Alex Heberling

I’m excited to announce that I’m now accepting art commissions.  Prices start at just $15, and if you’d like more information, please head on over to the commissions page of my website.

Instead of finishing my Connecticon post, I have some thoughts on buses.

Firstly, there’s a guy I’ve come to call Crazy Bus Guy.  The first time I encountered him was at the bus stop that’s right outside my window, when I was on my way to pick up my car from the mechanic the last time it pooped out on me.  He seemed to be muttering to himself and pacing around the sidewalk, and said “How ya doing?” when I first walked up next to him, then muttered and paced some more.  Then asked “How ya doing?” again.  When the bus actually came, he rode it just one stop forward, just around the corner from my building, and got off.

In the next weeks, I saw him periodically from my apartment at the bus stop, pacing and muttering, and even spotted him on one of the other routes I periodically ride.  Just yesterday he was on my bus ride home from work, and since it was crowded, I ended up sitting near him, and actually heard some of his muttering.  He was easily hitting 15 “fucks” per minute.  Gotta love the crazy bus people.  Aother female rider might have been creeped out by all his muttered ranting and swearing, I think the fact that I already knew he was just a crazy bus guy helped me ignore him.

On to my other thoughts on buses.

Around a month or more ago, I saw an article on bus-riding ettiquette in the Dispatch that I wish I could’ve embellished.  It’s a pet peeve of mine when people exit the front doors of the bus, since the buses I’ve known all my life prefer that passengers exit the back door.  Even if I’m sitting in the front of the bus (I prefer the back, specifically the first forward-facing seat after the rear doors or the corner seats in the very last row) I’ll exit the back unless it’s crowded and/or more sensical to go out the front.

I always wonder if it’s rude or dehumanizing to pull the cord to signal a stop if I’m the only passenger on the bus.  Would it be politer to ask the driver to stop myself, or does the driver not care?  Or do they really even notice that I’m the only person riding?  Being a decorated veteran of the service industry, I think about these things a lot, and just want to do what’s nicest for the drivers.

There’s a ton of construction going on involving sewers in the roads around my apartment building.  About two weeks ago, the street right in front of my regular bus stop was blocked off, and the driver asked me to go to the next forward stop until it cleared up.  (Which I’m doing.)  My return trip is also affected because when I disembark after coming home from work, I can’t cross the street for about a block in either direction, since the crosswalk is closed and the construction area has been slowly expanding as they make progress.  So I’ve been going in bigger and bigger circles of detours just to get home, as well.  I want my bus stop back!

Not too long ago, in the course of my work at the CRL, I scanned many pages of La Baïonnette, a French magazine from the first World War.  It was apparently a much more political publication than what I grasped while flipping through the pages looking for my next scanning victim, though I did tend to see “La Guerre” quite a bit in the titles of things.  I got the impression that it was just a really cool illustration magazine, especially since the majority of the pictures I scanned were of voluptuous French women sporting the fashions of the day.  (Much of which I will take advantage of for future costume designs in my comics.)  The magazine had many beautiful illustrations, but four images in the collection stuck out to me:

Observe: In all four images there is a couple in a restaurant consisting of a stylish young woman and an apparently older monsieur of average looks.  The woman is sitting quite primly beside her date, applying powder from a compact in two of the images, while the man appears to be having some kind of altercation with a waiter while looking at the menu.

There seems to be a meme here, but since I can’t read French, the images are taken completely out of context for me, and I just have to puzzle and puzzle over them.

(Also, I have a theory that illustrators only draw tableclothes because they’d have to draw people’s legs and such underneath them otherwise.  Ingenius.)

There was another impromptu hash today that was particularly close to where I live.  It was in a neighborhood in Upper Arlington in my home graticule of 40N, 83W.

The hash was in the backyard of a residential area as pictured, so we didn’t actually stand at the location like usual.  In the interest of getting more people to come out, I made an announcement on the Columbus geohashing  group on Facebook saying that the meetup would be at a nearby intersection at 5 pm.

