Radiant Comics

So what is happening you ask? Well I’m just kicking through some of my unread comics today. That and running my fantasy football league’s slow motion e-mail draft. Neither is particularly exciting to write about but that is par for this end of August course. It’s hot and not much is going on.

I have been looking into buying a new car this week. That’s a challenge in and off itself. I’ve never bought a new car before so the process is unknown to me. I’m alternately nervous and looking forward to the challenge. Nervous will not win I can assure you. I’ll have to go out to a dealership and test drive some stuff.

The car I’m driving right now is a 1988 Ford Escort. I got it from my grandmother five or six years ago and though it still has only 40,000 miles on it I just don’t trust it anymore. It hasn’t broken down in a year but every time it does that’s $500 out the window. And it usually stops running about once a year. Things always need to be fixed during NY state inspection time too. I don’t drive it very far for fear it will break down. Nervousness wins out in this case and I hate that. What good is a car that you can’t drive?

The twenty one year old Escort also has the bad habit of not starting on some days. Ninety nine days out of a hundred it starts up fine. The hundredth day it refuses to. It will start up the following day though. But you never know when it won’t run. Since I only start my car up about every second day maybe it’s even forty nine days out of fifty. Either way doesn’t fill me with confidence.

The Escort was the first car I ever owned. How I got to be in my late thirties, living in the suburbs, and not owning a car is a wonder in itself. The Escort has served me well but it’s time I replace it. After all I don’t trust it to bring me places anymore. And I feel like going places.

Where you ask? I have no idea. Maybe just joyriding. Everybody goes joyriding when they first get a car. I never really did. Understandable since I got my first car in my late thirties and it wasn’t a “long distance” one. I can’t do any joyriding now since every time I turn the key I wonder if the car will start. And in the winter, let me tell you, that’s when I really don’t trust the old car. Not that it’s run any worse in the winter but the thought of breaking down on a twenty degree night will keep me from driving anywhere. Those are the thoughts that will keep a person locked up.

I’d especially like to get out on days like these. I got nothing going on (besides the draft and that is an unusual occurrence) no paying work to do, no plans, and am too burnt out to make any of my own art. That’s a fine time to get the hell out of here and go for a joyride. But not quite yet.

The thing about new cars is that they are freakin’ expensive. I can only afford the very low end of new cars and that is $16,000. And of course that has to be financed because who has that kind of cash lying around. That’s another thing I’m learning about, financing. Interest on a car loan specifically.

It turns out that when they lend you money at 7% that’s not really 7%. It’s 7% a year on what you owe them. If I borrow $100 and pay you back 7% then I give you $107. Right? Not when borrowing from a bank over time. That 7% ends up being about 25% of the original amount over it’s lifetime. Yikes! No wonder banks have been so eager to loan before the crash. They can make a fortune in interest.

The advantage I have going in to the dealership is not much money and not much credit. I’m a hard person to talk into doing something he doesn’t want to do and talking me into spending money I don’t have is nearly impossible. Plus with nearly no credit history they are not going to want to talk me into spending more than I want to. Not in this environment.

So that’s the dullness of my life today. My head is filled with thoughts of car buying instead of thoughts of making art or some such. No wonder I want to get out and go for a ride.

I’ve pretty much had it with video games. There are very few that can hold my attention these days. Most are awful excuses for games that they want sixty dollars for. Even the ones that get good reviews I find are bad. Case in point: Gears of War.

I rarely spend more than twenty dollars for a game these days and thirty dollars is the exceptional high end for me. I no longer have any need for getting the newest games as soon as they come out. Been burned too many times for that. But I really wanted a new game because I played the excellent Halo 3 all they way through on it’s hardest setting and was hooked on video games again.

I checked all the review sites for the highest rated games that were sort off like Halo. I know no two games are the same but I just wanted something similar. I settled on Gears of War because is got such great reviews and looked like fun. I even payed thirty five dollars for a used copy of it. That’s how much I wanted a good new game.

It started out okay in the very beginning. The weapons were fun and the controls interesting. I don’t give a crap about the story in any video game so I ignored that here too. The first learning missions were okay. I had a good felling. Then it all came crashing down.

Gears of War is a squad based game. That means that along with you are three other guys in your squad that the computer controls. Non Player Characters (NPCs) is the old role playing lingo for them. A problem throughout video game history has been the fact that computer controlled characters are dumb and often more a hinderance than a help. But this is a new modern game with load of programers and processing power to make thing right. Right?

Wrong. The NPCs were dumb as dirt. At least once we got to this one spot. It was in a town. In the center of the town was a fountain or some such. It was circular and offered very little cover. Enemies could attack it from every which way. So where do my NPCs go? Right t0 the center of the fountain. Dumb asses.

