maybe i'm a little bit over my head

webcomics: like actual regular comics, only smart…

Mugendi — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:40:34 +0000

I’m not writing as much as I used to… I’m rehashing old stuff. I know, sad.
Originally did this for @bazanye‘s blog. And being as I am going through the worst writer’s block ever, I shall post it again…

Somewhere along the general evolution of mankind (or briefly after the creation of man, if you recently burned your copy of ‘A Brief History of Time’), someone in some art department decided that geek stuff is cool. The said art department person(s) went so far as calling the whole movement ‘geek chic’, which is not the girl at the office with the glasses and the Ugly Betty Season 2 clothes, because this chic is said with a sh.
Like ‘shut your mouth, I knew that’.

This destroyed the true nature of the geek, who could no longer hide behind the massive glasses and the social maladjustment and the ‘I <3 Star ~~Wars~~ Trek’ t shirt.
But the geek had one hidden weapon, secret code. Smartness in the guise of simple pictures of people, or people-ish objects talking in l33tspe4k, because there’s no fun in using regular vowels…
The really cool thing about webcomics is they have win. Yes, win is a noun, often paired with ‘epic’. Work with me here. And the opposite of win is fail. Logical.
So here’s a brief cut-and-run analysis of some random webcomics in no particular order…

a softer world

Photographs with typewriter text… Doesn’t get more emo than that. And it’s Canadian. Mainly consists of pictures of people and the equivalent of thought bubbles on an acid trip, devoid of inhibition. It has loads of dark humor. That aside, it has a way of making really weird puns that you laugh at for a while before you realize how creepy it actually is…

Dinosaur Comics

A hilarious comic, based on the conversations between a Tyrannosaurus Rex and assorted dinosaurs. All the panels are pretty much the same, but the killer is the nature of the stuff they talk about. The T Rex is generally smart, but in the “there’s a screw loose” way, so in the end his ideas just collapse under their own weight… That said, he does have some pretty interesting plans, friends and means of execution… And now we know what dinosaur small talk must have looked like…

Last Place Comics

A relatively recent discovery, this comic is disturbingly funny. It follows the writer (artist) Zach Cranor, as he does all sorts of things, like run for president, diss Mountain Dew, get hired as a director for ‘Oh Fuck: The Movie‘ and other random things… Guaranteed laughs, this one. And he throws in random characters as well, like Bitch Man and Burn Man and such…

xkcd

A hilarious combination of geek-centric stuff, like obscure math references, space references, obscure pop culture references and such. The people don’t have faces or names, but they are still epic funny.
One random thing that xkcd does is it takes things that geeks may go through (like awkward sexual tension and struggling to explain tech to non-tech people) and assorted situations of failure that are generally unfunny to the non-tech section of the population, like the shutting down of GeoCities…

Penny Arcade

Featuring Tycho (homage to Tycho Brahe) and Gabe (homage to someone… Didn’t want this to just sit there), Penny Arcade is a rather interesting webcomic.
It’s pretty silly, but it’s an interesting exploration of life from these two’s point of view. They’re essentially children in grown ups’ bodies, and they go through random things, like paying for virtual content and playing Dungeons and Dragons… You know, everyday problems…

–To be continued–

Pancakes, ready to eat…

Mugendi — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:34:26 +0000

2011: The Year That Was

Mugendi — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:48:50 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 60 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Merry Christmas

Mugendi — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 05:00:39 +0000

Nobody does Christmas quite like Kenyans. The festivities are quite an occasion. For the two odd weeks during which the ‘festive season proper’ occurs (keeping in mind that the carols and “Christmas sales” have been going on since November), life changes for a lot of people. For some, it means that the shops have odd, gyrating robot men encouraging them to spend money on things they didn’t need because prices have been slashed, for others it means that the boss will surprise them with a bonus, and for the lucky it means idling the hours away from some Coastal retreat somewhere, even though most of the time will be spent ‘retreating’ from the crowds of people that had exactly the same destination in mind…
Christmas is one of the very few times that Kenyans forget that money can only do so much, and they spend on all sorts of things, from gifts and clothes to liquor and parties.
Christmas in Kenya is something beyond special. Some time in the 90s, Christmas meant eating chapati, pilau and chicken, delicacies reserved for the most special of special occasions, seeing family from Lord Knows Where at specially arranged gatherings, dressing up in new clothes and showing off to anyone who cared. It was then when trees would be cut and decorated with cotton wool (tropical ‘snow’) and shiny garlands, along with lights and ‘fruits’. The whole point was to faithfully recreate the family scenes and presents that were shown on TV, while raising the holiday spirits for everyone involved.
At the core of Christmas is family. The whole point of the holidays is to get people together so that they can celebrate something shared, something of value, and to look forward to the new year.
Merry Christmas everyone, and may joy, peace and blessings be yours this festive season.

