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Gotta admit I had kind of a horribly depressing lonely time at the PDX zine fest. Not heading back next year. Guess I just don’t “get” the scene.

It’s like this celebration of idiotic business practices and purposefully lame entertainment ideas. What the fuck? Do you really want to read/write hundreds of words about your ass? Do you value some crazy person’s unfunny, half thought out, and poorly drawn political cartoons?  Do you always walk around saying “wowwww. that’s sooo rad. i like totally luvvvvv it. wowwww,” like a stoned moron?

Anywho. this is probably 90% sour grapes. And add a dash of extreme exhaustion. … And jealously that so few of the attendees appreciated what i was offering, or even cared to stop and look at it. I felt like i should be wearing a costume so that i might be taken seriously.

Today. this is all a rant about today. I have dimly fond memories of how the first day went. eep.

Before I rant further in this whiney diary sort of post, i should note two really cool people i’d like to promote. There were other cool and/or friendly people of course, but these two in particular offered the highest quality things for me at the show.:

www.tangledwilderness.org – offered the first zine i’ve EVER truly wanted with a passion, just by looking at the cover. and it was free! Also agreed to trade me for their steampunk magazine thing (the same publication that was at the maker fair? the same people?)
www.gingerlandcomics.blogspot.com – super talented nice guy who sat next to me, and mildly comforted me by just being a good human being. though i felt like his girlfriend was constantly giving me sour looks. maybe i smelled really bad. maybe they were cannibals. i dunno. whatever. this guy is super talented and you should check out his work.

back to whiney diary ranting of no importance.

I didn’t get to sleep much last night. I sleep with my windows open when it’s hot. And around midnight some crazy whore started screaming “don’t touch me! I can’t believe you left me there!” over and over, in the parking lot outside my window. that is, about 30 feet from head. I woke up with a start, 20 minutes after going to bed, thinking there was an emergency. Someone needs help!  Then i looked out and saw some drunk moron sitting on the pavement yelling at two nearby people who were trying to walk up to them. over and over. the screaming and the attempted approaches. kept repeating.

Then I remembered i live in a shitty apartment complex full of selfish scum. Weirdly wide awake, I wandered around for a while. Talked to my roommates. eventually figured it was safe to try and go back to sleep.

But these three fuckers were now standingaround on the balcony across from my window, drinking beer and talking shrilly in some other language. it’s about 2am by now, but these bastards don’t care. It’s time for them to get drunk and screech at each other. One guy in particular had an amazingly loud high pitched voice. of hellish pain. I tossed and turned. I yelled out random phrases. Out of my mind with anger. I fantasized about owning a gun so i could muster the courage to walk out and ask them politely if they could please be a little less drunk. I turned on my radio, full blast (playing Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. which i decided might actually have been strangely appreciated). I turned my radio down (thinking of my roommates, and other neighbors who might now want to kill me.) and switched to a classical music station. I have this theory that drunk people don’t like classical music. SHOT DOWN! I went out and smoked. I paced. I sat and stared at them for minutes on end, hoping they might notice and be creeped out. And just go back inside their damned apartment. christ.

Nothing worked.

around 4:30am I closed my window and sweated myself to sleep. They were less loud as well, admittedly (perhaps the classical had some effect).

and then it was up at 8:30 for a shitty day at the zine fest. Nobody bought anything. Except an old friend who stopped by and quickly left, leaving me more depressed that I’d ever suggested he might like it. Tons of hipsters, pretty girls, obese people, and freaks walked by. Many said “hi” if i made eye contact. but less than 5 out of hundreds stopped to look for more than a nanosecond. most seemed to look at me rather than what was on the table, and move along with their nose in the air. where are my people?

Anywho. the dude next to me was suprisingly cool, and some friendly gothics/punks in one booth were giving away a free transcription of a telephone interview they scored with Alan Moore – which was the highlight of the show for me.

This is probably too much information, and far from professional. but fuck it. soooo tired and angry.

…

Check back for the official show report at http://www.solidfuelstudios.com ! Yay!
With even more dirt and details! woo hoo!!!

