Category: Connections

I have indirectly rediscovered A Softer World, which I originally found and enjoyed in the pages of the one comped issue of NFG that I got from Zack’s roommate when I was in California. It was raining at the time. Fortunately, I had a hat.

But! The comic! Is really good. I’m probably going to read the entire archive today, although I don’t know how much quantity exists, since the magazine comics I read (presumably written and drawn in January) did not list a website, and the new ones do. Hopefully they’re all up there. ASW seems designed to appeal directly to me–it’s a three-panel comic built with tightly-zoomed candid photography, lower-case text in odd arrangements, and the kind of dark gray whimsy that I’d love to consistently capture in Anacrusis. I am very glad to be aware of its interweb existence.

Update 1252 hrs: They are all on the site, except the ones they sold to NFG–those were selected from a span of March to July 2003. These strips are painfully good; worse, they started out that way. If I wasn’t enjoying them so much I’d be gnawing my thumb with jealousy.

My uncle John provides justification for the backwards locomotion I witnessed yesterday. It’s an interesting site, but I haven’t yet found where they talk about the dangers of, you know, not being able to see where you’re going.

After two years, Sean is about to come back to the US from his time teaching music as a Jesuit volunteer in a Nicaraguan village. I’ve been reading his journal continuously for about three years now; he’s a funny and intimate writer, and I’ve tried to incorporate some of his observational style into my own voice.

I’ve known one (other) Jesuit volunteer teacher in real life, and I feel like I know Sean, in a way. Neither has exactly been entirely gung-ho about the program, but if my own personal sample is any indication, it attracts some pretty incredible people. I wonder if I could do what they did, and if I would. Or will.

I know it’s old news but I don’t care

I’m going to buy this album. In fact, I’m not going to stop at just buying it. I’m going to burn extra copies of it, and I’m going to give you one, hell, maybe two or three. I’m going to come over to your house, and we’re going to listen to it. Together. To every. Last. Word.

A trombonist in a brass-punk band called the Golden Showers

“One day I won’t put up with you. It’ll just be over. Where will you sleep?”

“You’ll always have to put up with me. I’ll be throwing things at you in the old folk’s home, knocking big wads of oily tinfoil right off your head. If you haven’t merged with the network by then in dork ecstasy.”

In my increasingly desperate search for materiél to scan between bouts of whanging my head against cryptic SQL procedures, I have finally committed myself to reading that old sawhorse of Sumana’s: Ftrain, residence of Paul Ford’s multiple personas and weird-category-structure Mecca. I mean, I’ve read it before, but as of today I’m reading larger chunks and really trying to grok its navigation. And it’s good. “Scott Rahin’s” columns are a quick favorite; they remind me of the amiable hate-fest that is a fact of life between certain members of the Nightlight Press Community and myself.

Been using that ol’ blockquote a lot here lately.

Given the cicada invasion on Bardstown Road as of late, plus the enormous and doomed Fourth Street Live revitalization project being advertised all over, well, Fourth Street, I’m pretty sure today’s Mac Hall takes place in Louisville.