May 31, 2004
Memorial Day Weekend - Sunday - Yum
Good eating in Animal Kingdom over in the Asia section, Pot Stickers in a spicy broth...yum.
Memorial Day Weekend - Sunday - Monkey Escape
While in Animal Kingdom, we watched this monkey jump from his island "habitat" over to a nearby rock and climbed up a tree where he obviously wasn't supposed to be. We thought it was pretty neato, but he was so close to the walkway that hopefully nobody grabbed him and ran off with him.
I don't think the monkey ate any people.
Yet.
Memorial Day Weekend - Sunday
We didn't do all that much on Saturday for our holiday, but on Sunday we did a day of Disney (a favorite past time of ours) to get out of the house into the sun and also so my wife can build up her photography portfolio. The first park we hit was Animal Kingdom.
May 27, 2004
Last weeks comics and a review/commentary
Since I didn't make it over to the comic book store on Wednesday (Extremely busy at the day job!), I can finally write a review instead of of reading the new stack of comics I usually get on Wednesday. Last Wednesday (5/19) was sort of a light comic week for me, it's not that I didn't get a bunch of books, I just didn't think there were a lot of great books from last week. The only real standout of the bunch was Demo #6, which I won't be writing a full review for, because...
1) A whole lot of other folks have already done it.
2) I would just be writing an 8 word review for the book: "I love this series, I love this book".
Demo #6 was a little different for me, taking a turn for the supernatural, but the book was still another excellent outing for Wood & Cloonan.
Today's review/commentary will be about The Gift #4. Now The Gift is not on my pull list, it was a freebee with my normal slab of comics. First off The Gift isn't something I would normally get, maybe I would pick it up and flip through it, but definitely wouldn't normally buy. The art has it's strength's and weaknesses, faces are a bit odd looking, anatomy is all over the place, and in the middle of everything the art goes sort of "manga" then it switches back. Some of the decent art is still a bit too "Top Cow" for me. He does do a great job on the "Ancient One" and in one or two places he gets the stripper right. But for me the art has more weaknesses than strengths.
The writing for me is...ehhh. One scene that I want to point out is when the "Ancient One" give the "gift" to the main character, the gift is in the shape of an extremely nasty looking bug that digs itself into the neck of the main character. Now this set of scenes doesn't look comfortable, Gregory writes the scenes over four panels, and the main character doesn't react until the next facing page. A large sharp bug digs itself into the mans neck, and nothing until it's nearly 75% in. This guy is one tough cat, I yelp when a mosquito bites me.
All in all the concept is neat, although I've seen elements of it all before. In a nutshell, a mysterious figure bestows a "gift" on a person and all sorts of wackiness ensues. It's got a sort of Twilight Zone/Tales from the Crypt feel to it, without being too "jokey". Did the free copy get me interested in the rest of the series? Ummm no...but I'l take another free one if it's given to me.
May 26, 2004
May 25, 2004
Idea Blogging
Why do I have ideas for stuff to write at places where I can't easily write said idea down? I do a whole lot of mental writing while waiting in line at the grocery store, showering, working at my full-time job, etc. But when I get to place where I can write those brillant ideas....nothing...nada, I draw a complete blank.
So just give me something that will plug directly into my brain. Nothing huge, I don't want it to record every aspect of my life. Just little notes here and there, "idea blogging", "brain blogging"...whatever.
Warren Ellis...if you get a chance...take that idea and run with it.
Blog Entry #1
The title to this entry is obviously a bit misleading, this is not my first blog entry. This is my first blog entry copied from my new Moleskine notebook. I bought a couple of these based on a blog entry from BoingBoing. The entry mentioned how great the notebooks were so I had to get one to try out. I can understand why the Moleskine is so wonderful. It has a wonderful, classic feel to it, and writing on it with my "new-fangled" Pilot gel pen just feels good.
For those of you who don't know me, I would call myself a "computer geek". So why would a self proclaimed "geek" want to use (gasp!) paper and pen? I really don't have an answer for it. I guess it's because I love a good mix of "modernness" with my "classic-ness". I know I could just use the numerous gadgets I've amassed over the years to work on my new project, write blog entries and to jot down research material, but this feels....better somehow.
I can now blog from, thanks to mFop2, my cell phone for example. But something like my phone isn't as easy as pulling out the new notebook and jotting a long string of sentences down like I'm doing right now.
