SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Today's Sunday Webcomics are as follows:

Dugan's Air Force is, strictly speaking, not a webcomic at all. It is a comic that happens to be on the web but at the time it was drawn the internet was entirely analog. You don't have to be in the Air Force to appreciate its unique qualities.

Hapless Harold, on the other hand, is a webcomic. It is as educational as it is entertaining.

PORCH PROJECT - final report

Today I restored the third pillar. I also took off the new steps I added to the west end so I could build this frame for the access opening. Then I took the stairs apart and rebuilt them using metal brackets and, although they still came out a little wacky, I am much more satisfied with their structural integrity. Basically if you fall down those steps it is your fault, not the steps. I will keep an eye on them and see how they hold up. I can remove them by taking out four screws, so if I need to work on them again in the future it will not be much of a problem.

All that is left is a little detail work and a final once-over with paint. It won't look much different from this.

There is not a huge difference between the current state and the way it looked when this non-summer google picture was taken. Which was my plan all along. Make it the same only better.

At least I don't feel it weighing on me as much now that it is visually unified, and the plumbing situation has eased off from impending doom status so I feel I can just relax all day tomorrow and take a shot at it on Sunday. It's not the kind of thing that makes for good blogging so I will not be reporting on it, but I do have a poorly-built leaky amateur skylight in my studio I need to fill in before the rains start up again and roof stuff is pretty exciting so we have that to look forward to. I will keep you posted.

PORCH PROJECT - two pillars restored

Today I got two of the pillars put together. Since I am putting 7.5 inch square pillars around a 3.5 inch post I have to cobble together one inch spacers to go inside. Of course nothing is actually one inch - it's all 3/4 for some reason. Somebody knows why but I don't. I happened to have some 1/4 inch flat molding that I could put together with 3/4 inch wood to make an actual inch. Pretty crappy looking but all they have to do is be there.

Here is what they are doing. The pillar boards are nailed to each other and to the spacers placed at the top and bottom of the post. There is a lot of fiddly work and adjusting to do, and nothing is really square or straight, but I am holding my own, so to speak.

Two pillars built, in need of some touchup and paint, but from a distance they look okay. They are certainly not much worse than what was there before. I am working at the limit of my skill and the ability of my tools and as long as you don't look too closely it's alright.

The bummer of the day was, just when I was about to start doing this, Donna told me there was water on the floor of the back room in the basement, near where she keeps some of her books for sale. I wisely had everything up off the floor on an old wooden futon frame for just such an event. It seems an ancient iron water pipe has sprung a slow pinhole leak, and it is very fortunately in a place that it will be relatively easy to replace it with copper. I keep hoping the 80+ year old parts of the plumbing will just wait until I am dead to fail because some of it will be a real pain to replace. So I got to start my work angry and frustrated at having been suddenly jolted out of my focus by another problem. It's been pretty rough the past few weeks with environmental issues - too hot, too sunny, too many people out doing things and raising a ruckus, and I have been generally anxious and depressed over that and my zillions of internal demons I never discuss with anyone. I really have no person or thing I can turn to for relief. Now I have to think of this new thing too.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Dark Days provides everything you have come to expect from a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC in artistic and literary quality, excuse pages instead of comics, and transgendered autobiographical content.

PORCH PROJECT - cosmetic

It was rainy for a few days this week, which delayed my work since it involved a lot of painting. Over the past three working days I have completed most of the cosmetic restoration of the railing wall. I was able to salvage much of the original siding, and only had to buy one 16 foot piece, the top one across the inside of the wall as seen below. It was mostly just painting, sanding, cutting and nailing which is not as exciting as demolition and takes longer.

One of the many useful features the old porch lacked was the cutouts at the bottom. Since it was only open at one end, all the leaves and blossoms shed by the wisteria had to be swept the entire length of the porch. That's what those cutouts are for - if you look you will see them on a lot of porches, so you can sweep stuff out. Some of the details came out a bit weirdly where the end parts come together, but it achieves my basic need of not having anything jump out at you from ten feet away that makes you say what the hell is that.
This is the wood for the pillar restoration. The short ones below are salvaged from the original pillars and the longer ones are new wood I bought today. I hope I have made my last purchase of materials for this, but I may end up having to buy one or two little things I can't predict yet.

Addendum: I just did the math and not counting the trip to the dump and the gallon of paint I bought today this project comes out to almost exactly $700. That is way more than I had hoped, but about a tenth of what I would pay to have somebody else do it. I was hoping for more like $400, but it's something I won't have to do again so I am glad I did it as well as I could. I think the wood I salvaged saved me about $150 - $200.

