A gentleman named Philip Nagle, from my father’s hometown of Tipp City, is trying to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society by bicycling through 48 states in 48 days. Okay, Internet, you got my attention.
Category: Family
Three things make a roundup
- Holly presents Towards a Critical Framework for High School Musical, which comes perilously close to accomplishing the formidable task of making HSM interesting to me. (As the author notes in the comments, though, it may already be too late.)
- Leonard is creating an free, online-only speculative fiction anthology called Thoughtcrime Experiments and he’s paying big bucks for stories! I can’t submit because I’m a first-degree acquaintance, but other people can, cough ahem guys.
- Oh, right, and MY SISTER’S GETTING MARRIED
In which I already break a promise
I know I said I wasn’t going to tell you every time we updated the podcast–I reserve that for spamming Facebook and Twitter–but seriously, you gotta listen to episode ten. One of the not-so-secret purposes behind the inception of the Hour of Knowledge was to help Stephen build a demo reel for his voice acting career, and this week’s show is a glorious vocal achievement. Even after engineering the audio (which means listening to every show, in chunks, about six hundred times), I still can’t make it through his half-improvised monologue without cracking up.
And Mom, this one doesn’t have any cusses!
People keep telling me I’m such a traveler
But compared to my siblings (who, I have explained to many people’s astonished eyes, are in Hilo and Oxford) I am the kid who ain’t never been past yonder fence. Caitlan has a beautiful post up now about her triennial trips to Italy with her friends Christi and Melissa, with whom I was privileged to ransack Innsbruck last summer.
Brendan painstakingly imitates a Photoshop filter, third in a series
I will probably never love another episode of television as much as I love Battlestar Galactica, season 3, episode 9, “Unfinished Business.” And not just because it has images like this:
I’ve spent at least the last year and a half (actually, more like seven years, since my undergrad Drawing I class) being obsessed with this limited-tone art style. I called it “rotoscoping” once, and Lisa and Will jumped on me because there’s no animation involved, so I have to admit that it’s actually what people call “tracing.” But selective tracing.
As was likely very obvious to anyone in my family, and as I only realized yesterday, my playing around with tone is blatantly derived from my uncle John’s painting and wood engraving work, especially his portraits of my grandfather (which he often combines with layered collage). Mr. Olmos there has some features similar to his, like the disappearing eyes which Ian and I inherited. I hope I get to look that craggy eventually. Right now people are still asking me what my major is, despite the obvious gray in my hair.
I almost forgot to mention that this is the first thing I’ve ever inked with the brushes I bought in 2003, and although it was a lot slower than my usual pens, I completely get why cartoonists get so excited about it now. There’s a feeling of dynamic control over the line weight that you just can’t get with pens, even the brush pen with which I inked a lot of later Xorph strips. (Not that there are actually any distinct lines in the finished images below. Good.)
So I made a picture and it’s a wallpaper if you want it: the images below link to 1600×1200 and 1600×1000 (widescreen) jpegs. There’s also a browser-sized version if you just want to zoom in a bit.
PS Can Battlestar Galactica be back on now plz
Update 2008.01.26 0001 hrs: Naturally, UJ has a much more cogent post on the subject (the art, not Battlestar), along with one of the portraits I was talking about.
I always thought Rowling gave arithmancy short shrift
Stories I have written that revolve around invented or reinterpreted methods of divination: Stella, Jaboullei, Rob, Shekel and Jewel. I was kind of surprised it was this few–I feel like it’s one of the structures to which I keep returning. There’s another one coming Monday, if you hadn’t guessed.
I think the reason I keep coming back to this is a variation on the existential dread I feel when considering the persistence of objects (eg the lives of sapient dishes): the amount of potential information in the world, and how quickly our ability to capture and interpret it is growing, and how insignificant that capability will always be–in an obscure way, these things terrify me. They also thrill me. Look at what we can discover! If time and distance are the universe’s crypto, divination is the original side channel attack.
I also live in constant fear of side channel attacks, by the way, to the point where I have resigned myself to much-more-likely primary channel attacks. I kind of never want to be even mildly famous, as that would destroy what flimsy comfort I take in anonymity.
Anyway, you’ll know I’ve gutted the shark on this theme when I write the one about logymancy. Meanwhile I want to do more of these little collect-and-explain entries; I think they’d be a better point of entry to Anacrusis for new or hesitant readers than just the sheer blank mass of the archives. When one of my best friends refers to my writing corpus as “a stupid amount” and my own mother is too intimidated to read them, I am pretty much failing to sell my product.
Harder Better Fitter Stronger
Oh yeah! I got a car! It’s a little black Honda Fit (yes, I know you’ve never heard of it) and, three hundred miles in, I love it more than I will ever love my children. My children, for instance, will not get thirty-five miles to the gallon on mostly-vertical Garrard County roads. They’ll be lucky to get ten.
I told this to my uncle Dennis, who reads this blog, and he immediately asked whether I had painted a big “FUCK YOU” on the side of it. I said: not yet!
There is another thing some do to moustache and it costs, I am told, a nickel
Can you believe Sam Elliott’s IMDB photo shows him without a moustache? I mean, it doesn’t even look like him!
Ian and I typed almost simultaneously today that his only real job in Tombstone (which I finally saw, and did anyone else realize that Ben Foster was doing a Val Kilmer imitation throughout 3:10 to Yuma?) was to grow a moustache, which is also what he did in The Big Lebowski and (apparently) Ghost Rider. Looks like he’ll be reprising that role in The Golden Compass. You can’t argue with success.
I guess it’s like they say: some are born to moustache, some achieve moustache, and some have moustache thrust upon them.
I’m willing to bet that anyone who meets Sam Elliott quickly becomes the latter.
Half an hour later, via text message: Brendan: “Best phone conversation ever!” Ian: “lol.”
When Ian and I talk on the phone it is for express and efficient reasons, so we don’t really bother with greeting protocols. When I called Ian earlier this evening to determine the provenance of one of Yale’s expletives, I forgot that he wouldn’t have my new cell number, and I was already on edge in a feverish Halo match. Thus:
Ian: Hello?
Brendan: DO YOU SAY FUCK BEANS!
Ian: … Who is this?