No context image, but somehow these Ghostbuster have their names Cyrillic script in a Canadian Walmart.
Did I Write This Week?
Yes! I did really and truly!
What’d Did I Write?
I wrote about half of the final part of my zombie story. The neverending stream of things to do with moving is finally slowing down, so the amount of time I’ve got for creativity is slowly returning back to normal. Did I mention I don’t have an internet connection at home yet? Well, I don’t. That’s kind of proven to be a blessing in disguise though since I’ve loaded up all the previous parts of “Fear and Loathing After the Bomb” onto a USB key and have been going over everything making little edits here and there that I’m going to use for the “definitive” edition when I release everyhing as an e-book.
All told it looks like it will be around 24,000 words. Or, about 1/3 of the first Harry Potter book. That’s not too shabby. And it only took me a little more than 5 years! At that rate maybe I’ll release my first book when I’m in my mid-50s! Hurray.
Shit.
To be fair to that timeline though there was a solid 3/1/2 years where I wrote literally nothing for the story (and was instead occupying my time by writing that blog that this blog eventually became). So, if I’m being optimistic, that means it took me around 2 years to write 24,000 words. That makes a somewhat more reasonable (but still incredibly daunting) 8 years to draft a 100,000 word manuscript.
Or, alternatively, if I manage to write 1000 words a week, 2 years.
I like the sound of that much better.
So What’s Next?
Well, now’s the fun part (well, I’m assuming that if you’re reading this you’ve got an interest in seeing the fruits of my labour). If everything goes as planned I will be completing “Fear and Loathing After the Bomb” tonight. And that means that after a nearly 3 year hiatus the final 6 parts of the story will be released starting the Friday. I’ll be spending the next 5 or 6 weeks editing and polishing the entire thing and then converting it into a free-to-download ebook.
I’ve decided that the versions that are published on the website will stay “as is” as of today (I’ve actually gone back and made a few edits here and there over the past few months) so that if you’re so inclined you’ll be able to compare the raw versions and the final form.
Disclaimer: I totally had this written and ready to go yesterday as a Tuesday post. However, without internet I couldn’t risk tethering my phone for all the photo uploads due to data consumption (especially since I’ll be doing just that tonight for tomorrow’s podcast). Sorry friends.
Hey! I’m back! I mean, I never really left, I was still blabbering away on Go Plug Yourself and 9ES but my writing ground down to an absolute halt over the course of the last month or so as I sorted out moving from my apartment into the condo that Sarah and I just bought. I’ll spare you the details of everything involved and everything that went wrong, but now the “shit to do” list has dwindled down to a manageable 4 or 5 things.
In all the hubbub I managed to not only stop blogging, I entirely forgot to to talk about December’s “REVOLUTION” crate (it was pretty great in my opinion). I also basically forgot that I was even subscribed to Loot Crate (and the box got sent to my old address). But hey, I finally got my hands on January’s “ORIGINS” crate so now I’m going to review it! I had no idea what franchises were going to get repped this month so it was kind of cool to have a total surprise with each item I pulled. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Jason: Silver Surfer is a good cartoon, innovative early combination of Compute and traditional animation. The story was obscure as comics go, Silver surfer is no Spider-Man, but still very popular. The problem with Aliens as heroes or the innocents the hero must save is making them human enough to be relatable, but still keep the flavor of their alien-ness. This show makes the aliens to be too naive or too weak for them to be compelling, and it makes it hard to care about them.
But it is a solid show and worth the time to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su7GJsbT2xI
Scott: Here’s the thing about these two shows; while neither of them is great, they both are extremely improved by partaking in chemical enhancements. On their own they’re okay, but smoke a joint and suddenly they’re fantastic (pun intended). Silver Surfer draws so heavily from the Jack Kirby art, that it practically screams for you to watch while on a hallucinogen.
Jason: Well here we go. this Fantastic Four cartoon is mostly notable because they were terrified that kids would set themselves on fire to be Johnny Storm, so we get no Human Torch and instead, we get a super-annoying robot. Stan Lee must have written this script when he was drunk and high. Reed Richards sounds like super patronizing and misogynistic Don Draper after a few martinis. They aren’t really doing anything new here, its weird to think that only a few short years later we get the much better Spider-Man and his amazing friends. This is only worth a watch to see how bad it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_gu4pfFeLQ
Scott: I want to say, that for your view of FF, that you’re so wrong about the voice acting. It is top notch. All four members sound distinct, true to the characters, and clear. Thing and Mr. Fantastic are not gonna get mixed up in your head. Herbie’s voice is annoying, but Herbie is supposed to be annoying, so it works.
