Others

Going to Germany, brb lol!
There is something to be said for the iPhone, always good for an entry on the move. Am waiting for the stansted train and wondering how to add a picture to a lj entry.
Ah, there's the train- bbl!

A million years ago, back when I first got this LiveJournal account, I posted tons of pictures of Wolverine. What I didn't mention at the time was that I drew a bunch of other X-Men at the same time but never scanned them. So here they are.

Rogue:



Storm (I always liked her in the mohawk and fatigues):



( Read more... )

House hunting is... weird. I've seen some strange houses now. I can safely say only one of them didn't flat out scare me. Hopefully this next weekend will go a little better. I've expanded the options. I'll post pictures as soon as I can. You'll see. Stuff that was scary and that I remember right now:

• poop in one disconnected toilet
• big patches of mold
• a fully wet-rotted room
• broken windows
• locks on a house used for housing mentally disabled people. You know that one is bad news.
• Tenents smoking something illegal in back room
• Owner offering me 7k to not get a house inspection before buying
• not closing back doors
• Duct tape holding drain pipe together
• Missing siding
• Half-completed exterior, no interior house

Job hunting is weird too. Hopefully that will go a little better the next couple weeks. Its getting closer to the wire now. I put in a couple applications, I have a pre-interview on the 5th. Hopefully I can line some more stuff up between now and then.

School stuff also weird. I'm not going to school for teaching after all. The advisor at Umaine was useless, kept delaying things and went on vacation. So, I couldn't get my funding before the due date. Instead, not one to let things be settled, I applied for a masters program, and are trying to get the monies for that. We'll see.... It's different. I'm going for intelligence studies, collecting intelligence focus. It'll be good because it will use some of the stuff I learned with my BA; but it is more adult, more career oriented. Plus it costs about the same as my BA classes did, and there is no GRE. Thats a positive.

Wednesday is our anniversary. 1 year. Imagine. It seems like so long, and so recent all at once. He says we're going to the Macaroni Grill for dinner. That will be nice - neither of us have been there. We're not buying each other anything right now. When we get the house, I'm buying him a giant screen TV for the living room. He's buying me tickets to have the sibs up for christmas. Its what we both really want. Now, I just got to find him something for his birthday. I'm debating if I ought to get him something special now or just wait and buy him a big recliner for his living room. He'd dig that.

I guess the big thing coming out tomorrow for most folks around my age is The State: The Complete Series. I'm wary of seeing the show again, which is more than likely far better in my hazy middle school memories than it ever could be in reality, but I had a lot of love for The State when it was first on. Heck, I was one of the eight people who watched The State's 43rd Annual All-Star Halloween Special when it originally aired. I will probably check this out eventually.

With any luck, this will pave the way for Viva Variety!: The Complete Series

I think this was a concept for a children's book. I like that I fit Jesse Hamm's HappyGoth in there.

I missed this awesome Skin Horse writeup on Fleen last week because I've been so busy putting the book together. Thanks, Gary!

Elliot and I are reading Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight. We took it out of the library and I'd really recommend it. The book is not just a cheap tie-in to a cartoon or movie, but features some really fun design work from Ralph Cosentino.

Last Christmas, idahoswede had given me the present of a theatre ticket for Hamlet, starring Jude Law. Today I went to London to see said production.
The morning became a little more hectic when I had a look at the Stansted Express timetable, only to find out that due to planned engineering works, it would be partly replaced by a bus service. Nevertheless, I made it to the theatre on time, and wedged myself into my seat - front row, but second circle, so I had to fight my flight-instinct (aka slight dizzyness) until the house lights went down, and a perfect view of the stage was revealed.
About 20 minutes or so into the play, I realized that while Hamlet is one of my favourite plays, and I have seen many a TV and film production of it, this was the first time I had actually seen it on stage. And while the films have the advantage of more settings, more costume changes (and, in case of Branagh, more text), there is nothing like seeing a play live on stage, especially when it is such a gripping and intense performance as this one was.
Jude Law is a damn good Hamlet. Witty, expressive, mad, desperate, edgy and also with an edge, and above all real. Not an easy task, to make this character everyone knows (sort of) fresh and real. Law is a pretty good actor, I hope he'll be working for decades to come.
Of the other actors, no name struck me as known / famous, but that didn't matter, good acting is good acting, whether you know the actors or not, and these were very good indeed. The King increasingly torn and despairing, the Queen... Well. The Queen I recognized by her voice (and thus make myself a liar): It was Penelope Wilton, also known to me as "Harriet Jones" in Doctor Who.
The stage was bare and stony, like a castle is supposed to be, with a few props and the use of light (and occasionally smoke and snow) changing the scene, the costumes contemporary. Polonius was fantastic, Ophelia too, the Gravedigger, wow - in fact, the only one who came across a bit wooden was Fortinbras, but then he only has a few sentences to speak and his character is this very rigid soldier, so I might be wrong about him.

