Zub Tales

I think I’ve now mastered a specialized form of procrastination… which I will now dub productive procrastinationism… the act of doing productive things which are anything but that one thing you know you should be doing.

I’ve done the dishes, dusted and vacuumed my apartment, taken out the garbage and recycling, answered old and new e-mails, put on the laundry, watered the plants… everything but started marking assignments – the same assignments which have to be marked so final grades can be submitted by Monday morning to the college. I’m contemplating scrubbing the bathroom tiles, for crying out loud.

Anything to avoid that pile of assignments and also avoid feeling guilty about it. If I do all these other things, it’s not like I just lazed around and was irresponsible… so it’s okay, right?

*whimper* Right?

Hate – marking – so – much.

Saw Snakes on a Plane last night.

It’s a great film to watch with a big and bosterous audience. Home video viewing will take the wind out of this thing’s sails like nothing else. Campy and ridiculous with a good blend of set-up and action, I had quite a bit of fun. The crowd yelled commentary and laughed or yelled at the appropriate parts, ramping up the amusement. I had a blast.

Is it a “good” film? Hell, no.

The core premise of the whole thing, that the bad guys would go to the trouble of getting a huge time-release box filled with hundreds of rare and hard-to-gather snakes on a plane compared to using those same resources to just get a big bomb on board, is completely ridiculous and mind-numbingly stupid.

Does it make for a fun B-movie worthy conflict? Yuppers.

The film advertised itself as a fun film and delivers on that level. Nothing more and nothing less.

Well worth checking out if you can bring a group of friends and turn your brain off at the door.

When the film has a great opening weekend, Hollywood types will misinterpret this as a trend shift and dump tons of crappy knock-offs at us. They NEVER understand innovation, a good idea in the right time and place and the simple theory that a good story and good production will lead to a solid box office performance. They’re 100% convinced that there’s a magic formula which doesn’t involve creative talent at all… that there’s a profit switch they can just turn on if they can just follow a popular film and beat it into the ground. It’s not that Pixar makes solid films, it must be that 3D animation is hot, hot, hot! It’s not that Spider-Man was a faithful adaption of one of the most popular characters in the world, it’s the power of comic-based movies! It’s not that Snakes on a Plane has caught lightning in a bottle, it’s that internet involvement/hype and b-movie badness is the next big thing!

PS: I’m not saying Snakes is a good story… I was talking more of broader trends. Snakes definitely falls in the “right time and place” category.

I’d been meaning to do this before, but better late than never… here’s the most active corner of my studio space at home:

Apparently I like the word “strewn”.

The side you can’t see contains:
– A drafting table
– Closet full of crap.
– Bookshelf full of comic trade paperbacks.
– Boxes of comp Exalted RPG books for artists that they haven’t picked up yet.
– Framed David Mack prints.
– Bulletin board full of art that intimidates/inspires me.
– Garbage can.
– The door.

Wednesday night I scewed up my sleep schedule again… blar.

I took a nap after I got home from the college, then woke up late at night and couldn’t sleep, so I worked like nuts on the book – I laid out the front and back cover, started on the credits page. I needed to take a break from remastering/relettering the main story as it was driving me buggy. Ever closer, but still not close enough to done.

Anyways, that meant Thursday I woke up early in a haze, napped mid-afternoon and then went deep into the night again. That’s put me on this weird split sleep schedule where I’m hungry or tired at weird intervals. It feels like there’s been 3-4 days already since Wednesday because of these long naps.

I have a ton of marking to do this weekend and a lot of organizing to do on college stuff next week. Right now I just want to have a lazy day, but I need to get enough done here to justify going out to Snakes on a Plane tonight with friends… hopefully people will be in the mood for drinks/dancing afterwards.

Talking with a friend about World of Warcraft this morning helped me sum up some of my current thoughts about the game.

The truth is that I’m thinking of canceling my account.

I’ve been logged on for only a few hours since I got back from San Diego. And inbetween Cuba and San Diego I was barely on as well. Seriously, less than an hour at a time over the past couple of weeks. Each time I log on I get incredibly bored in a matter of minutes.

I’m caught between two groups:

Some of my friends are HARDCORE. They play end game content multiple times a week and tweak their characters to an unholy degree. They talk about stuff for their characters and min/maxing equipment to a degree where I don’t even understand what they’re saying. They are competing at a level I’m not even sure I would enjoy. It’s too much.

