August 24th, 2015: FUN(?) FACT: there are deep sea lobsters, but they weren't discovered until 2011 and certainly weren't being eaten on the Titanic. OR WERE THEY??
Ugh. I need to do *something* with Scala. Hurts my soul not to.
So I've had a month to myself now. Have I squandered it? Probably. Lets review:
Visit all the public library branches in SF.
Am at 10 of 28 now.
I've picked off all the easy ones, they're just getting further and further away from here on out. Mostly the western half of the city left, with a few far north and south to check out. I still believe it's a good idea, gets me out of the house. I've discovered that the Teen section of the library is much larger than I thought/remembered it was. There's apparently a non-trivial section/genre called 'Urban Teen' that I've never encountered before. Also, the graphic novel section is pretty neat. And there's a *lot* of romance novels there, more than I even expected.
Today I flipped through Emily Post's enormous Etiquette book. It was fun and enlightening.
Try to walk more than 5 miles a day.
Working out reasonably well... Travel had an impact, but I'm not beating myself up over it.
One thing that I find particularly interesting is that it's not so much that the distances increased that much (I used to walk to and from work, and then frequently out to dinner or activities), but that the "active time" is what most noticeably jumped up. Even sitting at home crafting or cooking, I'm moving around around so much more than when I sit and code.
Finish piecing/appliqué of quilt so I can start actually quilting it (and taking it with me when I travel).
Quilt progress continues, slower than I'd like. But it is progressing. There's just so much work to do. I still have about 7 station dots to sew down. And two track bends to correct. And some more border to piece together. And then the whole thing to assemble. And then the back to assemble. And then the quilting can begin. And then, yeah, there's that whole second quilt I'd like to kick off real soon here. Hmmm. Quilt progress, as it comes along, can best be tracked via the #quilt tag over on my Tumblr.
Wrap head around food/cooking.
Eh, going reasonably well. I cooked chicken for the first time ever in the oven. Pathetic, but at least I'm trying to correct the situation. I made some super awesome sourdough bread using just starter recently. Sour and chewy and delightful. Am going to take another stab at it soon.
Draw more.
Fucking failure. A huge gaping hole in my pretty picture of intentions. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've sat down several times, both at the Cintiq and with my pencils. Aside form Dr. Sketchy's, I've not been able to produce anything. It's getting to be a little disturbing...
Not tracked in inital post, but worth mentioning:
Code for fun : going quite well. Have been really enjoying my Google Doc-to-LaTeX document converter project. Will make a stand alone post for that soon. Just got set up today (Tuesday) to run sutro.fm locally so I can start working on that again. Gah, I've forgotten how much I for (no good reason, really) dislike Backbone. Also, after bumping into a swarm of ex-Rdio co-workers, one after another, I feel an urge to clean up my animation patch for Thor. There's also some inventory management system project mentioned in passing by Logan and the joke-but-maybe-not-a-joke idea of contracting for a friend. And finally I'm starting to bump into enough minor nits that I don't like about Stalk like Stecker that I might need to re-write it.
Be more social : Seems to be going reasonably well. I have friends. They're pretty fucking awesome. They'll even hang out with me some times. There are things on the calendar. A number of them. I'm excited. Will post separately about it so as to not forget. Remember, future Rebecca. Life and friend can be good.
"Custom little wooden slats, presumably hanging in birth order, one under the other. It’s unclear what happens to the dead."
That's some real Rust Cohle shit right there...
For family reasons, I spent five days in Kiel, Wisconsin. It was interesting. It was hard. My phone had weak signal and no data. The only wifi I could connect to was at the public library. There is no Starbucks, the only chain here is a Dairy Queen, and I spent a lot of time quilting. Things improved when, on the suggestion of a friend in passing, I looked at the town through the lends of True Detective (season 1 only, 2 does not exist). Here are some photos and notes that I took.
Walking down a road. On my left there’s a hum on power lines, on the right is the rustling of leaves in the wind. Down the road there is what looks to be an abandoned housing development.
Bird cries and cicadas. The roar of Harelyes and trucks.
Everyone sees you. They are looking, they are watching, and you will know it. Unlike in San Francisco, where you can walk passed someone a foot away and their eyes will not track you, in Kiel there will be eye contact. And possibly a smile.
