Category Archives: Metariffic

IM he who is called I am

Lucas Blue: So I’ve been thinking of adding a new feature to the site.
Lucas Red: Oh?
Lucas Blue: Yeah, something to get me writing again.
Lucas Red: Are you out of drawings?
Lucas Blue: Not “out of”, exactly. But since I returned to the daily format a couple months ago I have been burning through my existing artwork at an alarming pace.
Lucas Red: So you need to slow the bleeding.
Lucas Blue: Right, and give myself time to do more stuff.
Lucas Red: Why did you go back to the daily format in the first place, if you aren’t capable of producing the material to support it?
Lucas Blue: I think that I am.
Lucas Red: But you have been relying heavily on notebook doodles and such from up to thirteen years ago.
Lucas Blue: It is true. I comb through old notebooks and sketchbooks and look for things that are worth posting. It’s quicker than doing new stuff.
Lucas Red: Why do you do this in the first place? Is it so that strangers will look at your work and decide that you are awesome?
Lucas Blue: It is for that, and also to entertain my friends who infrequently stop by, and also to create a record, I guess.
Lucas Red: A record?
Lucas Blue: Of my development as an artist.
Lucas Red: You barely ever put dates on anything you draw.
Lucas Blue: It’s a vague record. All of the recordkeeping I do is vague. That’s why I have so much trouble during tax season.
Lucas Red: Anyway. You’ve burned through all your old drawings, you need time to make more, and you want to keep the daily format. Why not switch back to writing for a while?
Lucas Blue: That’s exactly my thinking. But I don’t see myself switching back to writing exclusively, or even writing frequently. There is a reason I haven’t written much lately. I am not generally inspired to write.
Lucas Red: You have writer’s block.
Lucas Blue: I have writer’s fucking Great Wall of China.
Lucas Red: So what recourse have you?
Lucas Blue: This is my reasoning: I am uninspired to write and I am no good at talking. But the one channel of communication in which I currently have any skill is instant messaging.
Lucas Red: Because you have the luxury of taking the time to figure out what you want to say, but not so much time that you overthink it and don’t say anything.
Lucas Blue: Yes.
Lucas Red: So you’re going to post more IM conversations?
Lucas Blue: I’m going to post IM conversations with myself.
Lucas Red: With me?
Lucas Blue: Yes.
Lucas Red: How will people tell us apart?
Lucas Blue: I’ll give us “blue” and “red” designations.
Lucas Red: To symbolize the deep ideological split that has taken place in these United States?
Lucas Blue: I was thinking of it as an homage to that Superman story from years ago where he splits in two or something. Suddenly there are two Supermen. One is red and one is blue.
Lucas Red: They did that story again a number of years ago, when Superman was in his electric-powers period.
Lucas Blue: Of course they did. People were asking too many questions about Electric Superman. They needed a distraction.
Lucas Red: Are you insinuating our readers need a distraction?
Lucas Blue: No. But I do.
Lucas Red: And you think people will read this?
Lucas Blue: It’s possible.
Lucas Red: It’ll never work.

Forehindsight

The Daily Hey, while it has rarely come out daily, has been around for quite a while now. In one of my early posts, written before the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency but after it already seemed like Gore had lost, I, my ignorant, unseasoned voice emboldened by this strange, exciting new “blogging” technology, compiled a list of predictions for the Bush presidency.

Six years (and three ex-wives) later, let’s revisit these predictions, why don’t we, and see just how wrong I was.

Dubya’s pets, one dog and two cats, will become lovable national mascots and will on occasion meet world leaders in Dubya’s stead.

Barney, Bush’s Scottish terrier, was recently appointed ambassador to Finland. 70% correct.

Bush and Cheney will bathe in the blood of their enemies. Also with the blood of their enemies they will paint a barn, send relief packages to Transylvania, and prepare a delightful linguini dish.

All have happened, and have been detailed at length in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack.

Bush will refer to pasta solely as “noodles”.

And cats like to shit in the sand.