When I was in the WoW Alpha/Beta there were psychos on Unemployment or Student Loans doing nothing put playing the game EVERY day. You can’t hope to keep up with that madness. Their No Life trumps your Real Life every time.

Some of my friends are ROLE-PLAYING. They’re acting out little stories with their characters and involve themselves in scenarios outside the regular scope of the game. They’re using the game as an engine for drama, something I don’t really want to do. I like role-playing and acting, but doing that through the limited game emotes and typing doesn’t do it for me at all.

Maybe it’s just because I don’t have another person playing in the same room/space as me anymore, maybe it’s because I’ve been a bit more social lately, maybe I can see the grinding repetition clearer now… I don’t know. It’s just not grabbing me lately.

Too many different groups of people on different servers, not enough time to really dig in and no one around at my level/schedule/commitment to the game anymore. I don’t want to play with strangers, even if they’re nice – and they’re usually not. I don’t want to go on the same raids 20+ times to get one or two items. I don’t enjoy the PvP twitchy min/max elements. I log on, look at my quest log and feel like groaning.

All I know is that in the past few weeks I’ve had WAY more fun with things like Guitar Hero and my Nintendo DS. Playing a game at my own pace or playing video games with a live social component – playing with other people in the same space as me. I want a Nintendo Wii this fall so I can invite people over, laugh and have fun in the living room playing games. It’s the same reason I want a nice karaoke unit if/when I get a house. Right now I’d rather play cards or a board game with people than get frustrated with server lag, low drop rates or my character’s DPS rating being optimized.

I’m not as obsessive/compulsive as I used to be. It’s a good thing, though sometimes it feels weird not being as “in” to something all at once. I’m enjoying more things broadly instead of zeroing in on one at a time and going berserk with it.

PS: One of my hardcore WOW friends just IMed me after reading this post to see who my other hardcore WoW friends were to make sure he was raiding tougher game content and was more hardcore than they were. He was partially joking, but even still. 0_0

I feel a bit weird having missed Origins, Chicago Wizardworld and now Gen Con. Even weirder is since Dragon Con falls on the same weekend as the big Toronto Comic show I’ll be missing that as well. That means not partying with the White Wolf crew at all this year… that must be why my liver feels okay and I’m pretty much injury free. 🙂

I’m not even sure I missed the cons as much as just currently feel “odd” about not having attended. It would just be better to somehow take all the people I miss seeing at those shows and get them here for 2 days of drinking and partying instead… oh well.

My parents came by to visit today. I haven’t told them about the Makeshift Miracle book at all, which amuses me on some odd level. I figure it will be better to let them know closer to release or just surprise them with it. Since they have no internet they won’t even read this journal entry where I gloat about them not knowing, heh.

Running around this afternoon taking care of business errands and what-not… I saw something that made me laugh out loud.

One of the banks in my neighbourhood was having a fund raiser barbeque on the sidewalk for cancer research. The staff is all there hanging out making burgers and hot dogs for anyone who donates.

The employee manning the grill happily puffed away on a cigarette, blowing streams of smoke into the air as she flipped the patties over or rolled the dogs…

…at the CANCER fund raiser.

AWESOME

Dan has been asking nicely for me to do some art for him for quite some time. I don’t tend to draw pics for friends or family very often lest they pull it out at some later date and I hate it and then hate that they still have it. 🙂

Anyways, so I finally gave in… I ask him what he wants and he gleefully replies with-

-his World of Warcraft character.

Heh. That boy is obsessed.

Anyways, here’s the pic I did up this morning:

The whole sheebang took just over an hour, as I took my rough sketch straight into Photoshop and just started painting instead of doing a clean line version.

Original rough sketch behind the cut.

And tonight’s award for random shuffle best cheesey awesome ballad goes to – Total Eclipse of the Heart

Turnaround, bright eyes…

That song will embed itself into your brain like it has nasty fish hooks. You won’t be able to get it out without some kind of psychic crowbar.

You know it to be true!

The remastering/relettering of Makeshift Miracle continues… I just finished Chapter 5 (of 8), which takes me up to page 107 (of 172). After the main story is done, I still have to do the sketch pages, introduction, credits page and final cover design. There’s no light at the end of this tunnel yet.

Still quite a bit to go, but I’ve got the process down to a rhythm so when I am able to work on it, it seems to go steadily.

Once the Previews catalogue for November is out, I’ll have full information on ordering the book at your local comic book store and/or ordering directly from me via the web.