Who'd a thunk it? Injured from sitting on my hole drawing comics. Well it's not so much the drawing part but just sitting on my arse on front of a computer all day has caused an injury to my clam wrist. I know there are a dozen wrist injury/ wank gags to be made so let me deflate it.

I used to take great pleasure in knowing that my hand was hurting me from drawing or when I was knocking out issue 3 of MBLEH I got a callous where the pencil was rubbing off my middle finger. Probably fooling myself into thinking that drawing comics was comparable to other physically demanding jobs I've had, manly jobs.

Repetetive strain disorder is the culprit. Sharp pains in my hand, wrist and forearm even when nowhere near a pc. Over the past month it got to the point where the thoughts of spending my usual 3 hours a night at the drawing board seemed like a terrible chore. I've read up about it and it's serious shit, we're all spending more than time ever clicking away at games, our day jobs and internerd related stuff that it's inevitable we'll slowly damage our bods.

Being the big sap that I am, I've tried to find the positive aspect of now being semi-spazzed. I've switched to using my graphics tablet for everything which greatly reduces arm strain and I reckon it can only do my on screen drawing skills good to be using it all day. Have to bring to and fro to the job though. The 'illustrations' on this post were rapidly scibbled on the wacom a minute ago and it's getting easier. Hey, Brian Bolland rocks it digitally all the way now so theres no shame.

On reading up about how to limit strain injuries I found some good advice but as always theres the old chestnut; ' take regular breaks at 20-30 minute intervals'. That cracks me up, it's like rizla denying the dope connection or those cotton tip stick things that AREN'T for jamming in your ear. Breaks every 20 minutes? Nobody can mean that seriously. It says that on the instructions on a game, to take regular breaks, nigga please. I reckon the long years of console gaming, hunched over sitting on the floor bashing away on the sharp cornered NES controller did most of the damage to me and the relatively short amount of time spent working in an office just pushed my creaky carpals and jippy tendons over the edge



My right knee is fucked. I blame it on childhood pricking about, the console damage and a job I had where I had to crawl around alot. But even though it causes pain I still disregard all the sage advice of sitting with both feet flat on the ground blah blah, instead I sit in an excruciatingly painful pose where I sit on one of my feet which hurts not only my knee but my ankle and my arse.



I just flipped over my keyboard there and read the warnings on it: take a break a couple of times every hour. When all these voice recognition things come in and we can just dictate or beam thoughts to the pc, what will we do in with our hands? Personally I like messing with elastic bands. Maybe I should invest all my money in knitting needles for all the idle handed secretaries of the future. Or for the lads those squeezy things that Mr.T used to always have in his hand. Ah I better go do some work. ...or search for an online version of R-Type.