Deja vu and reset VI - it's here!

Way back last year, November 5th to be exact I mentioned Monster Fun on this blog, the comic Rebellion Publishing have decided to revive.

Well come Monday April 4th, guess what arrived!

In this Easter special, Frankie Stein manages to lose his own brain! Helly, the sweet-natured demon tries to help the Easter Bunny, but may have ruined the holiday foreverand the Leopard from Lime Street springs into action, investigating secrets from his past.

Sweeny Toddler will be up to some EGGS-TREMELY naughty behaviour!

The deal was simple: that Halloween special plus being revived aimed at actual children rather than retro adults although the latter will just lap it up from this April as a bi monthly.

They've got this right, the plots where contemporary strips referencing modern life such as streamed programming and cat cafés are there but are drawn more in the traditional comic strip form with just better colour and sharpness being printed in glossy paper unlike the newsprint we grew up on.

Traditional stories like Leopard from Lime Street retain their anachronistic pasts reflecting the eras they are set in.

There are quizzes competitions and draw your own bit for under 16's to send in and a fair number did from that Halloween special which shows they like a traditional plastic tat free comic.

Jolly fun, what?

Tumblr and Boy life

This week I'm looking at two things with a connection.

Firstly as most of you know, Tumblr for me started around April 2018 as an outgrowth from the original ASB site and from this blog although it would be a gross understatement to say I was pretty upset that that first Tumblr and those set up within that initial twenty month period are no longer with us.

With care and after much drama that I could do well without I still have accounts there and recently two things have come into being.

The first was you could pay away advertisements often at odds with your interests and gender too by either a monthly payment or a year subscription.

I'm as not keen on paying for things as the next boy but the reason Tumblr introduced advertising in 2012 was because it needed the money so apart from anything else that does give it a revenue stream and any business in the real world needs one.

The second thing was so much of that stuff just wasn't me so I opted to make a yearly payment being the cheapest option and that's working better.

It doesn't remove the sponsored stuff which in the ideal world I'd soon have as an opt in but it helps.

The other element is to do with how posts display on your Dashboard.

They are now rolling out a optional post size reducer so when scrolling long post don't take up large amounts of space but by tapping/clicking on expand tab you can see the whole if the post interests you.

That to me is sensible.

It's also Thirty Years since Calvin And Hobbes arrived on the cartoon strip scene.

Calvin and Hobbes follows the humorous antics of the title characters: Calvin, a precocious, mischievous and adventurous six-year-old boy; and Hobbes, his sardonic stuffed tiger. 

Set in the contemporary suburban United States, the strip depicts Calvin's frequent flights of fancy and friendship with Hobbes also examining Calvin's relationships with his long-suffering parents and with his classmates, especially his neighbour Susie Derkins. 

Hobbes' dual nature is a defining motif for the strip

You see to Calvin, Hobbes is a living anthropomorphic tiger, his best mate, while all the other characters see Hobbes as an inanimate stuffed toy. 

One of things I like about it  is although the series does not frequently mention specific political figures or contemporary events, it does explore broad issues like environmentalism, public education, philosophical quandaries and the flaws of opinion polls.

From a cartoon strip base, it get you to explore and question ideas and practises without preaching.

I follow two Tumblrs connected to this cartoon strip whose main character connects deeply with my understanding of boyhood.

The Black Gold of our past

Staffordshire has two coalfields, one from Cannock to West Bromwich in the Southern and a bit better off and the other here in the North circles Audley, Talke, Mow Cop and Biddulph and goes as far south as Fenton and yes the first three are very near my house.

Both were instrumental to the rapid economic and physical growth of both urban conurbations The Black Country with Cannock and broad Stoke On Trent/North Staffs area, practically a self contained city region because that coal made iron, glass and pottery production not just viable but most economic for firing kilns and furnaces supplying the UK and beyond.

Within living memory men would walk or bicycle in all weathers here to the local coal mines, coming back and we personally know of mining families.

Indeed one powerful and shocking memory of my Mum was seeing one "gentleman" walking back having called in at our local pub  having spent a good half of his wage on ale and bets, staggering blind drunk toward his his home to face the wrath of his wife.

In this area you'll see the preserved heads with winding gears dotted about and I did go as a boy in my teens down a mine which part of a then functioning mining museum just a few miles away which back in the day would of been one place you'd of ended up working at in some role or other.

A leprechaun and two discs

 Spring does indeed appear to making an appearance here with it warming up with the daffodills out along the main road here after sitting on a bench in the park with just a thinner jacket on with my shorts and grey socks enjoying the sun.

Time to play a couple of discs  starting with the all time early classic Harry Nilsson Nilsson Schmilsson album issued in 1971 came out on a Super Audio cd edition with just a print run of 2,500 world wide in October 2021.

This album, the title of which may escape you was a massive seller in that era and was the home of the #1 single Without You written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans of the Welsh group Badfinger.

Recently Mobile Fidelity Sound labs issued it's follow up.

