Write what you may or may not have done

I could not agree with the sentiment of panels 3 & 4 more, even if I designed a machine whose sole purpose was to augment my ability to agree.

Transcript: AHAAAAAAHhhh....oh phew......oh ho ho HO HO HO HO HA HA HEE HEE

Holy cow I just about shit a brick! Not one hour ago I finished writing the "Webcomics: What's up with that particular medium of entertainment?" episode of Handful and then I see that Yahtzee has done an episode on webcomics.


A good episode too, mind! I watched it, I enjoyed it. But mostly I was relieved that...
1) I put up that preview of the Ryan North Interview when I did, thus proving I had the idea to do a webcomics episode on my own and that I'm not aping Yahtzee.
2) That Yahtzee focuses directly on gaming webcomics, while I'm looking at the whole spectrum.
3) He's also doing a tongue-in-cheek "How to make your own" thing, while I am taking a different tack.
4) Despite some qualifying remarks in the closing credits, he's obviously taking a big dump on Tim Buckley - which is a perfectly fair thing to do with Tim Bucklebottom - and his webcomic that serves as a perfect measure of the worst in gaming comics...particularly the comedy/drama switch thing.

Oh and uh hey I got to be in Ryan's alt text today thanks to this shirt. I knew it would be good for something other than saving people's eyeballs from bursting due to a manliness overload at the sight of my pecs.

Jorb!

Well, just some temp work...but it pays well, looks to be easy and is just around the corner. The news in Toronto is filled with stuff about a subway problem that's causing large delays and I'm all

Who cares, chumps?

Chumps care, that's who.

Given that a temp job led to a long term piece of employment when I was in England, I hope the same thing happens here. Then I can buy nice things and focus on writing, as well as other more interesting things to put here then "I hear job hunting is pretty unenjoyable. Also, do you like food? I like food"


CHUMPS
---------------------------------
Addendum

Oh fuck me, that last panel made me do a genuine spit take.

Meanwhile, it's been kind of fun being privy to Dino comics creative process. Perhaps, now that life is finally entering a stable period for the first time in months, I'll get back to my own little thing..

Each year, Scarygoround's creator takes a break by putting up the top 20 albums of the year as reviewed by his main character Shelley. Even if you aren't familiar with the music, the whimsical and inventive descriptions of the music make a great read. Today's reviews includes one of Radiohead's latest which carried a very different method of description than my own and made me grin. Maybe you will to?

Maybe!

Brackenbeatzzz the Rapping Secular, Anglo-Saxon Male

So as I alluded to yesterday but maybe didn't explain properly - my head is just fuggin' buzzing with ideas for a new project, as well as the monologues and an older idea that has found new life in my head as a potential series of webisodes (and this isn't including a hoard of other, more tangential notions for this and that). Essentially it can feel like someone just dumped a bunch of pop rocks into my brain pan...in a good way, mind!

This kind of glorious thing pretty much always leads to plenty of long, highly detailed dreams that I can remember very easily the next day.

Last night I had the second in what seems to be maybe a series of dreams wherein a friend of mine whose name begins with "R" and is a writer shows up...and hijinks ensue.

This second dream involved me wandering through a webcomic convention that was cobbled together from pieces of the one I went to earlier this year and my high school gym. Quite soon, I found myself at Ryan North's table...which was more like a large desk. He was all excited about something so I came over and asked "What's up?". "Oh man, Oliver, I totally have a new thing that I'm working on and I'm so stoked about it!" he said. I asked if it was a new book or a new web project and he told me it was the former. "Here, you can see this preview copy" he said, then pulled one out from under the desk and plopped it right there in front of me.

The title was "Why Does Anybody Tell Jokes to Italians?" in this really ugly, yellow font. As I pored over the cover, which was the title overlaid on a fuzzy photo of Michelangelo's David, Ryan whispered "Just between you and me, I was only able to get twenty pages out of that idea so the other hundred pages are just filler". I turned to page twenty one and was greeted by another full-page, color photograph. The photograph was of "Grove St." which I knew in the dream to be the most recognizable street in all of Compton. Overlaid upon this picture was a grid of smaller photographs, evenly spaced, of dogs done up like the various members of NWA - though I swear one of them was Heartbeatzzz The Rapping Dog. "So, what do you think?" Ryan asked and thank goodness I woke up at that point because I may have had to tell dream-Ryan that his book was sub-par at best!