Woof. So I ended up enjoying very little sleep. But the fest has proven sort of fascinating so far. So many strange and interesting people. Not sure they’re my people. most seem to take one look at me and move on. most others take a look at my comics and move on. it is strangely depressing. BUT, around a dozen people actually wanted one of the two comics. And this proved immensely gratifying. wee.

What i should be doing right now is busting ass to get the website(s) up to snuff. but. buttttt. soooo tired. Was psychotically exhausted when i first got home. like babbling incoherently. that form of exhausted. now i’m in more of a slow moving zen state of waking meditation. I keep thinking of alternate forms of humorous signage to make for the booth. so strange. Anywho.

instead of sleeping when i got home, i cranked out two pencil pages for this blue line art board contest. I’d been meaning to (dying to) work on this all week, because some industry luminaries have agreed to judge the entries. and there are very few entries. and the deadline is tonight at midnight!!! So i buckled down, put on a NIN tour HD-DVD, and cranked out two pages. they are embarassingly rough. but hopefully the layout ideas came through. They were further muddied by a crash course in how to use my new all-in-one printer for scanning. yuck.

anywho. here are the two pages:

http://www.warrenblyth.com/remote/scan-pg8b.jpg
http://www.warrenblyth.com/remote/scan-pg9b.jpg

and here is the contest (where you can see other (far more polished) entries, and the script:
http://bloodandroses.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1284

sleepy time… Tomorrow is another day! ANOTHER DAY OF INANE BABBLING WITH CRAZY PEOPLE (whom I would like money from)… it is fascinating how, if nothing else, this fest experience has taught me a lot (a ton!) about how to summarize and pitch my work(s). super important. yay. i am suddenly overwhelmed with joy. 🙂

I really need to get into the habit of posting daily about the endless “goings ons”. Its 3am. so maybe today is a loss.

but here’s a quick attempt: Polished the colors for the third (final?) bit of movie concept art i’ve been fretting over for a local filmmaker. Will post in my Deviant Art Account when they’re all done. Next up is polishing t-shirt logos for Waldow. Possibly some tattoo “angel wings” art for another friend.

But this will be the week of Jedi6 space sequence end-gaming. Next week is Carrie’s dream comic, and the following week is board game polishing. These are uber tasks i’m laying down to ensure they get finished well before hell freezes over. Sooo, today i went out and bought a variety of things for the jedi sequence. Some toys that looked vaguely like alan and jeff (just spent an hour painting the mace window to have hair and be wearing the proper red-lapeled coat. Painting Mutt’s tshirt black was a cinch. hopefully post photos in here once I snoop out a miniUSB cable). I had to use some wire cutters to remove their legs so they could both fit in the cockpit of the jedi starfighter toy i bought last month. wee!

Also shopped for some things i thought would be key to the “ultimate weapon”. Ended up blowing around 30 bucks on trash cans and tubing and toys. Fred meyer’s didn’t have the trashcan lid i wanted so i had to hit home depot. When i reviewed the current animatic a few hours ago, it seemed clear that i was spending way too much time and money on this thing. hmm. no offense. ugh. erg.

Earlier today i finally sat down and painted the two planetoids i crafted out of paper mache. the red and blue paints were fun, but carrie offered some black paint… and i may have gotten carried away. In the crazy bright sun, they look awesome. but inside, they just look black (until you get very close up). Anywho. done.

And i guess that’s it. Less you count staying up way late last night working on Vitreous Humor. Re-watched kill bill vol.2 with carrie (her first time). started to re-watch mad max earlier in the day, but as usual i got tired after the awesomeness of the opening sequence. blah blah. I’m not sure how much personal bullshit to throw in. hmm.

Might be worth noting some exciting developments for the vidHero movie (plot pretty much nailed down during recent trip to Seattle), and theCommercialMovie (figured out Kshawn’s stand up political comedy act, and how to rework the ever expanding plot as a tv series). but. eh. hopefully these details will show up soon enough. … more later. sleep time.

woof.
The comic has been sent off to print (finally). Had a lot of trouble sorting out all the tech bits for proper pdfs (appending all pages into one file, assuring it was at proper dpi, assuring all fonts were included, assuring images were at max resolution with proper compression). So i just ended up going with 300dpi tiffs of each page. hopefully this won’t lead to more delays. (groan). I need to put up some recent work on my Deviant Art account. hmm.

