Friday, August 1st, 2008
But didn’t. And I suppose, in the scheme of things, I could still go, I would just have to jump ship and haul ass to Seattle. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the time.
But I can recall an age when those considerations were meaningless and stupid; bygone days where I quit my job after a moments pause, in order to continue the 24 hour marathon of Quake and Syndicate Wars. Or driving through a blizzard to take a friend home for christmas, and when the car slides sideways, I don’t fret…I just turn into the slide and wait for traction to return, humming along to the Nazareth playing out of the radio.
Now I have “responsibilities”. This is a watchword that our parents used with great frequency, and it’s often touted by the establishment. I don’t think anybody should be deliquent in them, but sometimes I wonder if we should blast a few of them out of the water. Days like today, days where I realize that a finite chunk of my existence where I could be enjoying intercourse with stalwart gaming peers, vinyl clad punk girls, and technical elite, has been traded with sitting in a dimly lit room, inputting numbers into a machine that is as thanksless as it is a bitch to operate. It makes me long for a stub cigar shoved into my clenched teeth, while I annihilate someone with a thrice-barreled machine gun. Looking after my mother’s plants instead feels somewhat empty by comparison.
Now I could be one of an infinite number of men who’ve reached a point in their lives where they discover that nightly binge drinking in their underwear, while screaming at a television screen showing the explosive adventures of an enviable, well-hung hero has been replaced with a 10pm bed-down, and steamed vegetables with skinless chicken. The result of which is a stronge urge to purchase a frivilous motor-vehicle containing no more then 3 wheels, and to drive said into the brush with an intention of acheiving no less than 25 feet of vertical flight for a period greater than 5 seconds; an attempt to capture the serendipity and care-free joie de vive encapsulated in every Social Distortion lyric ever sung. But I don’t think I am.
I think the image of “growing up” in our society has been concretized by the pop-culture as a picket fence, sub-urban lifestyle, with 2.5 kids and a VW Toureg in the driveway. Whenever somebody comes along and suggests that a grown man could be just as happy, playing the drums till 2am every Friday night, while consuming a six of his favorites, and eschewing the notional validity of starting a family, everybody starts questioning his sanity, or evoking the deadly “Mid-life” analogy that is so popular. You’re either a loser, or a lonely asshole: society possesses no in-between.
I’ve wandered from the path I started on; lamenting my failure to reach PAX this year, but I think my point is that next year I’m going to make it a point or driving there two days early, drinking a quart of Wild Turkey, and attending the Convention with vigor and brazen-rakish-hellfury. Perhaps the most important thing about having responsibilities, is knowing when to stop giving a fuck about them.
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
Being on Twitter is bad for me. I’m the kind of guy who wants to inflict a single, witty sentence upon as many people as I can, in a bi-hourly schedule. Hence why I blog so poorly.
Friday, June 27th, 2008
I read a lot of webcomics.
Like…a lot. I used to work in an office where my job consisted, mainly, of filling in a number of colored blocks on an excel spreadsheet, and making sure that within a given time, I spread the needed amount of work to be done, evenly with those blocks. Simultaneously, I was supposed to make sure that I didn’t use the same blocks too often.
I know, this sounds oddly like one of the original games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It also sounds like…Scheduling. It WAS scheduling. The relevance to my point, is that filling in the colored blocks required very little of my time. In fact, in a given day I could fill in the blocks in approx. 15 minutes. Now if you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that with that kind of …alacrity, I was left with 7 some-odd hours of time each day to sit at my desk and stare into nothing like a malfunctioning robot.
So I started reading webcomics.
I had Penny Arcade on the radar for a long time, but having read it as often as I did, there wasn’t much in the archives to rely on to maintain my sanity. I started reading PvP, Dominic Deegan, Scary-Go-Round, Goats, Wigu.com, VG Cats, and an endless list that could take up the rest of this post, but whatever. There’s shitloads of webcomics out there, and I read many of them.
And a lot of them suck balls.
Like…genuinely awful work. The art in a lot of them is half-assed, but that’s something that I can get past pretty easily. What amazes me, as a writer, is how fucking shitty the story in a lot of these are. And to top it off, is something even more insidious, and I’ve even DONE it.
Referencing OTHER comics and pop culture.
Oh god. I feel dirty every time I do it, but there are more than a few comics that make it their exclusive demesne.
I’ve been an advocate for a long time of referential dialogue. I believe that referencing popular cultural moments from television, film and music, have the capacity to raise the bandwidth of our communication. Not only can I convey the circumstances of an event, but I can also place you in a specific emotional context, all through referential dialogue. That’s powerful stuff.
