Polymorphism

I was dreaming about zombies again when I woke up this morning.

I was a barely trained soldier in some kind of war. It was happening in the midst of normal life, in towns that weren't part of the battle - even in dream logic, I thought this was weird, and asked about it. My leader told me that even in a war, we still need cops.

I had a gun, but it only held two bullets and it jammed. I barely even knew how to hold it anyway; I traded it in for some big nails in the shape of a digital C (long back part with two shorter prongs). I think I was supposed to throw them.

There was something about a van, and then the dream zoomed out away from my own perspective. Some terrible creeping weapon - I didn't see it but it might have been a golden gas - was set off by the enemies. It came across a huge (about the size of an RV) canister of an even worse weapon, which exploded. Back in my eyes, I saw, from a high perspective - I was up on some kind of plateau - soft-edged runners of this fast-moving, bright-and-evil-green gas booking through a cornfield. Then it reached the houses, and when it got to people it both killed the living and reanimated both the freshly and previously dead.

That was a little disturbing to wake up from. Knee-jerk reactions aside, it's not that I've been watching too many movies - I'm hard-pressed to even watch the things I've gotten through Netflix. Perhaps it is a reaction to the studied, professional-level awkwardness of the characters in the Flight of the Conchords episodes I just watched. Oh, hm, I did watch through Firefly, though, but they weren't very Reaver-y.

So, anyway, dreams an' stuff.

Sven Jimenez asked me about webcomic recommendations. That got me to thinking - what would an index by category of the webcomics I read look like?

All the comics on the regular current tab of my spreadsheet are included, under as many categories as they fit. I mean to add the infrequent, hiatus and archived lists later, and maybe the Reading ones (as in, I am reading the archive before adding them to the current list) as well.

I do not give a blanket recommendation to all of these, but I'd be happy to make individual recommendations - or take any! - or talk about webcomics in general.

( geeks )
( sci-fi )
( future (non sci-fi) )
( surreal )
( fantasy )
( mainstream )
( one-shot )
( sex )
( anthropomorphic critters )
( gaming )

I like to watch the interactions among webcomics. If I didn't have to work, I might waste spend some time mapping out connections, with different color coding for memberships to various collectives, pimping, collaborations, co-authorships, guest strips, links lists and character cameos. It would expand and expand as I added more names, and the connecting cords would multiply even as the existing ones thickened through repetition and addition of connection types. It would be a glorious Gordian net. Since I am not independently wealthy, however (and also not tech-geeky enough to have the 3D rendering software that would require), I will settle for reading, noting the connections - at the very least, the particular ones that led me to the strips - and occasional reviewing/pimping.

In the commentary area of dinosaur comics, creator Ryan North noted sadly that Minus, by Ryan Armand (also the creator of Ribald Youth), ended on July 3rd, and recommended it. I went over and took a look, and I second that recommendation.

Visually, these scanned paintings (they look to be watercolors to me, but I'm no expert) are lovely, vibrant bursts of clarity, artistic without ever falling into the trap of "artsy."

The art is a good match for the subject matter. The strip is a series of vignettes about Minus, a little girl with tremendous magical abilities. It's completely natural to her, used as an extension of herself, and her agenda is unavoidably altered by that - and yet it's still clearly the agenda of a little girl as well, with all that that combination implies: a child's wonder bound with a child's unthinking cruelty, impulsiveness, and the limited understanding of consequence, coupled with the ability to undo consequence, imagination along with the possibility to realize those imaginings. She is always confident, because, as seen in the very first strip, even though her differences cast her in the outsider's role, she is never the one on the losing side of a power struggle.

With such a childhood, one could grow up with a hideously deformed character, but Minus does learn lessons as she goes, about things like the downsides to cheating and the power of choice - the same ones learned by ordinary children, differing only in degree - and there's evidence of an underlying decency in her that suggests that absolute power doesn't HAVE to corrupt absolutely, or maybe at all.

It feels like I have used an ironically large number of words in talking about work that uses so few - a lot of webcomics are as much about the speech bubbles as they are about the art, but in Minus, words are used sparingly, and the visual medium supports the lion's share of the expression.

This is a really beautiful strip, and, complete at only 130 pages (though admittedly some pages do go down aways), reading through it is a small investment of time for a truly great return.

Also, please have this throwaway mention of a laugh-out-loud strip from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Mom's buying me shoes for my birthday - I said I needed sandals (the ones in the picture are not ones I can wear to work *grin*) but have been avoiding the mall, and she ordered me three pairs of the sandals that she likes, that I would not have bought for myself because of the price.

It's going to increase the number of shoes I own by 1/3. *laugh*

I feel better.

I don't know how long it will last, but it's not very surprising; even though I have some legitimate things pulling me downward at the moment, I'm just not very good at staying there.