Movies

Pool of London (1951) A complex, intelligent and multilayered noirish drama with numerous memorable situations and characters, centering on the activities of a pair of sailors in port for a few days. The standout performance is that of Earl Cameron, touchingly evoking the uncertainty of a man trained to wariness who unexpectedly encounters tolerance and a promise of happiness. A diamond heist is just one complicating factor to shake up and combine the numerous characters, but it is their humanity that comes through over the action and plot. The scenes and settings in mid-century London are outstanding and many tertiary characters add even more to an already overflowing story. A superior and engrossing film. 9/10

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Boy thanks for telling me that your Online Webcomic, "Altered Realms" is an Online Webcomic, because I wouldn't have known otherwise. If it didn't say Altered Realms - An Online Webcomic at the top I would be going "Whuuu??? What is THIS suppose ta be?" I have seen about a jillion online webcomics that make sure you know it is an online webcomic and I am glad to avoid the confusion that might otherwise arise from not being informed. I should make a list of repetitive motifs in Online Webcomics. Like 3DCG "Anthro" comics - those animal headed people I keep ragging about, Anthro (short for anthropomorphic) or Furry is what they call that stuff.

Set Apart isn't too bad for a 3DCG Anthro Online Webcomic, even with the added plus of being a Christian 3DCG Online Webcomic. Personally I don't believe Jesus died for the sins of foxes and dogs even if they can sit at a table and order lunch. The great thing about this strip for me, though, is that it went out with a bang - its last entry is a guest strip from Master Cartoonist Stripy Artist, creator of Stripy Six.

Addendum - The creator of Set Apart also has an interest in light bulbs, and has written a book called I Collect Light Bulbs.

Allegory - Escape from Reality has many interesting qualities not seen in the average 3DCG Anthro Online Webcomic. Not that there are really all that many of them, but this one stands out for its overall appearance, the fact that it is more an illustrated story than a comic, and the use of differently colored and fonted text to differentiate between characters, which I find far more baffling than the clumsiest speech balloon could ever be.

Enjoy these 3DCG Anthro Online Webcomics.

PORCH PROJECT - my rival

Just to provide some perspective on this whole thing, when I am patching and painting thirty year old siding to re-use it, or coming home with two boards and a box of screws, these guys are dropping off huge truckloads of lumber and materials across the street.

The strange thing is that, while it will undoubtedly be the nicest house on the block, it bears an unsettling resemblance to the crappiest house on the block, two doors down. Both views taken from our upstairs front windows.

PORCH PROJECT - siding, railing, and a stupid thing in a hole

The last couple of days have involved a lot of painting of wood in preparation for assembly into the finished porch railing. There was some drying time today which I spent cleaning up the garden and some small neglected areas. When we moved into the house there was a two foot high planter box occupying what is now the dirt strip in front of the porch, and when I tore it out there was one post that wouldn't come out so I cut it off around ground level. Today after a couple of decades I finally dug down deep enough to see what was going on. About two feet down I came to this concrete post hole filler. That is the sort of thing that is usually at ground level. There is no reason to dig three or four feet down, set your post in concrete, and then bury it under two feet of dirt. The only thing that makes any sense, and even that doesn't make any sense, is that they had this post they dug up from some other spot with the concrete on it, and then buried it that deep. Which is stupid. Nothing about this makes sense. I knew I wasn't going to get that out so I started whanging away at the post with U.S. GOVT, my loyal ball peen demolition hammer, until the concrete block cracked and I was able to pull the post out. The concrete is still down there, for the next guy to worry about.

This is what I got done over the last two days, replacing siding and putting the 9.5 inch wide upper railing on.

I had to do some cutting and re-assembling to get the railing around the support posts. I meant to give myself a little extra room but not this much! This will be covered when I reassemble the old pillars around the new posts.

These 2x2 sections are screwed to the post and railing structure, then the end and upper railing are screwed onto them The whole upper railing is secured to the low wall structure by screws from underneath every two feet.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Man, sometimes it seems like all the webcomics are just people trying to do Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, or an episode of Friends but everybody's got animal heads. I'd like to stand behind those jerks with a cattle prod and every time they started to draw a person with fox ears I would yell NO! and give them a jolt.

Well here is Dr. Dragon's House of Hope, a webcomic about space monster rehab.

Here is Public Domain Comics, where a guy just changes the captions on stuff or adds speech balloons to old pictures and says it is a webcomic.

PORCH PROJECT - rail framing and scrap to the dump

Yesterday I got the framing for the porch rail done. It was just a lot of cutting things to length and screwing them together, with only a few errors to complicate things. Here's what it looks like. The good thing was, I had to return some bolts and brackets I overbought at the beginning of the work and the lumber I bought for the framing and railing came out to be less than what I got back on the return so I ended up with a net gain for the day. I am becoming less satisfied with those steps as they seem a bit wobblier than I like. I don't think the 2x2 supports under the steps are stable enough.