After a frustrating few times of trying to make a stand there I decided to take a different tact. The enemies you have to fight come out of holes that magically appear in the ground. If you don’t throw a grenade down the hole more and more enemies keep coming out of it. I decided to try and take out the holes while my squad made their suicidal stand.

After trying this about a million times and blowing up hole after hole as my character died time after time I couldn’t take it anymore. I realized with all this technology, programing, and fancy graphics the game came down to throwing a grenade into a hole over and over again. Not much of a game.

And the fact that enemies came out of holes in the ground was annoying on its own. That is such a shortcut video game cliché. The enemy generator was a concept that worked fine in Gauntlet back in 1985 but come on. Come up with something new. If the terrain was thought out well (as in Halo 3) there is no need for randomly place enemy generators.

So then and there I gave up on Gears of War. I had no interest in repetitively throwing grenades into holes. I haven’t even tried to find a good console game since. And this happened last fall.

I did just pick up the John Madden Football 09 Anniversary Edition. I’m a New York Giants fan and wanted this just because it was the one that was released the year after the Giants won the Super Bowl. I wanted their Super Bowl roster. I waited until now to get it because it is twenty five dollars instead of sixty. No way is a Madden game worth sixty bucks.

I’m glad I did wait too because I find the game nearly unplayable. It’s pretty awful. To start with the play diagrams are practically unreadable. I have never seen football diagrams in a video game take up so little screen real estate. Maybe it’s readable in high def but on my regular 27 inch TV each play diagram is about four inches square. And the game plays as horribly as all Madden games have for a decade now. Makes me wonder why I wanted it.

The only good game I’ve played in while has been Advance Wars (whatever number) for the Nintendo DS. I played that one to death this past winter. All the Advance Wars games have been good so I knew I couldn’t go wrong with that one.

It’s a good thing that my iPod touch has become such a good gaming platform. It’s the only thing I’ve been playing lately. There are a lot of cheap games for it and some good ones. Plenty of crappy ones too but who cares if they are just a couple of bucks a piece. And there are actually games to be had. Not just fancy graphics with very little thought put into gameplay.

And yet I still miss the good console games. I’m sure there are some of them out there. I like the Call of Duty and Halo games but they are few in number and hard to find. Maybe I’ll give Fallout 3 a try if it ever comes down to a reasonable price. Until then I’ll continue with the iPod games.

I went into New York City today. Into the borough of Manhattan specifically. I live in the New York suburbs of NYC. I’m about forty miles north of Midtown Manhattan. That’s not a long distance to drive but in public transportation miles it is.

I could drive into NYC but I don’t do that too often. According to Google maps it would take me fifty four minutes to drive there. Or an hour and forty minutes with traffic. When is there no traffic in NYC you ask? I’d say between 3 AM and 6 AM. In other words there is always traffic. Whenever I’ve driven in to Midtown it has take at least an hour and a half.

Parking is another reason I generally don’t drive into the city. It’s not easy to find unless you have a budget for it. If you got fifty bucks there are plenty of parking garages. I guess you would have to do lots of driving to lots of places in Manhattan in order to learn the ins and outs of free parking on the street. Sure I’ve done it but it can’t be counted on.

I also have a very old car. If it breaks down I prefer it to break down locally. Who wants to be stuck on the West Side Highway in the middle of the day or night? Not me. And that highway can give quite a battering to my car. It’s not the smoothest of rides.

So for the past twenty years I’ve been taking public transport into NYC. Since I’m on the west side of the Hudson River than means busses. They tore the trains out sometime in the 1950’s when Robert Moses thought if he built enough roads they would never get clogged up. Boy did he learn a lesson along with the rest of us.

For all the years before I got a car I used to take the bus that came closest to my house. Unfortunately that bus took a solid two hours to get me into Manhattan. It was a local as are all the buses that run during non-commuter weekday hours and weekends. That was a long time to cover the forty miles I wanted to go. A commuter bus covered that distance in about an hour forty, which isn’t that much better, but they don’t run on Saturdays.

After I got my car I would drive ten miles to the mall in Nanuet NY. More buses ran from there than from my closest stop and it only took an hour and twenty minutes to cover the thirty miles from Nanuet to Manhattan. A fifteen minute ride saved me from forty minutes on the bus. Of course add half an hour onto all these bus times in case of traffic. Or rain. Or sun glare. Or whatever. You get the point.

There were always two buses an hour running from the Nanuet Mall. That is until last month when the budget cuts hit. Now there is only one bus an hour. As you can imaging things are more crowded and annoying. Especially when crowds are in the Port Authority bus terminal waiting for busses that don’t show up. That happens often enough but now instead of the next one being along in half an hour there will be an hour wait. Things can get crowded.