An embarrassing picture of Dubya will be published on an April 2001 cover of TIME in which Bush’s head is tipped over, his eyes are rolled back into his skull, and a long streamer of drool falls from his mouth. Possible headline: “Can Gene Therapy Help?”

nope
April 7, 2001

Dick Cheney will suffer a fatal heart attack on the floor of Congress as he is about to cast the deciding vote on whether or not the government should condemn homosexuality. He will clutch his chest and spin around comically before he falls to the ground, clutching a tiny American flag, his lesbian daughter’s name inaudibly escaping his lips. The movie version, starring Richard Dreyfuss and released the following year, will win six Oscars.

Stay tuned, folks!

Dubya will choose Joe Lieberman to replace Cheney. Lieberman will be flattered but decline. Dubya’s second choice, George H. W. Bush, will happily step back into the role.

Replace George H. W. Bush with Rudy Giuliani. And for heaven’s sake, replace Joe Lieberman with Ned Lamont.

Bill and Hillary Clinton will stay married, for the sake of her career this time. Chelsea will enjoy a short stint guest-hosting “Talk Soup” on E!. Playboy will offer her a giant truck full of cash to pose nude. She will make fun of them.

The Clintons are still married, but who knew Larry Flynt would get to Chelsea first?

Paula Jones, continuing to have trouble with her legal bills, will appear in a hard-core porn video with John Wayne Bobbitt.

That’s some sub-Leno topicality right there.

Al Gore and Bob Dole will co-host a politically-themed variety show featuring music, skits, and their own dry, witty banter. The show will be cancelled by FOX after four episodes. The reruns will continue to air on FX for another three months.

It never happened, but check out the new Gore/Dole buddy comedy, An Inconvenient What!?

Gore will authorize the publication of the un-retouched version of his ROLLING STONE cover photo. Women everywhere will swoon and purchase detachable shower heads.

Years later and global water pressure still hasn’t returned to normal.

California will be hit with a series of massive earthquakes. The result will be a natural geographical divide along the coast, and the government will rule that California should now be two states. The states are named “Alive California” and “Dead California”.

And this is why I still haven’t moved to the west coast.

Democrats and Republicans will say nasty things about the other’s behavior when they themselves did the exact same things last time.

Still waiting on this one.

Ralph Nader will chill out and lay low for awhile. Michael Moore will win the Green Party nomination in 2004. He will name Nader his VP candidate. Winona LaDuke will continue to be wherever the hell she was during the 2000 campaign.

And so she has been. For all I know. And who am I? Some guy who doesn’t know.

Palestinians will hate Americans even more than they used to. Eastern Europeans will hate Americans even more than they used to. The Chinese will hate Americans even more than they used to. Former Soviet Union republic residents will hate Americans even more than they used to. Western Europeans, Mexicans, Africans, South Americans, Israelis, Canadians, Arabs, the Japanese, and everyone in lower Asia will hate Americans even more than they used to. Australians will continue to like us okay.

Yups!

With Australia abstaining, every nation in the world will agree to wage war against America simultaneously. The war will be characterized in the press as a “conflict resolution effort”. Our armed forces, having dwindled in number, will require that a draft be reinstated. However, every single 18 to 24 year-old male will be able to avoid service by pretending to be flamboyantly gay.

And they pretended so hard that they ruined marriage.

Feeling pressure from all sides, Bush, his family, and his closest advisors will board a spacecraft and flee the planet, eventually setting up a colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn. The presidency will revert to the Bush family dog, who is accidentally left behind in a heartbreaking scene.

Two pet gags in the same bit? I really wasn’t paying attention when I was writing this. Anyway, yes, as ambassador to Finland, Barney is number 78 in line for the presidency, so…

…pudding cups.*

Tedward Kennedy will emerge as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nod for 2004. He will be assassinated the next day. In the next week, other assassination victims will include Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, former MTV VJ Kennedy, actor Jamie Kennedy, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. People will be really confused.

That one Kennedy dude got into that Ambien-related car crash. I’m gonna say this one came true.

“Survivor” winner Richard Hatch easily snags the 2004 GOP presidential nod, largely on a platform of not being naked. Runner-up Rudy Boesch will get the veep nod. Sue Hawk will be mentioned as a possible Secretary of Truck Driving.

