A flip, a flop, a flippidy flop-hop

Well I gotta say it was a treat having the morning off to go into Soho during the early hours. I'm not sure why I tossed my camera into my bag, but I'm glad I did. If nothing else, it was worth it for my spotting one of the ceramic tile space invaders which I first read about in the always delightful Colors magazine a couple of years back.I'll find out about the job by Friday. I think I might get beat out by other folk with more practical experience in post-production but on the other hand the interview seemed a pretty cheery affair and I had decent answers to their questions. We shall see! Anyways, more of Soho...And then there are two neat bits I spotted outside Leicester station before I headed off to work.

Addendum: Here is the Invader's own site.

SUCCESS SUCCESS...

...SUCCESS!

I mean, SUCCESS!

Thanks to some help from John I tamed the GIMP and was able to do better word bubbles than PhotoPaint 9 afforded me. Meanwhile the first panel of the next comic is done and I've been able to take a bit more time with it, since I have more than twenty-four hours until my Sunday evening deadline this time. Huzzah! Already the steady march of personal progress has begun.

But then.... who am I kidding? How can I ever compete with this?

Now to toss myself in bed and cross my fingers for the interview tomorrow. In that order.

Addendum: SHEESH! I thought .png's were the preferred file format for webcomics because they were smaller than jpg's....but converting from the latter to the former has more than doubled the file size. Sorry folks! I'll see about changing this later.

Stabbing back at the winking anus of infinity

It feels too much like defeat to not post SOMETHING.

So if you are down with spoilers and mostly complete work, click on this link to see where I am with the strip so far.

Pulsating Balloon

Sheesh.
So after some long-winded Skype with Paw, I seem to have a way of making word bubbles in Corel Photo-Paint.

It's more arduous then feels right though...it feels more like a work-around than a solution but here we are. I need to spend some time today NOT in front of a computer as my ass is turning into a kind of pulsating balloon and it is not a comfortable sensation! Tomorrow my dear, tomorrow. At least I can lay back in bed and get a head start on the art for the next strip so hopefully I won't be setting a pattern of delayed updates from the frigging get-go.

Meanwhile, I guess I'll keep going through the GIMP mini-tutorials until I have the requisite skillz to pay the word bubble billz.

*sob*

IN OTHER NEWS
I have an interview on Wednesday for a different job in Soho. But it is with a film post-production company so I can't shit my pants with dissatisfaction too hard.

I can't do that!

Plus I am apparently to be interviewed by another "Oliver". Wish me luck! OR DON'T.

I must admit, I'd thought I'd be meeting Oliver's by the dozen over here but this guy will only make #2 since I arrived last October. It's a bit strange since this would make Oliver's, in my experience, only marginally more common than they are in Canada (I think I've met four there in my entire life). I'd expected they'd be as common as "Mike". Live and learn.

Addendum: Posterchild illustrates a pretty good point today. His art, as always, is stellar but holy crap scroll down to see the mobile phone pictures he put up.

Insert Mandatory Joke About How Giving Birth Isn't This Difficult

UGH!

The art is done, scanned and cleaned up. But I have to postpone uploading the comic until tomorrow - though not for lack of effort!

Ah.....but I planned the fuggin' thing out for the use of proper word bubbles, thinking that I could make such things instead of using the old (and ugly) overlayed text n' lines bit. It seemed a simple thing for one to do. But Inkscape, the GIMP and trusty old Corel Photo-Paint have all screwed me to the bone over this in one way or another. It's getting to 11pm and my brain isn't working any better, so for the sake of quality I am going to wait until I can take another tackle at it tomorrow. Trust me, it would be disgusting if I used the old method - I experimented in my last moments of soft-ware dis-pare.

Some things I have learn-ed
1) The GIMP is infuriating (Every time I tried to embed text into the main layer - it vanished) and it is most likely only a good move for those who have already conquered Adobe Photoshop.
2) If I get serious about this I'll need a larger tablet, a larger scanner or both depending.
3) Cramming a weeks worth of work into twenty-four hours could perhaps not be the best idea.
4) I hate reading authors newsposts where they go over the creation of the day's update in excruciating detail and/or make a pile of qualifying remarks. Yet, I may have to get that out of my system just the one time - tomorrow.
5) I gotta get some sleep, now.

Though maybe I'll stare at this for just a minute or two, to sooth myself.

I'm not sure if it's an effective advertisment...