Of course the truck that drove, at speed, down the gravel road had a billowing confederate flag off the back of it. True, there’s some sort of printed text over the flag but... I’m skeptical that it was a statement condemning the flag it crossed.
There are many discussions about food. What did you eat? What did they eat. Opinions about the quality of food, how filling it was, and how much it cost. Is there really anything else to talk about?
The yards are large. Each house has one to five trees on it, and these are not light weight trees. These are testaments to how long this neighborhood has stood. These old houses’ architecture harkens back to German architecture, houses built by folks to remind them of where they came from, lived in by people who will never go there. All of the houses have basements and I am continuously reminded of Silence of the Lambs.
We’re in the back of a church-run thrift store. It’s a flock of old ladies, ranging in age from old to very old. There’s whispered discussion about how the church is trying to raise four million for a new roof or some such and folks are going to start to go door to door, asking for funds. There’s also the pie stand at the city fair to raise funds. One of the women scowls and mutters under her breath that she’s not going to bring a pie this year. Moments later a lady across the room loudly asks what pie she’s baking this year. “Oh, I don’t know yet...” the first calls back with a smile.
The women fill out nicely here. And then they keep filling in.
There are signs of breeding everywhere. People aren’t having just one kid and there’s whole jungle gyms being constructed for each brood. Toys litter all doorsteps and yards. The names are listed here on sign-posts in the yard. Custom little wooden slats, presumably hanging in birth order, one under the other. It’s unclear what happens to the dead.
On Wednesday, I started talking aloud to myself.
Don't get me wrong, it was great to see family. I got a tour of my Uncle's office and saw a picture hanging on the wall, made by my cousin in his youth. My heart warmed to see how fucking creepy it looked. Talking to my blood... forever interesting. My Aunt said something that struck me, something about "that typical Stecker coddling" in regards to making a sport of watching their friend dying of ALS trying to eat. You know, in a friendly way. Sounded very much like something I would say.
I found myself walking a lot, to get out of the house, to get away from the TV, to not go mad, to not get mad. On one of my walks I wandered by the Sheboygan river that snakes through town. Giving into a whim, I constructed a hanging stick triangle construction, binding it with just river grass and hanging it from a tree. You know, to reflect my thoughts onto the landscape.
The towns sprawl until they just sort of peter out for no discernible reason. A thin sort of sprawl. Crawling but uncrowded across the rolling landscape. Panning shots of residential girds bursting with trees. Patchwork fields on the horizon. I am so happy to be flying home.
In most countries women were not permitted to fight on the front lines of the war. Instead, they supported the war effort by learning, training and taking up jobs usually held by men.
These women did a lot more than rivet, they designed, built and tested thousands of aircraft in factories across Canada and the US. Prior to the war, women would have been mostly banned from taking up such jobs.
I don’t remember Emily taking the photo, but based on certain clues, I can work it out. The siding in the background belongs to the porch of a house where we were once roommates. My hair’s real short in the photo so I think it’s after a breakup. I used to do that after a breakup — shave my head.
I introduced Emily and Joey. This is my claim to Internet fame, now immortalized in a Kickstarter update. In the update, Joey talks about working the ISP call centre late shift. On a night I had off and he was working, Emily and I dropped by. For some reason, he left out the best bit, so I am going to tell it to you now:
We’re in the mall’s midnight-empty food court — talking, telling stories, and laughing louder and louder. Mall security comes. The guy is about to kick us out but Joey and I flash our employee badges.
“It’s OK sir,” Joey says, dead serious, “We work for the phone company.”
It’s hard for me to read early ASW as a comic. It’s full of people and places I know — old friends, people I went to college with, exes. There are shots I recognize from crazy nights, outings with cameras, and long road trips. It’s more like a family album that someone’s scrawled all over with words. It’s better than a family album because it’s got jokes. Award-winning jokes. About suicide.
Most people celebrating or mourning the end of ASW are celebrating/mourning a piece of media. For me, it is very difficult to disentangle the media from my friends. So I would like to tell you a little bit about my friends.
Joey and Emily taught me about pursuing curiosity with fearlessness. I grew up a skinny, bookish, nervous nerd, well-liked by people in authority. So many of the coolest things that I have done in my life happened because Emily or Joey did them first and then invited me along.
