Casual Notice All-Purpose FAQ

Casual Notice Site in General

The Casual Notice Comic

Casual Notes

The Casual Notice Site in General

Who is Casual Notice?  Casual Notice is Brett Hainley, a middle-aged freelance writer and hopefully eventually a teacher.  The name began when I noticed a lot of people snarling at Josh Philips on his Avalon tag board saying hurtful things about him and his strip without even considering the possibility that he, or someone close to him may have suffered an emergency (this turned out not to be true, but it was a possibility).  I tagged in under the moniker Casual Notice to indicate that, while I didn't know the full story behind the abuse, the casual observer might find it questionable.  I later started using it as a handle in various forums, and, when the idea for the comic was bandied about between me and web-god Joe Wendt, we decided it was a good one, so my old site (Havoc's Entirely Unnecessary and Utterly Pointless Web Site) was renamed and reformatted with very little of the original remaining.

So everything on the site is your work?  No.  Most of it is, and where it isn't I have credited the author or artist.

Speaking of your work, are you ever going to finish your History of the World?  No.

What about the Book of the Trip?  Will there ever be another entry?  Probably.

What about other projects, the guides, the novel?  I plan to continue work on the novel as soon as possible, and with any luck, complete it before the next NaNo.  The guides are currently floating until I can find a proper place to put them (probably somewhere under the Notes archive).

The Casual Notice Comic

Where is Casual Notice set?  Casual Notice takes place in a fictional suburb of Houston called Nebraska City.  The lead male, Scot Davis, is a history teacher in the nearby Nebraska City Independent School District (NCISD) at Caspar Weinberger Senior High School.  His best friend, Steve Carossi, is the principal there.

What about Penny?  Where does she work?  Penny works at Solutions, her father's private investigations firm, as a receptionist and occasional investigator.  It hasn't been mentioned in the strip because it hasn't really come up, yet.  Before you ask, Diana is a sports agent.

Speaking of Penny, what's her deal?  Penny is a five hundred year-old half-fairy.  Her parents met during the Norman Conquest of Ireland, and decided to have a child together.  Petal Oak (Penny's mother) is a true fairy.  Fairies are energy beings that only rarely take a full corporeal form, and even then it takes a lot of their energy.  Their lives are tied to the grove, forest or swamp that spawned them, and as such, they are more or less immortal.  It's not possible to kill a fairy; if you attack their corporeal form, they may pretend to die, just to make you go away,  and if you destroy their home, it will merely result in a weakened (for now) and angry fairy (immortals have a huge capacity for grudges; remember that next time you're in the woods).  Like the Dryads of Greek and Roman lore, they are tied to their home, and can't venture far from it, however, it is not the complete dependence that dryads exhibit for their tree-homes (partially because the fae are mostly born of the confluence of multiple life-forms, and are therefor more adaptable than the tree-bound dryads).           In order for Petal Oak to bear a child at all she had to give up her absolute connection to the place that first gave her life.  This, in a sense, was a sacrificing of immortality.  Petal Oak was, from the moment of Penny's conception, fully corporeal, and while she still draws energy from the life around her, it doesn't fully sustain her and prevent her death as her bilberry (like a blueberry, but redder and more tart) bog did.  So, while she remains extremely difficult to kill, it is possible.            Penny's father, Michael O'Riordan (aka Conal O'Ainle), came at it from a different side, and was necessary to complete the equation.  Michael was fully human until he consented to giving Petal Oak a child, at which point it was necessary for him to sacrifice his mortality.  This, again, doesn't mean he can't die.  He must, however, choose to die in order to do so, which is essentially the same thing since someone has to be utterly bereft of hope to actually choose to die (even suicides show evidence of last-minute attempts to survive).           Penny is therefor a confluence of the two, she is fully corporeal (although she can choose to be entirely energy if she wishes) and is bound only to the earth.  She is also completely immortal, until she also chooses to give that up to have a child.

Wait a minute.  If her parents met and conceived her during the Norman Conquest, how can she only be five hundred?  The Norman Conquest was over 800 years ago.  Yeah...about that...for a while, Petal Oak forgot that she was pregnant.  Fairies have an absolute control of their own bodies, and as long as Petal Oak was still pregnant, she could keep unborn Penny from growing in her womb merely by willing it (or, in this case, forgetting to make her grow).  Fairies are also not known for their long-term focus (unless it's a matter of grudge-keeping).