...but it did make me laugh.

First World Wonderings

Well how about that, a satisfactory sketch of Devon. I think her exceptional height is at least suggested, her hair is what I wanted and I even managed to avoid the dreaded crummy boobs.
And another one of Clive.
Not to mention this one of Ben, whose expression I find oddly charming. I guess I find apprehensive fear charming? I also rather like his hair.
So I've been frigging around with the wacom tablet a lot and though I think I'm certainly capable of at least doing a good tracing job over one of my sketches....I cannot seem to find a drawing tool in GIMP that doesn't produce super pixelated lines. I'm trying to work very large and then shrink things down, as Jeph Jacques recommends, but I think that my not having a gigantic monitor is making this very difficult. It's a shame because I was hoping that when tracing onto another layer, I could fix anything which my non-computer inking may have blotched.

The learning curve is also holding back the site itself, though steady progress continues to be made when time can be allocated to it.

At the end of the day, though, I find that the art can be beautiful but if the writing is poor then I just do not give a flying fiddlers fuck*. I could find dozens of examples of this but A) I don't want to get into the habit of slamming other webcomic folk and B) I'd have to look up a bunch of comics I no longer have the URL's bookmarked for, then relive the disappointment. Meanwhile, fretting about getting the writing PERFECT for the first five strips is also absurd, given that it always takes a webcomic (or TV series, for that matter) time to find it's feet - and feet ain't found except by using 'em!**.

There is also something to be said for just getting the damn ball rolling. So sometime (probably late) tomorrow, the first official strip of First World Problems will go online and I shall link to it here.

*Sheesh, MORE cussing.
**This metaphor almost works. Almost.

At the end of the day, this is all you need.

In a fit of frustration, I did up a fake job listing to post here which would encapsulate as much of the rampant stupidity you get in said listings as possible. But when I was done, spent and panting while collapsed over the keyboard...I realized that such vitirol was unhealthy and perhaps a bit too soon since I dropped a ten pound cuss in my last post.

But I did keep the shining jewel of what I wrote and so I encourage you to Follow This Link To Apply Online

One Hundred, No More, No Less

Hooooo boy did I get my time wasted by the University of East London today. Apparently it is okay for their people to tell lies over the phone to get you to come by for a job, but then be told there is only some kind of six month un-paid training on the table. I would like to write these people one hundred letters and these shall all begin with "Dear Cunts".

I got pretty wary when I sat down and was asked to fill out a poorly photocopied form which asked for all sorts of information that they should theoretically already have had since they found me through my CV on Monster. In all my life, that has been about as good a sign as if I were to walk into a prospective employers office to find him impregnating his sister while watching pro wrestling on the tee-vee.

But at least when I got home I had a letter from Spain, a letter which made this recent Overcompensating strip seem all the more special.
Addendum: Paul Pope writes something dear to my heart.

So something a bit surreal happened to me last Monday and I wasn't sure if I wanted to mention it to anybody, though obviously now I think I do.

In the evening I went for a walk around the neighborhood and generally enjoyed stretching my legs after a long day of spending too much time in front of the computer. On the homeward bound stretch, I came across The News in a medium other than word of mouth, newspaper, radio, television or internet. It was in the form of a shrine to a young boy of about twelve who had been stabbed to death by a peer, on that very spot.

About six feet high at the tallest section and about twelve feet long, it is composed of about a hundred small candles, several wreaths, photographs, a football jersey and a plethora of notes on paper and the supporting wall. Classmates, teachers, family and friends had all contributed. I couldn't tell you why but, when I was able to stop looking at it, I counted the steps back to my front door.

One hundred and eighty-six. That's not a lot, really. Try counting that far the next time you stray from your door, to get an idea.

A lot of conflicting thoughts came about from this. But they aren't terribly interesting or novel and that's not really the point of my sharing this - it would be rather self centered if it was. I just think it's improper of me to gloss over this when I'm trying to provide a full glimpse of London, as seen by me. I saw this. It is part of London.

I contemplated taking a photograph of the shrine but kept shying away for fear I'd be turning something terrible into pornography. Tonight, knowing I'd built this up a wee bit in yesterdays entry, I figured "No, no I really should take a picture if I'm serious about giving the full view of this city". So I took my camera and set about those 186 steps.

