[archive] [characters] [current] [titles]
Well, I've run through all the old comics now and I still haven't drawn a new one. Drawing these has become very frustrating for me; I want the strips to look really good - looking back at many of the old strips I am very disappointed in the quality of the drawings - but it takes me several days to draw a single panel when I take the time it requires to achieve the level of quality that makes me happy and once I've finished that panel I'm sick of working on the strip so I put it aside for a while and it never gets taken back up again.
For anyone who actually follows the stuff I write under this heading, the fish I was going on about in January died on Saturday.
I am just about meeting my self-imposed recording deadlines on my album and if all continues to go well it should be out in the world by mid-August. Once it's finished maybe I'll really start working on this comic strip again. For now, I guess I'll just be running through the old strips again. Even though there are no new editions of the actual comic, the "Title of the Week" has been updated very nearly every week for the past little while, so if you enjoy that there's still something to pop back to this website for, occasionally.
6 April 2004
Christmas was a lot of fun but it was hectic and I my only accomplishment of the season was that I lived through it. My power was off for a whole day and it was miserable. I had no lights and no heat (I did have hot water), and I spent the whole day pacing up and down in the dark worrying about my fish. I took the UPS off my computer and plugged the fish tank into it; it ran the filter and light for somewhere between four and five hours. We warmed up his water a bit and then went to my parents' house - where there was power - and I made dinner.
The last time I wrote in this space I mentioned that I had drawn the first panel of a new Checked Out. I have made no progress since. I haven't made any real progress on any of my projects during the last several weeks; too much other stuff has been going on. Because I want to work on my music project (and because I've lost all momentum on the comic) it may still be some time before anything really new shows up on this page. I still intend to return to these characters eventually, though.
5 January 2004
I took a week off work so that I would be able to spend some time working on my various projects but so far I've mostly just read a lot. I managed to completely forget the existence of this site at all; it seems that without a daily work schedule to worry about, the days of the week become meaningless and, as a result, Monday updates to websites just don't happen.
The books I've been reading a lot of are Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I have been re-reading the first four volumes to refresh my hazy memories of the story so far; it's been about thirteen years since I first read The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. I have now been through those first two a second time and am halfway through the third volume, The Waste Lands.
I bought the new hardcover editions of the first four books (and will likely pick up Wolves of the Calla in the next week or so). I bought archival book jacket covers to put on them from Brodart so they look like library books (but without the ugly stickers on the spine and over the face on the author photo).
Anyway, that's what I've been doing instead of recording new music or working on new comic strips (I've drawn the first panel of a new strip, by the way, and the whole thing may be finished before the end of the year - look for it in December). It wasn't what I'd intended to do this week, but on reflection I think it's actually been pretty good use of my time. I'd like to get back to my reading now.
21 November 2003
I love licorice candy. I like to keep some candy tucked away in my locker at work, because work can be very hard to deal with when there isn't any candy involved, and various sorts of licorice candy are among my favorite sorts to discover upon opening my locker door in search of sweetness.
The best licorice I am aware of is Panda licorice, which is made in Finland. A lot of stuff passed off as licorice by the greedy and uncaring corporations of America is basically a dumping ground for unused food coloring - it takes a lot of blue number this and red number that to make candy look black. Real black licorice is black because it's made with molasses. Panda's all-natural black licorice contains these four ingredients: molasses, wheat flour, licorice extract, and aniseed oil. This is what licorice should be.
The American licorice candy Good & Plenty actually is quite good. I bought a bag a few days ago and enjoyed it immensely. While I was eating it, I spent some time thinking about the name. I understand the "good" part, but why "plenty"? I bought a 7 oz. bag, and that was probably plenty, but I could have bought a 1.8 oz. box and I very much doubt it would have been. This led me to envision different names for the different sizes of package: the large package could say "Good & Plenty"; a smaller one might say "Good & Almost Enough"; while the small boxes would read "Good & Why Don't You Save Time and Buy Some More Right Now!" This would make more sense from a sales perspective; eliminating "plenty" from the name altogether would make even more sense because you never want people to think they have enough of your product - you want them to buy more and more and more!
13 October 2003
I had a lovely time at the Radiohead concert a few nights ago - it was definitely one of the best rock shows I have seen. The lighting was superb and they sounded wonderful (though I never understand why the sound people at these events feel it necessary to push the volume just slightly over the levels that can optimally be handled by the speaker system). Anyway, a couple of things related to my library career (it's a small world) managed to happen while I was there, so I thought I'd take a moment to write down a few things here.
First, the opening act was Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks. I had heard of Stephen Malkmus prior to the show only because someone in the library system decided to attempt to artificially manipulate our library catalog software to encourage librarians across the system to order more copies of the new Stephen Malkmus album Pig Lib. The computer system tracks the number of hold requests placed on an item; if there are a large number of requests for an item that the system owns only a few copies of, the item is placed on an alert list so that other librarians will know the item is in demand and can order copies for their library. A hold request for Pig Lib was placed on my account (and on several other people's accounts) in the attempt to make it look like a really popular item. I cancelled the hold after about a month because I had no idea what Pig Lib was and wanted to set a hold on something else (accounts are limited to 10 hold requests at one time). It seems I was destined to be exposed to this music. They were actually pretty good.
Second, my ex-coworker Rich (now a high school German teacher) and his wife arrived at the show while stage people were shuffling things around between sets. I leapt up and started waving my arms around in the air when I saw them. They sat down in front of us. In keeping with the last couple of things written in this spot, they were wearing T-shirts promoting a vegan lifestyle.