My issue with webcomics, and in the greater sense all creative endeavours, that rely solely on referential dialogue, is that they lose the thrust of their own message in the act of co-opting the referent. Using these symbols isn’t a bad thing, until your own intent is lost. At that point we’re simply engaging in emotional masturbation.
So I don’t want to name any names, but god damn it Kurtz, sometimes your work chafes my friggin’ nuts.
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
And nobody changes their mind about SHIT.
I was privvy to a second-hand conversation about Anime a little while ago, in which the proponent of said claimed that nothing could ever be considered Anime that didn’t come from Japan. And that he wasn’t interested in anything other than the “bleeding edge” (a phrase I fucking HATE btw) content coming out of Japan.
That was it. He dismissed everything else, out of hand.
Fuck. There are few things in this universe that will instantly arouse my ire more than somebody who just writes something off without even considering it.
For instance: Many moons ago, I was somebody that took a massive shit on anything that Michael Bay has ever directed. But I realized, to my consternation, that I really hadn’t seen much of his work. It was a reputation that I believed in, not empirical data. I must SEE his work. SO I watched Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon…now the next movie would have been Pearl Harbor, which probably would have killed me, but since I was too busy nibbling the barrel of a shotgun, I was unable to press “play”. I had determined, for myself, that his work was the lowest quality schlock. If they didn’t hate one another, Bay and Uwe Boll could start a club.
My point was that I was doing something that I myself hated. I was dismissing him out of hand, without having seen any of the work I was shitting on. Now if you’ve ever compared JPN vs. US animated items, you can probably understand 2nd Hand Conversation’s objection to North American content. It’s shit, a lot of it. Okay pretty much ALL OF IT.
But here’s a quote from that conversation:
“Someone has to prove to me that, over a long period of time, original english stuff is better than stuff produced in Japan”
Are you fucking kidding?
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
I’ve been sick as a bugger for the last 3 days.
My brother made some off-hand comment about his throat being scratchy, and the next day I woke up with Typhus. or Polio. I can’t figure out which…
I’ve been tasked with the job of coming up with a Lexicon for the Panda Girls treatment. A document specifying particulars words that will bear high significance in our world. I compared it, on the Axe and Crom comic site, to words like “Switch”, “Plugged In” “Agents” (some of these are two words….sue me).
It can feel like an exercise at times; writing these words for Axe and the movie. But all too often I realize, midway through something, that it wasn’t just Axe sending me to the Bronx for a sugar cookie: He had something specific in mind, and the outcome will be important. This is a good lesson to take away: Sometimes, you’re wrong.
Jesus…sometimes I’m RIGHT. The rest of the time I’m just shitting things up.
I’m going to drink a bunch of Neo-Citron now, and pass out for nine hours.
Later Bitches,
C
Friday, May 30th, 2008
Jesus Creeping Shit.
Of all the days, it had to be this one. Zeus and God put a bet on it, and someone paid off Loki to fuck me.
Yesterday, around 4p.m., I was terminal. Whatever I had for lunch was fighting on the western front, and no small part of my cranium was threatening to explode violently. I came home in a total delerium, ready to vomit myself unconscious. But the comic.
The comic had to Go Up.
Sweet crap, that was all I needed, was to be on my floor, shitting and puking, while Axe pounded his monitor and cursed my name. Fortunately a long, zombie nap brought me back from the brink; enough time for me to hastily inform Axe that the reaper was hiding in my bathroom, and I would be out of communication for who knows how long.
But Axe is a solid QB, and didn’t need me to run the ball in. The inking got done, the comic went up. The only missing piece were the words that adorn the bottom half of the friggin’ site. I awoke this morning, prepared to gut through my worsening illness and make something up.
And that’s when my windows partition vomited into my mouth, and boot camp told me to fuck myself. Good Times.
I would make my comments about the weather a post script, but I’ve already lined up a delightful quote for that, so let me just say: Fuck Rain. Thank you, and goodnight…
p.s.
“Never trust any technology more complicated than the knife and fork!” - Jubal Harshaw
Monday, May 26th, 2008
Yo peoples.
SO the Axe and Crom comic has finally gone live at www.axeandcrom.com
Check it out…for the love of god PLEASE check it out. The only way I’ll ever get ANY woman to bang me, is if I become a famous writer, with movie deals under my belt. Otherwise I’m just some bald loser with a lot of adjectives at my disposal. Writing the comic and preparing some of the copy materials has taken up a lot of my time when coupled with the completion of the Panda Girls treatment.
TOmorrow I gotta throw it at Axe and see if he likes the Treatment, and if so, do any edits he needs and start on the script. I feel way behind, even though we aren’t really that far behind in the grand scheme. Lucas took 15 years to make the new Indiana Jones…
Maybe he should have waited a little longer.
Oh shit Lucas. I just got you good, Fucker.
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Fuck you.