I still think Shakespeare should have ended the play with Horatio saying "Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!", and never mind the Ambassador bringing news of Rosencranz and Guildenstern, and Fortinbras taking over Denmark. This is how the play ends, to me - everyone dead, the tower of cards struck down, and only Horatio left to tell the tale.

After I left the theatre, I wandered around in a slight daze. I saw about ten "stuck in the 60s" Mod scooters with more headlamps than lights on a Christmas tree, dazzling mirrors, Air Force roundels and British flags, and old blokes - probably the original owners - in "The Who"-shirts having a blast. Then I went back to Liverpool Street station where I had dinner in the local Witherspoon's, and then back home. Tomorrow, work, and Tuesday, a flight to Germany.

The Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco (www.cartoonart.org) is organizing "Monsters of Webcomics," a showcase of cutting-edge webcomics work. The show's ten spotlight artists have already been selected. However, the museum also wants to include a virtual gallery of as many other webcomics as possible. If you're interested in having your art included in the virtual gallery, email curator Andrew Farago at gallery@cartoonart.org.

Feel free to spread this information around the webcomics community. The museum wants a wide range of comics included in the show.

Here's the press release:


Monsters of Webcomics
August 8 - December 6, 2009

The Internet has revolutionized all forms of communication, and comics are no exception. The Cartoon Art Museum explores the digital revolution in its latest exhibition, Monsters of Webcomics, a showcase of some of the best and boldest work published on the World Wide Web.

Cartoonists choose to work on the Web for many reasons. For some, it’s an opportunity to reach readers directly without going through editors, publishers, or syndicates. For others, it’s a chance to explore the artistic possibilities of the Web, whether that means working in a format that would be impossible in print, tackling subject matter most comic-book publishers won’t handle, or taking advantage of the rich palette available with digital coloring. Others simply want to share their comics with as many people as possible.

The comics by the ten artists featured in this exhibition run the gamut from four-panel comic strips to full-length graphic novels and include comedy, drama, history, science fiction, and sociopolitical commentary. As varied as this work is, however, it represents only a very small sample of the comics available on the Web. The Monsters of Webcomics exhibition also includes a virtual gallery that will highlight dozens of additional online comics.

(IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: If you are a webcartoonist and would like to participate in the virtual gallery component of this historic exhibition, please e-mail C.A.M. Curator Andrew Farago at gallery@cartoonart.org)

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Slow Wave
By Jesse Reklaw
http://www.slowwave.com

Hark! A Vagrant!
By Kate Beaton
http://www.harkavagrant.com

Girl Genius
By Phil and Kaja Foglio
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com

Cat and Girl
By Dorothy Gambrell
http://www.catandgirl.com

The Perry Bible Fellowship
By Nicholas Gurewitch
http://www.pbfcomics.com

Dicebox
By Jenn Manley Lee
http://www.dicebox.net

Family Man
By Dylan Meconis
http://www.lutherlevy.com

Achewood
By Chris Onstad
http://www.achewood.com

Templar, AZ
By Spike
http://www.templaraz.com

This past school year, I showed my classes selected bits and pieces of the 1998 NBC TV miniseries The Odyssey.


As a tool for illustrating difficult sections of the epic poem, the movie has its' strong points (the Calypso scenes are pretty good, and also was hilariously clear that most of my male students want to bone Vanessa Williams) and it's unbelievably weak points (wooden acting all around, awkward CGI that hasn't aged well) but I remember enjoying the spectacle of the thing when it first aired.

It got me thinking... what happened to the high concept TV miniseries? When I was growing up, there were plenty of 'em... both new and in reruns. These days, not so much.

I remember loving it when our cable provider finally hooked us up with the SciFi Channel and I was able to watch the Nazis-as-aliens run amok series V on four consecutive nights. Ditto The Day After, a blearily depressing take on nuclear holocaust in America. There were other series that ran on a similar theme- I've heard mixed things about Amerika, a "What if the Russians won the Cold War" series whose concept really sparked my imagination.

For a number of years in my teens, ABC was committed to making quality high concept mini-series, usually opting to adapt Stephen King novels for the small screen with mixed results. When those King minis were good, the were stupendous. I'm an unerring fan of their adaptation of King's gigantic good-vs.-evil opus The Stand. Even if it was less satisfying for those who loved the novel, ABC's version if IT has fans even today- my students referenced Pennywise as one of the scariest modern day monsters during an earlier lesson on the monsters of Greek myth.


For a TV movie that was made almost twenty years ago, and when you consider the budgetary restraints a production like that was under... for jaded teenagers who have "seen it all" when it comes to horror movies to even remember Pennywise is a big thing.

