"Bear Safety"

Thursday, April 4th, 2024

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Thursday, April 4th, 2024
The Year 2024!

NO FOOLIN

Assuming you saw the previous comic on April 1st: just kidding! April Fool’s! Okay now this is me ACTUALLY back. I don’t wanna say too much because I have been known to fail, but here’s hoping for a year filled with comics. Well, at least for a “rest-of-the-year” of comics, I suppose.

TODAY'S COMIC

On that note, you may notice that today’s comic looks different than usual, in that it is colourless. Colourless like my SOUL. Kidding. But the reason is to try something a bit new and different to facilitate it taking a bit less time for each comic. Sometimes I will do a full-colour comic, of course. Perhaps one per month? I’m just gonna focus on making the comics for now.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I don’t have it in place on the sidebar as of the writing of this post, but there are a few social media (mediums?) that I want to make you aware of which you may not be.

So there are the usual suspects like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter or X or whatever, but newly created is a Dear Inner Demons TikTok of all things. This showcases the comic in a unique way.

Additionally there is a Dear Inner Demons Youtube Channel. Did you know there is a Dear Inner Demons Youtube? Probably not, because I made it a billion years ago, and never told anyone about it and never really did anything with it. What’s my plan with it now? I’m not totally sure, but at the very least I will use the shorts format to post in the same format as TikTok. Beyond that I am considering some timelapse videos of making a comic, as well as even some narrated video essays on some of the topics of the comics.

NEWSLETTER

In spite of all that social media talk, I highly encourage you to sign-up for the newsletter. We all know how fickle the world of the internet can be. If any social media platform ever comes crashing down, the newsletter will hopefully still survive. Also, it is the absolute best way to not only stay in the loop of anything going on in the world of Dear Inner Demons but also as a way to be FIRST in the loop for things like flash sales, or special events, new comics, etc. You will find the sign-up thingy in the sidebar or down below if you are on mobile (or simply click this linked text here.

MORE ABOUT TODAY'S COMIC...

Okay so more SPECIFICALLY about today’s comic…. It’s the 80s! Could you tell? If it was full colour you would REALLY tell, whoa nelly. But alas it’s not. That’s right I chose to do a comic that could have featured really awesome 80s colours and instead did it as a grayscale comic. Sigh. Oh well maybe I’ll colour it later. ANYWHO …. Camping was a huge part of my life growing up. Living here in Nova Scotia we have some great parks and great campsites. I frequented Kejimkujik many many times and that was where I first learned about ticks! Ticks. The scourge of the earth. Bah.

I remember one time my uncle and Dad and I went camping and we woke up to a raccoon party in the night where they were all eating our food and playing disco music. Luckily however I have never had a full face-on encounter with a bear. I have dreams about it. Er, I mean nightmares, but luckily never in real life. Although from what I understand about that documentary Grizzly Man they are very social creatures. I haven’t seen that movie yet, I keep meaning to watch it.

As for the caption where it says “familiarity breeds contempt” the origin of that turn of phrase a mildly murky, with some people thinking it comes from Aesop’s tale of the Fox and Lion way back in 500ish BCE, however more modern thinking has it pinned to some French text from around 1300 which translates to “too much familiarity breeds contempt”, which was only ever recorded in English a few hundred years LATER in 1539 by some dude named Richie Taverner in his wacky book “Garden of Wysdome” where he says it like: ‘His special friends counseled him to beware, lest his overmuch familiarity might breed him contempt.’ I have paraphrased here a bit.

Okay, stepping away from the history lesson here, the first time that I heard this expression was when I was in music school (yep that’s right I went to University for Music) and my Theory teacher said it. He was a piece of work that guy, but that’s another story. Point is that was the first time I had heard it and it stuck with me. Apparently for years!

Anyways back to camping… did YOUR Dad ever play “Digsy-Dugsy” with you? You know, the game where he buries you out in the middle of the woods and your job is to find your way back to camp? I always found it strange how disappointed he seemed when I would find my way back. Ah well.