2014-08-25

Visit me at Southern VT Garlic and Herb Festival this weekend

My pal Madsahara & I will hawk our garlic-themed (& other) comics & art at the Trees & Hills booth this weekend at the 19th annual Southern Vermont Garlic and Herb Festival in Bennington, VT. I’ll of course have “Super Friendly Garlic” (in Square Dance #4), Pickle Vampire magnets, and “Midnight Snack” (in Square Dance #6 and Trick or Treat Comics #2)

Vampire Pickle magnet

August 30 & 31, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Camelot Village, 1545 Route 9, Bennington, VT

Admission is $5 per day or $8 for a two-day pass. Children 12 & under get in for $1.00.

2014-07-22

Jury-rigged Tent

Front of the tent

2014-07-17-2028a-jury-rigged-tent-550

I forgot to bring tent poles on a three day night camping trip last week; luckily my camping companions had more engineering acumen than I. After some futzing, they used too-short rain fly poles in place of the normal poles and some cord to suspend the back end of the tent from a tree trunk (we also put an odd short pole inside to prop the roof but I don’t know how much it helped). The resulting shelter looked weirder and had much less space than the normal dome shape, but it was enough to sleep in. Thank you Dan, Fardeen, Phayvanh, Randall, and Sarah for rigging it up!

Updates:

2014-06-23

Today I made basic navigation for the comics* in preparation for deactivating the Webcomic plugin, which is a step toward moving off of WordPress. They’re both lovely, but I want stop storing my stuff in a database and present as much of my site as possible as static HTML. I have a lot of backlogged and new plans for this site brewing; I also have some other obligations that take priority, but I’m giving myself permission to peck away at it a little.

*(which I should remove next time because it’s redundant right now)

2014-06-21

Downpower archives merged into the parent blog

Downpower was a secondary blog I maintained from late 2007 to mid 2008, a “journal chronicling the attempt” to “make my life better for the world”. The attempt and the blog were both underwhelming; the latter came to seven posts, which I’ve just realized are still online (I thought I’d taken the blog down). The WordPress installation is of course way out of date, which is a big no-no, so I’ve merged the posts and comments into my main blog, tagged them, and taken the standalone version off the Web. I hate linkrot, but I haven’t learned all the redirecting magic and I doubt it’ll affect anyone anyway, so as a stopgap here is a list of the posts and their old addresses:

  • Introduction (formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/11/07/introduction/)
  • STUFF (formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/11/14/stuff/)
  • Cutting Your Car Use (formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/11/28/cutting-your-car-use/)
  • In The Absence Of The Sacred (formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/12/05/in-the-absence-of-the-sacred/)
  • Doing the Laundry (formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/12/12/doing-the-laundry/)
  • Walden, and the dryer update (formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2008/01/02/walden-and-the-dryer-update/)
  • Off To A Bad Start (formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2008/01/16/off-to-a-bad-start/)
  • On Hiatus (formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2008/07/30/on-hiatus/)

There were also two pages of links:

(formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/local-links/)

(formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/general-links/)

And to round it all out, here’s a screenshot of how it looked:

The Downpower homepage

2014-06-18

Unexpectedly Finding the Library of the Lost

Zero #12: Library of the Lost minicomic (reprinted from Before Sleep #5)

I try to always have free comics like the Zero series on hand, both for promotional purposes and just because I like giving comics away. I also like leaving them in public places sometimes. The other day a person who found a copy of Library of the Lost pinned to the bulletin board at a bank in Milford, NH emailed me to say they’d enjoyed the comic and its “message-in-a-bottle distribution, which was like opening a Cracker Jack prize”. That feeling is one of the reasons I like leaving comics around, but what made this extra delightful to me is that I didn’t put that comic there. I guess one of the many people I gave a copy to at Broke must have decided to share with Milford’s banking public. The person who found it said they left it at the Milford library for others to enjoy. This all pleases me. :D