When we actually got there, there were no sidewalks or other cars parked on the street (curse you suburbia, with your lawns,  long driveways, and garages) so there wasn’t really a good place to stop and hang around without looking like no-good loitering hooligans, even at the chosen intersection.  We took a few pictures and drove once around the block, but nobody else came, so we left thereafter.  We did, however, see an unmanned lemonade stand on our trip around the block:

Today’s Hash on the Wiki

Today’s geohashing adventure took us once again to Westerville, Ohio!  The hash today was on the corner of Smokeburr Dr and Sunbury Rd, in the middle of a residential driveway.  We didn’t do chalk drawings this time, since it was private property, but we did go for a walk on the adjacent Hoover Dam.

Ohio’s Hoover Dam is not to be confused with Colorado’s;  they’re even named for different Hoovers.  Our Hoovers, Clarence and Charles, were a pair of brothers pre-eminent in the field of water technology, according to the big metal plaque of dedication in the middle of the dam.  The structure dams the Big Walnut Creek, and the reservoir serves as a major source of water for the city of Columbus.

We took many pictures of the surrounding area, but didn’t meet any other geohashers.  One day, one day.

I also hope to go to a hash in the Lancaster graticule one of these days, as well, since it would be the first documented hash in the area.

Today’s Hash on the Wiki | Hoover Dam (Wikipedia)

Chris and I recently started getting into geohashing.  There’s a whole wiki dedicated to it, spawned from a comic that laid out an algorithm for determining daily, random coordinates based on the given day’s date, the most recent Dow opening, and your home latitude and longitude.

Using the wiki to organize, there are official meetups every Saturday in every graticule (one degree rectangle of latitude and longitude) in the world.  Columbus happens to be split by the 83rd West meridian and the 40th North parallel, so we essentially have four graticules to monitor and can choose the closest point in any of them.  So far, we’ve made it to five different hashes among three of our surrounding graticules.

Our first hash was on June 14th, near Grove City, in the southwest graticule.  We overshot the location by quite a bit, and nearly got to Chillicothe before turning around.  In fact, we managed to get dramatically lost on our first three hashes, but were successful in getting to the fourth and fifth on the first try.

The second hash we visited was in the northwest graticule, which was on our way up to Toledo for the weekend, June 20th.  The coordinates were close to Upper Sandusky, Ohio, which is the halfway point driving between Toledo and Columbus.  It was in a field on a farm, and on the way back to the highway, we came across the Indian Mill Museum, which was tucked into a little pocket of trees.

The third hash was two days later on Sunday the 22nd.  It was also very close to Upper Sandusky, so we stopped there on the way back to Columbus.  Unsurprisingly, the hash was also in a large field, though since it was quite far away from the road, we didn’t trek all the way out.

Our fourth hash was on June 29th in the northeast graticule, on our way back from ColossalCon in Cleveland.  It was reasonably close to the highway, though the fact that the exits on I-71 are spaced far apart meant we had to zigzag around on country roads quite a bit to get there.  We’d given Grace, a friend of a friend, a ride up to Cleveland on Thursday night, so by bringing her to the hash with us on the way back, we recieved what’s called the Drag-Along Geohash, which is given when you bring someone to the hash who doesn’t know what geohashing is.

The fifth hash, on July 5th, was actually within the realms of civilization (not that farmland isn’t, per se) in the parking lot of a Kroger in Westerville.  We brought our friend Susan with us, since she lived nearby, and we left many chalk drawings at the spot in the lot.  At this last one, we were really hoping to meet other local geohashers, since hashes don’t fall within the metro area very often, but we ended up being the only ones there.  So sad.

I find the shockwave that Randall Munroe has created to be amazing.  It keeps reverberating throughout the entire internet.  After reading his comic for so long, I wonder incredulously, “Where was this guy hiding all this time?”  A single comic last year spelled out a date, time, and coordinates to the character in the comic, and when the day actually came in real life, people were there.  With geohashing, people of all walks of geekdom are traveling miles and miles to find these secluded little spots nearly every day.

