Unfortunately, those were the last set of photos I could take before I dropped my brand new totally amazing camera on my way back from the Portland airport and totally biffed the lens.
When he gave it to me, Matt half-joked that he got me my own camera so I wouldn't break his now.
I hate proving him right.
To my credit! I've been using his camera for the last three years with no incident! And then of course I get my own and it's in the repair shop within three weeks.
Ooooooooh my god. I started this at... 5pm? And then I went out with friends. And now it's 11:01pm. and I'm going to bed drunk. again. the second night in a row.
HAY EVERYBODY HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEW BATMAN MOVIE YET ITS GOT SOME DEAD GUY PLAYING THE JOKER AND YOU CAN TELL ITS A REAL MOVIE BECAUSE BATMAN TALKS LIKE HE'S FROM GWAR OR SOMETHING AND NOT LIKE THAT MICHAEL KEATON FAG LOLZ.
Seriously though, nice little flick with some legitimately funny moments, even if it's 10 pounds of movie stuffed into a 5 pound bat-suit. Also, the last half of the movie goes way the FUCK overboard with every imaginable character repeatedly beating you over the heat with thematically-driven monologues about the nature of order vs. chaos, which gets old real fast.
That said, everybody in the world is hereby commanded to purchase a Playstation 3 so we can play Fat Princess together. Seriously folks, it's a game about trying to make off with a fat princess before an enemy army tricks her into eating too much goddamned cake. I can only hope that these guys follow it up with another game someday where you bait tiny retarded kids into oncoming traffic using puppies and ice cream.
And now an acceptable WP set-up for those of you who'd like to follow along but who get dizzy with Twitter. Hopefully I'll figure out how to get some icons set for each writer so they're immediately distinguishable.
Can't get the WP to record further back than three days ago, although older entries are clearly present on the search rss archive for each twitter - I suppose I might have to just hand-code those in when this is all over. If you want to read from the top, here you go.
Shudder.
At any rate, it's nice to discover that I now actually know what I'm doing in WordPress - I've been lumbering around in it for months now, out of the public eye. Now I feel like hacking back at my new website might actually be feasible, rather than just depressing. I'm also having more fun writing than I have in some time.
Right-o, now shutting up about this project here for the time being! Gad, I feel weird today - spacey and shaky. Et tu, brain?
I'm looking for a Wordpress plugin that will syndicate the six Dame Jetsam feeds (all well written! gad!) to a single WP blog.
In such a way that they hopefully do not also syndicate the RSS title of each update, which generally is all 140 characters of the entry itself (ANNOYING). And can be set to indicate the Twitter ID of origin, either automatically or by my fiddling.
Things are heating up, and I'd like for non-Twitter people to follow along with ease and style.
Any ideas? I've tried five or six plugins but haven't come up with a good configuration. Honestly the closer it can resemble the Twitter Search results the better.
NOTE: hey folks, I'm so happy to have gotten such great contributors, but I think at 6 we're all full up, and straining the ability of readers to process it all!
THAT SAID, I have no idea why this should be the only project of this sort...if you're interested in starting a group Twitter story, feel free to post about it here and search for collaborators!
I was slammed both by dayjob and by freelance work this week, so to fill in, I had Luther participate in Kate Beaton's "conversation with yourself as a kid" meme. I think this officially makes me the dweebiest person on earth.
I'm resigned to the fact that these movies will never be quite as truly bad-ass as they should so easily be, due to a director who - despite being blessed with an eye for lush visuals and clever creature design - is a bit dunderheaded when it comes basic storytelling. A Hollywood director who is easily distracted by shiny toys and crazy character designs when he should be paying more attention to mining the thematic material on-hand for all that it's worth? SHOCKING, YES, I KNOW. Bah.
That said, anybody out there know of any good books about the history of anime? There's a nifty-looking encylopedia about the topic that I've found on Amazon.com, but I thought I'd poke around and ask about any other obvious related tomes I should be reading. I feel that it's about time I stop giving that entire genre the brush-off and try and make nice with that retarded little art form from the East.
Today I do not so much resemble a train wreck as I do a seriously botched parallel parking job.
Nomadic eyeliner, ectoplasmic hair, various half-sealed wounds, graphite smears, semi-regular mental spikes of "oh shit, did I forget about X?". When did I last have time to actually take a full shower? Where is my ipod charger cord? When did I last eat off of a plate? Why do people insist on having faces which they then use to speak at me with?
And it is only Tuesday, folks. This level of fry-out is usually reserved for Thursday mornings.
Surely the personal finance consultant I am meeting with today will take one look at me and recommend that I invest in a few bricks of meth and set up a corrugated box under the freeway.
Ah, back from visiting Vera in Portland and had what was quite likely one of the most magical weekends ever!!
It started kind of shakily when my train got stuck outside of Vancouver, WA for an hour and a half while waiting for a 90yr old bridge to lock back down after being raised for a barge to pass through. When that didn't work they called in some engineers to examine it. Eventually we retreated back to Vancouver and the conductor got all red-faced trying to find transportation for everybody. Ticketing agent: "I called a few busses to come by and take the passengers to Portland." Conductor, "No no!!! That's not good enough! Call everybody taxis!!" A few minutes later they herded passengers back onto the train (only about half of us got back on), screamed ALL ABOARD ALL ABOARD and pulled into Portland in 10minutes. It felt like the set of some goofy musical.