Rationally, I know I'm fortunate that a long bout of depression for me is a whole day and it doesn't take much to cut through it... but at the same time, I sometimes feel like I'm missing something, as if I'm chemically or otherwise unable to fully experience this part of my emotional range. It's probably stupid to feel handicapped by such a state, but there it is.

Not only that, but I just don't get much sympathy this way. Or a damn pony, either.

Better get to work, I guess, though I'd really rather not.

Today went bad. It happened nowhere but inside my head. It's a fairly rare occurence, for which I am glad.

After the final straw, a scare with Buddha and a sewing needle (How did he get the spool? My bad. How did he get the needle out of the spool? Cat magic. How did he refrain from swallowing it? Cat luck.), I called to bail on volunteering for the evening. I may see about making it up later this week, but I think they'll be closed the same hours I am off.

Tim, the "guybrarian" who "trained" me (oh, the quotes), promised to dock my pay to 1/2 of the 0$ I normally make. *chuckle*

I seem to have accidentally fallen into an informal one-upsman competition with parkrrrr to see who can introduce the other to more awesome webcomics. The net result of this is that we take turns being inevitably sucked into reading whole archives for hours at a time. I should make a list of his additions to my list.

Gosh, I like lists.

Anyway, his latest entry, Basic Instructions, led me to come across this excellent strip.

If I ever regularly game with a group, I would want a poster of this.

Last night, I received an email on OkCupid. It was from someone with whom I had an odd, brief email exchange ten months ago.

The new email contained nothing but the lyrics to "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You."

I didn't really know how to take this. Was it a message that he wants to take the tongue-in-cheek "stalking" from OkCupid to a higher level? A missive of desire from the poetically challenged? A Motown meme*? A reference to the movie Conspiracy Theory?

After some consideration, I sent back the lyrics to "30,000 Pounds of Bananas" by Harry Chapin.

(insert pseudo-pious music-themed quote here)



* I could get into a Motown meme - it would have soul AND alliteration!

A while ago, when I was all about soupmaking, nw1 recommended the cookbook Twelve Months of Monastery Soups by Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila Latourrette. I decided to make it part of the Amazon order that also included books for my Diana Wynne Jones project, and it has been here waiting for me to use it ever since... but it got warm in the meantime and soup wasn't sounding like a good idea.

Night before last, that changed, and I decided that soup to feed me and the fella would be fun. I brought the cookbook along to work and had the fella look at it during carpool time and pick out a soup that sounded good to him from the June section (it being June, it seemed the place to start). He chose Solyanka.

I had never heard of this dish before. However, at the bottom of the page it says, "'The classification of traditional Russian soups has been traced to 16th and 17th century annals. Solyanka was originally applied to any food by the peasantry. Today Solyanka denotes a savoury, tart soup in which sauerkraut or pickled cucumbers are one of the main ingredients.'" All righty then!

( Solyanka (Cucumber-Fish Soup) )

I didn't know how I'd like this soup, and neither did he who picked it. It was interesting - which is not a euphemism for yucky, that's just what it was. It doesn't really suit my palate in a long-term way - I could never make a quadruple batch and live on it for a week, I'm not even going to take it for work today, it's too soon - but I could eat it and enjoy it for one night. It's actually a good choice for this kind of really experimental, as in "We'll go out for Subway if we can't eat this" experimental, cooking - as I told the fella, the likely outcome was that he would like it and I would not, in which case I would make him take home the leftovers. The actual outcome is that I have two bowls worth of leftovers, not a huge commitment or enough for me to get sick of it, but I would not order something like this in a restaurant because I am reluctant to pay restaurant prices for foods that have the odds that I WON'T like it that this one did. It's the kind of thing I'd taste if someone else had it and then forget the name of it - highly unlikely with this kind of dish; I don't think that I've ever eaten out in a Russian. So yeah, this is a better way. The best way, of course, would be if someone who ate it regularly as part of their own cuisine made it for me. *grin*

I can't quite describe how it tasted. It was fishy, but not in an unpleasant way. It smelled... Russian... while it was cooking. I don't even know what the hell that means, but it did - it might be reminding me of my other rare exposures to the cuisine? I could also see this coming out of a German kitchen (German: "Ok, see, you boil the fish, and then you add the sauerkraut and you boil them too..." Non-German: "WHAAAAT?!"). I may be better able to express the experience of eating it when I get to the leftovers. Maybe.

I served it with multi-grain bread, a peeled whole carrot and sliced Muenster cheese. It was a decent meal.

Someone in my building is playing music. I can't hear the actual tune, but I can pick up the low parts. This happens infrequently, but when it does, it tends to go from 10:00 pm to about 2:00 am. On weeknights.

