Progress? Report

Well, i thought we had things in hand - yesterday things seemed all good with the main system. It ran fine all day while setting various drivers and watching movies and such.
And then this morning i tried to prep pages for a post. System died within 10 minutes.
And now it's looking like the motherboard 
may be the most likely culprit.

Man, i miss those days when i used to keep a render farm running.

There are two more components slated to arrive in the next day or so, and a potential replacement system, after i get that new desk into place. So, hopefully we'll be back to operational status by the end of the week - one way or another.

Meanwhile, we need an image!

Last night was the anniversary of John Lennon's murder. So, here's a painting that i posted once before, but somewhat larger this time. Still greatly reduced from the 6000x9000 original, but at least anyone interested has a better shot at sorting out the quotes at this size. You can even kind of make out my signature, if you really want to waste your time...

(That pattern in the background on the left is actually the titles to the songs he wrote)

Dear John by -3- (201? I'd have to hunt. somewhere between 2011-14, i think)

Maintainance Report

Meanwhile, lurking in a dark alley...

While the main system and i are down in the dark, i'm in the right state of mind to be doing drudge work. Some less visible happenings are going on currently.

A while back, Google/Blogger decided to freshen things up a bit. One of the decisions they made at that time was to change the default size on displayed text. It flipped from Normal to Smallest. So folks viewing old posts would see the small credits at the bottom of the post at twice the size of the actual post. Some readers may recall when i was trying to sort out what had happened. Eventually i realized that normal wasn't Normal, and i've hand set the text to normal size since that point. But that left hundreds of posts at the tiny text size.

So, i've been going through and setting each post by hand. We've caught up to the end of 2017, with the exception of one post from the King Kirby 100. Blogger will not allow me to edit that post unless i delete part. So, it stays tiny.

Only another 500 posts or so to go...

Commenters will notice that there is now a verification delay before your remarks appear. Unfortunately, a rabid seeker of child porn has issues, and so we're filtering to keep you readers from having to step in it.

So, what's the pic at the top? I wanted to include an image, as is my wont, but only have access to a scattering of old material at the moment. I believe i ran a Pulp Fiction Cover previously for Urban Zombie Tales. That's the painting without the text.
And, in case i'm misremembering, here's the texted version -

art by -3- (2014)

A Necessary Reminder

Somehow, it seems like a good time to repeat this Public Service post from 2017.

(This image is sized for 8x10 printing at 150dpi for easy distribution. Click for full print version)

Children In Charge

Just in case anybody had any respect left for the office of the President, a pathetic child's Rocky fantasy was posted this past week. And he didn't even have the decency to use the one where the Russian beats Rocky around for the source of the pic.

Well, i got the desktop system running for an hour, and here's what i think of the sad silly postings.
I captioned one, and left the other blank for you to caption.

Can we PLEASE get some adults back into the mix?

Yes, feel free to circulate them since you know i don't do that social stuff.

Rocky Trump Trump As Rocky Deluded Trump Fantasy Fat Boy Rocky Fat Trump Delusional Donald Infant President Trump Fat Baby

Pacific Northwest Hermit Visual Reference

As you may have guessed, main system still down. Or down again, to be more accurate. It's gone through a couple fixes, and it seemed to be good - ran for a couple of hours doing everything from test renders to games and vids without any issus.

But 5 minutes after i tried to resume work, the system went dark again. The Universe really hates the idea of me producing new artwork. It's been doing a damn fine job of preventing it for the last few years.

New components will hopefully arrive in a week. In the meanwhile, i believe i'll be putting another system into service soon. My oldest son is currently on long haul trucking runs with his lovely lady, so his desktop box sits unused.

The question becomes, will my hardware curse transfer over if his system goes into service here? Oh, the suspense...

Meanwhile, the previous post on the History murdering villain Paul Termann to the contrary, i do prefer to include at least one image with every post. With that in mind, here's a bit of chicken scratching from a few years back - a fairly up-to-date and accurate visual guide to the Pacific Northwest Hermit Artist in the wild. 

Just in case you spot it wandering outside the cave...

chicken scratchings by -3- (2016)

Paul Termann - A Name That Should Live In Infamy

On December 13th of 1981, on the yacht Apollonia sailing in the Caribbean, two week's of sullen resentment came to a murderous peak. Paul Termann decided to hijack the yacht at gunpoint and declared that Herbert Klein, the owner, had 10 minutes to live. Klein attempted to rescue the party aboard the Apollonia, but only managed to wound Termann, who shot and killed Klein's girlfriend, Gabriele Humpert, and wounded a man named Munsch working on the boat. 
Termann then hunted down Klein and finally murdered him.
He was caught, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1982, but released 20 years later. If you want to know more about what happened, try reading Off The Deep End: A History Of Madness At Sea by Nic Compton. 
 
Not so much a "Live In Infamy" kind of guy - more like a villain from a Travis McGee novel. Likely to be forgotten over time as just another crazy asshole with a gun.

However, that was just his origin story. The birth and source of his True Villainy.

You see, Paul Termann is ashamed to be a convicted double-murderer, so he decided to murder history to hide his crimes. The German high court has ruled that he, and others like him, can force their crimes to be scrubbed from news and historic records so they won't be reminded of their shame.