The previous night is not as clearly remembered, but I gather I was standing in a field not far from a school I was attending. I had an essay I needed to get done and it was due soon, but I'd only written a single page. Rob Near walked up out of the surrounding mists and offered to help out. I handed him the essay and as he put it behind his back with one hand, he pulled it back out again with the other. "All done!" Rob told me, before starting to walk away. Looking at the cover of the paper I saw that he had written on the cover sheet, in pencil, "This is basically a perfect 'C' grade paper and does not deserve any less". "Well" I thought "a 'C' is better than the fail I was going to get" and turned the cover page. I very quickly saw that Rob hadn't written the rest of the essay for me at all! He'd just inserted his full name, in 72 point font, in-between every other word and thus inflated my one page into five.

But as I looked up to chase after him, he was just stepping into the mist and the next moment he was gone. I had a brief flashback to when he carved his name eighty-two times into my ruler in grade five, then woke up.

Ah well!

Today I'm reviewing a short script by Mark Z, the fellow who was my other half in making the trailer the summer before last. It's nice to have someone to not only put that kind of trust in me as a person, but in my abilities. After that, more brainstorming for the project that came out of yesterdays crazed conversation...

Yagga Bagga

Yagga Bagga Hey

Yagga Bagga whey

Chomp Chomp Chomp Stairwell wood Michael Ondaatje is what you want to be and maybe I'm high from being tired and maybe I'm on the internet maybe.

American Elf opened up it's archives and maybe you'd like that. Let's not commit to any certainty okay and maybe this kind of an entry makes me a fourteen year old but the world needs those crazy kids goddamn it otherwise how would we all

eat

them for dinner.

Addendum: This is the thing

the thing that we are going to do.

Solar panels will be bought and affixed to a building that is older than pepsi-cola and the British Empire combined. The house will be lived in by good mannered folk who sometimes make ill informed decisions while raising their four bright, identical children. Boys so blond and blue eyed that even Hitler wouldn't complain but somehow the parents are black and we're not talking adoption or stem cells or nothing. It's just the way it is.

These people will give us money for living in the house and we will use this to pay off the solar panels first. This is being an adult. Then the money will pour in. I shall use it to move to Toronto without having to get an office job in Ottawa for a few weeks. You will use it to pay for lessons you have always wanted. In the end, I'll be somewhere different and you'll be someone different.

Then everybody claps and we win.

Readysetgo

Having your dick tugged on by the teasing hand of fate

Shucks howdy but I just had a tease. An hour ago I got a call from someone working on a production that needed a script supervisor ASAP. That is to say, someone able to work mon-thurs this week for nothing but expenses. But I'd have to quit my publishing job cold turkey in order to do it. Between my parents and a good friend there was a lot of waffling over what to do, weighing financial stability against why I came to this country in the first place. But in the end I got some wise advice to find out more about the damn production before making my decision.

In my exuberance, this had never even occurred to me. Always consult others before making big decisions folks, if only to help cover your blind spots! After a bit more careful reading of the materials I was sent it turned out to be a student short. Well, bless them krazy kids but taking a big leap like I'd have to simply isn't worth it if I'm going to land in a small puddle (and break my legs, to complete the metaphor). I gave them by best wishes and turned them down. Still though, damn, maybe I should be giving unpaid work with actual production companies a more serious look again. I'd pretty much rubbed them out as a possibility, feeling I couldn't afford it. but given how quickly I've been able to find temp data entry work (and some of the pay figures I was being offered just before taking this publishing job in Hammersmith)...well, I think I'll be looking back at it again.

Komix
Meanwhile, I've been looking over what I'm getting down for the comic and I like it but once again there shall be no update! This is because I'm fast realizing that I cannot escape the siren call of continuity and if I am to be having a story that develops then I need to maybe not just be making it up as I go along - as I've been doing thus far! Theoretically I could post the couple of comics I've got done and catch up today, but then it would only take one more violently loud house party or whatever to push me back into a cycle of catch-ups. I've found this painful enough to read, so I think I'm going to take advantage of the sunny side of not having a big audience and abide from updating though NOT working on the comic until I have a good buffer. Then I shall pseudo re-launch with gusto, a safety barrier and less pressure to crank it out which will - as my stupid habits seem to dictate - result in more being cranked out. That being said, I may have a fun drawing of yours truly up later today.

After the things I'm NOT doing, here is something I did/saw
So yes, I went to the ICA and caught that Extreme Environmental Guerrillas exhibit. It was much more of a fanciful, artistic endeavor than a matter of hard science but that's okay!

That's okay.

