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By Tgreen, March 21, 2011 11:19 pm

25 years ago next week, during my last semester as a senior in high school, I created a comic strip for my friends. Sgt. Suarez and his Howling Commandos was poorly drawn, crudely lettered, and barely plotted, with a title that was a huge copyright violation all by itself. It was a mix of action and comedy designed to make fun of my classmates while kind of commenting on what was going on in the world at the time. Then final product wasn’t anything great, but the period of April-June 1986 is one of those crazy, ultra-creative periods of my life, and I’m happy with what I produced back then, eye-straining artwork and all.

The reason I’m thinking about this strip now, and writing about it here in this blog, is because of the massive case of deja vu I had when I realized this was its 25th anniversary. As I mentioned, the strip included current events in between the bad jokes at my friends’ expense. And two 1986 events that got major play in the strip were the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the bombings of Libya. And this week, as I contemplate a 25-year-old comic strip, what’s dominating the news? A nuclear disaster in Japan and the bombing of Libya. The more things change, huh?

Near as I can recall, in the comic strip an invasion of Libya accidentally led to a war with Canada, and somewhere in the middle of that the title character gains some sort of super power after being involved in a nuclear accident. Hey, I said it was barely plotted, and it’s probably been at least a decade since I read the damn thing. But nuclear disaster and Libya were definitely in there.

Later this week I’m gonna have to dig out the old strips and read them so I can see how all of this is gonna work out. I could scan some of them in and post them, but they’re so bad looking I’m not sure I should. And considering some of the stuff I’ve been willing to share with the world, that’s gotta tell you how bad these really must be. And yet they unknowingly offered a peek at the future, so that should count for something.

If only I could match that 1986 level of creativity and work in 2011. Then I’d have something.

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By Tgreen, March 17, 2011 12:53 am

Just a reminder, we’re coming up on the two days you are absolutely, positively, under no circumstances allowed to call out sick. Do you even have to ask why? First up, we’ve got St. Patrick’s Day on the 17th. Call out sick then and everyone you work with is gonna know you’re passed out on some bar, open tap crammed in your mouth.

I mean, we all know you’re the type who would invent an entire adopted family if it provided you with some new family members you could kill off when you want some time to attend their fake funeral. So it’s not a stretch to assume that when you say you’ve got some kind of bug on the 17th, you really mean the drinking bug. And your plan to eliminate this bug is to drown it repeatedly with Jameson’s and Guinness. Your fake cough, while impressively authentic-sounding, fools no one.

And if the 17th is bad, the 18th is worse. Call out on the 18th, even if you legitimately have coughed out a lung, tripped over it, fallen down the stairs and suffered two concussions and a ruptured spleen, and everyone thinks you can’t hold your liquor.

So be careful over the next two days. Your reputation is at stake, and considering what you did at the office Christmas party after totally ignoring my advice about that, it’s not like you have a whole lot of reputation left in the first place. Think it’s annoying when your coworkers think back to that night and call you the “Millimeter Monster”? Call out on Friday and see what happens.

See you in the office.

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By Tgreen, March 13, 2011 5:03 pm

I used to work at a place called The Voyager Company back in the mid-90s. We made CD-ROMs (remember those) back when CD-ROMs looked like they might be the future, at least for a little while. The place closed down in 1997, gave me a severance check I used to buy my first Jeep, and that was the end of that. Here’s a clip from an astrology CD we made:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzTI-2emGAQ

Okay, so maybe it’s not such a huge mystery why the place went under. Or maybe it still is. I worked there for about two and a half years, testing software, managing the group of testers, and maintaining the testing “lab”, which was basically a couple of long tables piled with several out-of-date computers. We did make some cool stuff along the way, and any job that forced me to watch Spinal Tap, Robocop and A Night to Remember multiple times as part of my regular duties couldn’t be all bad.

