upstairs living space of the house.

    Luckily, when I had to sleep over at their place, I got to sleep upstairs with all the cool toys. (This explains so much, doesn’t it…?)

    This being the early 80s, and me being around 10 years old, my musical knowledge was limited to Top 40 radio, whatever my parents listened to, and… Grandpa’s tape and record collection. Not much of his available material stuck with me for very long, but man, I loved the Vangelis tapes like “Opera Sauvage,” “Mask,” and especially “Spiral,” from which the above track is pulled. Much like the Genesis stuff I’d get into a few years later, this was rich and complex imagination fuel for my little brain, and I ate it up.

    My father remains unamused by Vangelis, by the way: The notion of one man looping instruments and samples in a studio is what he describes as “musical masturbation.” I see his point, but I also sort of don’t care. (Love you, Dad!)

    There’s a direct, if unusual, path from that Dervish D song to the Jan Hammer and Tony Banks and Pet Shop Boys and KOTOKO and BT and Venus Hum pieces which form one of the pillars of my musical collection today. So, thank you, Grandpa George, for all those tapes we made all those years ago.

  • Eleven Years Of Grey Duck Dot Net

    I registered this domain eleven years ago today.

    Time flies when you’re… doing whatever it is you do when you start up a blog, then partially abandon it several years later, eh?

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