It should come as little surprise to those who know me that in my more frustrated moments I've often wondered if the only way we're going to avoid the "turn it around in less than ten years or we literally become a dying planet" thing is for some kind of literal eco-fascist regime or regimes to spring up. The guerrillas exhibit contained elements of just that. Take a gander at the manifesto of this fictional group.Now it's important to remember that this is not a serious proposal but an art project by a very talented looking lady named Michiko Nitta (whose nicely designed portfolio site can be seen here, with the Guerrillas project at the top of the right-hand side bar). Communication, food and death were the main subsections of the project/installation/what-have-you. Regardless of how plausible it is, I rather like the idea of hi-jacking the digital information tags to be found on thousands of animals around the world for a rudimentary communication relay network which would tie into the different species migratory patterns in an attempt to avoid the CO2 heavy traditional postal service (for letters, anyways) and the terrifying, ultra-disposable bullshit of mobile phones.

The art was also certainly ahead of the science when it came to the matter of food. The general idea being that we need to breed small, tasty animals which can be reared in our (in this case, the English) immediate neighborhood. This would not only get rid of the large carbon footprint of shipping in food from the countryside (and other countries) but would be using herds of animals which don't have as heavy an impact on their location as, say, cows. The pigeon/quail hybrid was a oddly amusing.And the inevitable rat hybrid (the Rattit - part rabbit).Now, as might be expected, the most extreme portion of the project comes under the final sub-section of death. I didn't get the best photo due to someone being in the way, but here is a shot of the Logan's Run style earring which is the centerpiece of the death section.In a nutshell, the proper EEG member would be fitted with one of these earrings at age twenty. Inside are a set of rings which prevent a needle containing one part muscle relaxant and one part lethal drug from injecting into the wearer. The inner ring rotates slowly and eventually, at age forty, the needle is allowed through to kill the wearer. Simply put, the less days we spend on this Earth, the less we consume of it. Remember, this is an art installation and not really a serious proposal. My first thought was of how the bloody things would probably go through some Beta problems and wind up offing a bunch of people in twenty minutes instead of twenty years. But it does set up the attention grabbing tagline "What would you do if you knew you only had forty years?".

After this there was a very enjoyable film titled "The Great Flood of London" (by Ellen Page) whose potential yo warn was somewhat undercut by the fanciful aesthetics (note the return of Zeppelins).



Another part of the installation, by a different person all together, featured a functional rainwater capacitor system made entirely from recycled water bottles. It's aimed at the suburban garden in an attempt to help make the currently unsustainable suburbs something we might be able to keep past the next fifty years without making terrible sacrifices. Sadly the designer, Elliot Frazer Payne, doesn't seem to have a website.Finally we come to something that I rather liked, a serious attempt at blending solar power and fashion. The website (and pdf) explains it much better than I can so I'll simply say that if I saw them for sale in a store, I would certainly pick some up (maybe holding out for a more masculine equivalent).

Few things are sweeter...

...than when the conversation behind you, on the bus, paints the outline of a short script for you. I had that joy yesterday on the way up through Camden from Tottenham Court Road.

Well, if you are a writer then this is a sweet thing!

THE REST OF YOU HAVE A NEW KOMIC

Also, for the first time in at least a decade, Whoopi Goldberg has not only come to my attention but greatly amused me as she tackles a co-host on The View...

Jesus Jumped Up Christ...

...it is FREEZING in London right now. Something like six degrees Celsius of wet, wet, wet cold.

Perhaps the satisfaction of having made a new comic will keep me warm?

Meanwhile, I think Overcompensating knocked it out of the park today and, if my recent dearth of purty pictures is leaving a gaping hole in your life, may I suggest swinging by my pal Tom's page for some incredible photographs of Hawaii - including where he goes to camp inside a volcano known as The House of the Sun.

Phew! New comic and an honest to goodness little art upgrade

Only a lil' one, I know, but still it is a comic! I learned a lot while creating a reference page for Charlotte and salvaging/partially redrawing the disaster I aborted this past Wednesday. But it all took precious time! Still, I'll be much better prepared this coming Wednesday.

Blogger is acting WEIRD about uploading images. When I moved my small archive of twelve strips to the new address I had to put them on Photobucket and link to them as I kept getting that damn problem. But then, when I was done the new comic I tried regular uploading from my hard drive and wam bam spickidey spam....it worked?

Meanwhile, it's been a quiet weekend thanks to an incredibly sore right foot that has kept me from wanting to walk too far. This is what I get for having feet one size larger than what 99% of shoe stores in England carry, thus necessitating my getting my parents to send me a new pair of dress shoes from good ol' PayMore ShoeMoreShoe. While wating for them, I guess I've basically been walking on soles so thin as to not count under the Geneva conventions and thus here we are.

I did see Superbad though and I'd give it a hearty recommendation, even over Knocked Up. It just held together better, albeit probably because it had a simpler premise, and the overall theme of friends helping each other through tough transitions was executed in such a way that it was impossible not to see all sorts of funny and/or heartwarming similarities in my own life while watching. It doesn't desperately need the big screen though, so waiting for rental might not be a bad idea.