Also, going back to my enjoyment of the "classic-ness" of this particular brand of notebook, I guess it's just one of my odd tastes. I love shopping at little local grocery stores and meat markets, probably due to the encroachment of the supersized "Walmarts" of the world, spreading like a pox across the countryside. I don't really know how liking small stores versus "Walmart-like" stores connects with me using a notebook (paper one) versus my cell phone/PDA/notebook (electronic one), especially since I really do love using all those things. Maybe I just want a simple non-electronic thing in my mess of electronic things.
One of the negatives to the notebook is that I seem to ramble a bit. Pardon my rambling.
May 22, 2004
May 20, 2004
May 19, 2004
Music I'm listening to right now....
It's good stuff. Bought it at Park Ave CD over in Winter Park. The CD has 26 tracks and a DVD for only $7.95. Not too shabby.
Buy it over at the Fat Wreck Chords website.
May 18, 2004
The Filth
Finished reading The Filth trade paperback the other day, and I had some thoughts spring up because of it. Now first off, I had collected the entire series prior to my purchase of the TPB, and I bought the collected version for two reasons. 1) I was tired of hunting through my long boxes to find the earlier issues of The Filth that I enjoyed (gasp I don't keep my comics in order! The horror!). 2) I really dug the look of the TBP and the art on the cover, but more on that later.
The Filth was my "gateway drug" into the world of Grant Morrison, I had never read any of his stuff prior to my first purchase of #1, but after reading it, I quickly added him to my "buy everything this author does list". I moved onto Morrison's New X-Men run because of this series, and started purchasing the trade paperbacks of The Invisibles because of his work on The Filth.
For those of you that haven't read it, The Filth is definitely hard to describe. In a nutshell (and for all I know I'm interpreting it all wrong), it's about the garbage collectors of the world, the ones that truly keep the order, because the world can be a horrible place and somebody has to clean up the mess. To be brutally honest with you, when I was buying the singles I didn't have a clue to what was going on. But it was Morrison's wild imagination coupled with Chris Weston's uncanny ability to re-create the monsters in Morrison's nightmarish visions that caused me to enjoy the series so much. Now this little rant is not a review, although obviously this is (in my opinion) one of the better comic series to come out in a while (no not THE BEST, just one of THE BEST!). It was just after my completion of reading it I had an idea.
Can they put out a "Special Edition"? No, not a metal plated, multiple cover mis-mashed piece of crap. I'm talking about something with the "special features" of a DVD, with original character sketches and layouts from Weston, notes and research from Morrison, conversations between the two detailing character development, and designs and ideas for the amazing cover art provided by Carlos Segura. The fonts used in the series and breakdowns of logo design would be cool too. Am I the only one that would find this interesting? It would be the equivalent of "The Art of Toy Story", a sort of documentary, behind the scenes of making the comic book from funny little concept into the tome that the trade paperback is. I for one would buy something like this, because other than getting enjoyment out of the story and art, I would love to see the "process" of creating the book. I'm guessing there are others out there as sick as I am. I know when I went over to SFMOMA they had a book section in their museum store, this type of book would sell there I think.
Now, I'm not trying to say that they should add additional material to an already great piece of work, simply for the sake of selling it in museum stores. But I think that members of the creative community and even those who aren't officially member of the creative community would be interested in it. I understand that there are some "special edition" items featured in some of the TPB's that come out nowadays, but I want to see that with everything! Making comics is hard work, and I would love to see not only the fruition of the creative teams efforts but how they reached that point. This possibly could work in the form of a completely separate book. Sold in book stores (no I'm not saying to screw over the comic book store owners), in maybe the art section?
Is this just crazy?
May 17, 2004
Hard Drive Enclosure
Anyone want a hard drive enclosure? I just got a new one in the hopes of upgrading to firewire (although I'm yet to be able to use the firewire with the new enclosure...just the usb....I will figure out what's wrong!).
My old enclosure was really flakey with OS X 10.3, just a warning to those who are interested. But it does work fine, and I owned it for only about a year.
Kind of a humorous story on why I purchased the original enclosure. I had a pretty sweet Toshiba laptop which I brought to work everyday. Most days I would have breakfast at my desk, then one day I dropped an entire bowl of Raisin Bran on my laptop. I quickly realized two things. One: Cereal and expensive computers don't mix. Two: Maybe it's time to move to that Powerbook I've been checking out. The only thing that was recoverable from the old machine was the hard drive. But it all turned out good in the end because my next laptop purchase was my wonderful Powerbook. Ah so nice, never to return to Windows again!