Jason: Herbie is a fun as Herpes. MUHAHAHHAHA Magneto doesn’t just throw out a mere diss, he drops super magnetic disses that stick to you like grandma Logan’s cookie recipe sticks to the fridge. MMHAHAHAHH.
True the voices are distinct. Maybe it is just slightly stilted simplistic dialogue that bogs it down. Still better than most of the Fantastic Four movies.
Scott: Better than all of the FF movies.
Distinct, and authentic voice acting. Contrast that with Silver Surfer, where everything is delivered at either “bored family dinner” or “Charles Xavier yelling at Liliandra” levels with no in-between, then FF really shines.
All that to say that Silver Surfer still wins this one, hands down. The art in this cartoon is special. It pops more than almost anything else in this challenge, and the use of computer graphics with traditional cell animation is actually (against all odds) wonderful.
Jason: Silver Surfer wins, agreed. But watch out sports fans the next round might just be the end of the line for the Sliver kahuna, as he goes up against the big bad BATMAN:TAS ! One of my odds on favorites to take this whole thing.
Scott: This is a tougher one than you might think. Spider-Man was a nice, long running show, and it told great Spidey stories, but some of those episodes are so convoluted. “Sins of our Fathers” has something like 19 parts to it.
Captain Planet might seem like a joke, but that origin story is great, and the rings of elemental power are pretty sweet.
Except for heart. They should have given heart to the American kid to at least try and make it cool.
Jason: The Spider-Man animation was constantly good, the writing was straight out of the comics and the voices were good. Venom show up, as well as Carnage, cross over with Blade, and others. Blend of CGI and cell animation that gives it a very 90’s look. This one was on right next to BATMAN TAS, so it was a good block of cartoon time.
While it’s not perfect it did portray a lot of the moral conflicts Peter Parker has, really allows the kids to see him as a person, the true ‘everyman’ of super hero’s. Truth to tell it’s not my favorite of the Spider-Man cartoons, but it is a really solid definitive version. Truly solid cartoon.
The long series are a half step between the ‘monster of the week’ formula and the true ‘meta-plots’ that were seeing now with Young justice.
Scott: I’m not saying it’s a bad show, but they made some weird choices. Alistair Smythe is one of the major bad guys for season one. Uggh. But, season 5 has the Secret Wars, and that was damn fine cartooning.
Jason: Aye aye. Love the Secret Wars.
Ok so by its very nature (pun intended) its easy to make fun of and crap on Captain Planet. But upon deeper review, there were some very good things int there. Captain Planet was preachy about the environment, but as we see the polar ice caps melting 20 years later maybe there was something to it that we should have absorbed more.
Also, it was a cartoon that took on surprisingly adult themes and issue. They covered HIV/ADIS, also I have to get some props to a cartoon that goes back in time to fight Hilter.
The voice talent on this show was huge. Neil Patrick Harris, Dan Ackroyd, Elizabeth Taylor!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdEbFVlRMcU
That being said, it’s easy to make fun of this cartoon for a reason. The charters were essentially 2-dimensional cut-outs of what you’d expect. I think the real problem with this show was a disappointment. At its core the message was good, but it was ham-fisted down kids throats. The over exaggerated nature of the cartoon keeps anyone from taking the very serious message with any degree of …gravitas? (Fuck, did I just use the word gravitas?)Other hero teams get the job done themselves, but Captain Planet relies on the judge of a super-powered elemental white man to fix everyone’s problems with a punch or tidal wave. Even Voltron and the Megazord were piloted by the team. Captain Planet’s team just summons their golem of natural disaster and stand and watch smiling while Hurricane Katrina wipes away that oil spill and yanks the fat pig man out of his office into the gulf of Mexico.Look at that, I got through this whole rant without picking on the Latina kid, his monkey and the stupidity of his ‘Heart’ power. Ah nuts!
Scott: While the message might be great, it’s just not cool enough.
Jason: Clearly Spider-Man clears the Captain off the board.
Welcome to “Know More Than You”, where Jason and I will be discovering what truly is the greatest cartoon from Saturday mornings and after school afternoons past.
This will be a herculean undertaking, and after much research, we have narrowed down the candidates to a mere 96 contenders. We will be relying on our experience and expertise in order to discuss and dissect the animated aspirants, and as true aficionados, we are prepared to discover, once and for all, what the greatest ‘toon is.
Let us take a look at group one; “Heroes and Spies”.
You can see that we’ve seeded the shows, and some of the top contenders have received byes into the second round.
