It's 1:45 in the morning. I'm tired, I'm wired, and I couldn't sleep if I wanted to. I'm reliving 80's pop culture hell vicariously on the Net, browsing back issues of x-entertainment.com. I'm also MUDding in another window. I've got anime blaring away on a TV I can't see from here. It's hot in my room, I've got a fan blowing semi-cool air intermittently across my back. All the lights are on in my apartment. I'm hungry, but not for any food I know of. Drank too much soda today, topped off with a stupidly large dose of Code Red. I've got Golden Monkey tea aftertaste embedded in my taste buds. Code Red, wicked tea from Fujian in China, sugared beverages I can't begin to count, Sweet Tarts. . . I've got more stimulants in me now than most people have in a month, and I'm lethargic. Slowed down. Tired, but insomniac.

In a half-dead half-asleep pseudo-awake state; half hot, half cooled, eyes straining, body aching, mouth dried out, mind switching between memories of an 80's childhood to slaying monsters to Japanese mecha to food to the fabled paradise of sleep. . . My sole consolation is that I've nowhere to go tomorrow, nothing to do. No committments, no obligations to be anywhere. I can sleep in, let my body repair itself.

'Cause this can't be good for me, not this long. . .

. . . and all I got were these three holes in my gut!

(T-shirts coming soon.)

I wake up on Friday with this horrible, nerve rending pain in my stomach, and promptly down the first 3 medicines I can find. After noticing the marked lack of effect of said medicines (i.e. I still felt like an Alien was hatching in me and tearing its way out of my body), I went to the hopital where a thoroughly pleased doctor informed me that my appendix had to come out.

Apparently my appendix was having a hard time coping in my body, feeling constrained by the intestines and stuff that kept its creative spirit imprisoned; and it felt that it was time to move on to bigger and better things, like the dumpster the docs threw it in after slicing it out of me.

Good riddance, I suppose. On with life. Stinkin' pills. . .

Stot & Jeff. 'Nuff said.

No, wait a minute, perhaps I should explain. . .

I've got this temp job, where they set me up do some near-brainless work on a database doing data cleanup. Basically sit at a computer, type in a record's number, click through the same sequence of buttons each time, and wait for the system to validate that record or update it as needs be, and log any error messages that pop up. Not the most fulfilling task in the world, but hey, I'm getting paid good money for an easy job in a crummy economy. Who am I to complain?

Here's the thing: the computer takes 15-20 seconds each record to validate it and recalculate some numbers. Now this is no huge amount of waiting time, but I have about 400 records to go through. And after about the 5th time I have to wait 15 seconds, I'm DEAD BORED. Short attention span? Nope, 15 seconds is an eternity when you're not doing anything except waiting for it to be over.

Go ahead, try it. Sit in front of your computer, stare at the screen, and slowly count off 15 seconds. Now pause, move the mouse around a bit, then stop and count off another 15 seconds.

  . . .

See what I mean?

Now multiply that idleness by 400. It'll drive you to distraction.

Anyways, I was trying to find something to keep me occuppied, that I could do in increments of 15 seconds. All I had at my disposal was a pen and some sticky notes. Naturally, I started to doodle during processing times, in increments of 15 seconds. I indulged in some "random stick art", an excercise where you completely blank your mind, draw a line on a piece of paper, then continue drawing whatever seems like it should naturally follow. And thus, Stot and Jeffrey were born.

Jeff came first, after some intense experimentation with right angles started to look a bit like hair. One record I drew a head under the hair, and managed to get eyes drawn in time. I liked how it came out, and spent 6-8 records doing variations on this basic design. By pure chance, one of these variations came out with a certain distinct attitude about him; a little cynical, a little amused, a bit of contempt for the world at large. I threw some random sarcasm on the sticky note for dialogue, then thought up a comeback for it, and realized it would be stupid to have my (as yet unnamed) character talking to himself on this sticky note. He needed a sidekick; a noble compatriot; a witty comedic foil; a brilliant mind with which to communicate. What he got was Stot.