Harry Nilsson's bold proclamation on the opening track to Son of Schmilsson immediately makes it evident the singer had no intention to repeat the approach of his commercial breakout, the preceding Nilsson Schmilsson – harbouring no desire to hold back on any front or advance any traditional notion of a career. 

The madcap album goes all out, delivering a wild ride infused with horror-movie effects, crass jokes, then-shocking profanity, snoring, and even a belch – strangeness that belies the fact it went gold and landed a Top 40 single in the form of "Spaceman." 

Both come as hybrid super audio cds meaning they will play on practically all cd players while offering the best sound on a dedicated super audio cd player and packaged as a mini lp.

Going one hundred and eighty degrees away from the his new audience didn't damage him!

Birthday and moving on

It's been a different week for reasons that would be obvious to anyone following the other blog and yet elements tie into things that have been a common theme.

Birthday was marked with presents including some cds, a couple of blu rays and books and I went out to  lunch on Tuesday pretty much as little me but toned done a little in a bit longer than usual grey shorts and argyle long socks but nonetheless a grey jumper, white shirt and off white and blue tie.

I had Cod, green garden peas and chips with the cod being in batter and a glass of orange which as the initiated know is normal given I don't do alcohol and am trying to drop off tea consumption.

You could say it was a fairly modern era boys birthday minus any kind of special venue but then covid did put pay to that for a good many in last two years too.

I've always liked animation and cartoons, buying certainly from the last years of the early two thousands a number of complete anime series of the shirt that tend to have twenty minute or so episodes.

There have been a number of streaming sites in existence for as long as the modern internet has been around, some authorized by the anime studio rights holders others not which can be useful for either trying out a series before buying or in some instances the commercial and geo-politics of licensing mean a physical release just isn't going to happen.

I have an account with one completely legal US based one which sometimes has problems around showing animes in a few territories since around two thousand and nine which was pretty handy and to which I actually have a annual membership of.

Rather like a few other places I joined in this era bits around my profile were muddled so recently I decided to renew chunks rather than starting entirely from scratch cos in fourteen odd years a lot does happen in peoples lives and it was obvious those people I had associated more with in its forum and clubs had moved on in life and so were not in any way active.

I also resumed watching the short animated feature Chi's Sweet Home which has episodes around the three to four minute part featuring the really cute and sweet cat.

It just felt right now my preference of profile description and avatar, confident in me.

Reflections two days before

However you look at this unparalleled period of rapid changes, reversals and general reversal of much we've taken for granted for well decades when it comes to travel, contact overseas or just the ability to see each other.

Sometimes that feeds into other things to such as how broken contact and rituals - as people we seem to just love them to varying degrees - can bring about fresh thoughts and changes.

For some people as awful as coping with the forever changing restrictions have been it's helped the shift out of relationships that just dragged them down.

With others it may be much less about being with those people so much as just what it is they like to do and present more as around them and when like me you're very much around the (adult) Little Boy area it may not be necessarily the most understood thing in a world that likes grown men and little boys very much apart and dressed very differently

From not exactly going far for me lead to thinking more about what I do wear especially more when I do go away looking at and trying things on as things started to improve from the mid to late Summer of last year.

At least one thing posted last November showed a newer part of how I might well look that I feel good in that fits around my perception of where along the continuum I slot in, liking short trousers and nearly always from a more adult as child angle where much of that adult world just doesn't apply.

Wearing my latest white lined grey short trousers with the blue banded turn over socks the decision not just to return to grey short trousers from longer karki almost Bermuda ones but to have my shorts taken right so proportionately the are as short as they were when I was in juniors just feels right for being stripped of anything remotely adult.

I reality I was that boy and I'm a zillion times better today for just being him.

You ain't going nowhere

 

I haven't really been very far in the last few days which meant I wasn't able to make much out of the more settled weather after the severe storms of the last week which on Sunday and Monday were genuinely frightening.

Trees were swaying and indeed in the woods a number of branches did fall and fairly substantial ones at that littering the trails with quite noticeable flooding too for good measure.

Thus I was reading things like this fortnights Match Of The Day magazine, the beano and playing indoors for most of the time.

So it was really disappointing to wake up just before four in the morning, then experience a most agonizing, horrendous pain in left calf muscle as it was "twanged", gritting your teeth as you felt like screaming and improvising at speed compression over it trying to get into a halfway comfortable position in bed.

When I eventually got up, it was a struggle to get dressed as I found the tightest most supporting pair of turn over top socks to wear before having several attempts to get upright and hobble in agony to the bathroom.

Then I found the stairs were too step to walk on without putting too much pressure on that calf so I ended up going down the stairs clutching my plushie in my grey three inch inside leg shorts feeling very little to get some brekkie sorted.

That was the point I realized I would need to keep movement to the minimum as getting about on your bottom is slow and literally a pain in the rear.

I'm feeling a bit better with it but I'll need to give it time to fully recover.