The problem was, or my problem was, anyway, no matter how interesting a job might look to an outsider, eventually the people on the inside are gonna be sick of it. Do the same interesting tasks, or look at the same interesting thing, every day and it’s gonna wear you down. At least I have to believe that or else I’ve got to take responsibility for how most all of my jobs have ended. But really, could you look at this every day for a couple of months and not go just a little insane:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUQN98dKfuE

The only reason I’m even thinking about this old job is because I realized recently how much it contrasts to the job I’m doing now. On the surface, the jobs look the same. They’ve got the same title and fairly similar job descriptions. But the main difference is that at Voyager, I was mostly helping artists make their art work on new technology. At my current job, well, I’m not. We won’t get into who I’m helping or what I’m helping them do, but there’s not a whole lot of art going on.

As I try to squeeze some form of creative activity into whatever time is left over after work is done, I find myself thinking more about jobs I had where I got to do the creative work, or jobs like at Voyager where at least I was able to contribute in some way to someone else’s creative works. I have a feeling this will all contribute to whatever decisions I make when it’s time to move on to the next thing. Assuming the economy allows for such thinking and doesn’t, as it does now, force everyone to take whatever they can get and be thankful they’ve got it. But yeah, when I watch a clip like the one below, and recall the crazy days and nights trying to force the technology to do what the art demanded of it, and ultimately succeeding, it makes, for example, banner ads feel a little lame:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPYOSLqN5Ns

That clips is from Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel. I worked on the Mac version of it my first day at Voyager. A couple of years later when we wrapped the Windows version, on the spur of the moment I decided it should be my last day. I stayed because it was raining out and I wouldn’t have had anything fun to do in the rain. This was seriously my thinking on the matter that day. And that thinking reminds me not to get too nostalgic over the Voyager job, or any other job I ever had, because no matter how good they might look in the rearview mirror, there wasn’t a single job I didn’t spend some time trying to figure out how to bust the hell out of at some point.

But hey, Voyager folks, don’t think I hated the place. I didn’t. You were all crazy talented and I consider myself lucky to have worked with you as long as I did. I sure can’t say that about some places I’ve been. Time to leave the mid-90s back where I found them as I contemplate my next move.

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By Tgreen, March 12, 2011 2:13 am

Yes, I know I should’ve posted this 2 weeks ago, but I was busy. So busy that I couldn’t take 5 minutes to slap together a blog post? Perhaps. So let’s not waste another moment. Here’s the deal. I’ve got a story, Cog in the Spring 2011 issue of The First Line. Until March 13, you can get a free PDF download of the issue. So click here and look for the Free Issue link. You’ll get a free PDF that has my story and several other fine pieces of fiction. And if you get there after March 13, you can buy the PDF, or a hard copy of the issue, and not only will you be entertained, but you’ll be giving some nice folks a couple of bucks. You can’t lose.

And to give you an idea of what you’re getting into, here are the first 2 paragraphs of my story:

Sam was a loyal employee. This wasn’t saying too much in an age when a loyal employee was mostly one who didn’t steal office supplies or badmouth the company on Twitter every other day. Still, such employees were getting harder to find in an age when a loyal employer was one who didn’t lay off half the staff every other month. Sam realized that for many it was all a game now, with some of his coworkers trying to screw the company before the company screwed them, but Sam didn’t play that game.

For one thing, he didn’t have time. His role as lowly cog in the great Transglobal Endeavours machine kept him busy for nearly 50 hours a week. He constantly referred to himself as a lowly cog, but in truth he’d worked at Transglobal Endeavours just shy of 5 years now and had officially figured out a long time ago that his entire division, and possibly the entire company, was made up of nothing but lowly cogs. He often wondered if it was appropriate to refer to anyone as lowly if everyone was lowly. He didn’t know what he was, really, and so he said cog because it was somehow comforting.

Wanna see the rest? Head on over to The First Line and get yourself some short stories. Thanks for stopping by.