So what about Diana?  Diana is the Greek goddess of maidens, the moon, and the hunt, as it says in her bio.

No, really.  Really.  Conceptual gods exist because people want them to exist, and initially, they are given a whole lot of power by the actions of worship and sacrifice.  However, just because people stop believing in them as a shaper of the world and of lives doesn't necessarily mean they stop believing in them entirely, and, as long as someone believes in a god in any way, that god continues to exist.  Some gods, either through their icons (i.e. the caduceus of Hermes) or their actual worship or invocation, have some vestigial powers remaining, but none of them are as great as mythology credits them (at least, not anymore).

Who is the Old Crowd?  The Old Crowd is a loose confederation of various gods and immortals (meaning any person who has lived significantly longer than the human average with no apparent signs of wear).  It also includes certain undead (like Dr. Cagliosi, the zombie veterinarian).  Not everyone in the Old Crowd knows everyone else (much like webcomic artists don't all hang out at the same club), but they are, for the most part, aware of the others.

So you're saying immortals and gods are common in the world around us?  No.  I'm saying gods and immortals (and undead, and mythical beasts) exist in the world of Casual Notice.  But I'm also not saying they don't.  Assuming a wide range of, say, 10,000 immortals of various stripes existing in the modern world, that makes them just over one ten-thousandth of one per cent of the world population:  not even a blip on the anthropological radar.

What about Schmookie?  Schmookie is a dragon.  They're not Old Crowd, although the Old Crowd takes responsibility for them (and all the other mythical beasts still extant).

You know what I mean...  Okay, dragons, which may derive from a joining of proto-fae and dinosaurs, are corporeal beings with the ability to change their forms at will.  They mostly use this ability for survival and for gaining mates.  All dragons are female, and while they reproduce by a sort of parthenogenesis, it has to be catalyzed by intercourse with a male being (although there may be some genetic exchange in the process, it's a very strange process at least partially aided by "magic").  Dragons are omnivores and can eat pretty much anything that is not itself imbued with the energies commonly referred to as "magic".  Ironically, all dragons have a particular fondness for dragon eggs (including their own) which at least partially explains their rarity.            Dragons are not, contrary to popular opinion, particularly intelligent (at least not in CN-world...maybe elsewhere), and exhibit approximately the same level of problem-solving and retention skills and sophistication you would expect from the family dog.

What did you mean by "The Old Crowd takes responsibility for them"?  While there is no actual governmental order among the Old crowd, they do abide by (and enforce) certain ethics and projects among them, and certain of them are so extremely powerful that most generally accede to their wishes.  One such is the Fae Grandfather.  He (it, technically) is arguably the oldest immortal on the planet, and among the most powerful, he was born in the depths of time from a gathering of prehistoric mosses and continues to exist wherever moss grows (which, by the way, is everywhere).  He is extremely powerful (though not omnipotent) and when he decides to notice the world (which is rarely) and make a suggestion, it generally has the effect of an order.  He suggested that dragons might prove a difficulty if some affirmative action toward domestication and control were not taken.

How do you create Casual Notice?  I just happen to have a tutorial on that, here.

Casual Notes

What gives you the right to spew your opinions all over the internet?  The First Amendment of the US constitution.

Yeah, well, who said you can decide what comics people should read?  I did.  It's my site.  You're free not to read the reviews, and even more free to use the forum to tell me why I'm full of shit.  Oh, wait, I closed the forum because it was being constantly raped by spammers and hackers.  I guess it just sucks to be you.

Are you a Conservative or a Liberal?  Yeah, what you really mean is "Am I a Republican or a Democrat?"  I'm neither.  I have never voted a straight ticket in my life, and while many of my opinions may seem conservative, others of them are quite liberal.  I am (I like to believe) a moderate and my opinions most closely align with the Libertarian party (although I'm not as fully committed to the utter elimination of all governmental controls).

Have a question you feel should be added to the FAQ?  Send it to me at bhainley@casualnotice.com.
Be sure to put "FAQ Question" in the subject.