Today I loaded up what was left of the old porch and hauled it to the dump. All the unpainted wood went to people who will use it in some way, so there was just this carload of painted wood.

Here is the entrance to the transfer station. It is about a ten minute drive down the freeway from here. The truck ahead of me is on the scale, checking in at the window to find out where to take it. They weigh your vehicle on the way in and again on the way out and charge by weight with, I believe, a $20 dollar minimum. The white structure in the background is the big shed where I was to go.
The last of the old porch is on that big heap of scrap wood. There were a number of different heaps around the shed, with the constant rumble, crunching and beeping of a big machine scraping it up and moving it around. It smells like an elementary school lunchroom plus dust. It always reminds me of my old lunch box.

I worked on the big 2x10 boards which will form the top of the railing after I got home, sanding them smoother, priming them for painting and cutting them to fit. I promptly screwed one of them up in the cutting, and realized I needed a longer board to work with anyway so that's both bad and good.

PORCH PROJECT - west steps

Yesterday I built the steps for the west end of the porch, something they don't seem to have had ever before. The west end, nearest to the driveway, was blocked by a railing, as shown in earlier PORCH PROJECT reports. It was possible to put things up on the railing and walk around to get them and take them into the house, but if it was a big box of heavy books, forget it. I am tall enough I could reach a bag of groceries over and set it on the porch floor but Donna couldn't. Here is where they needed to be. One thing Barron and I have discussed is where we will install our wheelchair ramps, and I have made that process much simpler by opening up this end of the porch.


Here is the plan. I screwed up the first diagonal I cut, as I thought might happen, but I had extra stock to work from for just that reason.

Nothing very exciting happened and I eventually ended up with this. After working in the blazing sun for too long you would think I'd have sense enough to quit but I also wanted to rebuild the front gate since I had everything set up for that sort of work and ended up making myself feel pretty lousy by the end of my labors. I am still recovering today. It didn't make it to 90 degrees but anything over 80 is pretty tough for me to take. The next stage is restoring the railing and cosmetic details.

Movies

I have found that foreign-made comedy or romantic-comedy films give a much better view of normal people's lives than a serious drama or other genre of film, so I sometimes watch one just for educational purposes. That was my motive for watching Anuvahood (2011), a British Urban Comedy. I had no idea what life was like in public housing projects with a mixed, primarily non-european population and wanted to see it in another context than the brutality and violence which would be required in a serious drama, knowing that a lighter tone would make it tolerable. It was entertaining and easy to follow even though, as I expected, I was unable to comprehend 3/4 of almost every sentence because of the cross-cultural dialect, accents and slang. It showed circumstances, characters and environments I would not otherwise see. For educational purposes, 6/10.

I then watched Mutiny in Outer Space - 1965, a low-budget Infected Space Station movie, also for educational purposes. Its most notable feature to me was the unusual resemblance to the 1968 Infected Space Station movie The Green Slime, particularly shots of the space station floating around draped in fungus. It was also notable for a complete lack of understanding of the nature and purpose of a spinning toroidal structure - they had magical artificial gravity so they were essentially riding a big merry go round through space, unnecessarily. I understand that at this point all that is left for me to see of SF films is the dregs and oddities. 5/10

I have also been seeing Chester Morris movies. I think I first noticed him opposite Joan Blondell in Blondie Johnson, a gorgeous hunk of man. He was a pretty good B movie actor who may be best known for the Boston Blackie movies, but they are usually pretty poor films and I enjoy seeing him in slightly better things, like the Pine-Thomas productions - the B-movie unit of Paramount, which have good production values, lots of familiar faces, and fairly good stories. I enjoyed No Hands on the Clock, Gambler's Choice, and Double Exposure as well as the early forensic investigation TV drama Diagnosis Unknown (1960) starring Patrick O'Neal, which seemed to me to be unusually well-written and acted under the circumstances. I also managed to locate a copy of the first episode of the 1967 TV series Coronet Blue, in which he briefly appears.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Wow, is it Sunday again? Man, I got some serious partying done last night. You know you're having a good time when you find yourself lying on the floor looking up at people asking if you are okay. Anyway, one of the benefits of modern webcomic technology is the ability to scan sketches and pencilling and work them up in photoshop. I see a lot of that when I am prowling around for SUNDAY WEBCOMIC entries, people who aren't super great at drawing but they really funk the art up in p-shop with all kinda blurs and way too much airbrush and highlighting that doesn't really work, and special effects that don't quite fit the flat scratchy drawings which never fully integrate into the picture. I just haven't seen an example pure enough to select for a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC until I found The Redeemers. I was really impressed by how many different photoshop filters and techniques the artist uses without altering the basic character of the drawing.

Since I have trained you to expect more than one SUNDAY WEBCOMIC per WEBCOMIC SUNDAY, you may also want to enjoy JJComics, A brief gag strip.