Stot came about much the same way as Jeff - hair first. Grabbed another sticky, drew a line, drew another line next to it, decided I liked the contrast between a character with right angles for hair and a character with 180 degree angles for hair, and the Character Soon To Be Known As Stot was born in 3 records. He joined Jeff on Jeff's note, delivered his line, and did such a dazzling job that I declined to crumple the note and throw it away with the rest.

(Here the narrative pauses dramatically to allow the audience to savor the moment of Stot and Jeff's creation.)

After such an illustrious, explosive beginning, the naming of the characters was rather anticlimatic. Quite simply, I wrote down the first names which came to me during my next 15 second break, which happened to be Stot and Ernest (what kind of a name is Stot? Still, it popped up, so I kept it). Next record, I randomly decided to change it to Stot and Jeffrey, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Irrelevant history, to be sure, and almost surely a bit of history that will (mercifully) be overlooked by the world at large, but 'tis history none the less.

So there you have it, two comic strip characters spawned of boredom, designed by capricious acts of geometry, and named through sheer randomness. One could argue that since the random outcomes were a result of my own mind, then my subconscious actually dictated their design, and thus Stot and Jeff are merely reflections of my deepest, innermost thoughts and desires. *shrugs* Perhaps that's true, but if it is, what does it say about the human psyche that the first thing it generates when left to its own devices (in my case) are 2 stick figure heads? Figure it out, write it down, maybe it'll get you a book deal.

So. . . I'll post a few Stot and Jeff comics a bit later, whenever I get around to it. Until then, I hope you've enjoyed this gripping tale of the creation of 2 comic strip characters you know absolutely nothing about.

I've just returned to the dorms from Spring Break. Found my computer still up and running - Win98 up 8 days straight without a reboot? Simply amazing! If I could just get my other HDD working, I'd jump into Linux. . .

Downloaded and ran Progress Quest - it's like an MMORPG, but with no user interaction; everything is done for you, and you read a summary of your conquests, monsters killed, inventory, quests completed, etc. It's been running for 3 hrs now, and I'm hooked; also I'm apparently a Lvl 5 Trans-Kobold, who recently attained the Bastard Lunatic class. Fitting in a sense, I wonder if I could get that on a business card. . .

Amazing what your mind will be amused with when you want to go to sleep, but you just can't.

On another interesting note, I left KaZaa running trying to download 12 things over the break (mostly e-books for Cisco certification). Came back, after 8 days only 2 had completed. What does that say about KaZaa? other users' connections? the state of the Internet? the universe in general?

If the universe can be extrapolated from something as small as a piece of fairy cake (re: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), what would it look like extrapolated from the accumulated downloads of everyone on KaZaa? No - too scary to contemplate - it would probably turn out to be composed of HOT TEEN ASIAN PORNO SEXXX mpg's and N'SYNC mp3's.

Hmmm. . . I just watched an hour of TV. Not the normal limited set of shows I usually watch - West Wing, ER, Law & Order (the first few seasons), assorted animes - but I just turned on the TV, hit a random channel, and watched an hour of pure crap. Now I'm remembering why I don't do that more often. This is the predominant form of entertainment in America? How on earth have we not been wiped off the map by someone with actual intelligence? All it would take is someone broadcasting on TV, for 24 straight hours, that it would be a great idea to go jump in the nearest ocean, and half of America would do it before anyone figured out what was up. The sad part is, half of the remaining half would figure out what happened and jump in also, just so they didn't miss out on the latest trend.

And the remnants would write endless books on what went wrong, and experts would flood CNN (after all the anchors drowned during "on location" shoots at the ocean's floor) with their charts, websites, and statistics explaining how this POSSIBLY could have happened, and there'd even be a story on it posted to the Slashdot front page, with a new "stupidity" icon made just for the event (finally, Troll-free comments due to massive Troll drownings!). And right about that time, the person who started the pirate broadcast would wake up from a long nap, mutter "Huh! It worked!", and go on to prove that P is equal to NP. At least then, everyone left would get it.

Garn, my Trans-Kobold Bastard Lunatic, is up to Lvl 6, and has managed to scrounge himself 190 Gold and a Longsword after completing quests to "Deliver this carrot", "Fetch me a Cookie", and "Exterminate the Gold Dragons".

I think that makes my life complete. . .