Okay, this goes up on Wednesday. It feels like it’s Thursday to me.

My eyes are really bothering me today. The air is full of dust and animal dander. I’ve tried clearing them with eyedrops but it really isn’t getting the job done. I need new glasses again. My current pair are quickly becoming useless. The fact that the stupid ass UV coating scratched off of one lens didn’t help any. I’m not sure where I’m going to go to get a new prescription since no one has done a good job of analyzing my eyes since I was 16 or so. They all rely on those machines, but they never seem to do it right. The last time I got a decent pair of glasses the guy that did it was an old school, old man, who is absolutely dead by now, that used his ancient device and served me up a pair of glasses that served me for over a decade. At the moment my eyes are burning and feel like they have gunk all in them that I can’t wash out. Yesterday it was much better but the wind wasn’t blowing fine dust everywhere. I can smell it in the air. I honestly don’t know how I managed to draw the page because I’m having a bitch of a time seeing the screen.
My right eye has been my close up vision eye for most of my life but now it’s not particularly good at any distance. The left one has always been better at distance and it isn’t deteriorating as fast. At this point it’s doing most of the heavy lifting in everyday life. When I put on my glasses it still works more or less fine with the lens that’s for it while the other eye is only somewhat improved. One of the biggest problems I’ve had with my eyes in the last few years is that they don’t want to work in tandem when I’m in motion. They fight over dominance and it makes me feel unbalanced. They always did that to one degree or another but as I’ve aged it’s become more and more pronounced. Especially when my glasses weren’t calibrated properly.
In the last few years I’ve unconsciously started using whichever eye is under control of the most awake part of my brain. I know I’ve spoken about this before but my consciousness moves around in my head. Meaning that the version of me that’s driving the meat robot feels like it moves around depending on whatever my condition is. Like, when I’m under extreme stress, or grieving, my right eye will close and part of my brain will go into low power mode so I can get through whatever I need to. It switches on its own and I’m not sure how much control I have over it, I just know that it’s a thing that happens. When I’m in a state that is very normal I seem to sit in the front of my head a bit more. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I became blind because my awareness seems to always become untethered if I’m in the dark for an extended period of time while not sleeping. Would I just sort of float around in my head? When I close my eyes I generally feel like my awareness moves into my forehead a little. My thoughts seem to come from the back of my head and move to my mouth even when I’m not talking out loud. Also the voice in my head seems to be more everywhere than the way my awareness is focused in a single place. I know most people don’t think about this sort of thing because they are often confused when I ask. It’s hard to conceive of an existence where you don’t have a brain that works like mine because this is the only kind I have. I know that there are people who must have a very different existence though since some people don’t think to themselves, or can’t visualize things. It’s kind of a shame that I didn’t think about this kind of thing as much when I was in school because I would have asked other artists about it. I can’t imagine being an artist if you can’t visualize things in your mind.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough of that for now. It’s almost posting time. The problem with the website not appearing for some people will probably be solved in the next day or two. I got a message from the server admin that said the domain registrar wasn’t updating a thing and I needed to do it myself. So when I get the login from mom I’ll do that. She took the password book with her.

I’ll see you guys on Friday I hope. I also hope you have a nice Wednesday and Thursday. Until next we meet, flup the florp.

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Humans produce heat while ghosts eat heat. Its the Matrix but in reverse. And should be enslaved as such.

Listen, if those ghosts are gonna live rent free in my house the least they could do is lower my AC cost.

Really, the notion of Microsoft bombing Dallas to harvest its ghosts to enslave them to lower their cooling costs for AI is offset only by how the heat absorbed would empower the ghosts and create an angry ghost army of ice-mages.

But that really is our last, best hope against Skynet.

Please have Vicky come back in. Please have Vicky come back in.

If you wanna drive to Denver, I can get you hooked up with a better eye doctor or two, but otherwise, the best I can say is to look for a private practice that’s got years and years of reviews, and see if there’s an old fart doctor who owns it (sadly, many seemingly-private offices have been bought out–try calling and asking who the actual owner is). They all use machines to a degree, but yes, it’s entirely possible to overly rely on them. Your eyes are only going to keep getting worse, unfortunately, at least for the near vision; welcome to middle age! You may need either bifocals, or at least a separate pair of glasses just for working up close. Buying a more expensive pair of glasses will probably avoid the flaking coating you’ve had, but it might honestly still make more sense to buy several cheap pair online instead–if they die after a year, whatever, they were cheap and you have backups. Or maybe buy one really good pair for work that just lives at your desk, and then cheap ones for everything else, so you don’t care if they get dirty outside or dropped when you’re moving boxes around.

For your eyes, if you really need to rinse them alot, buy a big bottle of Biotrue contact solution; sounds funny, but it’s basically a gentle saline, and cheaper than buying tons of artificial tears (stick to Biotrue though; the other brands sting, especially if your eyes are already sore). To wash your eyes, you can either buy Ocusoft lid wipes or foaming wash, or if you want a more natural option, tea tree oil (just don’t get it IN your eye; it’s for washing the lash line of all the gunk that builds up, and you’d be surprised how much improvement you can get after doing it a few times, if it’s a new thing). If you haven’t already, pick up some Pataday at the pharmacy; formerly a prescription-only allergy eye drop, it’s now over the counter. Warm compresses are also a free, easy thing that can help your eyes feel better.

