word mining central
Day 665:
I’m still mining, but much more slowly, as everything feels like it’s a giant knot.
I’d give anything for a hot spring to soak in right now. Even building a fire hurts. (And when it hurts, it’s a lot more risky to do.)
Pain medicine is definitely lacking here.
The Sheldon series of comics features a young boy who accidentally became a millionaire with a dot-com. He lives with his grandfather, a talking duck, a squeeing lizard, and a farty pug.
He, like the author Dave Kellett, is a total nerd.
We know they’re nerds because Pop Culture! is 237 pages long and is wholly made up of comics about pop culture nerdery — as many as 3 per page. It contains sections like “Star Trek”, “Star Wars”, “Superheroes”, and “Nerdery of all types”.
Now, as I am also a total nerd, I enjoyed every single bit of this book — but be forewarned, it is not like the standard Sheldon collections where you get story arc after story arc merging together. It is more like Pugs: God’s Little Weirdos in that it collects all of the comics on this particular topic and puts them together.
So this book is light on the story arcs. (Pugs was, surprisingly, not as light.)
But you’ll still laugh your tail off.
And if you’re new to the comic, or just want some light humor without lots of plot, this is a great read.
Day 664:
Today was:
Most days my back is perfectly happy with this; today it’s been mad all day. I don’t know if I just pulled something or did something more serious (finally), but it’s not happy. So I’m trying to take it easy.
I’m not very good at taking it easy. There’s always something to do to up the chances that nobody will kill me tomorrow.
The first half of Herding Cats, A Sarah’s Scribbles collection is filled with Sarah’s comics and they’re so good I’m already threatening to send it to a friend.
The second half I didn’t expect at all: it’s a well-written explanation of what it’s like to be an artist on the internet in 2019 and how crazy-ass and required the internet is. (Said explanation has comics illustrating the main points, which is awesome.)
I’m definitely not a millennial, but I’ve seen everything that Sarah talks about on the web and it’s all true. If you want to give good advice to someone young who wants to be an artist (or writer or maker of any sort) and also wants to occasionally put those things somewhere that other people can see them, you can’t do much better than this primer on what to expect.
Day 663:
Miserable and rainy outside and the caverns are all filled with zombies.
(Well, possibly not. I didn’t feel like checking.)
Anyway, it was a good day to stay home and fletch arrows. Stars knows I have enough feathers in this place to fletch enough arrows for all of Earth’s fleet, if they used arrows anymore, which they don’t.
The wood here is rarely knotty and takes well to a knife, though it’s hard to get true roundness without the grain splitting. I’ve thought about trying to make a lathe but I don’t think it’s a matter of speed, I think it’s a matter of how the trees grow with almost square trunks here.
(Makes sawing a table a sight easier, I can tell you that much.)
So I have enough arrows to hold me for a bit and I even got up enough nerve to use them to kill a zombie hanging out uncomfortably close to my front door.
Not a bad day, if you excuse the horde.