My cubicle runs on magnets. Those little rare-earth monsters smaller than your pupil that pull a couple of pounds each. I order them off the web. It’s like Magnetic Christmas when they arrive.

The company where I work, you see, decided last winter to build out the office with fancy new cubicles. I don’t like cubes, but I’ve worked in them before. I can deal. At least, I consoled myself, I’ll have some personal wall space to hang printouts and white boards and whatnot. And padded walls absorb sound nicely. I do value privacy.

So we worked from home for a week while the office got renovated. And came back to find this:

Turns out we’re the proud new owners of genuine Herman Miller designer cubes. My Studio Environments they’re called. No padded walls here. These puppies are all curves and rectangles and steel tubes and frosted glass. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I’m confident the list price of just one would make a respectable down payment on a Lear jet. I give all props to our execs for going top-of-the-line. With all sincerity, this is an awesome company to work for.

Also, I hated these cubes on sight.

I mean sure, they have doors. That’s extremely cool. But they look and feel like plastic shower doors. In fact the frosted glass between cubes is quite a bit like a translucent shower partition. Nothing personal against my coworkers, but that’s not the mental image I need when I drag into work Monday morning. “Permeable privacy” the brochure calls it. “Parabolic sound reflector” is more appropriate, considering all the smooth, curved surfaces. “Alien spaceship,” “dog pound” and “cryogenic pod” have also come up more than once.

In case any of my company execs are reading this, let me be clear: the cubes have grown on me since then. Compared to neutral-toned cloth boxes, these are very stylish and pleasant to the eye. I appreciate now what the designer achieved. But they are, and shall always remain, quite absurd.

Riddle me this, Batman: How do you hang printouts on a glass surface? Tape? Suction cups? It took me awhile to figure it out: magnets. Put one on each side of the glass and the paper is pinned between them. This was a liberating discovery. Turns out magnets also work great to attach things to metal tubes and plastic cabinet doors. (In the photo below, pictures are hung inside the cabinet.) These rare-earth jobs are even strong enough to penetrate my pressboard desktop. I’m all about magnets now. They also make a fun stress relief toy.

Unfortunately they’re not strong enough to hold up a white board. Solution? Frosted glass and plastic doors make decent dry erase surfaces. I’ve worked double shifts where my cube looked like a madman’s room in a horror movie, covered top to bottom with half-decipherable scrawls.

No doubt Herman Miller and my coworkers would find that an apt comparison. Maybe I am insane. No one else in the office has blanketed their stylish glass box with scribbles and magnets and loose papers. Why is that? Am I a trendsetter or just a freak? Honestly, I can live with both.

I’m only getting started anyway. Along with our new cubes came these slick double-swing-arm mounts for LCD monitors. I didn’t attach monitors to mine. I screwed on more white boards. Magnetic, of course. Who else can rotate their white boards to any angle on three axes at a whim? No one, that’s who else! In fact I’m in the throes of what you might call a “cube mod.” The details will have to wait for another post, but it’s become one of those creative obsessions that won’t stop until my children notice their college fund is shrinking. I get the most satisfying looks of bewilderment from janitors and cubicle maintenance guys.

Yes, we have cubicle maintenance guys. I enjoy their visits. In fact I’m thoroughly enjoying this whole experience. Despite my initial misgivings, I couldn’t be happier that we moved into these weird overstyled beauties. Maybe rebellion is the mother of invention. Or maybe I need to get out more.

Nah, it’s definitely rebellion. Right?

The future makes me feel like a chick.

Let me back up. As you know, the comic strip is on vacation. A big reason is that we’re looking for a new house. (By “new” I mean “not antediluvian like our current one.”) My wife spends countless hours poring over real estate listings on the net, where searchable databases are updated throughout the day. She downloads all the particulars - lot & house specs, school & utility districts, et al. - the usual stuff agents want you to know. They include photos of each place. Sometimes there are adorable “virtual tours” in glorious Quicktime. Generally there’s a link to Yahoo Maps or some equivalent, affording a view from space of the domicile in its natural habitat.

How cool is that? We are totally living in the future here. Everything you want with a couple left clicks.

It ain’t enough.

I’m notoriously skittish about commitment. Buying a house is like adopting a dog: it’s hard to tell if it will bite you in the ass. Faced with this paralyzing decision, I turn to the old, frayed comfort of nerdity. To wit, I’ve got a bookmark list of alternate information sources. Between the photos on a listing, various satellite images and Google Street View, I can piece together most floor plans despite agents’ attempts to embellish them. From county property records I can apply exact measurements and even use Google SketchUp to model it in 3D. In half an hour I can take a virtual stroll around the place, or judge how our furniture will fit.

Dig deeper and there’s more. Worried about drainage problems? I can view the area’s contour lines to a one-foot resolution. I can pull up a catalog of flood plains and storm drains. Crime? I can list every complaint in the past few years within a thousand feet of the house. I can pull up the addresses of registered sex offenders (that’s a pleasant one). I can tell you traffic patterns. I can tell you if any endangered species live nearby.

I can peruse tax records on the current owner. I can read everything he’s ever done on the internet. If the house is near a traffic camera, I might be able to tell you what he’s doing right now. And it’s not even that time-consuming.

Face it. This future we live in is creepy, geeks-shall-inherit-the-earth stuff. And it makes me feel like a chick.

Specifically, this chick. If you don’t recognize her, that’s Theora Jones, a character in the 1980’s TV show Max Headroom. The cyberpunk series took ace reporter Edison Carter through a dystopian future in which the homeless are harvested, TVs have no “off” switch and citizens vote through overnight cable ratings. Heady, prescient stuff.

Carter handled the two-fisted legwork, but he got nowhere without Theora, his “controller.” She worked at the TV station and guided him by radio. There was nowhere she couldn’t go by clickity-clacking on her trusty computer. Ubiquitous security cameras gave her virtual omniscience. Internal schematics of every building were laid bare on her screen. She snatched control of locks and lifts and sprinkler systems. Her nimble fingertips touched everything. (Is it getting hot in here..?) This gal was a badass on the wires, not to mention easy enough on the eyes that twenty years later my hormones have yet to recover.

I, it should be noted, am not so easy on the eyes. (But I didn’t go on to marry Corbin Bernsen, so it’s a wash.) I do feel kinship though to swift-fingered Theora. How long before I’m able to clickety-clack into random security cameras or raise and lower barrier arms in parking garages? We’re halfway to Twenty Minutes Into The Future. And I like this power. It makes me feel more secure in my decision-making. Lucky I’m a good guy like Theora, right? I mean, aren’t I?

Come to think of it, I’m also in the process of selling my current house. It’s listed online and everything.

I’ll be right back. I just need to close the curtains.

Theora, is that you?

I wrote this little piece a couple of years back, after perusing a web site about historical publications. It’s all about depravity so I’ll call it NSFW, but it’s not graphic or anything. Some of the language might be hard to explain to your mom. Which is really ironic.

Seduction For A Nickel

I’m pleased just now, in a dorky sort of way. If you’re a writer, you understand the joy of tunneling through a good thesaurus. In the last two weeks I’ve started exploring a new online reference called The Free Dictionary, which gives me verbiferous jollies that thesaurus.com mysteriously ceased to provide in recent months. It’s fun again to search for just the right word. (Hey, I said it was dorky. Allow me my little pleasures.)

Little pleasures are a ubiquitous theme in the webcomics I’ve been rummaging through of late. They’re all about young girls and imaginary friends. Is there a genre name for these sprinkly confections? They seem to be everywhere. Minus (which I reviewed a month or two back) is a good example; another is Jellaby by Kean Soo. If you’ve never come across it, Jellaby is about a distractable little lass named Portia who befriends the titular big-eyed dragon. It’s the cute tale of an outsider and her sweet, toothy, probably-real monster. The story is lazily paced, easy to sip and not too saccharine, while the art is clean and confident. I do like the purple motif. (I confess something’s off about the big heads and tiny legs of the kids in the comic. The style is obviously inspired by Calvin and Hobbes, but the children’s faces don’t scan as children to me. Maybe it’s a thematic choice? In any case I got over it after awhile.) The bad news is the comic ran weekly for a year before going on hiatus in mid-story to publish as a graphic novel, and the online archive hasn’t updated since. The good news is, of course, there’s a graphic novel that promises much more involved adventures (though I haven’t read it yet). Plus the web site has some fluffy extras to snack on.

Sharing The Secret Friend Society web site with Jellaby is Salamander Dream by Hope Larson. It’s a charming sequence of vignettes about a growing girl and her masked friend Salamander. They wander nature together and their relationship changes in subtle, wistful ways. Salamander Dream is a complete online tale (that’s also been printed) so you can enjoy its sweet allegory and gentle, dreamy art without fear of a premature end. Larson has published other books as well, which look like worthy risks for the price of half a pizza.

Unlike the Secret Friend Society comics, Dreamleak by Greg Fraser is still updating regularly. Dreamleak is the story of (wait for it) a young outsider who wanders her dreams and meets a new friend. This time our protagonist Amy is alienated by a move to the city and escapes into a nocturnal fantasy in which she is not alone. It’s more conventionally comedic than the others and is largely dialogue-driven, which casts the child’s fantasy world in a more adult light. But don’t take that to mean the whimsy is gone. It’s plenty there. The strip has some of the rough edges of a beginning webcomic - unpolished art, word balloon issues, some fourth-wall breaking, etc. - but it’s plain to see the talent Fraser brings to the table. He’s got a feel for characters and a cinematic eye. If he keeps working on his craft, we could have a name in the making. (Plus, the web site design is just too cute.) Start at the start and enjoy.

Finally I’ll toss Matt Forsythe’s Ojingogo into the mix (because I recently tossed it into my RSS mix from a link off The Abominable Charles Christopher). I admit I know nothing about this comic except it’s pseudo-Korean, was hot stuff a few years ago and has recently been re-started on the web. What matters is, it’s mondo weird. It would probably make more sense if I had any cultural knowledge of Korea or maybe manga, but I don’t want to dilute the strangeness. I have no idea where it’s going. I barely know what it’s already done. It’s like a freaky mental exercise. Oh yeah, and it’s got a little girl with dreamlike monsters.

Come to think of it, I should dig around my RSS subscriptions for a few more webcomics to review. Maybe next week.