so now

Mugendi — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:10:04 +0000

The thing with being human, having a heart, is that you end up gathering a lot of baggage on the way, trying to get over the past without making a mess of the future. I want to change the past. To go back to the forks in the road where I took the road not taken (poetry reference win) and take the road that’s taken more. Having taken a course with such promise, only to realize that I would end up doing something completely unrelated at work, having blown off a unit in school that I could have followed up on and made something of, having a bagful of what-ifs that dig deeper and deeper into my back as I carry them along, picking more along the way…
I want a time machine to go back in time with, bearing the knowledge that I have now, changing things, well aware that I will not be the same person.
I want to be free of guilt. I want a blank slate. But this slate has been painted on. Nothing can be written on without crossing lines that have been written before.
Maybe I’m just taking on more loads than I can handle. Not maybe, definitely. That’s what I’m doing.
I could just change, instead of struggling with an ever blunter pencil.
Sharpener… Nice allusion.
I sharpen my pencil and draw some more, make plans to ease myself out of the mess I have fallen into, instead of picturing how I shall fall asleep inside it and drown.
Dark imaginings.
But I have the light within myself to counter it.
Counter it I shall.

snakeskin

Mugendi — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:48:16 +0000

The snake is a fascinating creature… Every so often it sheds its skin and gets a chance to grow. Moulting, they call it. And it’s a confusing time for the snake. Pretty much everything it knows ceases to exist. Its eyes get clouded over and it can’t see, it has to lie still for extended periods of time, making it exceptionally vulnerable, it pretty much just shuts down. It doesn’t have an option.
Then comes the transformation. The skin sloughs off, and the snake has a flawless blank canvas to work on. old scars are gone, while the senses that it had lost come back. Restored, the snake has to grow as fast and as much as it can before the new skin hardens in place.

Milos, by Anis Mojgani

Mugendi — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:53:14 +0000

Let us take a sack of spray paint and spray paint over the paintings.
Let dance through Paris;
kiss in the shadow of the Louvre,
crawl inside its windows,
scroll manifesto’s over its canvas’,
write Morse code on the sculptors,
roll a sleeping bag on the floors to sleep inside of, tell one another a story by flashlight,
unearth everything from before,
bury each other inside the other,
feed grapes to the ants,
light fireworks in the fists of sleeping kings; kill a monarch.
Break back outside and find a world to do all these same things to;
up and upon against break the bricks, climb over them,
and when the sirens scream,
laugh aloud,hold my hand and run fast.
Run through the streets with me with a bunch of bottles,
a bucket of gasoline,
a mouthful of matches,
a pocket full of paintings and fresh faced batch of policemen to chase the fires we are lighting,
laugh on a shoulder of gold.
And i thought that the museums where cemeteries where the dead paid the wall to hold what we had so that we could walk through what we once were,
And children take their sculls to turn into gardens,
to pluck for forefathers and farther stars,
that on some nights resemble an armless mother praying for her arms to return.
Every tooth that we tear from our jaw to fling at the black gloved riot soldiers as another shadow that we are trying to lose.
Let every giggle be filled with lust; let us laugh this night away
I could save me by having my mouth around you,
and i will hold you afterwards like you were the pulpit and I was the sky,
and this love that danced between that hardness was a telephone line of holiness that those two things spoke through.
Take me into your heart like I was a saint,
and you were a face of forgiveness blooming in a valley destined to sink further.
Be a river with me;
Be the storm;
the bend in the path;
the front porch; the heat in the south;
be a boot full of banjo strings;
a fist full of written songs;
a mouthful of chocolate dust.
When they come to take us,
stab them between the eyes.
Do not take your hand from around mine.
Make a fist with the other, and punch spines like guilds, spit, sweat, kiss them like a grandmother. How will open mouthed terror love filled?
And when they come to cut out hair and ask to hear penance come from inside us,
say with me loud and trembling,
but loud and clear that:
“I have already emptied myself. I kissed regret goodbye, took the hands of another backwards angel, and rode backwards into the rain”
When the hangman of morrow comes to hang the sun in its daily execution say this with me: “‘Sarah we are apples, our love is an apple; I’m unbuttoning my shirt; painting a circle over my heart, please, just shoot straight.”

