im in ur culture, satirizing ur memes

One of my daily interweb comic stops is PvP. Supposedly it's about a group of people who work at a video game related magazine, but that's just a sly cover for some character driven humor and strange diversions.

One of those diversions is the adventures of the lolbat. He made his entrance in this strip. I thought it would be a one-shot, but he has had an entire story arc now, starting here. It's been going on for four days and I don't know when it will end. How do you even end something like that?

Scott Kurtz is an interesting guy. He certainly has a knack for the homage, including drawing in the style of other comic artists. I thought this was absolutely inspired.

Handout from Painting Seminar ... 28 Weeks Later

4 Days Later: In case anyone lost theirs and wants another copy it is available HERE in handy pdf format.

28 Weeks Later: Stef and I watched zombie sequel "28 Weeks Later" last night. Meh. I thought 28 Days Later was an inspired take on the while zombie flick thing, but 28 Weeks Later just seemed poorly conceived in comparison. It just never felt particularly focused. When the movie was over I didn't even care enough to watch the deleted scenes. The ones they left in were tedious enough.

The Wonder of Horrible

Have I mentioned I like the work of Joss Whedon? No? I'm pretty sure I have. Well, if I haven't then I'll say it now: I like the work of Joss Whedon. I won't list it here. You have an internet for that.

His latest work is called "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog." Go watch episode one and come back. It's only about 10 or 15 minutes, and I know you don't have anything else to do right now or you wouldn't be reading this. Go now. I'll wait here.

[LATER THAT SAME DAY]

Great. You're back. Okay, if you didn't like it then just go away and I'll see you next post.

Stef and I were able to watch the first three or four episodes for free before they went all iTunes give me money give me money on us. I'm pretty sure I'll end up paying for future episodes. I'm not sure I've watched a serial about a lovesick wannabe super villian before, but it really works for me. And the singing? Yeah, I like that part too. In fact, I'm pretty much just a Joss Whedon fanboy at this point. He could film a guy in a mascot costume kicking a telephone pole for a half hour and I'd probably download it and watch it from start to finish.

LATE BREAKING NEWS! I was immediately notified by an alert reader of The Guild, which stars Felicia Day as well. I am going to have to watch this... it looks like it's been going on for a while.

Thanks, guys!

I want to take a minute to say thanks to everyone who attended my first painting seminar, and thanks to Planeswalker's Magic Bag for setting everything up and hosting. You guys were great! Congrats to Corwin on winning the Winsor & Newton Series 7 brush, too. That was a mighty cool Chaos Sorcerer.

It was very encouraging to see you all actively applying the techniques I was explaining was very encouraging, and I got some great advice from you guys too. From what I saw in the class I'm really looking forward to what you have to show me next time I'm there!

The web site for the tutorials I was talking about is http://miniature-mentor.com.
Also check out the free tutorials here: http://www.coolminiornot.com/article
The OSL (object sourced lighting) examples I was talking about are here and here. The painter of the Neo Soviet scene in the first example is the sculptor of the Armorcast gun-blast add-ons that Dave was talking about seeing at GenCon.

Buck's Final Meal

Today Buck, Ann Marie, Subbu and I went to Tower Inn to celebrate Buck's second to last day of employment at EMU. After two years, he decided to bite the hand that feeds him and take a job somewhere sunny. What greater insult can you deliver to your Michigan coworkers, I ask. Sunny. Florida.

While there we had the waiter take a group shot of the four of us. Paul would have been there, but he's busy testing grade submission through WebCT Vista. It's just as well.... his switch to the AAS team from the PSS team makes him part of them, not us. You lose. You get nothing. Good day, sir.

Tower Inn is an interesting place to have a last lunch, since one of Buck's first meals here was at Tower Inn, and the waitress dumped a glass of diet soda in his lap. Today there were no such mishaps. On the way back, Ann Marie stated, "Awwwww, somebody lost their lunch!" Against all bounds of common sense I turned to look at the spot in question and saw this, thankfully.
Colloquialisms were forgiving this time.

The plan now is to watch Buck tweet his way to Florida with his iPhone that he is far too pleased to have. (Rise before Jobs. Now kneel before Jobs.)

Returned, immersed in RegEx ... and lost keys

I'm back from vacation! Portage Lake Covenant Bible Camp was big fun, great worship and deep teaching; it was refreshment for body, mind and spirit.

I'm writing Perl scripts at work right now, and am bogged down in the language of regular expressions. Years ago I had some cursory exposure to Relay Ladder Logic, the language of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC's) and decided that anyone who could fully grasp RLL was a little unhinged. I'm starting to feel that way about regexp's.

Returning from vacation I realize that I have lost my keys. My house key, my truck key, my work keys, my P.O. box key...... gone. I'm sure they are in the bags somewhere, but until we have emptied out every reservoir of stuff that came back from camp with us I don't think I will find them. Losing keys is a funny thing. They really are tangible connections to things that happen in my life, and losing them makes me feel disconnected from my everyday activities.

Saturday is my painting seminar at Planeswalker's Magic Bag. I think 10 or 12 people are coming specifically to hear me talk about miniature painting. Hopefully none of them will be better than me, so I don't have to rough anyone up.

Animal Sertivude and Cosmic Ark

For no good reason, the subject of the Atari 2600 game Cosmic Ark came up today at work.

The concept of the game is that you fly from planet to planet rescuing little animals before their planet gets destroyed. In the screen shot at left you can see the large ark, the flying rescue craft just to the left of it, and two squiggly animals on the ground in need of rescue.

The part that always confused me was that the amount of fuel you received to travel to the next planet was directly proportional to the number of animals you captured on the previous planet. The only rational conclusion I could make was that the animals were being used as fuel. Ann Marie had a different take on it. "Maybe they're being forced to run on little treadmills."

hmmm. I hadn't considered that.

Still Basking

Thursday at about 11:00 AM the photos of the Golden Demon winners from Chicago were posted on the Games Workshop website. The Ork looks pretty darn good! I'm a little surprised at the level of local celebrity I've received because of this minor accomplishment. The guys here at work are geeked, people at the Paint Creek GW store are geeked, and people at Planeswalker's Magic Bag (where I hang out on the very occasional Saturday) are geeked. I'm even doing a painting clinic at Planeswalker's on 8/23. I'm still awaiting the posting of the honorable mention pics, because I'm really hoping the duel looks good in the photo.

Last year my goal was first cut, and I got honorable mention. This year my goal was a trophy, and I got a bronze and an honorable mention. Next year's goal: a silver! I suppose now I should start thinking about my '09 entries...