I’m so sick of your stupid shit. Your customer service system is, in a word: Byzantine. Your rate structures are total garbage, and the only redeeming feature you had was not hassling your internet users…which has ended.
But the birds…oh jesus, the birds.
I actually had a friend working at Telus when the original “Stupid Animals” advertising push started, and according to that friend, they had the campaign made for them, and then dropped the company that made it. They’ve done all the updates to it in house. And it shows.
I’ve hated it since day one, but I understood why they ran with it: it appealed to a lot of people. And Telus was a company that desperately needed to appeal to the consumers of the world. At the time, they were viewed as an Evil Empire of corporate shit-heads, who’d weaseled into a service previously run by the government, and were preparing to knife-rape our bank accounts into submission. These clowns needed to dazzle us with bullshit. And dazzle they did.
That was 12 FUCKING YEARS AGO. I’m begging you to stop. You ass-faces are in total control now. Grab the red batphone off the wall, and dial up Johnny CEO and tell him to stop stroking the thigh of a fat korean boy for 10 god damn seconds and approve a new advertising budget. This offends every sensibility I have.
I’ll tell you what, pay me 50 bucks, and I’ll come up with a new campaign for you. IN fact, I have it, here it is…for FREE.
“Telus: We promise to stop fucking your mouths”
DONE.
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
A little while back, or probably more like 3 years ago, somebody asked me who my writing influences were.
At the time I didn’t really have an answer that made any sense. I sort of muttered a number of non-committal things, made a strange and possibly incorrect reference to the works of William Burroughs, and then chugged the rest of my Rye & Coke. I’m not sure if I have a better answer now, but people have asked me again, so the issue is moving to the forefront once again.
When I was 15 I would have told you that I wanted to be Robert Heinlein. BE HIM. Not be LIKE him, I mean scoop his brain out, remove my own, and place it into my meat-shield. I would have been pretty happy with that…well…for like 20 seconds or something. I loved Heinlein. He represented a stream of thought that was so free, and in line with my own hearts desires. He was a writer who had actually thought about the Taboo’s, Laws, Emotions, and Failures of humanity, and had drawn conclusions of his own. He had thought of things that transcended the canalizing effect of apron string knowledge, and try to think in a way reconcilable with logic and compassion.
Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but he played the game his own way.
But life is a slow release from ignorance, and the fact is, I’m not Robert Heinlein. And more importantly, if I valued the idea of thinking for myself, and breaking free from the indoctrination I received in my formative years, than my final lesson had to be overcoming those same things from my mentor. The student surpasses.
As I got older, I found myself drawn to a lot of separate sources. In the end, my own twisted mechanism fell in with a writer that many of us aspire to be as crazy as: Hunter S Thompson. So much so, that I found I emulated his writing. For a time I was content to think of the world as a Mechanism that had no respect for the Process. A harsh playground, populated with cold-hearted pimp/bullies, who shook their fists in the air, and bellowed at me for control. A piss filled crevice, lorded over by cheap, fuck-off politico’s with gilded whores on their arms, pumping our wallets to feed their appetites, and leaving the Common Man, raped and worthless on the street corner.
But that was always a little too hardcore. I still feel amazed when I read Thompson. He was a high-powered scientist, with a jeweler’s eye for politics and the theater of life, capable of distilling complexities with precision, while consuming that which was distilled. Those who envy him, often envy the hard line he walked, and assume that to achieve the same Gonzo Power, you need to be as twisted as Hunter was. Sadly, they are wrong, and I’ve mentioned it before. Hunter was a journalist of immense talent, and his daily grind and snort was the past-time that helped him endure his tour of duty in the emotional hurricane of Journalism in the time of Agnew, Nixon, and the Powers That Be.
Now I feel like I’ve actually started to touch my own voice, and it contains within it some of the elements of those mentioned above, and others that have crossed my path. I love reading, and I love to feel the skein’s of thought that authors and ‘wrights take us all on. Writing Panda Girls, and working on the novels I’ve been chewing up for the last few years (Two of them, and they are whores who do not love me), I’m searching now for the joy of writing, and trying not to worry too much about changing anybody’s life.
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
I’m getting my ass kicked right now, so my updates have been few and far between.
I saw Iron Man with Axe yesterday, good shits. My only complaint is that a lot of comic movies craft the origin part of the story well, and then take a big shit closing the loop on the film. This one was pretty good, but still felt anemic; like they got done filming and realized “Holy shit, there’s only five minutes of the movie where the struggle takes place”. I was happy leaving though, and look forward to another Iron Man (preferably called “Iron Man 2: More Iron, Less Man”.
Oh, Rosenbaum is leaving Smallville, I guess somebody around there finally grew a fucking brain. Run Michael… you run your ass off.