Earplugs don't block it out - there is a slight element of hearing, but mostly it is sensation: I feel it as a pounding, in my body, between my shoulderblades, on my brain. It doesn't help at all that it is very irregular, with low tones and sharp percussive irregularities in the backbeats. It ALSO doesn't help that from the "sound" of it, it just about has to be music of a type that I pretty much loathe.

It could be a lot worse - I've been sleeping more solidly lately, straight through the nights, and it may be that this actually goes on every night but only keeps me up when they turn on their music before I sack out. It isn't strong enough to wake me, either - that would require perceptible sound - it's just enough to prevent sleep if I haven't already made it there.

I got dressed one night around 1 and tried to find the source, but had no damn luck; I am not even sure how to complain about it, or that I would WANT to if I could figure out how. It doesn't have a huge impact on my life, exactly. Tonight though, it's exacerbating both my chronically shortchanged need for sleep and the headache I've been carrying around. Odd that I haven't complained about it, usually I feel completely unable to function when there is any pain at all between my ears - but still, definitely damn annoying.

I'm going to bed and hoping that I can either distract myself from it and fall asleep while my conscious mind is dismissing it or nod off during a lull. With late nights and non-late mornings (yippee for the cat who thinks that staying in bed past 8:30 on a Saturday should be a capital crime) exhaustion just might carry me off.

Ok, seriously. Some of the people that message me on OkCupid... I don't even want to mock it, I just want to hide and/or cry.

I am not sure where the line is between honest and mean. I hope I didn't cross it, but really, I do not want to hear from him again, and doing that girl thing where you don't really admit that you aren't into somebody is just a waste of time for everyone involved.


( the conversation )


the "u" thing always makes me wince but if he'd caught my interest I would have asked him if he could stop, and if he was able, that would be just as good, really - I am a fan of being conscious of and able to control communication tips, whether verbal (such as "um") or fostered by chat laziness. However, what I told him about his profile being a turnoff was based on nothing but the (extremely) bare facts:


( The Profile )


This guy made it through grad school? Uh, ARE there unaccredited grad schools? Not only that, but one of his three adjectives is "man." I... yeah, no.

Ok, actually now that I am free of the conversation it does make me want to laugh some. I mean, you know we weren't a match - I am hardly ever bar on Friday nights. I might be friend or movie or work from home, even, and though smoking ban do make bar more likely, bar not really me.

he was green
and made of kids
the soylent green of superheroes

Jeez, these dreams! I got barely enough sleep, and then such dreams I had that at least the last half hour of sleep I got was NOT rest.

There were many high school students loitering outside my window (weirdly, several were Snape incarnations from parodies). I knew I had to go to school with them, so I went and got a vertical striped multicolored dress (which, what? I would pretty much never wear that), but I didn't get it on before torrential pouring rain started, and all the kids went away. I morphed one male coworker with a friend I've never met (I actually have a lot of those now), and another with a lady who works at my apartment complex. Then I got together with them to go and report the fact that his and my ground level apartments had tremendous leaks in the ceilings (and just what the heck was going on in the apartments above? Were they even occupied? What an outrage! Except I wasn't). So, I guess I didn't have to go to high school after all. I did however have to report it so urgently that all I went in was a loosely wrapped towel.

OH YEAH and there was also this part where I was watching a movie with my friend, and then I was IN the movie, where I had this crazy distant Glenn Close mom, and my dad was dead or missing, and the mom was keeping all these secrets from daugher me, and there was just a box of money. Then I pulled back into audience perspective and the character was Jennifer Garner, sneaking into a safe to get memorabelia about her dad; she found a box of ripped up checks and some photos. The plot was that the dad had written a bunch of... not bad checks, but something fake, and then he ripped them all up so they didn't exist any more,(there were two boxes) and that meant the daughter just got a box of free money. Then she turned around and the safe was unguessably tall and all full of these boxes of papers and, I dunno, snapshots or something. I guess the mom was seriously about holding onto memory stuff. The scam is SO stupid now that I'm awake, but it worked in the dream.

Also I said "God damn it!" to a former priest, and he corrected me, "No, just damn it."

You know that feeling you get when you go somewhere that's more of a "home" to you than even the place where you keep your underwear*? That's how I feel right now; I just got back from my first real evening volunteering at the library.

I actually started last Wednesday. Last Wednesday being what it was, I took half of a Dewey decimal/fiction shelving quiz before being herded with everyone else to the restrooms to wait out the tornadoes; theb finished the quiz in the john, hung out with some drenched baseball players and a couple of very well-behaved poodles, chatted with my training dude about webcomics before getting a ride from him back to my apartment, which is literally across the street (it wasn't weathering at the moment but there was still evil potential in those skies).

An unnoticed tension has fallen away. I've been "going to" do this for so long; now I AM.