All this lead me to trying out a New Jersey Transit train. When I said there were no trains on my side of the Hudson that wasn’t exactly accurate. There is no longer a NY west side passenger line but the freight lines are still there. Plus there are a few trains that go along the New Jersey part of the Hudson River. I had only taken these trains a couple of times decades ago. They took a long time and didn’t go directly into Manhattan. You had to take them into Hoboken and then take another train into lower Manhattan.

Recently NJ finished their Secaucus Transfer Station. Now you can take a train from Nanuet to Seacaucus and then catch a second train from Secaucus to Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan. All that takes about an hour and twenty minutes. Down from an hour and a half (or more) and about the same time as the bus. I never took that route because trains run only about once an hour. Of course that’s what they cut the bus schedule to so same difference now.

I’m not sure if I like the train any better. I generally like trains better than busses because busses get stuck in traffic a lot more easily. But this train ride has a transfer in it and that doesn’t make things easier. Maybe it’s because the train ride is new to me but it was more tense. On the bus I put my headphones on and zone out. Sometimes I nap and sometimes I don’t but there is nothing to do until I get off at Port Authority. With the train I had to pay attention. What stop is this? Are we at Secaucus yet? What platform is the train on? Gotta make the connection. Wait for the connecting train. Is it here yet? Trying to catch and waiting for two trains is no fun. Twice the anxiety.

And then there is Penn Station itself. Oy! What a mess. Port Authority Bus terminal is no pleasure palace but it gets the job done. Here is how you catch a bus at the PA. Find out you bus’s route number and then find out what gate it leaves from. It left from the same gate last week and will leave from the same gate next week. Now go up to that gate and wait with a few hundred other people. Off peak and on the weekends don’t expect people to know how to line up properly. They really just mill around in sort of lines. Plus the gates are big and there are usually about four bus routes for each gate. When your bus shows up don’t be surprised to see people ignore the lines and rush it. It’s also amazing how many people rush the wrong bus. Keep a calm head and you’ll get on eventually.

Penn Station on the other hand was designed by idiots who I don’t think realized that people were going to have to use the building. Either the Long Island Railroad or NJ Transit here is how you catch a train at Penn. First you wait in a giant “Waiting Room” that is really just the big disordered hallways outside of the tracks. There are digital signs everywhere with train number and destinations on them. What track will your train be on? That is what you and thousands of others are waiting to see posted. Ten minutes before the train is scheduled to leave a track number is posted. That is the cue for the three or four hundred people who are waiting for that train to hurry to its track. The track is accessed by an entrance hallway/staircase that is two people wide! It’s a near stampede for every train. Who designed that crazy place? No one designed it. I think it just happened.

So though I have no love for the bus I didn’t find a better way in the train. I still might take it again but I’m not sure. All I know is that it sure is a lot of time and effort to cover thirty miles.

I’m a bit tired today. I threw my annual backyard party yesterday. I was, of course, up late because who can sleep right after throwing an party? I’m usually in bed by 11:30 PM -ish but last night that was more like 1:30 AM-ish. Being a morning person I was up at my normal 7 AM. I just can’t sleep late. Hence my sleepiness. I’ll be taking a nap later on. I’m pro-nap.

I often spend the afternoon after my party watching a movie or two. I normally don’t sit down and watch movies or TV. I’ll often have the TV on as I’m drawing, painting, or working. I listen to the TV more than I watch it. Maybe once every week or two I’ll actually sit down and watch a movie. But the day after my party I’m extra tired so all I have the energy for is sitting and watching.

Throwing a party is a much different experience than attending one. That’s because you have things to do. You are throwing a party after all. You have to keep things organized, bring stuff out, answer queries, and clean up a bit as you go. Plus socialize with everyone. When attending a party you’re just hanging out with whoever. That’s a little breezier.

My friends are pretty easy to throw a party for. We’ve all known each other for a long time and have all thrown and attended many parties together. My friend Bunche is usually at my event. He will come up early and cook stuff (pulled pork, ribs chicken, whatever he feels like) and then man the grill for a while. He couldn’t make it this year but I have a lot of friend who can grill well. Anyone who wants to takes a turn grilling up some, burgers, dogs, chicken, and sausage. Things went smoothly as the charcoal burned all day and I was free to run around and host.

It’s always amazing to me the irrational thoughts that go through one’s mind when hosting a party. The first is “Will anyone show up”? It doesn’t matter that you know people will show up. You will still think that. Every host does. This is my fifteenth or sixteenth annual party and I have about the same number of people show up every year. Around thirty plus. And still the “Will anyone show up”? thought enters my head every year. I can pretty much ignore it but it still exists.

The second irrational though is, “Will there be enough food”? We all know this one. Every host at every party fears running out of food. It’s truly universal. Often the fear is verbalized. Usually at parties my friends and I have attended or thrown there is a ton of food left over. Guests bring food with them and the host usually overestimates the amount of food for fear of running out. I have plenty of stores nearby and can always run out and get more food at a moments notice so running out of stuff is not really a problem. But still the thought enters my head. You can’t stop irrationality. It has a mind of its own.

