If you own a cat… or better yet if you are owned by a cat you have gone through this ritual… every morning. Hemi (best cat in the world) does this every morning. I have decided that he thinks he’s Lassie and we have a extremely clumsy kid named Timmy living in our neighborhood. Fortunately Hemi seems to forget all about Timmy when he gets a bowl of canned food. Canned food is the important part, since the dry food is still sitting in his bowl.
Thanks to 24 Hour Comic Day, I have a number of strips ready to ink and finish. Being on Fall Break right now I’m working to get most of them set up, but to get a reasonable schedule set, I’m going t o try to switch from “Whenever I want to publish” to Tuesday’s & Thursdays. We’ll see if I can keep that pace going with work. I’m still learning the new interface to publish, so I may need to work out a few bugs… If Hemi would get off my keyboard.
On the other blog that I manage (indianageoaching.com) I have a list of all the geocaching challenges in the state of Indiana. I update it quarterly, and from time to time scratch my head at the complex challenges people have come up with…
Yes, those of us who have a spouse that is into caching know this feeling… You plan for a quiet night out, maybe finally that romantic dinner for two- not at the local pizza place (although I have nothing against the local pizza place- Gramboli’s Pizza in Oaklandon- blatant plug). But just when you think nothing could be nicer, wham! a new cache is posted. That or you realize why your significant other chose this restaurant, because the valet staff had placed a cache in the parking lot so they could chuckle at folks digging around through the foliage in their evening wear…
I actually have gotten a bit done in the month I’ve been “off” of school. Including, some yardwork, attending some workshops and meetings, read a little, and yes, I shaved. Who knows? I might actually get My Geek Odyssey back on a somewhat regular schedule or at least a bit of a buffer built up before school starts.
As a teacher I always tell my students that Summers are there for teachers to collect “patience.” Then when the school year starts they give it out every time a student misbehaves or does something wrong. Hopefully they will collect enough to make it the entire year. Even as I consider what next year will bring, I’m trying to gather some patience – and maybe that comes from taking a nap or eating a leisurely lunch out – taking maybe 35 minutes to eat. For those who comment about how “nice” it must be to have Summers “off”. I doubt you would be able to last a week in a normal public school classroom. I saw this post on the all- knowing, ever wise Facebook, and suggest that non-educators read it. I don’t complain (much) about the “perks” others get in their job – like being able to go to the bathroom when they need to- just sayin’
My Geek Odyssey can sometimes be a warped commentary on my life… So let me start off with this fact- I do love my parents. They just celebrated 50 years of marriage (woo hoo!) and I know that even though I don’t always agree with them, that they try to do what’s best for their kids.
Now that said, my brothers and I, when we actually talk (which is about once every few years) sometimes discuss the ranking system employed by my parents. We all know where we stand. I know, I know, all parents treat their children equally, love their kids equally, but as kids we also understand that sometimes one sibling might be considered better. This is my opinion from my experience, your mileage may vary. Still when my brothers and I talk we know that some have higher scores than others and certain things give you an advantage. I have finally gotten to the point where it really doesn’t matter to me, it used to and I wasted way too much energy trying to make my parents proud of me, I finally worked on making me proud of me. Sure I don’t get the spoils of war, but I also sleep well at night knowing that I don’t have to be anyone but myself- no matter how much trouble that can get me into. Like doing a comic about the family ranking system… might not have been such a good idea, but honesty, my parents taught me, is important, and as I said, I do love my parents. The bonus is I no longer have this comic idea sitting in the back of head and can move on. Cecil, by the way, is upset since he figures we are out of the running again for whatever the keeper of the High Score would get… I keep telling him we could have gotten Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco treat). Oh, well, I’m off to find a turtle to wax, hope you all have a great day and remember- Be yourself, no one else can, and even if they could, your closest.
Yes, as many people have heard Matt Smith will not be returning as the Doctor once this year is up. Just as when David Tennant left as the tenth Doctor and Matt Smith replaced him there are many people quite upset about his. For me, I love some of the things Matt Smith Brought to the character, especially “Bow ties are cool” But you could almost see it coming once Amy and Rory left. The eleventh Doctor’s story was really one of his companions, first Amy, then Amy & Rory, now Clara. The dynamic has been how they relate to each other. I am looking forward to the 50th Anniversary Special and seeing how the play Matt off. “I don’t want to go” were the last words of the 10th… What will be the words for the 11th? The other thing that I’m trying to wrap my mind around (as are many on the net) If Matt Smith is 11 and Time Lords can supposedly only regenerate 12 times, and they just introduced a previously unknown incarnation which would make matt Smith actually 12, How are they going to explain everything? Wibbly-Wobbly Timey Wimey… ook!