Tonight I:


-- proved that I can shelve fiction and non-fiction by shelving a half cart (the method here is to put adult on one side, juvenile on the other - hope I don't tip over a cart!), putting the books in the right places but tipped face-forward with bookmarks sticking out the tops so my work could be checked

-- overheated in the stacks (I am told the air circulation is sometimes iffy)

-- decided I am not taking juvenile head-on yet; when I was a regular reader of picture books I didn't even comprehend how authors worked (I was ever a voracious and random reader; the idea that if you liked a book you could find other books by the same author and have good odds of liking those too didn't really sink in until hm, I think it was Judy Blume and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing followed by Superfudge that led me to get that, so that puts me at eight, and I had to have that idea down before cataloging could possibly make sense) and it seems kind of Byzantine here; this is fine with the peoples there

-- "gossiped" about Anne Rice and that Connie Willis/Harlan Ellison thing a couple of years ago

-- ordered several shelving carts

-- caught a handful of juvenile books that had been racked with the adult ones for reshelving

-- found a book that another volunteer couldn't find

-- struggled with names

-- met the big boss

-- failed to find the large print area independently

-- was startled by the "five minutes to close" light flick


I'll be going back on Wednesday, after which I will probably be done "training" as a shelver. I look forward to it. I actually like shelving. :)


* With apologies to any constant commando warr iors.

I went to bed but I can't sleep so I came back. I'm kind of feeling strung out and weird. It'll pass - everything passes sooner or later - but it's not fun. My sinuses also seem to want to relay some mysterious message - it's hard to interpret but it seems to mean roughly, "We don't like you." Sickness may be in the offing. Damn do I ever hate summer colds.

I should really check the responses to the comments I make more often. I do it though my profile page, and only every other day at most. I would set up email notification, but I am really resistant to that idea, since even the small amount of email I currently get is more than I want to be receiving. Thing is, though, with my present arrangement I miss out on making timely responses to some things, so perhaps I will reexamine the problem yet again.

Also, new icon.

I've been eating fresh vegetables with pretty good regularity, but I need main dishes to go with them, and I can't really cook after work on a weekday - it puts 7 to 9 hours between lunch and dinner, and that's too long. So, trying this cooking ahead thing. I've been doing it, actually, with big pots of soup, but I end up doing one at a time and then I don't wanna make another to alternate, so I just eat the one kind of soup until it's gone, and meanwhile I get sick of it, and the lack of variety is probably not great for me, either.

So I bought a zillion things of meat, and this weekend I made:

diet meatloaf (it has green beans, recipe from grandma, it's actually pretty good)
some kind of improvised taco mess
beef and broccoli (chinese dish)
italian beef (I need some peppers)
spaghetti pie (dish with spaghetti, or in this case spaghetti squash, as a "crust" topped with cottage cheese and then a meat filling. It was supposed to be turkey breakfast sausage, and instead I came home with plain ground pork. Little confusion there, so I had to fake it a bit; fortunately, cheap red wine covers a multitude of sins)

I've been eating largely vegetarian for a good while, which has changed only recently; we shall see how the body deals with this meat invasion.

I am one single girl and I have at LEAST fifteen meals prepared in my fridge. It's fuckin' weird.

I went to the library today to check some things out and pay a tiny fine, and did something I've been putting off a long time, as well - signed on as a volunteer.

In Idyllic Dream World, this is the first step of a progression that ends with a master's degree - but a peachy keen and much more realistic possibility is an actual job. :)

In actual reality, training starts Wednesday.

Up too late. Not even tired, though my brain is starting to feel mushy.

I've read more than half of Preacher this weekend; it's hard to stop, especially when each issue flows so cleanly into the next and they're all right here. I recall disliking reading scans of print comics before, but it seems that reading webcomics copiously over the last four years has prepared me quite well for reading in this format.

I did take a break from it earlier today, and read most of Anthem, by Ayn Rand, which I finished just now. I would have been better off sticking with the walking godhead, his guntoting girlfriend, his boozy vampire sidekick and the trail of bodies splattered behind them.

( cut because it's not fair to spring Ayn Rand discussion on anybody unawares )

Earlier today I fell asleep reading her version of dystopia - I'm surprised I didn't have nightmares.

I really like the moments on Sunday mornings when I think, "Oh, yeah, new postsecret.

Ok, I lied about bed.

It seemed important enough to stay up and announce that the webcomic FreakAngels is astonishingly good. Apparently the author, Garth Ennis, is the same one from the print comic Preacher, which is supposed to be very good (can't vouch for that yet, but I've promised to taking a stab at it) I guess that was incorrect information. However, the information that Preacher is excellent is spot-on.

What I really wanted to point out, though, are the amazing things the artist, Paul Duffield, can do with water, in the first and third panels, respectively.

Ok, bedtime for real now.