But when I got close I saw four girls all around twelve or thirteen, looking upset and pacing around the the front of the shrine. Two were crying and that was that, really. I crossed to the other side of the street and walked right past, not wanting to intrude. I overheard a little of one of them talking to the others. "...I guess we could pray..." she said, not sounding entirely sure.

Also!

He was my hero when I was six years old

Sorry for being a bit quiet folks, I'm really trying to nail that thirty second advertisment script as I really want that Junior Copywriter job in Soho. The deadline is tomorrow though, so I reckon some healthier updates will be along the way. There is, in fact, a post I've been meaning to put up for four days but when you see it you'll understand why I wanted to take the time to word it carefully.

Until then, here is the dude, the dude who everyone should know talking about the topic we all need to be engaged with. I don't mean George Strombolpolobolopbolopblopobus.

LDN

It's been a while since I posted some pictures from around the city, so here are some I took between some shopping in the afternoon and drinkin' in the evening.Here we are at Leicester Square, which intersects with Charing Cross road (where all the bookshops are and hence myself on many a day). There are also several theatres and independent shops - the big chains haven't penetrated this area very much by comparison to, say, Oxford Circus.Later on party A (including myself) were going to meet some folk (B) on Cannon street but the nightclub (C) got a very low grade based on it's exterior (D). Thus a migration was made over to the Thames.
Beer, fun was had. True story! Now I have to wrap my head around that durn instant cappuccino commercial...

It's not just Alberta that is turning toxic

Never mind the brief skateboarding ad at the start.

Jeeeeesus Christ

THANK you Mr.Ban

From Upon The Great White Horse

Last time I was in Uffington I didn't end up going here, but I'd been three years ago and never really forgotten about it. The Great White Horse is arguably the site in the area and the view from here is magnificent - or so I'd been told! The day I'd been atop it for the first time, there was an absolutely ludicrous mist covering the countryside and I was denied the view. Thus, during one of the days immediately following my time in Athens, I asked my friends to take me up there again and this time I was much luckier.
The often quoted "they" say that if you stand upon the eye of the horse and make a wish, it might come true. Despite my disbelief in these sorts of things , it was just too amusing an idea not to try.

HUH

"SAM I GOTTA GET BACK TO YOU ON MY SMOKING MOBILE PHONE WHICH IS A MORE EXPENSIVE MODEL THAN OLIVERS, SO I CAN BERATE HIM FOR FUNDS I OBVIOUSLY NEED"

Well, it looks like my contact at Network Rail has reached the end of it's continuously extending ways. July 27th will be my absolute last day inputing railway forms in the dingy borough of Barking.

Okay!

Now job hunting has got to get serious. But, on an encouraging note, not more than a few hours after I learned about the contract....I got an email letting me know that I am long-listed for a job whose listing read thusly: "Junior copywriter required for trailer, TV & Radio commercials, at Soho based creative marketing agency. No experience necessary. Must have passion for writing, movies AND commercials."

I have to write a commerical for coffee, a thirty-second tv spot, and have it in before next Tuesday. If it is suitably marvelous then I will be short-listed, which I can only assume leads to an interview (or perhaps some chav wrestling).

Oh oh oh, last night I was harrassed at bank machine by a homeless man - but it soon became okay because he had to take a call on his mobile phone. I considered being a smartarse and waiting for his call to finish so he could resume badgering me for money, but then I remembered there must be a hundred better uses of my time than arguing with somebody who is clearly on the street either by choice or poor decisions. The mentally ill and genuinly disenfranchised of the homeless population don't buy sodding mobile phones!

Bits and bobs

Well, one splotch of England is pulling it's weight rather well.

Meanwhile the BBC has just dumped a pile of new jobs into the market, BUT they are all open purely to the disabled. Thus I am guessing an affirmative action quota needs to be filled.

Sheesh, anybody feel like pushing me down a flight of stairs?

Addendum: Posterchild's July 10th entry is a hell of a lot more novel and adds a lot more to the community than most street art - check it out! Hell, emulate it!

