Friday afternoon and it’s hot and I’m still sick. I always get sick in May. I don’t know what it is but I always get sort of like a cold for a week or two and then it just goes away on it’s own. Right now I’m very much under the influence of generic cold liquidcaps and I’m soon to be heading back to bed for a while.
I had to mystery shop post offices today. It’s worth $12 a shop, but I just didn’t feel like driving today. Since it’s the start of Memorial Day weekend here in the states, the cops were EVERYWHERE today. I mean speed trap after speed trap. One tailed me as I went to a post office then went up the street, turned around, then came back with it’s lights flashing. Thank god it went to the highway and not after me lol.
I made a promise to Moopie not to work out when I’m sick again. Last night I did stepper and I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was so out of it. I went like 20 minutes instead of the 15 I was supposed to stop at. Beavis & Butthead were on TNN and I was just watching and walking and I my mind went blank. I’m so used to the routine now that it’s hard to break it even if I’m sick. I don’t know. But a promise is a promise and I’m going to keep it. Moopie knows far more about working out than I ever will so I kind of listen to her on this one. So no weights today …
Right now I’m trying a Vanilla Coke. It tastes like coke with Vanilla ice cream in it. I don’t think I could drink a six pack of the stuff, but you know, once and a while isn’t bad. It’s not as god awful as lemon Pepsi is, but it’s not going to be my drink of choice. I’m also eating Tostitos bite size corn chips. I bought some jalepeno cheddar dip to go with it and as soon as the dip is cold, I’m going to try to scare the cold out of my system. Hey it’s worked before. Honest. 🙂
I’m kinda fading away so I think I’ll go read my Charlie Brown treasury. It’s called, well, “Peanuts Treasury,” and it features strips from 1959-1967. It’s pretty cool. I think Peanuts is the only strip where a lot of the characters we associate with the strip actually weren’t born when the strip began. Linus, Lucy, and Sally, for example, were all born a couple of years after the strip started. So it’s funny to read the really old strips and watch them “grow up” into the characters we know and loved.
It’s so funny how things have changed though. Like Linus had glasses in the 60’s. But you only saw them when he wanted you to see them. Snoopy was a lot meaner in the early days, that’s for sure and Woodstock didn’t come around until … well the 70’s or so. LOL, I’m so lost in the 50 year history that was Peanuts.
I tried to explain all of this to Moops the other night but I don’t think anyone’s gonna get it. We’re at one year here at One Day at TechTV. For me, just having a little quasi-comic strip on the Internet is a really big deal and a year means a whole heck of a lot. Though sometimes I look at the greats and I just am lost in how they do it. How they keep their ideas fresh, especially guys like Charles Schulz, who had 50 years of work on the strip before he died. I’m just in awe of how they do it and I’m in awe of the character development and the rich histories that surround the strips. I’d really would love it to have 2 years here, or 3 years here, and develop a real history for these characters and hopefully have something down the line where you can see how they’ve changed and how much they’ve grown while (hopefully) still being worth it to read.
My immediate goal was to create one of these treasury type books, but in web form, so someone could spend an afternoon just reading silly stories about TechTV. I think we’re at something like 130 strips now and I’ve done that. Now my goal is going forward with these characters and seeing where they take us. I seriously don’t know. I have rough ideas for the next 12 strips and that’s about it. I have no clue. LOL.
Honestly, my best friend, Summer and Moops have both seen how I work this strip. I usually have a concept in mind but not a lot else. For example, the latest one with Martin and Erica. I knew I was bringing back the Laverne and Shirley gag and I knew that I wanted Martin to freak out. So I put Laverne and Shirley at the end of the strip. I found a picture of Martin working in the dress at the computer. I stuck in some lines about him trying to beat something being released to the web and it ended in the typical “NOOOOOOOOOO!” to set up for Laverne and Shirley. The rest of the strip? No clue.
Instead of figuring it out, I went to work on the strip that followed it (which is the Kate strip). I had that in mind since I had to write Kate out somehow. I went ahead and wrote that strip and actually uploaded it to the site before I went back to the strip before it.
For the Martin strip I remembered that we used to do a lot of gags about Erica being scary, so I went back to the old standards (Rerunning the Days at TechTV is the theme this season after all). I found some pictures of Erica talking and laid them out on her side with pictures of Martin reacting on the other side. Once I had the strip laid out, I simply started writing captions at random. I knew I had to explain where Martin got the skirt from and I needed to find something for him to freak out about so I hit the old standards … raiding the girl’s locker room. I’m such a guy. A few captions later, it all pretty much meshed and now Martin is having a freak out that leads to …
Oh you think I’m gonna tell you? 🙂
Sorry, you gotta keep reading to find out because I really don’t know myself. 🙂
On that note, sleep is calling. Cold pills here I come.
k9