An A-Mu-sing Situation

Happy Halloween! I’ve managed to be late to everywhere, and Halloween’s one of them too. At least it’s not yet December!

October’s not my favourite month. I’ve been skipping film club all month because I’m not very fond of horror films. Half the time I find stuff cheesy, the other half of the time it gets me thinking, but a little too much. It’s not like I’m afraid or anything, I just value my good night’s sleep. I’m a comp sci student at uni, there’s horror abound and I don’t feel a particular dearth!

Go ahead and laugh, I’ve got a very late comeback. Late. Haha. Halloween pun.

This should knock your socks off if you’ve had to sit through statistics/maths/physics or just generally want to be a-mu-sed.

Mu is the mean in statistics, the refractive index and coefficient of friction in physics, micro- units in measurement (10⁻⁶ anythings), just a fancy variable to impress your non-math friends, or to give your math friends nightmares.

I did a quick search to see if there was anything I missed, and the answer was a loud, resounding yes.

Mu stands for a lot of things, even within the same field, there’s an impressive list on Wikipedia!

Well. Happy late Halloween. Wooo, wooo.

Applications

After months of filling forms, your doctor’s appointment will begin to read like your latest college application.

Name: Mr. James Owen
Age: 18 years old
Sex: Male
Date of appointment: Freshman, undergraduate, 2019-20
Reason for visit: Ever since I was a young child, I have wanted to visit the doctor. This selfless man with the white coat and the stethoscope asking me to take a seat as a four-year old on Christmas morning with a Thomas the Tank Engine play-set stuck in my mouth, shoved in with Thomas and a few of his mates intact (or maybe not) in pure excitement of the sort only a four-year old high on Nesquick on Christmas morning could be, I was enraptured by this man and his love for his art, and the enigmatic pearls of wisdom he occasionally sprouted.
He spoke seldom, and when he did, it almost wasn’t ordinary human English.
“Aaaah”, he said, and while that should have made no sense at all, somehow, I understood the man. His command over his subjects was complete, his composure and dignified mannerisms subtle, yet screaming.
He nodded ever so slightly and passed me an ancient puzzle, a few scratches on a paper. Once again, while none of this made any sense to me, mum seemed to understand, he was universal; she nodded, although I felt her body relax for some reason, as in defeat.
I—

‘Oh shit, I think I’m close to the word limit, I gotta end this!’

*scratch, scratch*
“—That incident left a very deep impression on my younger self, and for the last fifteen years, I have only had one thought every night that I go to bed: I would like to study medicine at Harvard.”

‘There we are, now we just sit and await that call.’

Ten minutes later, a nurse walks out holding a clip pad and a wearing a concerned expression.

‘Mr. James Owen?’
‘Yup, that’ll be me. Tell me, did I make it?!’
‘Mr. Owen, it’s alright, I’d like you to come with me.’
‘Definitely!’
…
‘Nurse, where are we headed?’
‘We read your profile, James, and there may be a slight problem,’
‘Oh dear! Would you need an additional portfolio? Recommendations? My thesis from summer research?’
‘No Mr. James, you’re really sick, and just to make sure you’re not a hazard to yourself or anyone around you, we want a little check up.’
‘Nurse, you must have made a mistake, I’m perfectly fine! Take a look at my athletics! I played for Junior Varsity, I’m very fit indeed!’
‘Don’t worry kiddo. It’ll all be okay.’
‘No, no, what does that mean? I’m perfectly fine, I told you, I’m not crazy! Are you rejecting me?!’
Nurse smiles sweetly
‘We only wish the best to you now, and in all your future endeavours. Come with me.’
‘What?! Nooooooooo!!’

Social

Sometimes, you just have nothing to say. I’ve often had nothing to say, I’ve just hung around wondering how people talk so much.

Then they turn and hit you with the s-bomb. You’re so silent!

Yes, well, if all you can talk about is the last wedding you all were at and all the food you ate there, there is no way in a million lives I can contribute to that chatter.

I’ve realised of late that my way of coping with this, anticipating that dreaded blow, has been verbal diarrhoea: oh you wanna talk food? Allow me to divert and rant about how spicy this was, and then hijack the conversation and start talking about the history of spices and why all countries in the world wanted to set sail for India back in the set sail times (hint: thé answer is spices). Then I plan to dart and run away before you can throw any kind of bomb at me. I’m out.

Or you can be nice and give me the wifi password and we can avoid this whole mess. Keep me leashed, I guess, if you value your sanity.

And yeah, of course you’ll probably end up in one of my comics. That’s the sole reason why artists exist. We love annoying you.

Life of the Party

To be honest, I’m probably more of a panel number two. Who wants to deal with real people anyway, right?

Wait, you’re telling me they exist and I’m hurting their feelings? What?

Anyway, there are probably even more stereotypes, but I only get so many square inches of napkin.

You ever sit around wondering how on earth could anyone be enthusiastic about something as dull as a “reunion” with people you mostly don’t know? Or rather, people who ask you if you remember them but you could swear you’ve never met them in your life—but of course you remember them don’t you? You met when you were two years old!

Well, call me a silver-liner, but here’s what I just realised: reunions, or any gathering with a lot of people, are happy hunting grounds for material. So much material. And so here’s the outcome: new material!

What other stereotypes have you seen at gatherings? (Yes, you’ve been to one and had to stay for five hours, don’t hide it. And you observed too. You were too bored, so spill.) Did you run into my characters? And were you the life of the party, or me?

I Got Dragged Back Here. Thanks.

Alright guys, suit yourselves. Look who’s back here, especially when I said I wouldn’t do this here. I’m around kids quite a bit these days—kids of every kind, including a little pupper—so I’m kind of used to dealing with people putting their foot down here and around. The only way to win is to give them what they want, while getting what you want. Subtle. An art. A master move.