I remain skeptical

Mugendi — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:30:57 +0000

These are troubled times, if the news is to be believed. Traditional, safe systems are giving way to rapid, hard-core change. The things that were true for Generation X are not necessarily true for Generation Y. No longer will we look to the things that are and see a future beyond the next couple of days. The old rot is out, the rush of the new is in.
But are we throwing the baby out with the bath water?
Fine, Egypt and Tunisia show that there is no future in dictatorship, that people power backed by a change in how people get their information has led to a systematic enlightenment… But the key component, the people involved, would they have done what they did if they didn’t have the sophistication of social media behind them? Did the people that spearheaded the revolution and the Arab Spring know that they were just creating space for a cruel game of musical chairs?
There has been a lot of speculation that the revolutions will spread to other countries with similar situations outside the Arab world, but this is yet to happen. That said, there have been several follow-up events, like Occupy Wall Street, where protestors have occupied a park in downtown New York, in an attempt undo the system of wrongs that is the US economy…
But until I see a change that is long-term, sustainable and democratic, I remain skeptical.

the great social (book) experiment

Mugendi — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:20:31 +0000

Books are amazing.
They have the ability to bring people together in very interesting ways.
I attended the 2011 StoryMoja Hay festival, where I met the people behind ‘Pods Must be Crazy‘, a social experiment/book club that collects books and encourages people to leave them in public places for others to find and read.

Pmbc library

View more presentations from pmbclibrary

The whole point, first of all, is to make it a habit for people to read books, and as soon as they are done, they leave them in public places for others to find, and (hopefully) read and leave in another public place. The books have little tracking forms in them, where people write where they found the books.
Granted the titles available were kinda hard to read (like ‘The Children’s Encyclopedia’), but with luck, and the addition of books that are sitting in people’s houses gathering dust, the collection will grow larger and more varied.
In a rather interesting twist, I got Landed Gently, a crime thriller, which I traded for Hamlet, and that is what I’m reading now.

Hopefully I shall find a book or two after I finish with mine and leave it somewhere random.

do you remember the time?

Mugendi — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 15:45:15 +0000

This comes a while after a post about some of the things I did and believed in when I was a child.
Would you want to be a child again?
The problem with life is we all start young. So much for intelligent design. Like we work our way through it, getting more and more wisdom, some of which we could have used beforehand, but then again it’s the nature of life to save the important lessons for later.

Childhood is a generally turbulent time. there is so much to learn, so much to get right, so much that is, conversely, gotten wrong, leading to punishment, and if you’re lucky, a life lesson. Along with that, you get scars, a potent reminder of when you fell.
But you know where and when you’re going to fall. Would you do it differently? Perhaps. Then you would deny yourself some of the lessons that you learned as a result of that experience. Maybe you become a changed person, so much so that you don’t recognize yourself.
Therein lies the irony. If you could travel back in time and change yourself too much, you become someone else. If you change too little and you will suffer twice the fate.
Truth is, you are already changing your future based on what you are doing now. Forget those momentous gestures that you think will drastically change the future into some weird, wild, unrecognizable tangle of stuff… But maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Forks in the road should not leave worries about roads not taken. They lead down increasingly complex expressions of probability. They are, in a way, the first step in the journey of a thousand miles. They have their own consequences that you may not know at that moment, but when you realize what exactly is going on, it all fits…
Don’t be afraid of the future, instead work on your present. Make it the best present you can, and the future will take care of itself.