The third irrational thought is “Are my guests having fun”? Everyone is clearly hanging out with their friends and having a good time but that doesn’t stop this though from entering your head. If you are an attendee of the party and you’re having fun and this thought never enters you mind. As a matter of fact throwing a party is the only time this thought will ever enter your brain. I’ve heard many a party host nervously ask a guest if everyone is having a good time. Yet if a group of friends are out at diner, hanging in the park, or at a night spot this question never enters anyones’ mind. You have to be hosting a party and think yourself responsible for your guests’ enjoyment for this thought to be thunk.

I think I had about the right amount of food this year. There were some leftovers but not a ton of them. That’s good. There have been some years when I could have thrown another party the next day with all the leftovers. That’s a little bit too much to deal with.

Drinks are a funny thing too. When we were all in out twenties a lot of my friends were big drinkers. Cases and cases of beer were drunk at my party. Then sometime in our early thirties everyone’s beer consumption went way down. But their beer purchasing didn’t. I’d end up with cases and cases of beer after the party. It took three or four years for things to adjust themselves.

Drinks have changed a bit more now that a lot of my friends are entering their forties. Plenty of juice boxes for the kids and lots of soft drinks left over. Now it’s the bottles of water that always run out first. Everybody drinks less sweet soft drinks than before and more water. That hasn’t quite adjusted itself yet.

A lot of my friends help with the clean up at the end of the night. packing food up, bringing things inside, folding up chairs, and bringing things into he kitchen. This always helps make the night a little earlier. Of course I’ll always be up late anyway because who can sleep after throwing a party? Now I’m back to the beginning. maybe I’ll go lay down.

It’s a pensive evening and I’m sitting around thinking about nothing. How is that? I’m not sure. It’s a cool, crisp, and a bit rainy July evening that is perfect for letting the mind drift into new places. But somehow it’s not. Hmmm…

I want to write a couple of more comics strips tonight but I’m not sure if I’ll get to it. I’ve been writing and illustrating about five strips a week in advance of setting up a web site to display them. I’ve been putting off setting up the website because it’s something I don’t enjoy too much.

It really is a lot of work making a functional and good looking web site. It involves a lot of moving things over an eighth of an inch and contemplating how it looks there as opposed to there. Endless minutia and endless contemplation of boring-ass gradients. It really is dull stuff. It’s much more interesting making the strips. Plus the website probably doesn’t even matter. Who’s ever going to see it?

For me the joy in making anything is the making of it. The odds of any creative endeavor making anyone money or bringing them fame is slim to none. If that is your expectation then prepare to be disappointed. And most of us get disappointed. So I enjoy the act of adding something to the world. Even if the world doesn’t know it.

Of course I generally don’t care what the world knows. It matters to me more what I know. That’s what I’m in charge of. Plus the world cares about way too many things that I don’t care about. Mostly pop culture stuff. I have no interest in the latest hit movie, song, or TV show. I can find my own things of that nature to like. It’s pretty easy. They broadcast them right into our homes.

Now I’m rambling. Where was I? Contemplating the nature of contemplating? That’s little odd.

I was just contemplating the NFL’s announcement that next year they are moving the NFL draft to prime time. I’m against the idea. It ruins the good time my friends and I have on draft day.

For the last few years we’d hang out on a spring Saturday afternoon (the draft continued on Sunday but we were done with it by then) while the NFL draft was going on and have some pizza and shoot the breeze. It was an oasis of football in the off season and an excuse to get together and hang out. Not a ton of “Watching the draft” really went on because there is not much to watch.

Next year the draft will be on a Thursday night at 8 PM. They want to get a bigger TV audience but I think it will be a smaller audience. No one will be getting together on a Thursday night and consequently anyone who watches the draft will actually have to watch the draft. You really don’t want to do that. The draft is long and boring. And I’m one of the people who likes it.

I think there is no way that as many people will be interested in the draft on a Thursday and Friday night. A Saturday afternoon is one thing but after a long day at work who wants to sit by themselves and be bored by talking heads killing time between draft picks? Bad move NFL. Way to spoil my good time.

I’m in the mood for some video game football now. Too bad there are no football games I like. I’m not a Madden fan which is the last of the officially licensed NFL games since Electronic Arts payed for the exclusive rights to use NFL players and teams. I still have my older NFL 2K games and do like them okay but they are far from perfect. I want to play a near perfect NFL football video game. Sucks for me that it doesn’t exist. Such is life.

I’ll sign off now before I ramble on any more about another topic completely unrelated to anything that has gone before. It’s that kind of night. Think I’ll write those comic strips now. Maybe I can pull something out of my brain.