They call it the Right To Be Forgotten.


Let's call it what it is - the Right To Edit History For Personal Convenience.

No wonder the UK wants out of the EU. They can hear George Orwell's anguished screams echoing through the ground. What was once considered Orwellian Nightmare is now a Personal Right in the EU. Not just governments, but any criminal can now erase the past.

In more normal times if a law was passed allowing criminals to hide their crimes, we'd point out the horrible possibility of murderers using it to cover up their crimes and hide their past from the potential victims around them. And, perhaps even more disturbingly, erase all memory of their victims in the process.

But that's where we're starting from these days.

So, how soon can we expect it to be used to cover up war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity carried out by governments and corporations?

Remember - in our twisted laws, corporations - entities founded to escape personal responsibility - are considered human beings, entitled to the same rights and protections. But, as noted, without being bound by all the same responsibilities. They already routinely get away with murder, now they're being handed a tool to wipe it from the public memory.

It's hard to decide if this ruling is epicly stupid or actively evil.

Either way, it certainly leaves me wondering what those who made the ruling must want erased from their pasts?

Or was it simply a matter of being bought by those who want to use the law?

Sorry - no joke today.

Just the joke that Paul Termann played on Truth.

And The Universe Laughed...

The mind and i have been reuniting lately. As you may have noticed, we posted 3 out of the last 4 days. And work has been going well on getting back towards some painting. Finally sorted out all the problems with the 3D model and render software and actually prepped for a painting. Today was get the graphics tablet and painting software re-installed day so we could maybe do some real artwork again.

Regular readers know what comes next...

The Universe seems to actively hate it when i get any artwork done. And so the system died. Or rather, it seems that the video card fried out. A burst of snow to the screen, and nothing.

The graphics card is, of course, the newest and most expensive piece of gear in the system. It costs more than half of what a new system would run. It's a massive beast with two huge fans that looks like a drone ready to lift off.
And, like most of what's made these days, it's a piece of crap. But, that's how we do it in this great land. Computer components used to be manufactured with rigorous quality controls and be built to last. They had to be, because they were still trying to build the market.
But, once everyone is using them and needs them, that gets tossed out. Make it quick, and plan for it to die soon so they'll need another one - the American Way of business, responsible for so much of what you hate about the world around you.

Joy.

So, yeah. Who knows how long i'll be down. Or how long the system will be down, for that matter. I might have an old card around that will work and get it up and running again within a day. It might be weeks. I don't even know where to go to get one these days, and experience precludes use of internet to order things like computer parts. Thanks, no - I don't need the wrong part shipped from China to arrive at the wrong location and MAYBE eventually be returned for the right part - but one that was previously returned by someone else due to problems with it... try again. 

I tend to be a nexus for system errors, even when the system isn't rigged for abuse.

So, maybe there'll be new post tomorrow.
Maybe there'll be new post next month.
Maybe next year.
We've seen before how this can play out around here.

Meanwhile - i like at least one pic in every post, but the only thing on this system right now is Smoker Warning Label for cigarettes and such that we should try.

This one might actually work -

Cynical Susie And The New, Odd Little World

As mentioned yesterday, Cynical Susie veered into Damned Odd territory at the end of the run in Comics On Parade. And it all started, appropriately enough, when she met a Hermit...

Comics On Parade changed format with issue #30. They started focusing on a single strip or creator in each issue, and the variety strips were swept away - including Cynical Susie. Her newspaper comics stopped the same year, and she never came back home from that odd little world.

page art by Bernard Dibble(?) from Comics On Parade #s 24-29 (1940)

If Only A Fish Would Fly Down From Heaven With A Job In His Bill!

Today we've got a little dalliance with three ladies from the '30s - Becky(Helen), Laverne, and Susie. Becky Sharp wrote and Laverne Harding drew a Sunday comic about Cynical Susie. (There was a daily, too, but just barely. It was soon a Sunday Only strip.) The series debuted in 1933 and ran through the end of the decade, though both creators left before that point.

One of the especially noteworthy aspects of Cynical Susie is the artist; Laverne Harding became the first female animator in Hollywood. She was already working with Walter Lantz at Universal when Susie started publication, and was promoted to Animator in 1934.

We come in at the end of Laverne's run on the strip, with Bernard Dibble taking over the art in her absence. Some may recall another strip from Dibble that appeared here previously, Looy Dot Dope. These come to us from Comics On Parade - one of those early comic books that re-packaged newspaper strips. That included L'il Abner, who pushed Susie, and everyone else, out of the book a few years later. 

Let me just say right now - "I don't know."

I only have one or two issues before we're jumping in, and the $50,000 debt was already incurred. How this happened or what the debt is supposed to cover...? 

That's one of Life's Little Mysteries for me. Just acknowledge how very special Lily Whey must be to stand as collateral on that much cash in 1930s dollars.

Before too long, Susie managed to turn things around, though things seemed to fall apart first. The Director discovered that Susie was back on the lot...

Before the end of her time in Comics On Parade, things would get damned odd and outright weird...

page art by Laverne Harding and Bernard Dibble from Comics On Parade #s 7-10, 12, & 15-18 (1938, 1939)