Thanksgiving

I initially typed 'Thanksgibing' as the title, which if you played FPSs would be kinda funny.

Anyway, Thanksgiving is next week, so there will be no blogs or Art the Wanderer as I will be in California having food forcefully stuffed into me by my mother. She worries that all I eat is cereal, candy bars, and soda, so she tries to get as many nutrients into me as possible while I'm there.

Just for the record, I do occasionally eat a carrot.

Art the Wanderer will return on the 30th, with the standard blogs following that week.

Please have a fun and safe Thanksgiving. See you in about a week.

Cheers,
-Jason

Mornings

I don’t like mornings. Actually, I should clarify. Mornings are fine. It’s getting out of bed that’s the hard part. I’ve never been what you would call an ‘early riser.’ I have always been more of a ‘meander out of bed at around noon-ish’ type of fellow.

Even in the rare cases that I do get an actual decent night’s sleep, I still have serious problems simply getting out of bed. Once I’m up and moving, I’m fine, but the whole ‘actually moving out from under the covers’ is the hard part. Especially when it’s cold. Or hot. Or any temperature, really.

So, I was lying in bed yesterday morning and watching the clock. I know when I absolutely MUST get up, which is far different from when I SHOULD get up. I was playing the ‘five more minutes’ game, which is what happens when I wake up enough to actually look at the clock. Five minutes turns into ten, with turns into twenty, etcetera.

It occurred to me, as I was lying there, that there really should be some sort of device to get people out of bed. Alarm clocks are nice, but they’re simply too easy to thwart. What we need to some sort of . . . oh . . . dart based system. Preferably involving a monkey.

NOTE: The monkey is superfluous, but it seemed like a really good idea at the time. So, yes, there’s a monkey.

My first idea involved a monkey that lived in a little box above your bed. When the alarm went off, it would be prompted to shoot you in the butt with a dart loaded with Red Bull or some similar drink. The dart would wake you up. The Red Bull would keep you up. Simple, yes?

But monkeys are notoriously bad shots and what if you were sleeping on your back? Would the monkey switch targets? Would it wait for your butt to present itself? Would you really trust a monkey with a dart gun and a grudge from being forced to live in a tiny box?

Frankly, the plan seemed a little flawed. So I modified it. What if the monkey simply dropped a bucket of cold water on you? Aim wouldn’t be important and if you secured the bucket correctly, the monkey couldn’t drop it on you. However, there’s always the problem of the monkey drinking the water or peeing in it. In the first case, there would be no water left. In the second case, you really wouldn’t want it poured on you.

That idea was then nixed. What if the monkey lived under your bed and simply yanked the covers off? The monkey would probably be happier and you wouldn’t get a bucket of monkey urine in the face every morning. This seemed like the perfect plan, save that you’d have a monkey yanking your covers off all night when it was grumpy after drinking too much while playing poker.

Yes, monkeys play poker. Typically Five Card Stud (Texas Hold ‘Em hasn’t really caught on with the monkeys).

At about this time, I was forced to get up or be late for work, so I was unable to come up with anymore ideas. Consciousness does that.

However, what if I combined all three into some sort of monkey dart firing, water throwing, cover pulling mechanism? It could work.

Cheers,
-Jason

Portland Comic Book Show: The Recap

Well, the 31st Portland Comic Book Show went off without a hitch last Sunday. It was a rather dismal day, but the crowd was pretty good and everyone was in a good mood, save for that guy who kept complaining about the pengiuns, but there you go.

NOTE: I'm not sure the penguins were real. I didn't actually see any penguins, but that doesn't mean they weren't there. I've never seen Russia either (or Montana) for that matter and people insist they exist. So, I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt about the penguins.

The show went really well, even though Leigh couldn't make it. My good friends Laura and Doug went with to provide moral and physical support and they had a good time as well.

I ended up next to Kerry Scribner from Art by Bastett, who was not only a great artist, but also had the patience of a saint. She pretty much drew free sketches all day (nice free sketches at that) and only got up twice the entire day.

Also near me were the gentleman from Bricker-Down Productions who do The Killing Jar. They were very cool and I had a long talk with them about comics and things in general.

Afterwards, a whole group of us went out to dinner, including Jason Metcalf, an excellent artist, Randy Kintz, another great artist, Jason Martin, yet another great artist who's website I don't have. Javier Hernandez (hope I got that right) was also there, though he was out of business cards, so I don't have a website for him either. Brian who-last-name-escapes-me was also there to help out Jason Metcalf. Brian is the regional head of the Hero Initiative, an amazing charity for comic veterans. All in all, a fine bunch of gentleman to go grab dinner and talk comics with.

Anyway, I strongly urge you to go visit their sites and tell them they're marvelous.

So, to sum up: Con good, Penguins potentially bad, hanging out with comic artists good.

Cheers,
-Jason

Portland Comic Book Show

Just a quick announcment: I will be making an appearance at the Portland Comic Book Show this Sunday. Leigh is not coming, due to family obligations. So come on by (or up or down) and say 'hi' or whatever form of greeting you prefer.

This will be our (or my) last public con until the next year, so if you come by, you can totally brag about it.

"Dude, I totally saw Jason at their last show in 2009!"

"Who?"

Anyway, look for a new Art the Wanderer on Monday and the usual blogs the rest of the week.

