Zub Tales

At the school… class is in about 10 minutes.

You know you’re tired when you wake up, hit the snooze button to get another 10 minutes of sleep and then proceed to have a full blown deep sleep dream in those 10 minutes before being bolted awake by the alarm again.

Moving boxes at Udon, moving furniture yesterday at the school. My body is now taking its revenge upon me.

Also, how is it possible that people can tell me this morning:

“You don’t look like you’re doing too well. Are you eating well?”

“I’m always amazed that you have so much energy early in the morning.”

They can’t all be right. Some of that stuff is completely opposite. So strange.

Also, breakfast of choice for me here at the school the last two days has been dipping a cheese croissant into scalding Tim Horton’s hot chocolate, then drinking the cooled down hot chocolate remains after the croissant is done. It tastes better than it sounds, really.

It seems a whole pile of web artists are sketching Batgirl and posting them in their Livejournals for no apparent reason… lots of fun pics though. Check my Friends list for several. Here’s my 15 minute doodley:

For some reason I like that her bat head points are bending at the top. 🙂

Okay, back to work for meeeee!

EDIT: Whoah, the Batgirl meme’s gone crazy… apparently there’s more than 300 Batgirl pics now and more coming! It’s created quite a bit of traffic on people’s LJ’s too. Looks like I’ve gained 10-20 new Friends watching my journal. Very cool. I wonder if this will morph into more sketch threads of superheroes. Heh.

For new people just coming here for the first time, my name’s Jim Zubkavich. I’m a project manager and illustrator at Udon, plugging away on various art stuff for comics, RPGs and video game stuff. When I’m not doing that stuff, I teach part time at Seneca College in their Classical Animation program. Before all that, I was a web comic guy who created a story called The Makeshift Miracle. That’s the quick intro.

Busy times. Thanks for coming by. I hope you add me to your LJ list and enjoy my work and rambling stories.

EDIT 2: Scanning over the massive Batgirl list can be very daunting. Some are awesome, some are little more than doodles done with the mouse, some are quite tasteless, some aren’t even drawings. It’s a very strange cross section of skills and methods. The whole thing’s become unwieldly in its strange rambling internet scope, which is too bad because people may miss some really cool ones.

Below are my current favorites, after looking at ALL the crazy entries so far:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/aves_ives/145862.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wogs/617454.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/bettinamarie/9636.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/bangalores/13754.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/pyawakit/339.html

It’s 1am and I’ve been feeling listless and out of sorts… again.

Late at night, restless, I sat in bed and read Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Lost At Sea one more time.

Damn. Love that book.

If I can create something that works as well as that does or evokes real thoughts and feelings the way it does, I’ll have something creatively rich and worthwhile.

“Grass looks nicer from the other side, you know? Grass where you’re standing looks like dirt with green hair.”

I’ve got a new bi-weekly column starting on Newsarama all about breaking in to the comic industry. Y’know, because I have nothing else to do 😛

One Step: Launch.

Click the link, check it out and give me your feedback here, there and everywhere. Pass it around and let other people who could use the info know that it’s there.

I woke up crazy early from the only non-nightmare dream I’ve had in 2006 so far. It was some sort of Cowboy Bebop-esque future with a stolen piece of data contained in a Pachinko ball. What the hell. There was sex, violence, style and jazzy music. I think I ate Mexican food in the dream as well. Very confused and groggy right now. My stomach is also none too pleased with being awake before 8am.

Yesterday was ridiculously productive working on finishing Exalted #3 so it’ll go off to the printers on time. Here’s hoping today can be equally productive when I head to Seneca to do administrative stuff and prep for ther new semester that starts on Monday.

In order to do that though, I really need to wake up. Ugh.

I had a quiet New Year’s Eve. I’ve been feeling burnt out and just wanted a solo one this time out to relax and reflect. I cooked myself a pretty sweet dinner and settled in to watch Back To The Future, which I got on DVD over the holidays. Christopher Lloyd makes that movie.

Got a chance yesterday to check out Body Worlds at the Science Centre yesterday. It’s a fascinating exhibit that sounds creepy and strange but is oddly humbling and enlightening when you actually see it first hand. Looking through anatomy books or looking at overly perfect sculptures of people is one thing, but seeing real human beings like this really is an amazing way of understanding human anatomy. Much like how sculptors can have a much stronger grasp of volume and form when they translate that experience into 3D modeling on the computer, seeing this stuff helps you visualize the human body and understand it in a new way.

Admission to Body Worlds also gives you entrance to the rest of the Science Center, so I got to see some of that as well. Some of the machines and science games have been there since I was a kid, but most were still interesting or at the very least a bit nostalgic. The shadow capture room still kicks ass.

Getting ready to leave, I saw one of the staff whizzing around on a Segway and actually got to give it a try. I’d read reports about it and how effortless it was to operate, but trying it first hand was quite amazing. I can’t see myself owning one any time soon, but it’s really a marvel. Standing relaxed and tilting slightly to move forward or back, I learned how to operate it on a functional level within about a minute and a half.

That was my nerdy first day of 2006. My legs are actually a bit sore from all the walking around. Here’s hoping the mind expansion bit keeps going throughout the year.