Rock beyond reality, brah.

So the radio station I work for has this whole psychedelic theme. The mascot is the cat on acid to your left. The motto is "Rock Beyond Reality," and we have program names like "High Noon," "Flying High" and "The Escape." We play all kinds of rock, but seem to specialize in oldschool trip-balls-to-this-shit-with-your-friends rock. Pink Floyd, Yes, the Grateful Dead, etc.

I only explain this so that when I tag something with "rock beyond reality," everyone understands my full meaning.

So yeah.

If you ever see a post that's just a random list of phrases and this tag, now you'll know why.

Oh, one more thing.

New comic's up today.

They've been at a bar for the past few strips, but this is a new scene. It's one of those strips that tells the story through subtle details, through the art. And Saffron's really adorable in it.

This is also the end of my buffer. I've already cut a bargain of sorts with my readers to just not update on Wednesdays for a while, so the next one's due up on Friday. I'm gonna go down to the Jolly Swagman Bean Broker now and try to get a couple more in the buffer.

One final thought: I've only had Facebook removed from my bookmarks for a few hours and I already feel a lot more productive. I even caught myself mindlessly browsing and instinctively going to where the bookmark used to be. This is gonna free up so much time; I should've started blogging earlier.

The government shutdown thing.

Pretty entertaining article's up on Slate right now, covering the government shutdown thing in the way that news media typically covers similar government dysfunction in Third World countries. It makes obvious that journalistic standards need to be raised, and foreign countries treated in the press with the same gravity and seriousness that we treat our own.

But enough about that. This isn't the first government shutdown that's ever happened, and unfortunately it probably won't be the last. All I can hope is that the Republicans actually do it. That way the country - the whole country, not just the people paying attention - will finally realize how deranged they've gotten, and will turn out en masse to return the Democrats to power in the House in 2016. Divided government is shitty government when one party refuses to negotiate, and the Republicans need a time in the wilderness before they can be trusted with power again.

Found a background I can settle on.

The old one just felt too... musty. A yellowed map of trade routes between principal Atlantic ports from the age of sail. I mean, it's awesome in the right context. But this isn't it.

I ended up using an image I've loved for years: this. I found it on this page, it's about some stormchasers that travelled through Chadron in 2006. The oldschool font in the header kinda goes with it, makes it all look vaguely Western. And I've always loved thunderstorms on the Great Plains; they're just not the same anywhere else. And the best ones are the ones like this, where you can see the fronts colliding.

Anyway, on to figure out all the sidebar thingythings.

Looking for a new blog background, and-oh shiny!

I'm searching through my pics, and then I found this:



There's a great story here.

Back to blogging.

It's all kinda familiar, and yet a bit disconcerting.

This was prompted because I finally got sick enough of Facebook. I got sick of people I can't unfriend posting shit I can't tolerate, sick of being exploited instead of making a few bucks by running my own ads by the things I say, sick of the constant game requests, sick of the complete and utter timesink it has become, sick of every damn thing on there.

I'm not too sure about the blog title yet. I may switch it out; I haven't decided yet. For what it's worth, "no regrets when the worms come" is a line from this song:



For that matter, I'm not sold on the background either. It's a retouched version of the background I had on my old Myspace (remember that?) crammed into 300kb because that's all Blogger allows. I played with other backgrounds - one with the night sky, one that was a picture I took on the way back from Rapid City one evening. Nothing jumps out and says "I MUST BE YOUR BACKGROUND."

So everything's kinda touch and go. I don't know what this space is gonna look like in a few days, but I'm sure I'll muddle through somehow.