Currently, i’m trying to land a small job for a local filmmaker, designing costumes and making concept art. I drastically underbid, because i figured it’d be a great portfolio building exercise. Nerves are slowing me down. but it should be pretty kick ass work, even if i don’t land the job.

Still fucking around with the logo for Carrie’s IncognitoCostumes business. I didn’t quite understand what was wrong with this “Scissor fairy” icon i worked up, so I just settled on a simple icon using the letters “I” and “C”. Put it on a business card mockup that i thought was kind of brilliantly retro (like 140 years retro) and bleak. I’m not sure if she’s happy with it, but she’s asked for a few further tweaks. hmm. While settling that, I’m planning to just put up her webpage with current logo/fonts. So it will move forward.

My game pitch “Fun Funeral” was selected by the local PAGDIG learning project 1 group, so i’ve been putting together a slim design document to help everyone discuss and nail down the details. Worked up 4 specific “macabre puzzles” (which could easily be reused/tweaked for multiple uses). But had planned 5. These are like genres of puzzles. hmm. Several ideas for the 5th, but none seem up to par with the quality of the first 4.

Need to finish my vidHero t-shirt design (had to drop the original simple design of the logo on the chest with “H” extending up to the throat and down to the belly, because the printer can only handle a 13″ square area). Planning to put the logo inside a personalized/weird video tape diagram. Just haven’t had that spark of inspiration to nail down the specifics of this video tape diagram. Took a few photos for reference. lightly worried it’ll end up either too boring, or two blocky (like a heap of macaroni on your chest. I’m thinking of this old Pearl Jam t-shirt in particular. It was cool when you studied it, but from a distance it just looked like a block of shit).

My plan to whip up a quick fun board game using business cards on a backing board has ballooned into 3 separate games. Ie, the first concept didn’t play very well (too much math calculation distraction), and ideas to fix it have split off into their own solid concepts. The idea was to just let two people play out an epic fight. But now i have a separate “Hospital Bills” (number-modifying card game) and “Three Act Deciding Moment of Art” (overlapping tiles) games, which haven’t been playtested to ensure they are fun/concise enough. Still brainstorming through the original idea, trying to think up a more unique approach to the limitations of card size and board size. The original idea of just ripping off this cool fencing card game has proven very elusive. blechk.

And there are tons of other tasks piled up as well. short videos of “Spaceship to Hell” and “Brain Cell”. Writing up reports for solid fuel website. Redoing a daredevil art submission for a contest that is already over (the art i did submit was kind of embarassingly shitty, and i have this new doodle in my sketchbook that perfectly captures what i was thinking). Several scripts have been written for a “Mind Molds” strip, and just need to be drawn. I set up Paypal with my business checking account, and now need to figure out shopping carts here on the site. Need to write up the final script for issue 2 of vidHero (integrating some recent cool ideas for crazy layout tricks). Supposedly, I was going to finish the first draft of the vidHero movie script by the end of June (but now i’m waffling on the seemingly cliche “first time out adventures” nature of it).

bleh. this has all left me exhausted. Currently I am staring at a wall dreaming of vegging out with some video games. erf. Guess it’s break time!

Just finished absorbing all the tasty details of the criterion DVD set for Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers. Really damned satisfying look at the story, the ’46 “classic film noir” approach to the movie, the “solid student film” version made by tarkovsky, and the ’64 “bad ass pulp” take on it. Also includes Stacy Keach reading the short story, along with critics dissecting, and studio notes, and actor interviews. Really amazing to see such a short story interpretted and laid out in so many different ways.

Mostly i’m astonished how much i still care about the very simple idea of “a tough guy who’s lived a bad life, but won’t fight back when his Killers show up.” Something about it is so awesome, that you can approach it from tons of different angles and it’s still pretty interesting. why? WHYYYYYYYY???

Anywho. In vidHero land, I’m finishing up the cover art (eek, color. ugh), and have decided to go with a 24 page print, and just include a concept letters and art 2-page spread, and an advert for Jonason’s upcoming comic, James and Robot. Credits and copyright inside the front cover, solid fuel pimpage inside the back cover. The plan is good. Just need to execute.