I LIKE THIS MAYBE YOU'D LIKE THIS

This is a neat little "How each comic gets gone" video by Octopus Pie. It's more of a fun animation than any kind of actual tutorial, but still!



Meanwhile, the title for this post could arguably be used for 98% of user created content on the internet, I reckons. Ah well, if you haven't already then please check out the latest episode of my own little darlin'.

Get ready for clocks

Well hot dang, it's a NEW COMIC!

Tomorrow? Clocks. So many clocks like you wouldn't believe.

First World Fiddling

So here is my first proper play around with "colouring". I think I've just about made up my mind about going black and white or colour. Though I suppose I could always do colour for the site and desaturate the images for any kind of printed collection I might be lucky enough to do, some two hundred comics or so down the road.

But then, since writing is and will most likely continue to be my stronger half of this word n' picture show, it's probably best to aim for whatever lets me put out the comic quicker and more frequently. Thus black and white looks to be a winner for the time being!

The Terracotta Warriors, and the British Museum in general, were quite a thing today. Sadly, cameras were not allowed in the central exhibit (the Warriors) but they were kosher everywhere else and thus I have plenty of great pictures I'll be putting up over the next couple of days. Now you have something to live for!

Also, the hunt for a better font continues. Opinions are always welcome!-----------------
Meanwhile, the topic of protracted adolescence is something worth thinking about and this short article takes an interesting, male-centric angle on the matter.

Also, it seems the world's oldest profession is not human exclusive. That is to say, CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CHIMP WHORES. DO IT NOW.

URF

THAR WE GO

As my Uncle Phil would put it....

...I am cream crackered. The last little while has been ten kinds of stressful for reasons I didn't bring up here lest it become one of those blogs and this afternoon it finally caught up with me. Try as I might, any attempt to progress past what I got made me feel like a dickless man trying to fuck his way up a mountain.

I....I think I just coined that horror.

As partial means of compensation I put forward these two offerings and a humble promise of a comic on Wednesday.

Hollywood (Monkey-Dust style) takes a crack at the Ivan O'Dobsky story...

...and then again, with The Crusades.

Zer is a new comik in town

NEW COMIC

Meanwhile I'm working on a kind of art upgrade for Sunday's strip (and, theoretically, every strip after). I'm afraid that's all for today folk! Though if you still feel yourself to be in the mood for a good black and white comic, may I suggest the relatively new Octopus Pie? It has some great, clean art and fun writing for the little story arcs which the author prefers to structure the strip with. You don't have to, but you may wish to start at The Beginning.

"Running...

...before walking" is an old line that kept popping into my head over the past fourty-eight hours.

So yeah, it should be pretty obvious why the latest First World Problems took me a while! I hope it mertis at some mirth!. To compensate, Wednesdays strip will be three panels showing only Clive's mouth as he recites my favorite Radiohead lyrics.

IN OTHER NEWS
There's a new, big climate change movie with a much more hollywood style spin to it than Senore Gore's offering. Here's the trailer.

Anyways, here's the film's website. Go crazy with your thoughts in the comments section! I'd love to get some other reactions before I settle my own.

Meanwhile, in a the more traditional vein of first world problems, living on a budget as I am now gets a bit sore when Threadless come out with not one but two shirts I really want for the first time in almost three years! BAH.

Just to rub things in, today I had to turn down an entry level job in publishing because it didn't pay enough to cover my expenses!. BAH.

They live in a pretty sparse town, it seems.

Holllllly crap is this a mid-week First World Problems Update I see?

Maybe!

Will we* be maintaining a two-strips per week update schedule?

Let's find out together.

*I


Addendum: Augh! I just spotted a typo, which I will fix tomorrah.

Another Sunday comic update.

Hey hey, the last member of the main cast is finally introduced!

Now I'm going to get some Canadiana in me by watching the "Bon Cop, Bad Cop" DVD which Cathy kindly sent over to me. To think, I've gone almost eleven months only hearing Parisian French.

"Twice" by Little Dragon is especially melodious.

Hey hey, it's a new comic at a reasonable time of the day! Fancy that.

After carefully consulting with MENSA, Al Gore, Stephan Hawking and several men in labcoats...I came to the conlusion that a smaller comic might result in a smaller file size.

I am a University educated man!

Between finishing this comic, getting a good start on the next and finishing my short post-apocalyptic script, I cannot help but feel productive! But do I feel like going on to write some corporate sponsored erotica? A little!

Meanwhile, Giles Peterson is in week two of his "Best of the year so far" series and the songs are just magnificent. If you want to try out some new music, I can't recommend this enough*.

*I probably could.