Emily was this fiercely intelligent classmate, a year behind me. Once I got to know her, I started specifically picking courses because she wanted to take them too. Joey was this fiercely intelligent co-worker. On days when we had overlapping shifts I’d sometimes end up staying late, hanging around banks of telephones under harsh white lights because it was so fun.
In the first year or so that I knew each of them, I took more risks, explored more places, talked to more strangers, and was asked to leave by security more times than in the previous 18 years combined. I learned that I could get away with far more antics and be welcomed in far more places than I’d ever imagined possible.
I’m implying legendary adventures because that is fun and exciting, but I am also talking about really basic stuff. Exploring weird parts of the Internet, daring to interview live humans for school essays, going to parties, leaving a steady job to work for a start-up, learning to pick a lock.
I owe my current writing career in part to the fact that Joey and Emily managed to cobble together something like a living off of the comic. In Halifax, it seemed like all the jobs were call centre jobs and we spent a lot of time talking about how to get away from that.
One time, Joey and I calculated out how much money we’d need to live if all of our best dreams collapsed. How much could we give up and how many of our friends would give us a couch to sleep on for how long without overstaying our welcome? How much should we contribute to their groceries so we weren’t taking too much advantage? What clothes and equipment would we need to start over? How might we rebuild? The calculation was hilariously flawed, but the number we came up with — $200 a month — made anything seem possible.
Over the years, Emily, Joey and I have talked about their early struggles with distributors, first experiments with crowd funding, sudden huge hosting bills when they got linked by someone famous, the details of negotiations with publishers, and the general business of trying to make bank as an indie on the Internet.
I never tried to pay rent by selling merch about weird architecture, but the (probably false) belief that I could if I did things well enough for long enough kept me writing until I started getting offers to write for pay. They got there first and invited me along.
12 years is a long stretch and at different times we’ve each drifted closer and further apart. But even during the days when the threads of friendship have been thinnest, I’ve always had the comic. A funny sad window into my friends’ funny sad worlds.
I’ll miss it terribly.
This is the VERY SAME TIM from my ASW post! See? My story checks out.
I started my comic, Dinosaur Comics, on February 1st, 2003. Joey Comeau and Emily Horne started A Softer World six days later, and not too long afterwards Joey emailed me. "What are you going to do with your Nobel Prize for Comics money?“ he asked. "My name’s Joey. I do a comic too.”
I followed his link and read all the comics there in one sitting. They were hilarious and sad, sometimes at the same time, and I saw stuff done in comics that I hadn’t seen before. I remember this one in particular, because it is the one where I mentally recategorized the series from “this is good” to “okay, this is great”:
I wrote him back and asked him what he was going to do with his Pulitzer Prize for Comics money.
That was 13 years ago.
***
I have two friends who are marrying each other, only one of them’s an American, and there’s a part of the immigration process they have to convince the Canadian federal government that theirs is a real relationship. They have been directed to collect essays from people wherein we swear we know them, and to demonstrate our Friendship Credentials we go over our relationship with one or both of them and explain why this friendship is real and important to us.
What we have to do, in effect, is write an essay - just like in school! - only the subject is why my two friends who are marrying each other are so great. It’s a friendship love letter, and it was so satisfying to write. There’s no time in our culture where we are allowed to walk up to our friends and say “Our friendship is so amazing, and so important to me, and I wrote an essay about it. I hope you enjoy it,” except for this one, created by an immigration bureaucracy. I think we should change that.
***
Joey and I emailed back and forth almost daily for several months until one time he was in Halifax while my girlfriend Priya was visiting, and I insisted they meet. I hadn’t met him in person yet, but I’d already told her all about him. I told her she had to go meet my internet friend. They went out for breakfast, and when the bill came, Joey just looked at the bill and smiled wide. Priya picked up the tab. Then he got her to push him home on his skateboard. This story makes sense when you realize how much of a charmer Joey is. Priya said she loved him! I wasn’t surprised. "Joey’s so great,“ I said.