Hopefully some of this advice helps; it’s all the least-expensive options I could think of, from someone who works in the field. If your eyes get bad enough, a steroid eye drop might be in order for a couple of weeks to get it back to normal, but you’ll have to visit an eye doctor for that. I think you can get the actual drops for fairly cheap at Walmart’s pharmacy though. Good luck!

What eye drops are you using?
My wife has had a surgery on both eyes and typical moisturizing drops don’t work anymore. She has to use Ivizia during the day and some prescription one at night that’s like Vaseline almost. Had to start using an eye mask too avoid drying out under the fan.

If your air is that dirty, do you know about the “Corsi-Rosenthal Box”, a lockdown-era invention? 4 HVAC filter rectangles as the sides of a box, box fan as the top? Maybe a round “shroud” on top of that, tape the edges together, no particular bottom? (I think there might be a bit of disagreement whether to point the fan into or out of the box.) There’s a sideways variation with 5 filters.

You can buy thicker, more expensive filters (“MERV 13”) that can supposedly filter out even viruses floating in the air. It might be possible to save money on that by just buying a roll of the filtering material, or maybe not.

I just used one cheap filter and attached it directly to the box fan – that’s probably the wrong way to do it since it didn’t seem to look dirty after weeks of usage, and when uncovered the fan seems pretty slow now. (sorry if this all got double-posted)

Why? Why do I find Maddie so damn adorable? She is a big ol’ cinnamon roll, just like Mike, but she somehow has another layer with the just slightly off from the point dialogue.

This is why I love this comic. I can actually see myself befriending some of the characters if they were real people. You’ve created something great!

There’s an old article about the possibility of ghosts concentrating energy from around them. It appeared in the October 1980 volume of Analog Magazine. It was inspired by an experiment that supposedly showed goats lost a tiny amount of weight when they died. Using math on the various phenomena of ghosts and poltergeists, the article arrives at an estimate of 7 grams mass-equivalent energy tied up in the semi-stable pattern of a ghost.

Vincent Price, the actor, made a lot of monsters films, + horror films, in: the 1940s, the 1950s, + after.

A lot of them took place in old, 1800s-looking houses.

He once said, [I’m paraphrasing him]:

” I DON’T like modern houses. The ghosts have no place to HIDE!”

(By modern houses, I’m guessing that he meant “modern and futuristic looking” houses, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s house + art/architect’s studio [?], that was built in 1959.
It is named- Taliesin.

Presumably, he meant Wright’s entire design philosophy for houses, or at least those houses normal people could afford–he did specifically advocate for things like how to build a small house with lots of room, aka, very open and spacious, lacking alot of the small corners, closets, back hallways, large attics, and such, that you can find in those older Queen Anne-style houses and such. Ironically, Wright’s studio was deliberately burned down and several people, including his mistress, killed with an axe, by a deranged servant he employed for no apparent reason, so maybe the ghosts got pissed at the lack of hiding places and possessed the man to get revenge.

I’m open to the possibility of ghosts. I have yet to experience one, though lol

Jackie, I don’t mean to be alarmist, as this may be an issue strictly related to me. But have you seen a decline in your metrics within the last couple of weeks. After you posted the page where Evrina was sassing Alex, the site was a dead link for me. Even when using direct web search. It wasn’t until yesterday where I could get touch and go service. It appears the comic was going smooth sailing on your side, so I’m inclined to believe it was a personal issue on mine. But I wasn’t having any hiccups connecting anywhere else. So I was curious if this was a wider spread issue.

I’m not fully versed in how websites work anymore, so excuse my simple explanation. Apparently my registrar doesn’t automatically update when the server does. The server admin found the issue and gave me the required information to do the manual update. In theory things should be fine now.

I would suggest picking one of the social media platforms I use to serve as an emergency contact point in the event of a service outage.

https://x.com/betweenfailures
https://bsky.app/profile/betweenfailures.bsky.social
https://www.facebook.com/BetweenFailures
https://www.facebook.com/Jackie.Wohlenhaus/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/263417838175
You can also use the site’s email which is betweenfailures @ hotmail .com

Just as an aside, I haven’t looked at the site metrics in years since ad revenue for the site was destroyed by ad blockers and Google. As long as the Patrons are happy I don’t worry about things like site traffic. It hasn’t contributed meaningfully to the maintenance of the site since the introduction of the subscription model for monetization.
I recently began uploading pages by the month, at the end of each month, to those sites for people who don’t want to use the actual website.

Cool, I’ll keep that in mind. I was vaguely worried, since I know this is probably the last thing you want to deal with. So I’m glad it was only a minor issue. Thanks for giving me the contact links. I don’t really use socials myself, but I’ll do my best to report any issues on my end if I see them in the future. Also thank you for all your hard work, BF is a sincere pleasure for me to read on rough days.

I use my glasses from 2011 at the computer, and have my 2018 glasses if driving conditions are bad. And, there are discount ordering sites for glasses if you have an old prescription you like. The other numbers to know are lens frame height, and width. My current frame says 54 16. Near sighted.
If my eyes are that irritated, I go for a full splash my face in the sink, then eye drops after my face is dry. And maybe a Reddit search on Google.

16 is your bridge width. Frustratingly, few frames include the height.

Try an ophthamalogist rather than an optometrist, if you can find one. They are much better, especially if you have complex issues (and Linus from Peanuts treated got his glasses from one, which is how I know they even exist). Also, don’t get the lens coatings unless they are specifically prescribed–they cost more and scratch more easily.

Good luck!

2910 Cold Spots.

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