The Internet does it again

...Ropes me in, that is. O Internet! Foul pit of creativity and fun, discussion and debate. I was considering getting into a whole discussion of my ambivalence about the Interwubs here, but now I think I won't. That'll show the Internet who's boss!

Suffice to say I finally got a conduit for Internet juice (an ethernet cable) after a month at my new apartment without one (more on that later) and after writing a hefty email to a friend I read webcomics and various writings related to webcomics for nigh unto three hours: MS Paint Adventures, Pictures for Sad Children, Dinosaur Comics, and the new-to-me Dresdan Codak (which is utterly gorgeous and brilliant and I can't believe I haven't read it yet).

What really drew me in were a long blog post from MS Paint Adventures' Andrew Hussie about his creative process and a chat log from Dinosaur Comics' Ryan North. The discussion with Ryan was so clever and funny that I wished I could be as clever and funny online for others to read and admire as the writers I was reading and admiring. And that brought with it a wistful sense of what-might-have-been: What if I hadn't eschewed online culture? What if I'd found playful ways to create wonderful things for an appreciative audience of fellow screen-starers? Maybe I would be happier, wearing attractive hipster gear and surrounded by attractive urban types, saying clever and wonderful and imaginative things all the time.

Well so anyway I guess I'm doing a little more of that kind of thing now that I live with two fabulous theater-improviser types. In my last post I mentioned being happy, healthy, and wearing blaze orange pants. Unfortunately, even before I got around to posting that, my new-roomie situation went from polite-but-rather-tense acquaintanceship to openly hostile. In April I'd moved in with two women, who I'll call Melanie and Edith. Melanie had been in the apartment for two years and Edith had just moved in the month before. After about three months it became clear that Edith had major issues with Melanie, in part because Melanie had more issues than she'd let on in the first place. I got delightfully stuck in the middle. We spent another three months on increasingly futile and strained attempts to resolve everyone's differences, and then decided to go our separate ways. I'd love to tell the whole sordid story, but I think that's enough. Also, I ripped a fatal hole in my beautiful blaze orange pants. It proved unrepairable. My health remained okay, though.

So anyway, now I live in a new and lovely place with four other people in a funky house at the top of an egregiously big hill. Here's my backyard:


Pictured here are the glorious hills of the large open space just past our fence; our fence that sometimes deer walk past; a ruddy colored plant from outer space (or looks like it anyway); and the most wonderful cat in the world, Carmel aka Carmellie. She sits on my lap a lot and puts me into altered states of consciousness, mainly relaxed ones.

Here's some more backyard and hills:


Some more backyard foliage:


And the deck outside the room across from my room:


Note that I took these from my own small deck, which my room opens onto, a feature of which I am most fond.

I guess that's about it for now. Happy remaining ten minutes of Thanksgiving! (For those on the West Coast, or at least anyone who sees this at the exact time I post it, and I suppose for anyone reading this in Hawaii exactly however many hours from now...)

The blaze orange pants have happily enjoyed one more wearing since their rupture, and here they are as part of my Halloween costume. That's right, I am HUE MAN, a dude whose superpower is his embracing of every color of the rainbow, baby: