Freakangels 0069

No Saturday Open Mic tonight? I understand completely if everyone is busy with anonymous Belkin routers and took a week off.

Please forgive the long and schizoid nature of this post. I want to be good but you have my wheels spinning again.

Alright, open page 6 in photoshop.

From top of bounding box in the first panel to 1111 pixels, is 1066 pixels. We like 1111 for reasons I don’t feel like explaining. Just say it resembles four sticks like the Zeppelin song Four Sticks which I happen to think is a great song. And 1066 was a pretty interesting year yes?

The width of the panels appears to be 660 pixels. Again, another interesting number. If you know what a Golden Rectangle is you might already know that a box with a width of 660 and a length of 1066 is what they call golden, but whatever, I was bored and so wasted an evening doing simple math and constructed a Golden Rectangle from scratch. Da Vinci used geometry like this in his paintings so why not Mr. Duffield? Paul is cool like that, right?

From the bottom left corner, using the width 660 as the side of a square from which to begin drawing a golden rectangle (as in Wolfram’s instructions here), follow the steps until you’ve drawn a line between the upper right corner of the square and the midpoint of the square’s opposite side. You’ve drawn a line which perfectly threads the hook dangling in panel 3, which itself has a string dangling from it, which along with the drawn hypotenuse implies yet another right triangle, which is very humorous. The length of this line is calculated as the square root of a squared plus b squared right? a squared plus b squared in this case is 544500.

We in the time travel business like symbolic fours that turn into symbolic fives and 544500 has that nice near-palindromic feature inside it, followed by two zeds. If the Roman alphabet we use today were numbered in a sequence (with a = 1, b = 2, c = 3 … and so forth), 5445 would spell out EDDE, such as the name of the Crusade-era church in Lebanon, which is also pretty interesting, not to be flogging old Christian shit unnecessarily.

So anyway, find the square root of 544500 and you have the hypotenuse being about 738 pixels long. 738 pixels away from the midpoint according to Euclid’s instructions on making a Golden Rectangle, is the precise top of the panel 1, thus confirming page 6 here is a Golden Rectangle.

You are very tricky people.

Continue the little golden rectangle game until you’ve chopped up sequential boxes to draw the Golden Spiral. With the spiral superimposed on page 6, in one orientation anyway, the curve starts along Kait’s path through the doorway, and then after some adventures drills infinitely into the top corner of one of the gas cans in panel 1. Here are four versions of Page 6 with a Golden Spiral drawn onto it, in no particular order. This example here would be on the top right.

If oriented another way, the spiral comes in like sunlight through the window in panel 1, goes through Kait’s head and then through a cupboard into her abdomen in panel 2, then the buckle of one of the bags on her belt, then approximates the fish eye curve in panel 3 while leading through the door Kait has just come through (at the spot where the plaster is crumbling by the light switch). It continues though other cracks in the plaster and terminates very nearby the blue plastic bin in which I used to store my stuff at the apartment off SE 23rd Ave where I first read Transmetropolitan, here in Portland. Nearby the plastic bin at that apartment were all my trash bags full of clothing, which are also evident here.

Oriented a different way, the Golden Spiral leads through the door Kait entered in panel 3, then through the gas can, then through more cracked plaster, then the knob on the oven someone else noticed the other day. In this case the spiral bores infinitely into the wall almost exactly between Kait and the outer contour of the oven, with another humorous right triangle formed by the the boxes making up the spiral and yet another crack in the plaster. Plaster being made of calcium, this reminds me of broken bones, which, well…, you know, those suck.

Oriented a different way, the spiral begins approximately at the suspected location of the fish eye lens in panel 2, travels along the length of Kait’s arm in panel 1 and then the gas cans, curves through the cracks in the plaster on the left of panel 3, then one of the plastic bags on the ground, through where Kait’s foot gets cut off, then her right hand, then the shelf next to the oven and then through the burner on the oven. Then it goes back through the door Kait has just traversed, golden rectangles forming interesting triangles all over and of course the obvious pentagram right where it should be on most diagrams of the properties of phi, the Golden Ratio. It then goes through Kait’s magical head, eventually terminating at what looks like the focal point of the camera lens of doom, as measured by the fish eye curve of the leftmost wall. A circle drawn around that focal point using the curved wall as a radius includes the entire room in panel 3, and also the oven along with Kait’s lower half in panel 2. Other interesting circles drawn with cracked plaster bits as the center include the gas cans and the oven.

So yes, lots of gas cans and oven items of note.

Seeing my old apartment in here, and thinking about all my old houses, I realize that I wish I’d thought of all this before defending Luke in earlier threads, because I also used to have a housemate named Luke who was a total dick, who was violent, and who was accused of rape at least once, in a way that wasn’t a joke and not as subject to interpretation as a fictitious comic mystery. His greatest defender in my household was a short bald girl with initials approximating chi rho (or rho chi, to achieve Arkady, whatever), who had also overdosed when she was younger, and who otherwise is just as brilliant and charming as our Freakangel friend who enjoys the CHIKKENS so very much.

So I get this now. Sorry I’m late.

The “Arkady” I lived with was very upset with Christianity for oppressing all the teen lesbians, whereas I was curious about at least some “Christian studies” because of the math, and this was one of many reasons we didn’t get along back then, aside from my being utterly insane. She lives in Texas now and trains dogs for a living, which of course are Warren’s favorite, the enemy of humans. I think she was also trying to install malware on my system the last few times we spoke in AIM chat. Where I first noticed that my residence was being spied on a few years ago, which happens a lot, was in the place where I first had the blue bin near the bags of laundry. For various reasons I was inclined to think it was my Arkady doing this to me but she denied all involvement. If it wasn’t her doing the spying and the hacking and the pranking and so forth, it wouldn’t be the first time blame was purposely misdirected at a hapless internet user I used to know in real life.

I assumed the Luke character in Freakangels was based on something else, because of his pants problem and his monologue on floods and time back in the beginning of the series, so I totally blanked on my actual housemate named Luke. I assumed the Alice character connected to an ex-girlfriend who was briefly in England around the same time Freakangels was being put together, according to comics media I’ve read here and elsewhere, and that the Mark character was based on yet another (total cunt) housemate who is an associate of hers. Two Summers ago after leaving the compromised apartment, I spent a week up in Seattle with a friend who lived with me and Luke and “Arkady” fifteen years ago, and he was busy growing strawberries in his free time, so, check. Maybe? I’m wrong a lot these days so hopefully I’m not jumping to conclusions but boy do I like strawberries! Hell yeah!

The other Freakangels are a little unclear to me so far, though I was engaged once to a lady who didn’t like boring monogamy and would sometimes organize orgies like someone around here in the Freakangels comic, ahem, and to be honest I never should have left her alone with my computer back in January, the night that it suddenly snowed in Portland for no good reason at all. Otherwise, rain and floods and living several days in the future are what I do, so I’ve always been curious about what inspires this comic every week, even if I don’t say anything out loud because I’m scared of writing something stupid in a giant crowd again.

There have been pranks of this magnitude pulled off before (like the entirety of Catholicism for instance), but what is more interesting is that this comic turned out to be a time machine, either by mistake or by design, incorporating Warren’s readers into its architecture. This might be construed as unbelievable and/or at least a little dangerous. Information from my life is being broadcast through all you guys into all sorts of times and places, at least partially creating the history we live in now, in a way which is not a lie at all, seriously, instead it seems kind of amazing. If Wikipedia is to be believed, it might be how I wound up as St. David the Patron Saint of the Welsh, Warren’s favorite, back in the sixth century, about which you’ll just have to trust me because I don’t feel like explaining the whole thing right now. But Wikipedia can be falsified like anything else right? So maybe the article there is also part of a prank.

I won’t go into the shape on the cracked floor near the blue bin in the last panel, which is a customized tesseract pointing at the place where I used to both sleep and dream in that apartment. It’s not like I can copyright such a thing anyway, but it is a part of something I’ve been studying for the last two years or so.

My understanding of the prank as I first experienced it in 2007, where my internet and my real life interacted in ways which should not be possible, was to slowly drive me crazy with interconnected story phenomenon until everyone was done laughing at my devastated life. Perhaps this was some kind of payback for obtuse comments I’d left at other locations on the web not realizing just how obtuse they were. I’m not sure anyone caught on at first to the natural disasters and unusual violence that accompanied every step of this joke as comic book fighting dopplered out in every direction, in every dimension, but hopefully that should be obvious by now.

This is a very special time we live in, I hope you know that.

By the way Warren, I’m pretty sure it was Republicans who fucked up your computer with the novel on it. Popular activist figures have to be way careful during an election year, especially the author of Crooked Little Vein and so much else. Trying to catch them might be difficult though.

Do you guys know Roger Waters? That guy is cool.

*waves at Dr. Who*

p.s. My favorite part of the Wolfram diagram is how you can use it to spell the word “fap”.