Another 24 Hour Comic Book Day has come and gone. This year I made a Tom Stoppard – inspired comic about Star Trek TOS from the perspective of the Redshirts. I didn’t like that I didn’t create my own original world for this one, but I did like telling the Redshirts’ story.
“Ensigns Massey and O’Hara are Dead”
And, similarly to how Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead works so well precisely because everybody knows Hamlet and is familiar with all the tropes, I didn’t have to establish the Star Trek tropes because it is assumed that everybody already knows them.
I also liked drawing the Redshirts as super huge beefy guys, because they do work the security detail after all!
This weekend, Doc and I went up to Sacramento for the Broken Strings Music Festival, and we decided to also camp at Folsom Lake SRA. Unsurprisingly the lake is really low right now. Like, really low.
This is what Folsom Lake looks like right now.
The sun-baked martian wasteland left behind in the lake bed was fun to explore, but perhaps not as fun as tubing around on a nice big lake.
The ocean is a desert with its life underground and a perfect disguise above
We still got to swim around in the American River, though. But let me tell you this: I am suspicious of fresh water. Like, ultra paranoid. Having grown up in and around oceans, I feel like swimming in fresh water can only ever lead to weird brain-eating amoebae or flesh-eating bacteria or blood sucking leeches or even blood-sucking fishes. This is what swimming in lakes and rivers means to me.
A piece of driftwood in the dried up lake bed of Folsom Lake.
I still swam around in the American River for an hour or two, though, and had a lot of fun. I wouldn’t shut up about leeches, though.
I also ended up taking the Leaf on a mighty journey:
111 miles each way. My original plan was to also go to Placerville for some climbing, but it was way too hot out there that climbing would have just been brutal and not fun, so Folsom was the end of the line for us this time. If we had gone to Placerville, that would have been ~136 miles each way.
On the way there we only had to fast-charge once, in Vacaville, because I charged the Leaf to 100% at home the night before and I also had access to level 2 charging in Sacramento while we dorked around there. Although I should mention that ~80% of the level 2 charging stations in Sac-town are in garages which are CLOSED on the weekend. Which is… frustrating. Pretty much everything in that town closes for the weekend, because a lot of the government workers prefer to live in the Bay Area and they take the train to Sacramento every day and it turns into a ghost town whenever they don’t commute in. A weird side effect of being the state’s capitol, I guess.
On the way home, however, I was unable to get the charge up to 100% at any point, so we had to charge twice: once in Davis and once in Vallejo. Oh, well. I had originally planned on using the level 2 charging to get it up to 100% for the ride home too, but alas we were running around so much doing other things that this didn’t really happen. Still it wasn’t too bad.
Welp, I finally took the plunge and upgraded my PC to Windows 10. I haven’t used it much yet, but so far I like it better than Windows 8. And I liked being able to upgrade it the same way I upgrade Ubuntu; for free over the internet without it messing up my directory structure that it took me years to cultivate. Even the desktop remained the same! I mean, just in case I pulled everything off the desktop except for stuff I didn’t care about, but all that desktop stuff I didn’t care about remained in its place.
As of yet, I can’t say much more about the operating system itself, other than it was the smoothest Windows upgrade I’ve ever done. All of the old Windows operating systems I had, I refused to upgrade until the machines running them straight up died, because I did not want to deal with the hassle. Man, I used Windows 95 FOREVER. It was actually kind of embarrassing.
And it only took Windows becoming a dwindling brand, desperate to remain relevant, to make them improve the upgrade experience.
I did actually like that cat riding a T-Rex with grabbers gif that they put out as Windows 10 promotional material, though. That was pretty cool.