One comment I heard as I was walking around in a Doctor Who (a properly licensed Doctor Who) t-shirt was “I like your shirt” followed by “I hate that Doctor Who has gotten so popular.” I understand, it used to be like you were part of some exclusive geek club if you understood and quoted Doctor Who. It was a badge of honor, that due to market saturation no longer works. Ok, I’ll agree that if you know about the incarnations prior to #9 you might still have some geek creed, but after the 50th anniversary special and with BBC America doing monthly retrospectives of each incarnation, it isn’t going to be long before the hipster “geeks” know almost as much as the true whovians, and that kind of makes me sad. I’m happy that people are learning about a great story and great characters, but will this popularity cause the show to lose something special, in order to appeal to the masses? Some might say it already has.
Yes, this is a new comic. Yes, it is a very late comic. Yes, I’ve been busy coming up with bad excuses as to why I haven’t been able to draw a comic or come up with a story. Yes, I’m a bad person.
Cecil knows about cunning headwear.
As for the comic my chin actually comes in white now (I blame almost 25 years in the classroom) and the punchline, everyone is a geek about something, and some people worship at the alter of a canceled Science Fiction show that was on Fox (not Space Above and Beyond, although they exist also). Some fans started selling on Etsy their home knit versions of a rather interesting piece of wardrobe, that only appeared in one episode. Fox Execs, didn’t think anything of it until their accountants decided that this could be a profit center and had the lawyers send out cease and desist letters. It was like a million geeks screamed out in horror online and were suddenly silenced. Fortunately, millions of these hats will soon be available at conventions with “official” and “collectors” tags on them.
Hope to see you again on Wednesday.
Yes, I do have a lot of well reasoned and thought out explanations as to why this comic has been on an unannounced hiatus… all of them are lame and just make me feel guilty. Hopefully as we close in on the 4th anniversary of the start of My Geek Odyssey I’ll get back into the groove and get comics out more consistently… can’t promise anything, but I can try.
If you get a chance I do suggest you check out one of my favorite places on the web: Thinkgeek.com and see what they have on sale today… the crazy thing is sometimes these items actually get made! The quick examples that come to mine are Unicorn Meat and the Tauntaun sleeping bag.
When people first started getting excited over “Flashmobs” one group, Geocachers started to really go hog wild over them. They were a quick easy way to get a smiley… unfortunately most of the time they aren’t done well, at least in Indiana.
One of my favorite flashmobs that I attended started with the group gathering in a somewhat out of the way portion of a mall. We then took out bananas and proceeded to walk through the mall talking on the banana as if it were a phone. When we go to the end of the mall we ate our bananas and dispersed. The looks we received as a large group talking on bananas was priceless. This is not usually the case.
What tends to happen is this- a large group of geocachers gathers (conspicuously) and chats somewhere near to the flashmob location. At the appointed time the group moves, as one, the 10 yards across the parking lot, to sign the log and take a picture- instead of fading back into the crowd, they hang around talking. No one is surprised, or delighted- what I would consider and epic fail. having seen video of some wonderful flashmobs that take lots of planning.
I’d like to ask those geocachers planning flash mobs to be a little more creative, and remember the goal is to surprise and delight the muggles, if you are just their to socialize, then don’t call it a flashmob.
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As for my work, I am hoping that I have completed my work with the dogs & the ponies and can go back to simply herding cats, which will make John happy, because I should be able to draw more comics, although my hand was pretty sore after this one- I’m out of practice.
While we were on vacation one things we got to hear a lot about was the terrible “blizzard” that was heading towards the midwest. Since we were nowhere near it, we sat and observed through various means what happened.
On television things were appropriately dramatic, with a lot of “worst storm”, terrible things going to happen, dogs and cats living together- mass hysteria… Nationally, people were preparing for what the Mayans had foretold.
In Social Media we had a number of professional and amateur meteorologists taking a stab at predictions. I was a bit concerned (for Hemi) but figured he should be fine. As real reports came in I think many people realized that there were more than one definition of the word “blizzard” Technically- it was a blizzard since there was a specifically defined amount of snow falling while the wind was blowing at a specific speed, or a yummy ice cream confection at Dairy Queen. For those who deal with pop culture though a blizzard has something to do with massive amounts of snow and tornadoes and yeti… lots of yeti. This didn’t seem to have any of this and by the time we got home I was out of $25 for asking the neighborhood kids to shovel my driveways that had mostly melted.
While meteorologists are getting better at predicting, it is our romantic notions of things (like the blizzard of 1978) that causes panic and french toast runs.
