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.
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
I’ve been in the black for the last little while.
With Axe creating a new Panda Girls structure, I’ve been trying to make a new treatment of it happen in record time. Truth be told, I’ve been sandbagging the last year, it’s bullshit that it takes me so long to get our work done. A big reason for that has been a lack of love in my work.
I’ve always loved writing, but when it became a job, I got bent outa shape too easy. I lost some of my faith in just having fun while bashing out words, and more importantly, I lost my zeal for just giving ‘er shit. Stream of consciousness writing isn’t always the best, because inherently it relies on your latent intelligence to get you over some of the logical gaps in whatever subject you’re working on. If you haven’t noodled out some of those gaps, you’re going to crash when you hit them.
But we’ve been thinking about Panda Girls for 2 years, working, talking, structuring, writing, re-writing, crying like assholes. So it was time to quit being cautious.
When Axe got the new structure done, only one thing came to mind.
“In the immortal words of the Doors: The time for hesitation is through.”
Fucking A.
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
I haven’t done a Vlog (video blog) in a while.
Like…6 months. In fact I think THIS is the last one. There’s been a lot of shit flying around since then, and it’s also frustrating that I’m still where I was then. The treatment of the film. Ugh.
Axe and I have to fight a lot to not become depressed with our progress on the movie. The fact is that we’re not classically trained in screenwriting or script development…anything. We taught ourselves. So there tend to be a lot of pitfalls that somebody has already managed to fall into when they were back at Juilliard or whatever hell they attended.
As such we tend to run into walls, and then backtrack, all the while time keeps on ticking. Well…yesterday we realized we’d finally run over a huge hump. Axe recently did a new draft of our structure, and he took some long strides. His new structure pulled together some character arcs in a really tight package, and gave answers to a lot of our logic questions. They aren’t perfect answers, but they’re a good footing to launch from. And then I stepped up.
And crushed the bitch. After a little while with the new structure, I essentially pulled the rest of the story together, and last night when I explained it to Axe, he did some backflips. The rest of this week, our Production Hours will concentrate on Treating the new structure, and by the end of next week, it should be completed.
We’re close.
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
A lot of writing pundits suggest setting aside time to write. I agree, it’s really handy to have a specific block of time each week/day/whatever to work. That’s great if you’re a pro, and writing is the only job you have. Sadly I started out my working life in a slightly different path, and now I’m working towards the professional writing gig. So… a lot of the time I have to sneak writing into my work day.
When I worked in an office, it was easy. I’m sitting at my computer typing anyways, I just got really fast with alt-tab, and could shift in between my work and my writing easily. Hell, my job was so simple that I often could just blatantly be writing and nobody would say anything. I could do 5 hours of writing in a given day and have no qualms.
Now I work in a bikeshop. And while it’s my brothers, and he’s fine with me writing during down time, there isn’t a lot of down time to be had. Now my window for writing at work is a lot smaller. Sometimes it may be a few minutes, sometimes a single minute. So I ninja in some of my work during the day, slipping into my gdocs and dropping little word-shuriken whenever I can. It would be great to write as my day job, so I could have the time to seriously work on a topic or project, or storyline. But I may suck at this, the determination has yet to be made.
So if there’s any advice I could ever give about transitioning from Dog Catcher to Writer, it’s to cherish the small times you have to write. If you do have the opportunity to set aside a block of time, do it, it goes a long way. If you don’t, well, that can be even better sometimes. When you have 5 hours to write something amazing, you spend 4hrs 34mins trying to work it out.
When you have a single minute, procrastination has no foothold. You become like a revengeful ghost.
“If a samurai’s head were to be suddenly cut off, he should still be able to perform one more action, with certainty. If one becomes like a revengeful ghost, and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he will not die” - Hagakure