Anyway here's the eBay auction for the enclosure.
Such a great picture.
Such a great picture. Our photographer kicked oh so much ass. That's me and my beautiful bride in the upper right corner.
Some pictures from our wedding here.
May 15, 2004
Walking in Winter Park
Just before it started to rain. This time, I downloaded straight from the memory stick, to iPhoto, and in ecto I did all the importing and converting straight from iPhoto. I never got anything like this in the world of Windows.
Great gravy I love macs.
May 14, 2004
Fark Photoshop Contest
Today's theme: Using IKEA-like instructions, throw together some plans for saving the world. There are some great ones in here.
May 13, 2004
This is a story?
This is a story deserving the front page of The Pulse?
House of Ra has decided to change its logo
Thats....oh....zzz....so.....exciting.....zzz....
Ummm....slow comic news week?
Honeymoon: Flight Home
Not too much can be said about the flight home. I do enjoy Frontier Airlines, my only gripe is from San Fran to Denver still no satellite TV in the old Boeing planes. The flight though from Denver to Orlando was in a brand spanking new Airbus. It still had new car smell (plane smell?).
One thing I can now laugh about, was running into some bad weather when we hit Florida's panhandle. There was a pretty large cold front crossing the southern US when we were flying home, so I expected a little bit of rough weather. Surprisingly though, there wasn't all that much until we neared Florida. Then we saw it. You could actually see the front from our window, it was pretty cloudless throughout the flight, but when we hit the back of the front (back of the front?) it was just a wall of clouds. And when we hit it, the plane did a dipsy-do. It dropped and shimmied left-to-right. Not enjoyable. You know when you're in a plane, and something like some really rough weather hits, and it sort of calms down and everyone in the plane is really quiet, maybe laughing nervously to cover up the terror? It was sort of like that. But we survived. And that's all that matters.
May 12, 2004
Wildcats Irony & Some Stormwatch
Head over to the Wildstorm site, look down at the area that says "Message Boards", hopefully you will see a picture of one of the Coda and underneath it, the following:
CODA WAR ONE
How can the WILDCATS hope to survive?
Easy, DON'T CANCEL IT YOU BASTARDS! (I added the link to the latest Wildcats issue)
You may all now go about your business.
Oh and Stormwatch #22 is out today. Pick it up, it's enjoyable.
May 11, 2004
McDonald's launches Happy Meals for Adults
Does this sound weird to anyone else? Also they used the word "Active" in the campaign so I keep reading it as "Active Adult" happy meals. Here in Florida there are a bunch of "Active Adult" communities which really just mean large communities of old people. So McDonald's has released a Happy meal for old people. That's nice of them.
May 10, 2004
Honeymoon Day 6-10: San Francisco
Well, to finish off our trip we headed back into San Francisco (where we originally flew into), and checked into the Westin St Francis. The hotel is smack dab in the middle of Union Square, in downtown San Fran. Walking distance from shopping, museums and a whole lot of restaurants the hotel is near most of the action. Christine was a little creeped out by the hotel, it was built in 1927, so architecturally it's old, the place has been obviously upgraded to Westin standards, but just the smell and "feeling" of the place was "old". Also there was a chandelier in the room, and that was just kind of odd. The additional cool thing was the bellman asked why we were there and we mentioned that we were on our honeymoon, so 15 minutes later a bottle of wine was delivered to our room. Free booze is always good.
We ended up making a dinner reservation at a place in the Italian district, "The Stinking Rose". What's this place's specialty you ask? Garlic, garlic on everything, so much garlic we had horrible garlic breath for hours (we got up several times during the night to brush our teeth it was so bad). But what a great resturant, well worth it. I had a prime rib there that was better than the prime rib I had eaten at The Ahwahnee Dining Room, we didn't try the garlic ice cream but all-in-all some great eats.
The next day we headed over to the SF Museum of Modern Art, which was well worth the visit. The museum is very open and bright, I don't remember the last time I was in a museum of modern art, but this was certainly different than most of the bit more "stuffy" fine art museum's I had been to.
