Derik Badman's Journal

Baby dove appeared later yesterday high up in the mostly cut up tree in our backyard. I guess he managed to fly well enough to get that high. There were also two adults feeding the babies yesterday. After weeks of there only being one adult around, I'm not sure if that's the mate returned from... just ignoring the babies... or if it's another adult just helping out (maybe one of the young from a previous year). Probably should do some research on doves. As the day went on the baby in the nest was moving around a lot more outside of his nest along the porch beams. This morning neither baby is to be seen on the porch.

███ and I primed our bedside table pieces yesterday. Next weekend we can paint and maybe we can get to assembling by Sunday. That would be exciting, as Lianne is going to be away for a long weekend at a weaving class in northern PA, so it would be a nice surprise for her to return to finally having someplace to put stuff next to the bed that isn't the floor.

Last night over dinner ███ was talking about someone he knows, describing him, "the thing about x is...", and I wondered: how do other people describe me? How different is my sense of my person in comparison to the me other people see? I feel like a lot of me is internal, I'm not always super outgoing or great at conversation, and so much of what goes on in my head just ends up staying there because I don't think anyone else is interested in hearing it. Is that part of the draw of journalling?

As part of my payment for writing the essay on Crepax for The Comics Journal online the other week I got a bunch of free books from Fantagraphics that showed up on Saturday. Yesterday I read Inés Estrada's Alienation, a near future science fiction dystopia (well, depending on how you read it I guess), about ubiquitous virtual reality, transhumanism, and, kind of, the singularity. I've not read much of her work before because her art style is not stylistically what attracts me, more cartoony, often simple and flat (visually speaking). She breaks out of that fairly often in this book with landscapes, VR UIs, and some of the VR worlds/programs shown. Those slight stylistic changes help make the "real" world of the story a bit different than the virtual one, but I think that could have been played up to better effect. The whole comic is printed in a dark ballpoint pen blue that makes everything a bit drab and grey. I feel like, based on the content, that making the VR scenes somehow less drab, more realistic, would have improved the real/VR divide visually and added to the theme. All in all it is an interesting read, projecting a future world that feels believable in many ways, but it also feels like it doesn't give enough attention to some of its elements. One of the characters (the partner of the protagonist) often acted in ways I didn't understand the motivation for, and the ending seemed a little rushed.