Who are these people?**

Jesse Ventura, with nothing but a machine gun, camoflauge pants, and a hunting knife, will make the world Safe Once Again For Democracy.

Why have you forsaken us, Jesse Ventura?

Why?

* Shorthand for “I’ve run out of steam with this joke and am abandoning it here”. It’s a thing. Tell your friends!

** I know full well who they are.

All-new, all-similar

At this writing I have gone live with The Lucubus Version 6.0. This revision entails a drastic change in layout philosophy (goodbye, nested tables; hello divs and CSS) as well as a change in engine (Blogger is out; WordPress is in). The site is still in a tweaking stage; the three-column layout breaks when one clicks on the comment link, to name one of many glitches in need of repair.

In addition, the transition from HTML 4.0 to XHTML has left my archives strewn with code that does not validate properly. I am gradually going to go back through my archives fixing code and categorizing posts (only about six hundred or so) . I will also gradually implement some neat PHP tricks that I’ve picked up along the way.

Why did I bother redesigning the site after two years of relative dormancy? One reason is optimism: if I’m not sick of looking at the site, maybe I’ll feel more inclined to post. The other major reason is I wanted to experiment with CSS as a layout strategy and not just a fancy way to mark up text. After all, that’s the way our founding fathers in the W3C envisioned the interweb.

Comments are open. Feedback is welcome. Not that I have any regular visitors at this point, but all you people doing a web search for “hentai” and coming here in droves only to find it is merely ALT text for an image which doesn’t even show tentacles, let alone tentacles raping anybody – well, maybe you’ll be interested in the new look.

A return to former lateness

So I’ve decided to start writing in this thing again. I figured it was time to take my brain out of mothballs and start ‘er up for old times’ sake. I figure my angle here can be: grad student is perpetually flummoxed by his experiences at school for post-industrial design. Grad student has secret public outlet which he is certain nobody ever looks at anyway, unless they have performed a Google search for some tawdriness which coincidentally happens to share five words with something I wrote several years ago. Grad student sees opportunity to express feelings, tell stories, achieve catharsis.

It does seem unlikely that I’ll be able to write frequently. Perhaps I should rename the blog Infrequent Drawings of Girls in Tanktops and be done with it. But you never know.

Stay tuned

I am currently performing a wholesale revision of the site. I am taking some time off to do this. In the meantime, busy yourself with this shiny thing. Look at how it shines! It’s so shiny. Shine on, object of shine!

Quest for filler

A fair warning: I am going to post all kinds of stuff in order to meet this quota. Old class assignments, IM conversations, e-mail conversations, photos, drawings, links… basically all the stuff I would have posted anyway, except with a less discriminating selectivity.

I have also sent a notice out on my forum that I am seeking guest-written Heys. As my forum regulars are among the most intelligent people the internet has to offer, I can only hope that they’d be willing to help out with some filling.

Which reminds me, I also made a resolution to see a dentist this year. Where’s the danged yellow pages?

Daily Hey Magic Number: 101

It’s on

I sense that this is going to be something of a challenge.

You see, at the very beginning of this year, I made a promise that there would be 365 entries in this blog at the end of the year, even if it meant that I would have to write most of them on December 31.

Well, it turns out that there are so many left that I can’t afford to wait that long. Despite catching up at the end of June, I still managed to miss 93 entries between July 1 and today. Actually, I hit every day in July, so really, it’s that number between August 1 and today. And if you add in the posts I need to make for the remaining days of the year, that’s a grand total of 103 posts I have to make, including this one.

Faithful readers may recall last time, when I started off with 42 posts to make up. And even then, I had to rely on old journal entries and other things to meet that quota. But I am in Beavercreek right now and those journals are not with me. My friends, I may not even be able to use my own computer to make these entries (although by god I’m certainly going to try).

And on top of all this, I still have Christmas shopping to do, not to mention shopping for a car (more on that later). Who knows what nonsense I will rely on this time around? Isn’t it exciting?

Daily Hey Magic Number: 102