I started grad school, which meant moving to Toronto where I didn’t know anyone. Joey emailed his friends Tim and Ro and got them to invite me to a games night they were having. Listen: I was young. I was excited. I showed up early and rang their doorbell at 6pm for a 8:30pm games night, because I had no idea what I was doing.
Tim and Ro invited this complete stranger in to join them to dinner that night, and it turned out they were awesome, and now just about everyone I know in Toronto can be traced back to Tim and Ro and those weekly games nights they hosted. What Joey gave me through Tim and Ro was a friendship starter kit, a way to make moving to a new city easy, and when my books got water damaged during the move, Joey sent me new ones. All his favourites.
I love him, and we would’ve never met if it weren’t for A Softer World.
***
Emily and I disagree over how we met in real life, but that’s great because now we have a mystery at the centre of our friendship. There’s a sequence of events where I say one thing happened and she says "no you’re crazy THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE”, but I can’t even remember what our two different versions are anymore. Mine is absolutely the right one though.
One of my earliest memories of her is of being at Tim’s housewarming for his new place, and in his kitchen he’d left this seltzer bottle: they’re those giant pressurized water bottles clowns spray each other with, at least in cartoons I guess? And obviously at some point I sprayed Emily a little, because this is what happens when you leave me in my 20s in a kitchen at a party with a seltzer bottle. Emily sprayed me back in revenge, but it was more than I’d sprayed her, so obviously I needed to spray her back to make it even. It went back and forth until Tim burst into his kitchen, (understandably) mad that we’d sprayed water all over his new apartment. He told us to stop. We apologized. And as he was leaving Emily emptied the bottle on me before putting the drained bottle in Tim’s hands.
Reader, I befriended her.
One time she sent me a physical letter. A real letter! Nothing is more classy. I hung it on my wall. I bought a used typewriter at a garage sale so I could respond in kind. She moved to Toronto later on, and we started hanging out all the time. When Jenn and I got married, she photographed our wedding.
I love her, and we would’ve never met if it weren’t for A Softer World.
***
One April Fools’ Day I took down Dinosaur Comics and replaced it with what I claimed was my new project now: A Softer World 2: Better Than A Softer World. This one was a picture of my friend Eric combined with words I lifted from a conversation that Nicholas Gurewitch (The Perry Bible Fellowship) and I were having about The Incredibles.
A reader emailed me, upset that I would end the comic he enjoyed for “what is effectively just a parody of another comic” and urged me to reconsider.
***
Another time my comic mentioned “truth” and “beauty” and Joey and Emily’s comic that day mentioned “truth and beauty bombs”, so we started a message board for our comics called that. We don’t post there anymore, but other do. It’s still running. People got married because of that message board. Children exist today from that thing! There’s a chain of events that leads from today back through our years of comics and friendship, through Joey and Emily and the way our three lives have intertwined, all the way to when we three babies started comics within the same week even though none of us can draw, and Joey emailing me to inquire about my Nobel Prize for Comics money. Without A Softer World, I never meet Joey, I never meet Emily, and my life is completely different. Probably worse, too!
It’s almost definitely worse!
***
There’s a dedication in the first Dinosaur Comics collection. It reads, “To Emily and Joey: the first friends I ever made in comics, and still the best.”
I’m sad Emily and Joey’s comic is ending - more than I thought I’d be, I’ve got all these big feelings about it you guys - but I’m glad it was there. I am here to tell you now, and without hyperbole, that this comic and the two people behind it have shaped my life more than any other work of art. Take that, the Mona Lisa.
In conclusion, A Softer World was so amazing, and so important to me, and I wrote an essay about it. I hope you enjoyed it.
I've picked off all the easy ones, they're just getting further and further away from here on out. Mostly the western half of the city left, with a few far north and south to check out. I still believe it's a good idea, gets me out of the house. I've discovered that the Teen section of the library is much larger than I thought/remembered it was. There's apparently a non-trivial section/genre called 'Urban Teen' that I've never encountered before. Also, the graphic novel section is pretty neat. And there's a *lot* of romance novels there, more than I even expected.
One thing that I find particularly interesting is that it's not so much that the distances increased that much (I used to walk to and from work, and then frequently out to dinner or activities), but that the "active time" is what most noticeably jumped up. Even sitting at home crafting or cooking, I'm moving around around so much more than when I sit and code.
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