Okay NOW I'm gone for a week

I just had to share this first of three episodes in Adam Curtis' latest series The Trap. The man is just brilliant and makes Michael Moore look like a chubby teenager with his hand down his pants while swearing loudly at a poster of Ronald Reagan riding horseback.

Belated birthday sketch

Strangely, I finished doodling this before the conversation in the last post's comments truly got under way. Alas, the text on the right got smudged and had to be replaced with cee gee eye!.

Well, screw everybody, I'm off to Athens tomorrow. I'm taking a vacation from work and all things internet OR computer related until late Sunday the 24th. Email me if you wish, just know that I shan't be up on my correspondence until at least that point in the future.

Thanks to everybody who wished me a happy birthday! It was pretty swell. I greatly look forward to coming back from my vacation with a clearer gameplan for the rest of 2007 and piles of photos of Athens.

And maybe some finished blueprints for Scarlett RoboJohannson 1.0

Addendum: Superman fights the real life KKK in the 1940's

*Tootle Parp*

Wheeeeee - apparently I have the same birthday as Chris Onstad. My webcomics success is now assured by this divine omen.

I know I've mentioned this to some folk already, but I thought I'd mention here that in the UK there are "Youth" discounts as well as the usual "Student" discounts. I think that's pretty okay, since it's unfair to assume that someone going straight from High School to the job market should be expected to pay the same rates for transit etc. as someone further down the road, who isn't working the kind of jobs one can get when only in possession of a high school diploma.

The cut off for this "Youth" discount is, you guessed it, twenty-five. My gorgeous Youth Rail Card picture is now but an archaic relic of times gone by! Here's hoping a pack of archeologists don't abduct me while I'm checking out the Acropolis in three days time.

Less than twenty-four hours of being twenty-four to go...

This panel is from chapter three, page nine of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell. I recently spoiled myself with the softcover and after the mandatory re-read I feel like I may have found a format that sits at just the right point along the line from rigidity to flexibility. The above panel is the standard size used throughout the work in a 3x3 grid. Always, the page can be split along those lines and throughout Campbell cleverly chooses to merge different combinations of these panels in various manners which change the rhythm and flow of a page - as well as simply allow larger illustrations!

If I run with this then I suppose it is a theft of sort, but honestly I think that technique is one thing and style another. To me, "stealing" the former is always acceptable because otherwise nobody would ever learn how to do anything but by reinventing it entirely from scratch. The latter is much less so, with cherry-picking being widely accepted as another method of learning but flat out copying being just as wisely frowned upon. Unless, of course, it's an homage or you're being postmodern.

Meanwhile, if the Adam Curtis documentary I posted below got you interested in the man and his work, there is an rather good interview with him that has the headline "Our anger is being ironed out of us".

Two days until THE AGING

I'm trying not to rabbit on about the webcomic too much now, since I'm hoping to have it up in a somewhere in the four to six week range. But I thought I'd put a little up today. Generally I've been busily filling a sketchbook with practice on hands and rough experiments in style, since I wouldn't say I really have one of my own yet. But I have been trying to get one "template" image down for each of the four main characters that I can then refer to whenever I draw them. To the left is an older one of Ben that I drew about six weeks ago and to the right is one of Charlotte that I drew last week. I don't think they're worth a thorough dissection but I will say that the reason my characters always seem to be pointing or laying their hand away from themselves is simply my way of forcing more hand practice.

Meanwhile, shucks howdy but job hunting has been a strange creature this time around. Now that I have a few months behind me of data entry, I'm getting a couple of calls a week with offers of moderate to high paying jobs (proportionate to my current pay) where I'd get to work in the heart of London.

Which would be great, except that these jobs are always just evolved versions of what I'm doing now. I've been able to find some better job listing sites and an agency that claims it deals with media (publishing/film/tv) and it actually does - as opposed to the usual, which is that they deal in media sales....but that is too recent to expect results yet. Man, it's a tough thing this drawing a line in the sand about my next job having to relate to my degree and/or passions but if you keep taking "anything" jobs then you'll only ever be more qualified for FURTHER "anything jobs".

To conclude: The Greek word for "Wanker" is "Malaka". It is sometimes used as a coloquial greeting, such as "Hey there, my [Malaka's]!". Knowledge is power!

The only boobs in this post are politicians

ZING.

Check out that biting, political commentary!

Actually, you'd be better off checking out this brilliantly put together documentary - in three parts - called The Power of Nightmares. It traces the history of the of the ideological groups which have polarized the world over the course of this century thus far and manages that rare feat of being both factually and stylistically impressive in it's exection.

Yesterday...

...a picnic at St.James was great fun and along the way we spotted a whole lot of people lined up along The Mall (to clarify, this is the name of the long road which leads up to Queen Victoria's monument which is in turn just outside of Buckingham Palace). A policeman told that soon there would be the second last practice parade for the Queen's birthday. Impressive that literally a few hundred people were lined up just for the next to last practice.
What you can see in the background of this picture is a part of that practice heading towards the Mall as seen from where we settled to eat, which was a several hundred years up and over from the Monument. As you can see, everything has greened up since the last time I took pictures in St. James park.Now then, I might not have included that poor photo of the procession but it's needed for contrast to the other procession which caught me unawares as, hours later, I trumped down Oxford Circus in search of bits and pieces for my trip to Athens.

Why look!
Is...is it?
Why yes it's hundreds and hundreds of naked cyclists!
Call me a pervosexual if you will but, as you can plainly see, I was far from the only person pulling out a digital camera or mobile phone. After the initial "Oh me, oh my!" I found it neither arousing, disgusting nor even fearful!
It wasn't the hunt for perfect bodies that made it hypnotic, it was a two part equation that consisted of 1) the sheer volume of people that kept snaking by for well over ten minutes and 2)the fact that you were getting a pretty egalitarian cross-section of human bodies.
I mean, let's face it, we all know that 98% of the naked bodies we're exposed to in film etc (even dead bodies in murder mysteries, which sometimes makes me raise an eyebrow at the implication that even corpses must be sexy!) are uniformly "perfect".
The cyclists were doing this to raise awareness of motor vehicles contribution to climate change, to suggest to us that if more of us rode bicycles that it would do a great deal to help alleviate the problem. It was an interesting thing to imagine a society where bicycles are the dominant mode of transport and all that would change. But what they unintentionally raised awareness of was that maybe we shouldn't fret about our bodies not being sculpted like Hollywood film stars and take comfort in the fact that the vast majority of us simply are not made that way - and that that is okay!