And so I’m back to posting these here.

I suppose most of you guys are more familiar with this blog, and I’m too lazy a bean to update you guys with links to every comic I post over there (FYI if you actually are suddenly in this weird position where you’re craving napkin comics, head over to Origin of the Pitchforks, in spite of the name, I promise you the site doesn’t bite. It’s actually quite a pretty blue colour. That came about after precisely four hours of a CSS colour code nightmare. It’s pretty) so the comics have come home.

Don’t you cheer in that corner, you’re promoting anti-lazy behaviour. Boo.

Anyway, speaking of lazy, here’s a lazy Sunday morning comic, because I don’t get to read the newspaper on most other days now.
What do you think of it? Would you have spent any time looking at that dashing Lolex model? I imagine he’d be a tad bit disappointed if you didn’t.

 

I’m Bad At Promises

First up, I gotta say I try.

But I’m also quite a heat of the moment sort of a person, especially when things happen after 11 PM. Which means, for all the stories I string about being up till 3, I’m there, but I’m really not.

My friend and I have a theory that after 11:30 PM, my alter ego takes over. And after some inspection, we’ve come to realise that my alter ego is in fact a monocle-wearing, Fedora-tipping, moustache-sporting, English journalist called James. 

Too bad half my best work seems to come after 12 AM. 

So I’d promised comics twice a week, and now I’ve put out more. Feast, dear readers! (Actually, I don’t really recommend eating while you’re reading comics. I’ve done that with my Spider-Man comics (with a hyphen, as the guy himself has said!). It doesn’t end well either for your food, or for the mag.)

Here’s one and here’s the second. 

To be fair, the last one isn’t really a comic, so you can cut me some slack. If you actually like the comics and would want to consider it one, then you’re rare, hurrah for more comics!

New Comic, Everyone!

No, I don’t think I need to do this either, but it’s 12:10 AM, and I’m feeling weirdly restless, and have a final that I’m currently taking a break from, and feel the need to justify in the form of some concrete output, and hence you, poor reader, may just have to bear the brunt of my anxiety and live through yet another post.

Well, I’m keeping my word about updating the comics regularly. And so here’s the next one, albeit on a much nicer looking blog. This blog remains a black background, and majorly just because I’m adamant about that. As a matter of fact, my obsession with dark backgrounds, as clearly influenced by the fact that I’m pretty much a computer science stereotype with the penchant for coding on dark backgrounds, has kind of spilled into my new blog as well. As of twenty-four hours ago, it was a clean, pristine, cold, spacious white. Now it’s dark blue, but a very comfortable dark blue indeed, or that’s my opinion anyway. The cool thing is that while the background is blue, the text and the comic are still on a white background, so I found a good loophole right there. Everybody wins!

Do let me know what you think of the new blog though! It’s kind of shiny and new right now, and I’m eager to see what I end up doing with it. Hope you are too!

There’s Change A-Comin’

Hi

I’ve picked possibly the absolute, singularly worst time of ever to decide to do this, but I’ve decided to do this, so I’ll say it here. 

I’ve been drawing a lot of comics of late. My current record stands at 7 in 24 hours. 

Of course, as you can probably guess, I have had a math exam recently. My inspiration to do everything that’s not math peaks around math exam time. 

To put that mathematically, we hit a local maximum on the inspiration function around the input time “math exam period”. 

Some of you have probably seen a few of my works as well in the past week, and in general the response seems pretty positive; I’m impressed someone’s reading my scribbles on a tissue paper, but hey, I have this ego of mine and I’m gonna assume you liked it. 

Just because. 

So I’m going to try and make a bit of a habit of this. 

I’m going to try and make the comics a biweekly thing, and while I love being able to use this ambiguous statement to hide under a rock uninspired and lazy for two weeks before coming out of my cave with a comic, I’ll clarify here that I mean the twice-a-week sort of biweekly. 

At least, I’ll try to mean that. 

Some weeks if I can, I’ll try to push out three. I haven’t decided on the days yet, but let’s work this through elimination. 

Peeking at my exam schedule, I have all my tests on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That counts out all days beginning with a T (and my lazy alter ego yells, “Tuesday, Thursday, today and tomorrow!” Shoulda done this yesterday.) 

So maybe Mondays and Thursdays. I don’t know, I have no idea how my schedule will look in two weeks time, or if I may sneak back here at 4 AM and try to silently delete this post and wonder, in all my exhaustion, what on Earth I was thinking when I wrote this up. 

But for now, I’ll try to keep it to this!

I have a new blog I had to make for my portfolios, and it actually is a little friendlier to centred images than my comfy black background baby blog here, so I’ll post them there, but will put out links to there on this blog because everyone’s even lazier than I am. 

So I will try my best, I will see you there this Thursday! (Glances nervously at watch and realises she has exactly three days to get her act together)

The (currently gaping wide as an empty galaxy) brand new baby blog can be found here: https://www.originofthepitchforks.wordpress.com and if you don’t like the name, fight me, I like it!

Life To Its Fullest

This one’s admittedly a little lo-fi, but you have to understand, I’m a computer scientist, not an artist! (Walks away clutching back)

Also yes, the title’s ironic. And the irony’s a cover up for my absolute lack of decisiveness when it comes to deciding what a good title could be. Do understand I’m pathetic at titles. We’ve gotten to a point where I’ll openly admit it. Readily admit it. Our lot isn’t meant to be too creative, our only goal in life is to sleep, please.

Thanks?

Exhaustion

Finals are exhausting. In every possible way.