A few pictures from around Uffington

Athens Roundup

Right, sorry for the last few Athens posts just being picture dumps. Between several distractions and the worry that I might be approaching carpal tunnel syndrome, I've been reluctant to spend a lot of time adding text to them. But then, there isn't a whole heck of a lot to say. I must admit my trip was rather top-ended in interesting things to mention. The cruise was fun, but I became rather closely acquainted with the phrase "monotonous beauty" after hours and hours of the same gorgeous imagery of blue waters, islands, little villages...Day three I left unstructured and used to spend a few hours exploring the suburb of Glydfada, where I had a decent lunch and grabbed a beach towel for use at one of Glydfada's many, many beaches. I was tempted to try and see if I had the chutzpah for one of the nude beaches I'd heard about - thinking back to the brave, bareback bikers. But it's probably for the best that I didn't find them, since I couldn't even muster the chutzpah to ask a stranger "EXCUSE ME, WHERE ARE THE BEACHES WHERE THE CLOTHES ARE OPTIONAL?". Sorry, Athens, you lost out on a sight to last the ages!In the evening I mostly enjoyed pottering around the streets of Pelaka, the cafe and shopping district which lay along the North-Eastern side of the Acropolis. By this point I'd basically stopped using my camera as I felt like I'd seen more of Athens through it's viewfinder than my own eyes. As I suspected might be the case, my new memory card led to me taking a few hundred photographs in the first two days...by the third I needed a break, lest picture-taking become a compulsion. It was during these wanderings that I found that print shop which united me with the cold, warm, loving, hating eyes of Triplex. The kind of aimless city wandering I enjoy doesn't generally make for great stories though, sorry!
During what time I had during my last day before I had to catch my flight, I toddled around the National Gardens a bit and bumped into a bird house which I hadn't seen before. Later I went to take the tube back to the airport. At first I was stunned at how clean it was. More so than Toronto or Montreal's systems and certainly lightyears ahead of...oh, say Baker Street Tube Station in London - which I swear still has coal dust from the Victorian era on it (that might not be hyperbole!). It looked a bit like what 1960's futurists envisioned rail systems of the mysterious year 1999 to look like. In stark contrast to all this was the section which doubled as a small museum, seen in the last photo of my previous Athens post. In the far backdrop you can see where they allow you to see a cutaway of the earth which is marked with all the different era's of Athens ancient history as you go deeperthrough the layers.
Flying over the Alps I went back into ultra-tourist mode and took several pictures as we passed that famous landscape - which you've been browsing while reading this post. After a quick stop in Zurich where I bought some duty-free Swiss chocolate and quickly hopped back on to come on back to good old London. That last photo, which is a bit fuzzy (sorry), is of Hyde and St.James park.

All in all the Athens leg of my vacation was very novel, but I found myself kind of just wanting to get home near the end. I suppose it had been so long since I'd experience extreme heat for several days running that I forgot how much I didn't like it! Plus it really is a city for couples or large groups, not a lot is there to accommodate the lone traveller. I might go back again, but not on my own and not before seeing a lot of other places first. The next time I have a bit of cash to spare I'm going to hop over to Paris for a weekend, I think. Looking back over the week, I think I may have taken more from the second leg of my vaction - my return to Uffington.

My admiration for those who use Wacom tablets...

...just went up about 300%. Yesterday John helped me get my computer to finally recognize my lil' tablet, so today I've been doodling with it and generally trying to get the feel. I find it's best not to look at the tablet at all and I think I'll get to the point where my tablet drawing is about as good as my pen & paper drawing in another day or two. But these first few experiments keep bringing me back to falling on my ass while trying to learn how to snowboard for the first time...

Athens Round-up: Day Three - Narrative to follow when I ain't so dang tired

Writing oneself into a corner can still be profitable some times

Man, I've been stuck on a Bronze Age Sky God story called "Spec-Ops Delight" for a while now. As the name suggests, it's the third in a trilogy (EVERYTHING HAS TO BE) with "Aircraft Carrier Delight" and "War Room Delight". But I think I'm going to break the rules and leave it at a duel...ogy....for now. Naming the country was perhaps a fool mistake and though sending a half dozen Clint Coltrane types into the palace of The Foreigners leader may seem like a recipe for komedy laffs, I'm finding it isn't!

But one good thing came out of the scraps. I'll just paste it in here.

"They were the top fighters of the U.S. army, men who made Clint Coltrane look like a collection of fast food condiment packets festering in the backseat of a station wagon with no air condition on a summer’s day, while you write overwrought metaphors and keep wondering why the publisher hasn’t called back...It's important to note that the U.S. special forces spoke in English, but only technically. Military shorthand, urban slang, spanglish, codenames, film quotes, redneck slang and other sub-genuses of that great beast - American English - all mixed and matched within our heroes lexicons. "

Trying to figure out how they would sound when speaking this hyper bastardized version of English was the hardest and most enjoyable part of brainstorming for this short story. Hopefully I can find some way of working it into future projects.

Meanwhile, brainstorming for the short film sub project proceeds apace, with some serious light bulbs going off while riding the train into work today. While chucking down some dialogue I remembered something my collaborator (Myspace Man) said to me when we first met to discuss what would become Momentum. He mentioned how a lot of the writers he'd turned down couldn't' seem to realize that writing a film is different from writing a play.

Now I have tried very hard to view plays as I view any medium of story telling and I'd say that by now I do in fact feel this way. But I must admit that for years I have had to fight down a bias against them, which made any play have to work twice as hard for me to enjoy it as much as a movie, television show, book or comic. It's tricky to sum up, but I guess there was just a certain smugness and winking to the audience in a lot of the first plays I was exposed to which smelled to me of a big circle-jerk between those who made plays and those who regularly patronized them.

For reasons I have yet to nail down into precise explanations, romantic comedies can be the absolute worst for coming off as poorly adapted plays. A very good, recent example of this would be a British film I saw recently that is called Scenes of a Sexual Nature.

It tells little stories of seven pairs of people all enjoying a sunny day in Hampstead Heath park. Every single one of these stories is ether contrived, old hat or both and made all the more grating by having a kind of swagger to their telling which is there to tell you that they are totally real vignettes of things that happen all the time in real life yet are fresh and ca-razy. The dialogue always sounds unnatural and is delivered in the manner of an amateur play actor who isn't quite sure about the difference between projecting your voice to the back rows and shouting. From the incredible "Man gets caught looking at attractive woman by his less attractive wife, then fails to lie his way out of it" scenario to the "Pair of gay guys discuss things that you wouldn't expect from two gay guys, like wanting kids or being monogomous, as if they're real people or someting" scenario....the whole thing just screamed "Crappy amateur play!" at me.

SO to come back to the point, when I was tossing down dialogue this morning and thinking back both to my collaborators remarks...I tried to use that crappy movie as a benchmark against which to measure my own words. Put a gun to my ahead and ask for a short itemized list (this happens all the time) of what makes a film script that reads too much like a play and I'd give you this:

1) Smug self awareness.

2) Far too little communicated by what is seen as opposed to what is said. Basically an overabundance of exposition.

3) Very specific situational happenings being put out as universal truths.

But I'm open to input on the matter!

Fwaaah

Just a little doodle - more Athens and Athens notes to come when I'm not feeling so burnt out on computers at the end of the day. But I thought I'd mention that the script I've been developing for MySpace Man has gotten to a draft which warrents going into pre-production! So hey hey, that ball is starting to seriously roll and though scripts tend to need continuous attention in the form of minor tweakings, the majority of my work on that is done and I can now focus on new things.

Since there are stunts and CGI involved, the pre-production will be lengthier than for most 20 minute shorts. Not wanting to lose inertia, my collaborator has asked me if I want to make a simple (I.E., two or three characters, mostly out side so lighting is easy) five to ten minute short in the meantime. So I'm brainstorming away and scraping my notebooks to try and have a synopsis of something fun and easy to make...

Also, I got my tax refund today and by golly it is pretty okay! I definitely feel better about what I spent on Athens now, that's for sure.

Athens: Straddling the Aegean

I guess dog mess is a pretty serious threat to the human race

Sheesh!

It feels weird....

....not being in Canada on its birthday.

Though, thanks to Mum and my Aunt Sheila, I do have a fat wedge of chocolate cake wrapped in a small Canadian flag!

HAVE FUN GETTING DRUNK IN THE STREETS EVERYBODY.

I

I'll be doing my laundry.

Hopefully nobody pees on the War Memorial on Elgin St. this year!

Addendum: Though not nearly as big a deal as a national birthday, England is having a rather special day today as well. The national smoking ban has finally come into effect. It's kind of funny to read about, having seen all the usual pro and anti arguments having played out in Canada years ago. Some of my coworkers were theorizing about how this might "ruin pubs and bars" just as I remember various pundits doing on CJOH news. I reckon it'll be just the same as it was in Canada, a lot of meaningless whinging for the first three months and then acceptance.

The best part about a smoking ban is that, touch wood, I honestly do not think it could ever end up being reversed. Can those of you in Ottawa or Toronto honestly imagine it happening?