Anyway, dinner that night was at a southern food place and I had some delicious yam fries with a very time-costly Ranier cherry salad. YOM. Then came the terrible Hellboy II movie - I seem to be one of four people on the planet who hate it, so I'm not going to say much, though I was convinced I would like it because Pan's Labyrinth was intense and amazing. Cornball moments just aren't very intense or amazing. I felt like I was watching a fancy Power Rangers episode. It was very pretty, though... Cathedral head was awesome.
The next day was berry picking and then to a river!! I had never swam in anything besides a pool before due to an intense fear of water as a child, but for the sake of comfort got over that pretty quick (I also kind of just slid in there due to very slimy rocks). I thought a leech had bit my bum as I plucked off a smallish, hard poo-shaped thing whose flailing claws were quickly retrieving. Then I realized it was a hermit crab of sorts and I probably caused more trauma to it than it to me. Later on we had a barbeque and on Sunday there were waffles from a window with Dylan and Erika (I am glad to hear all the good news!! =) That afternoon we made all sorts of things while also overheating ourselves in the kitchen - chocolate raspberry cupcakes with vanilla buttercream, raspberry limeade, and the best effin' blueberry ice cream. I return slightly sunburnt and five pounds heavier. Way to show a girl a good time, Vera!! =D
Man, back to reality. Sent a lengthy page of notes and my own version of my show's promo to the studio on Sunday, and haven't heard back from them yet. @_o I dunno if I should be making a big stink about how it should be run, but it'd be nice to prevent another show that is completely over-run with one liners. On the other hand, maybe that's the only type of show our studio seems to understand. 9__________9
Sorry I missed last week's update, I am a scoundrel.
Perhaps the spot color makes up for my slackery? Probably not, but it's there anyway.
The last few weeks I've been really changing how I do DAR based off feedback I've been getting from other cartoonists.
Most dramatically (and least obvious to you readers), I've been working a LOT larger.
Normally I'd draw and ink the whole comic on an 8.5 x 11 piece of crappy printer paper using pens and erasing my pencil marks afterwards.
Now I'm still doing my initial penciling on the same paper, but then I scan it in, blow it up enormously in photoshop, print out the larger version (sometimes on real Bristol paper!) in a light color that won't be picked up by a scanner, and then ink on that. Working larger really is making it a lot easier for me to draw everything. Amazing!
I'm also trying to use brushes and brush pens a lot more, since they have a much more natural-looking line than what a pen can produce. Unfortunately, I have a hella hard hold which makes my hand cramp up and shlop down super fat lines. Aw well, I'm still practicing.
Oh! And thirdly, I'm only using THREE grey tones (30, 50, 70%) instead of the eleventy billion I was using previously. Dude, it's soooo hard for me. Ideally this would help me keep my tones less busy and more focussed and maybe someday even speed up my toning process-- but for now, trying to find balance in the grays this way takes about 500% more time and I think it might possibly be looking MORE cluttered right now :-/ BUT, I'm sure this will improve the more I do it. Hopefully my pages will print out better now, too.
This strip and the previous one have been my first experiments with these new techniques. Hopefully you guys'll be seeing some significant quality improvement in the near future!
Hm; betrayal already on Twitter - it seems the first six posts from Dame Jetsam no longer exist for me to find them. Other Twitters with over 20 entries are still paginating and archiving as usual, so whaaaa?
Was anybody pleasant enough to be keeping those early entries at hand somehow, or will I be forced to recreate what the poor gal was saying in her first moments of life so that people can read from the beginning when I'm done? I mean, she's already under threat as it is...
EDIT: whoop, for some reason it shows up in Google Reader RSS (although not in the feed as it's displayed raw by Twitter).
Fascinating. Everybody return to your homes. Nothing to see here.
As Dave Roman just pointed out, the series finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender is hitting the airwaves this weekend:
Anybody here in Portland have any plans to check this thing out, group-style? I might be able to offer a 40-inch HD TV to watch it on, though I don't have cable televison handy. (A Macbook with a torrected/streaming copy of the show can be run through the TV, though, to say nothing of just downloading the series finale straight from Xbox Live.)
I haven't had much time for personal drawing lately outside of the comic, but it's nice when people get me to draw things for them.
A couple of relatively quick recent commissions - one of Ariana that seems to have tragically been eaten by FedEx (reparations will be made!), and one of the goddess Athena as a leather dyke. And Hephaestus as, apparently, a trailer park loser.
Are you folks the best readership ever? Survey says yes!
Bah, in the process of downloading Song Summoner for my iPod I discovered that any previous games that you may've purchased and subsequently lost due to a storage failure must be purchased again. Granted, Peggle is easily worth twice as much as the original 5 bucks that I paid for it before my harddrive crashed last March, but why isn't the license for that game tied to my iTunes account and NOT the storage device I download it to?
The world has a ways to go when it comes to digital media rights management, I swear to Christ. I never thought that Microsoft (and Xbox Live downloaded games in particular) would ever be ahead of the curve on this kind of thing, but c'mon.
Anyway, as Mike mentions here, our 2-page Hellboy-themed CulturePulp comic hits newsstands today (courtesy of The Oregonian), so check it out either here online or in print (ha, what web-friendly peeople read newspapers these days? No one! Jokes on us, I guess! Ha. Her.)
Okay, off to do a bit of wash in preparation for the big Goonies-themed adventure out to the coast tomorrow. This'll be the first time I've ever laid eyes on the Pacific in person. Cue Morgan Freeman, motherfuckers!
“I find I am so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head... I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.”
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