Instead. I’m about to blow 50 bucks on gas to drive down to my folk’s house and do some laundry. discuss recent events. wee. While this has always seemed pointless from the front, it has always turned out very inspiring on the back end.

One the comic is done, I’m planning to finish off this “space battle fx sequence” for Alan Winston’s star wars fan film “Jedi 6: Queens of the Sith”. Just 5 years late! woo hoo! I think it has a lot of potential, based on the blue screen acting (being funny), and the high impact comedy action that is planned. But i can’t decide if it would be better to complete it as a sub par computer graphics animation (with perfectly controlled timing) or with sub par paper mache and models (celebrating the lack of budget and time, but less likely to be well timed). Part of me really wants it to be a great action sequence demo reel. but this probably isn’t important to the movie. hmm.

After this, the plan is to finish the vidHero movie script (with an eye towards shooting over the summer). But part of me wonders if i shouldn’t just shoot a trailer and try to seek funding to shoot the full script. Seems wise to leave the pain and suffering of shooting a 90 minute movie to a less “crazy” idea. For many months, a little voice has been wondering why one would write a big crazy fx laden super hero action movie, but shoot it as a no budget bullshit amateur video. slim chance of success. WHEN DO WE LEAVE!

Now part of me is wondering if the current structure for the movie is all wrong. just like the comic, i sense that it’s a relic from an old mindset that only cared about being funny. I don’t think comedy is my forte. And after dwelling on the whole mass of Ernest Hemingway’s “the Killers” it seems clear that my movie pitch was schizo, and embarassingly shallow (in both structure and characterization). I’m thinking maybe i should excise the whole first half hour (of hospital-based vigilante training gags/backstory) and just focus on making a movie about a city vigilante. The hospital segment seems like it’s own story, and has little to do with the movie’s ultimate goal (of violently critiquing the body of work of a certain fame-fringe director).

I’m more and more obsessed with the idea of making contained art projects that function as aggressive critiques on failed directors. I think there’s something in floating in this idea that has the possibility to be a very modern/challenging evolution of art. It ties into this idea i have that critiquing anything art related has become pointless, since everyone is now an artist. The abuse of art, action, and criticism, could cross the gap between criticism and art in a way i don’t think i’ve ever seen. But it’s also almost overwhelmingly likely to come off as a pretentious. Like an geeky moronic tribute to the genuine motivations of the french new wave movement. That is, if anyone can even see past the first layer of each project. which will no doubt be a shitty layer of failure. hmm. SO BE IT?!?!?!?!

So. This is the approach i’m sticking with for today. 🙂

I’m not sure optimist is the word to describe someone who knowing walks into a train wreck of self expression on the off chance it might make their life worth living.

Erk. I’m rather sick right now. Fairly congested and dizzy. Soooo, to briefly rant about trivial details (and pretend they represent progressssss!), here’s what I accomplished today:

– purchased chicken wire, paint, spray snow, Obi Wan’s jedi starship toy from Episode3, several kinds of tiny halogen light bulbs, 2 sample metal parts for chain link fences (which look like one of vidHero’s shoulder projectors, when held together). Most of these are elements for a jedi space sequence I’m planning to finish off for Bravado Entertainment (only 5 years late!). I guess I’ve already started. hmm.

– sawed a fine piece of wood in half, and screwed 7 supports into my wall, to finally finish this shelving project i started a couple months back.

– thought a bit about what to write in the first issue of the comic, in lieu of a proper letters page. Many ideas and complicated pun filled thoughts. But ultimately I haven’t typed out a word. erk.

– watched the 1964 version of the Hemingway’s The Killers. Loved it.

– bought some food. Cooked BBQ chicken legs for dinner (for moi, and the 2 roommates).

– bought the book “how to make web comics,” and am 110% sure it was a wise decision. now i just have to read the damned thing. and think about it. and implement it. bleh.

and in possibly related news (of creative processing), Carrie and I sang a certain song last night, for our friend Kshawn to put in his documentary. I thought it was kind of hilariously perfect. And he seemed to enjoy the final cut i sent him (of COURSE! how could anyone resist it’s rough imperfect charms!). but he also seems to be making it clear we’ll need to do another take. which I expected. but … somehow i hoped wouldn’t be necessary.

erf. so that is all. monday is over. time for sleep. must shake this head cold. erk.