Cheers,
-Jason

Prophets 0, Niners 21

So, there is a lot of talk about 2012 these days. Everyone from the History Channel to the Disney Channel is doing some sort of special on it. According to the doomsayers, everyone in the prophecy business has predicted that the world will end on 2012. Or, potentially, the world will be covered in fudge. I’m a little unclear on the details.

Apparently, even Nostradamus, the most well known of the prophets, has a quatrain about 2012. It reads, in part ‘nous sommes screwed.’ Which in French translates to ‘We’re screwed.’

I don’t put a lot of stock in the whole 2012 thing. Frankly, the world has been predicted to end so many times (anyone remember the ruckus about the Millenium?) that all the enthusiasm I can muster is a ‘meh.’ Though, of course, if the world does end, I’ll be greatly embarrassed. And probably dead, so no big loss there.

NOTE: I actually bought about $800 dollars worth of Peeps before the Millennium, just to ensure that I would have an adequate supply for the apocalyptic wasteland that would follow. Well, it was more like $80 worth. Or $20. It might’ve been $10 in quarters, I don’t really remember.

Honestly, if the world is going to blow up, I would just as soon not know about it. There’s nothing I can do about it anyway, so I’d rather be happily watching cartoons and eating Peeps up until the big moment than worrying about it for years before hand.

Yeah, I’m a man of simple pleasures.

Frankly, if the prophets were so good, why didn’t they predict useful things, like football scores? The world ends, big deal. The Packers win and there’s rioting in Green Bay. Or who’s going to win on American Idol? These are the issues that we really care about.

I mean, would it have killed them to let me know that Kim from Computer class liked me when I was a Junior in High School? I eventually figured it out, but I was about seven-years too late. Yes, I’m not fast on the uptake.

To sum up: World ending. Not very useful. Me getting a date: very, very useful.

Cheers,
-Jason

Pooping (or not)

Oddly enough, this particular blog is not about me. It’s about my buddy Sean’s three-year-old. Let’s call him James, mainly because that’s his name and I want him to read this when he gets older and be vaguely embarrassed.

Now, James is a typical three-year-old, in that he’s short, hyper, and has the attention span of . . . well . . . a three-year-old. He also refuses to poop. Oh, he can poop, he’s done it hundreds of times already. He just doesn’t want to do it in the toilet.

This led to an interesting evening where several of us went over to Sean’s house for some après dinner conversation and Sean spent the better part of an hour in the bathroom with James trying to get him to go, so to speak.

Sean was eventually tapped out by his lovely wife, Devon, who had as little success. Forget trekking across Middle Earth to destroy the One Ring. Forget defeating Voldemort. You want a real Epic-quest? Get the kid to poop.

NOTE: Hypothetically speaking, I wonder how many xp it would be worth? And what would be the reward?

It says something about humanity that a small child has the willpower to defy many times his weight in adult and refuse to do something he desperately needs to do at the same time. I think it mostly says that it was a miracle that we survived at all.

I am pleased to report, though, that James eventually pooped about two hours after we left, making it about three in the morning. This means that they spent about five hours with the lad in the bathroom before he finally acquiesced and everybody could go to bed.

Now, the only question is: how long will it take the next time? For Sean and Devon’s sake, I hope not too long.

Cheers,
-Jason

Omni-Directional

Some of you may have noticed that there was no blog yesterday, for which I apologize. I was otherwise occupied by fluids exploding out of my body in almost every direction.

In layman's terms, I was sick in a really horrible, liquid-intensive way. And now, before someone points this out, I don't think it was connected to the green slug of snot on my hoodie from the last blog. For one thing, the snot was green and nothing that came out of me was green. It was a medly of orange and white.

It was almost festive.

Anyway, I'm going to bed early, so I can go into work and deal with the roughly 3k emails that are now sitting in my inbox.

Look for another installment of Art the Wanderer (and this next chapter's a doozy, if I do say so myself) and the usual blogness the rest of the week.

Cheers,
-Jason

Snot

So, I was typing away this morning at work and while pausing to consider whether or not a Pink Ponysaur could defeat a Silver Snakeatops, I noticed that there was a humungous glob of . . . something stuck to my chest.

NOTE: Yes, a Pink Ponysaur could take a Silver Snakeatops. They not only have the power of Heart, but the power of a Thompson Submachine gun.

It was green and globby and rather voluminous. It looked like something that would come out of an orc’s nose. It wasn’t particularly dry, either, which made it all the more disturbing.

The question is, of course, where did it come from? I’m pretty sure it didn’t come out of me, as I think I would have remembered that. I mean, the sheer volume alone suggested that no mere human could have generated this thing. Honestly (and I’m not trying to be gross here), we’re talking slug-sized here.

And the other question is when did it get on me? I didn’t walk past any goats or horses or rabid hippos all weekend, so at what point did this thing land? Which brings up another question: how did I not notice when this thing made contact? And more importantly, how long had it been there?

Anyway, I cleaned it off with a couple paper towels (I would have preferred a flamethrower) and I deposited the hoodie directly into the washing machine once I got home, so hopefully it’s taken care of.

I quizzed the ninjas about it, but they denied any knowledge. I tend to believe them, as their tastes run more to swords and humorous flatulence devices.

This suggests I may have a new enemy, one who deals in slime and ichor. I had best be on my guard, lest I fall into another mucous-y ambush.

I’ll keep you updated.

Cheers,
-Jason