Munroe somehow takes the underexposed, pure emotions in people’s hearts and manages to stir them into action.  The feelings of adventure and fun that adults seem to forget about are suddenly brought forth, and instead of feeling childish, we feel alive for once, knowing that there are others who feel the same things.  When you’re tired of feeling like you should repress such thoughts and emotions, it’s incredibly refreshing to not only be told it’s okay, but to have evidence that a whole slew of other people feel the exact same way.

XKCD is a comic of “romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” but I didn’t realize until recently that the romance part of the slogan wasn’t just referring to loving another.  It’s about loving the world, loving your life, and exploring all the facets of both.

Put on your rose-colored blogging goggles; it’s so much more lifting to look at the world that way than through a screen of dry cynicism.

[ Columbus wiki entry | My Flickr Set of geohashing pictures | Columbus Geohashers Facebook Group ]

When I thought I was marking a comment as spam in my moderation panel, I accidentally deleted all the comments I’ve ever gotten on the blog, including one for my last post about the shredded wheat ad. While my total comments could be counted on one hand, it still sucks, and if any previous commenters come by and wonder where all the blog comments went, I assure you it was not personal… I just fail at blogging, apparently.

Yay, technology!

I came across something I found really interesting while working at the library recently. It was an illustration ad for “Shredded Wheat Biscuits” (the forerunners of our beloved Frosted Mini-Wheats) from Heartst’s Chicago American, dated December 9^th, 1900. Alongside some nice illustrations of shredded wheat and recipes for suggested servings was the following:

“Send This Greeting: ‘Peace on Earth and Good Health to Men’ if they will eat the bread as it comes from Nature’s kitchen, pure, sweet and wholesome. No yeast germs, no baking powder gases, no greasy shortening, which defile the body tissues, making the flesh weak and the bones fragile. A light, short bread, already baked, the perfect food to keep the body clean. Peace on Earth: Unnatural breads have killed more men than bullets.”

In “Mac Hall: Volume Whatever,” Matt Boyd remarked several times throughout his commentary that “the more people change, the more they stay the same.” Today’s huge trend of organic this and that, of which I admit I’m a skeptic (I’ve been eating normally processed produce all my life and I’m perfectly healthy) and the public outcry against additives and preservatives in food immediately came to mind when I was scanning the shredded wheat ad. It seems like indisputable proof that hype about ‘pure’ food is nothing new whatsoever.

Stuff like this was obviously going on over a century ago. And if the shredded wheat biscuit was considered the pure alternative to ‘unnatural breads,’ then what would the people who agreed with this ad in 1900 think of their peers who had grown up on unnatural bread? We now think of homemade bread and other such processing-free foodstuffs the epitome of healthy and wholesome food. What would they think of us now?

With all the hype about eating a healthy, chemical-free diet in the last ten years, did anyone ever stop to think about what the opposition to such diets were saying when they were the norm?

The more people change, the more they stay the same.

Update: The shredded wheat ad that I scanned can now be seen online here.

Corner on Main is a non-linear interactive webcomic. I wanted to take a single block of about 15 minutes, and tell many different stories that all happen in that same short period of time. The comic’s title is that of the convenience store around which all the stories take place; one vignette is from the perspective of the shop clerk, another is from some of the customers in the store, and so forth. On each page in any given character’s story track, background characters are clickable, and doing so will take the reader to that person’s story track, picking up at the exact point in time that they left the first person’s story.

The experience of reading Corner on Main utilizes some of the unique capabilities of webcomics, and cannot be reproduced in print form. By interlinking all the stories on the web, it creates thousands of potential ways to read Corner on Main, none of which need to be remotely linear.

Just as a note of interest, I updated the website with a bio and contact pages.  I came down with a cold last weekend as I was finishing my most recent comic project, so now that I’m essentially done working on it, I’m trying to let myself relax and get out of the “I have to be doing something NOW” mode.  I’ll have the new project up for viewing sometime this week, so keep a weather eye out.