BAR!

Here're some pics of the bar...



Frame work:

More bar skeleton:

Finished top and sides:

Thanks to Ben, Steveo, Sam, Tom, Scott, JQ and Veronica for your help. And to my dad for letting me use his power tools, without which this would have sucked a whole lot more than it did. More pics to come.

Yeah...But Is It Marketable?

Ugh...somehow this post just got deleted. Let's try again, shall we?

So, I just purchased something pretty cool. Eilean Buntata by Will Ellwood is a short story that Will is selling on his blog site. He's posted the first 400 words on the site and you can get the other ~3500 by making a donation of $5 or more (that's approx. 3 pounds sterling, which is how you have to enter it, yeah, he's a Brit, don't hold it against him). The story itself is great, kind of a mix between Robinson Crusoe and Lost and X-Files and...uh, something with potatoes. Yeah, that oughta wet your appetites. The writing has an old feel to it....using context clues, Wikipedia tells me it takes place sometime between 1837 and 1901, which really comes through. Check it out, and toss the guy some money, it's tough being a writer.

This has also gotten me thinking about the ways to market my own writing. I think a system like this could be good for serialized stories and other such projects. I've got my own on the backburner right now and maybe I can get something like Will's approach working for me. I've had worse ideas.

In other news I've got a bar almost complete...I should post pictures...just as soon as I figure out how.

Conventional Knowledge

Hey all,

Here's where I want to go in 2010:

PAX East - Penny Arcade's Game Expo...I've watched from afar every year as this thing kicked ass over there on the west coast. Well now it's coming to Boston at the end of March. Be there biotches.

C2E2 - Chicago, the Windy City. This thing is in mid-April and looks like a lot of fun. It's comics and entertainment and stuffs. Good hold over until...

NYCC 2010 - We have to wait until friggin October for this thing. Hopefully it'll be worth it. I had a great time last year and hope to again in Oct. Those crazy Romitas are on Guest of Honor duty.

We'll see if I actually make it to all/any of these, but that's what I'm shooting for in 2010. If you're interested in going to any of them/meeting up there, let me know.

Online Comix Classes

Hey, it's my daily, bore-you-with-stuff-that-I-want-to-put-reminders-to-myself-in-as-many-places-as-possible-capade. Because the suffix -capade makes that ridiculous sentence ok.

A couple things from Bleeding Cool (where they really need a better system for finding articles that are part of a series):

Michigan State University’s History Of The Modern Comic Book By Professor Ethan Watrell - This link is for the first post and you can look up any others by searching 'Michigan' on the site. This is just a trimmed down version of the class that Prof. Watrell is actually teaching at MSU. It's fallen behind a bit because he's been sick of late, but more should be coming in the future. Good history lesson on comics. You can also visit the official class site where he posts podcasts of the class, PDFs of his class slides and the kids blog about the single floppies that they have to pick up and read on a weekly basis. Such a cool class.

How To Write Comics And Graphic Novels by Dennis O’Neil - Again, this is a link to the first in a series and you have to do a little searching to find the rest, but these are chock full of good tips on how to write comics from someone who's been in the industry a while.

I've been following both of these since they started and they've sparked some really interesting ideas for me, which I should be able to do a little fleshing out on in the near future.

Kbye.

News Blast: Top News of the Day...For Me Anyway

Learned about the existence of Them Crooked Vultures. Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and John Paul Jones, nuff said.

These fucking robots are going to kill us. Thanks a lot Switzerland, now we know why you were neutral during the human wars.

Geocities is shutting down today. XKCD has a tribute.

Yanks made it back to the World Series, but if you care at all you probably already know that.

Scott sent me this one today...Society made them that way. Killers and why they kill. It's your fault, and your fault, and especially YOUR fault.