Third, they said that they had won their concert tickets. I had to pay for mine. I have never won any concert tickets. I did once win a large box full of frozen burritos. I think Rich and his wife won tickets to concerts while I was working with him, too. They told us that they use multiple phones to increase the chances of getting through to the radio station giving the tickets away. I would feel like I was cheating if I did that. My current co-worker, Jared, also won concert tickets not too long ago to a Coldplay concert that I wanted to see but which sold out before I could get any money together.
I'm not sure what the point of all this is; just, I guess, that it's a funny old world and that at some point I'd like to win some concert tickets.
1 September 2003
Just the other day I wound up in Dee's on my lunch break and, despite the articles I'd been reading for the past week or so on mad cow disease, I decided to order a french dip. At first I thought this was a good compromise decision, remembering reading somewhere that steak was meant to be marginally safer than hamburger (as who knows exactly what bits of the cow are ground up in it), but then I realized that the au jous had an even higher risk factor, as soup is derived from bone material.
Apparently, mad cow disease is present only in the brain and nervous system, but can wind up anywhere in the body when the brain is blown to bits as the first step in turning the animal into product. It seems like it would be a good idea to kill the cows in some other way if we know that this method is responsible for spreading particles of disease throughout the animal, but it also seems like a good idea to stop feeding the cows disease-ridden feed from the rendering plant. Cows get this stuff the same way people do - by eating infected tissue.
Since one lonely mad cow was declared to be the only one that could possibly ever have been in Canada (yeah, right), I've been one step closer to vegetarianism. Not real vegetarianism, obviously, as mad cow disease makes a lousy deterrent against, say, eating bacon at breakfast, or pork chops, or chicken, but it's still a step in that direction. I already refuse to eat fish (I just don't like eating them - blurgh).
More than just the fear attached to the possibility of getting a horrible disease, though, mad cows, to my mind, help enforce the moral argument in favor of vegetarianism (an argument which, in most ways, I agree with, but I have not yet successfully incorporated into my lifestyle, because I am weak). The mad cow clearly places the companies that are selling us food they know to be potentially unsafe - because taking the necessary steps to make it safe would cut into their profits - on the side of evil.
Penned in by evil on all sides, I have, like most Americans, become somewhat apathetic; I'm going to try to be better, though - really I am. Just let me finish this burger.
11 August 2003
There are times when I feel guilty about eating meat. So far the part of my mind that feels bad about killing poor animals that haven't done anything to me hasn't been able to win outright against the part of mind that says "Yeah, but they taste good!" The obvious weakness of that last statement as a moral argument leaves me thinking that vegetarians must be on to something.
Extreme veganism, however, leaves me bewildered. I see a clear difference between eating a piece of cheese and eating a hamburger. The moral position against all products derived in any way from an animal source just isn't as strong if the animal in question is still alive and well at the end of it all, but, while there can be little argument over what constitutes a living animal as opposed to a dead one, endless discussion can ensue over whether or not a particular creature can be considered to be well. The vegan position, as I understand it, is that animals such as the dairy cow are treated less than ethically. It probably varies through the movement whether it is the conditions in which the animals are kept, or the likely slaughter any animal that outlives its usefulness has to look forward to, or simply the fact that the animals are expected to produce for their human masters.
I can't think what there is for a dairy cow to do apart from producing milk. Maybe they could be released into the wild, but they're not really wild animals. If they are supported by human society, then they should have to work, just like I do. It would make sense to me to support dairies which had clean, pleasant working conditions for their cows rather than ones which didn't, in much the way that if I found out a certain brand of shoes were made in third-world sweatshops I'd be inclined to buy shoes from someone else; I wouldn't stop wearing shoes altogether, so I can't see why I'd want to stop eating dairy products.
Perhaps dairy cows should get days off. Perhaps they should have a nice retirement, rather than slaughter, to look forward to at the end of their careers. I could see the moral argument behind these ideas. If we could provide better things for them, I don't see what's wrong with them providing some things for us. At the moment we probably aren't giving these animals as much in return as some surely think they deserve, but that's what the vegans can go out and campaign for, that's a social change with a certain kind of justice behind it, that's what would make a lot more sense to me than cutting dairy products out of my diet and walking around feeling superior about it.
This thought was sparked by this title of the week.
23 June 2003
I kinda blew it in the webcomics world. Just as I was finally beginning to feel the first trickle of recognition, it suddenly wasn't fun anymore. I didn't write a new strip for months and, as a result, lost my spot on webcomics.com. It's been about 16 months now since I published a new Checked Out. I've thought of a few ideas for strips since then, but can't get worked up enough to actually draw anything.
Though I still have little to no desire to draw any new Checked Out strips, I've been entertaining ambitious plans for something like a Checked Out graphic novel. So far there's no story, no art, and no real enthusiasm for the work, so don't expect it to be finished early next week. I'd give it another 16 months; by then there's a good chance I'll have the first page.
Even though I'm not really working on any new comics, I haven't lost my enthusiasm for the Checked Out Title of the Week. With that in mind, I've given the Checked Out website a thorough spring cleaning - it had gathered a lot of dust during the last 16 months of neglect. I'll be cycling through the old comics as well as posting a new Title of the Week every Monday. That is, unless something important (like a really long nap) eats up all my time.
19 May 2003
Checked Out comic strips, characters and website © 1999 - 2004 Tim Hinkle