The first floor was a mix of early 20th century modern art (Picasso, Dali, etc) and more recent artists. The second floor was our favorite, dedicated to Architecture and Design. We could have spent hours on that floor, it was one of my first complaints about the whole thing, was that this floor wasn't nearly big enough. The next floor was modern photography (which Christine enjoyed) and the fourth was dedicated to the "Pop" art exhibit which I loved but Christine didn't like all that much. The fifth floor was an personal collection that was some wild stuff, you have to see to understand. My only other complaints was the museum was a bit antiseptic feeling, but I guess that's modernity rearing it's head. One exhibit we didn't enjoy that much was The Art of Romare Bearden, it just didn't do all that much for us, pretty boring.
The rest of that day was filled with POWER SHOPPING!!! Which is almost as good as free booze. That night we dressed up all proper and headed over to Farallon, a restaurant that we had booked a month before. That was an amazing meal, I love a restaurant that out of the blue brings out food you didn't order and goes "The chef would like you to try some of this", the extra food they brought out was a lobster bisque..AMAZING STUFF!!
The last day of our trip we headed over to the coast, walked on the Golden Gate Bridge (scary!), drank some great beer over at the Beach Chalet Brewery & Restaurant (brewery first! then restaurant!), then finished the day by walking around the Golden Gate Park and visiting the Isotope, an unbelievably great comic book shop in SF. Ryan Yount was working that day and he signed copies of his hilarious comic Scurvy Dogs for me.
Very Cool End to a great trip.
Honeymoon: Complete
May 09, 2004
Buy some stuff!
Why don't you buy a copy of my comic book series Touch of Death?
It's good stuff! I swear!
May 07, 2004
Demo love
A bunch of folks in the comics blogosphere has been writing about this, so I figured I should too in order to spread the word.
Sponsors too numerous to mention are holding a Demo Contest for Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's Demo, a wonderful little series about having "super" powers but not becoming a "super" hero in the "conventional" sense. It's like the anti-X-men. Good stuff, should be read by all. Enter the contest today and if you haven't read it, bother your local retailer to carry it.
Here's an interview with Brian Wood from Thought Balloons.
Frank Gerhry and MIT
Wired article about some really cool architecture.
(Link courtesy of Eyebeam reBlog)
The Shining...with bunnies!
The Shining, in 30 seconds, played by bunnies. Great stuff.
By the same folks who brought The Exorcist by bunnies.
(Link courtesy of Jeffrey Zeldman)
Bush may seek more than $50 billion...
Holy hot crap! That's a ton of money for not discovering any weapons of mass destruction, having to deal with the circus trial for Hussein, and for weakening Al Qaeda.
(Link courtesy of The Agonist)
May 06, 2004
May 05, 2004
Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 may not be released by Disney
From the article:
Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, told the New York Times that Eisner asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Emanuel said Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where President Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor.
This is the country we live in? Is this completely insane to anyone else?
Although it makes for great press for the movie. Maybe that's what they've been planning all along?
May 04, 2004
May 03, 2004
Comics and spandex
Gutterninja has a great blog entry about comics and the stigma they have over them regarding super heroes. It's the old "comics are just about people in capes right?" argument, stuff I definitely feel strongly about (especially since I currently don't write any super hero stuff). Good stuff.
Check out the entry here.
(Link courtesy of Grotesque Anatomy)
Micah Wright: Not a Ranger
Newsarama has an article on Micah Ian Wright's admittance to never being an Army Ranger, whole lot of back and forth arguing about this one in the message boards following the article.
I didn't even know he claimed to be a Ranger. I can see how this can rile people up because of his politically tinged writing and it doesn't help his credibility all that much, but at least he admitted it.
Also a bunch of rumbling about it at Pulse.
Can I have Stormwatch back now?
Fund Mammograms for Free
Just visit this site, and click the pink box in the center. That's it, it's all you have to do.
Tell your friends.
(Link courtesy of BoingBoing)
Animal Rubber Bands
I think they are pretty cool.
Check them out here.
(Link courtesy of BoingBoing)
Christine's Art Show
My wife's first art show is this weekend (May 8-9) over in Tampa. Come stop by if you're in the area.
Information on the event.
Her website is being worked on right now. Link to it will be up soon.
International Comic Arts Association
Got an email a couple days ago that the International Comic Arts Association website is now live. I've ranted about this before, it's exactly (one of the things) that the comic industry needs.
Go check them out and send them some cash or comics if you can.