It must be said however, that for every good King mini-series, there was something like The Langoliers, a strange melange of time travel and bad CGI monsters that looked a lot like Pac-Man. Also, the mystifyingly boring remake of The Shining was pretty self-indulgent and languid. Still, more of the King minis were good than bad, and that's something.

NBC too was in the game, albeit with taking a "classier" route with adaptations of classic literature with the best special effects of the time. NBC's version of Gulliver's Travels with Ted Danson was decently accurate, if I remember correctly. At the very least, they addressed more of the various destinations that Lemuiel Gulliver encountered than most adaptations usually do. I also enjoyed their version of Merlin (starring Sam Neill) so much that I bought a DVD of it in college... although, admittedly, I found it in one of those giant bargain bins full of DVDs at my college's local Wal-Mart.

I suppose the day of the network television miniseries has seen its end, at least in a way that even attempts to cater to my interests as a viewer. ABC and NBC have had "world in peril" meteor mini-series on this summer, but they weren't appointment television, by any means. The major networks have seemingly ceded the genre to cable and pay television, and I've enjoyed a bunch of those (HBO's John Adams absolutely floored Ellen and I last summer) they don't have the same feel as some of the series I listed above. It's a pity in that when network TV got it right with a TV miniseries, they became a phenomenon.
.........

The internet was invented by military bigwigs so that we could share pictures and videos of cats.

My home is being invaded by dozens of tiny black flies, about three mm long and thin.Can anyone tell me what I am facing here?

Edit: There's one crawling on my computer screen. At least I thout it was crawling on it. But it is crawling around INSIDE it. Even if it curls up and dies right now, I'll always have it in front of me.

Edit: This is my window from the outside, after I closed it. Most of the crawlies are caught in spiderwebs.


Also, the bug in my computer screen has died. Inside the visible area, of course.

1. What is your favorite vegetable?
2. What is your favorite salad dressing, sauce, gravy, or condiment?
3. What is your favorite culture's food (American, Chinese, Creole, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Soul Food, Southern U.S., etc.)?
4. What is your favorite beverage?
5. What is your favorite food?

1. I like broccoli a lot. Green beans when they're in season, but we eat more broccoli.

2. Caesar dressing is usually what I use on salads. I don't eat a lot of gravy outside of Thanksgiving.

3. I like Mexican food best these days, or more specifically, Tex-Mex.

4. Water. Boring, but that's pretty much all I drink. Occasionally I treat myself to a gallon of Newman's Own Lemon-Aided Ice Tea, but those are fewer and further between these days.

5. Ellen makes a chicken pot pie that I love, but if pressed, her pork chops are my favorites.

I am finally discovering the wonder that is podcasts (late to the game, I am).

Any recommendations, anyone? :)

The strides over the past decade in thought-controlled medical devices is truly astounding. Here is a mind-controlled wheel chair by Toyota!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/01/mind-controlled-wheelchai_n_223810.html

And THIS is so fantastic... Developers creating subdivisions around organic farms:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/business/energy-environment/01farm.html?_r=3&hpw

How awesome is that?! I would love to live in a community like that! What a great use/reform of all this endless suburban sprawl! What a great way to combine previous ways of living with modernity. yay!

And for all you new parents (my friends are having a mini-baby-boom): Hungry? Burpy? Just Messing with You? The Baby Cry Analyzer
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geek-kids/newborn-infant/bea5/

Yesterday's strip is the comic in question.

This is Uncle Chris' Bargain Week here at the comic! Today's tip: If you live near one (sorry East Coasters) head over to Half Price Books' website and sign up for their e-mail list. They're having a big sale next week and they'll send you awesome coupons for it. 50% off one item next Sunday! I find awesome stuff at HPB all the time. Last week I got the first Starman Omnibus for $16 bucks and today I bought Lucy Knisley's Radiator Days for $6!

Well. I guess that's one way to end a series.

Who let RTD at it again?

I write this on my iPhone. Not neccessarily comfy, but definitely wow.

Convention sketch:

I totally totally totally hate this comic, but I ended up drawing a follow up tomorrow which I like a little better. That means I have to use this piece of crap today.

I don't know if this helps anyone out, but Southwest Air is having a big sale today. If you book a trip now for sometime in the fall, you only pay like $30 to $90 bucks one way, depending on how far you're going. It seems like a hell of a deal; if I were a swingin' single, I might book something now and figure the rest of it out later. I know it's short notice but check it out.

( I went up to London today to see a matinee performance of Waiting for Godot (yes, the production starring Gandalf, Captain Picard and Dickens). )

So much for this; bed, now. And on Sunday, it's Hamlet, starring Sky Captain Alfie.