“Batman: The Animated Series” has to be considered a top contender, but I wouldn’t count out an upstart like “Young Justice” or a classic like “GI Joe A Real American Hero” either.
As we break the head-to-head battles down, we’ll try to find some online videos for each battle so you can watch along with us, here on Know More Than You!
Welcome to Drink to Think,
the show about alcohol, cocktails and how a drink might be able to make us better people. The basic format of the podcast will revolve around one cocktail per episode. We will go into the history of the cocktail or liquors involved, followed by a story of how some form of meaning can be given to the cocktail and finish with a tasting. You are encouraged to make the cocktail with us and if possible have a tasting with some friends just as we do in the show.
Many of the story portions of this show will be excerpts from the manga Bartender written by Araki Joh and illustrated by Kenji Nagatomo. The overarching theme of the podcast is on alcohol and its trappings but the underlying theme is about human hardship and creativity. Hardship because when you need a drink it is often because you have had a rough day and creativity because it is very impressive that humans can apply a great deal of meaning to anything in their lives. For example, this show will explain how a simple story can make a world of difference around something as simple as a glass of liquor.
Hope you enjoy and here’s to you my friends.
Today’s Cocktail: Old Pal
A cocktail of three equal parts rye whiskey (replace with whiskey if you don’t have rye), dry vermouth and Campari. Stirred with ice and strained into a glass. garnish with a lemon twist if so desired. I learned to late that the cocktail is to be stirred not shaken. The reason for this is shaking a cocktail makes it colder and dilutes it a bit. But you don’t want that with a cocktail that is mainly spirits, apparently. I apologize for the misleading information.
I will be joined by my old friend TJ and we will wax philosophical about the meaning of the cocktail in the third section.
Keith, a few other friends and I were chatting online a few weeks ago about sports and local politics, and I decided that if a major league baseball team ever were to return to Montreal, I would push hard for them to be called the Pitbulls. Because this is my city, and my city is all about the pitbulls.
For no reason whatsoever, I put together this uniform mock-up from a template I dug up on the internet. I think it’s both funny and a pretty nice looking jersey.
Joe Casey and Tom Scioli look back at the history of comics and say to themselves if Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are the best comic collaborating creators of all time, then why not make more comics like “The Man” and “King”?
Thus Gødland.
While I will get in to the plot a little bit later, in all honesty, the plot is secondary to the project of trying to recreate the magic of the early years of Marvel Comics, especially in the first six issues of the series. There is almost no doubt that the book was conceived for Joe Casey to use the bombastic dialogue characterized by Lee and allow Tom Scioli’s already Kirby-rific pencils to ape/honour Kirby unabashedly. There are some themes that are updated for a modern audience (A BDSM super-villainess, a high-functioning addict chasing the ultimate high), but in an odd way, the seem more like 70’s counter-culture slammed into a 60’s comic than an edgy plot for a 2006 book. It seems like it should be a hot-mess, but the creators run at full speed fueled by sheer enthusiasm, and you can’t help but be dragged along into enjoying the ride.
Adam Archer was the last surviving astronaut on a failed mission to Mars when he stumbles across an ancient artifact that reveals a universal consortium of galactic sages. They bestow upon Archer powers of near-godly scale; teleportation, flight, invulnerability, power-blasts, and so-on. He is returned to Earth to jump-start human evolution to prepare for admittance to the community of the universe and all its advanced culture, but the United States government mostly just uses him as a cross between secret agent and super hero, keeping him in a downtown compound with his three sisters. Neela was also an astronaut, but her career was nerfed with the discovery of advanced inter-stellar life. Stella is dutiful and computer and communications-savvy, and Angie is a punk-rock rebel pilot. They have interpersonal dramas as the main plots roll. Archer saves a green dog space prophet, fights the aforementioned drug-addict villain, and rescues Crashman, America’s favorite hero, from torture and death.
I have just re-read “Hello Cosmic!” for the third time, and each time reads more smoothly than the last. The dialogue is loud, the art pops and jumps and punches, and the book is homage, parody and love-letter to Stan and Jack’s Fantastic Four/Iron Man/Avengers work together. I give it four Johnny Storms.
Man, I can’t wait until I have a better put together office. You know, better put together than all my stuff out on the coffee table.
On a totally unrelated note, every single time I write the word “Perspicacious” I think I’m going to mess up the spelling, but I think I’ve got it nailed.
Did I Write This Week?
Yes! Not what I was originally planning on writing, but writing happened all the same. But I didn’t finish off the zombie story as I had planned. Still, I managed to find time to write a little bit creatively. Sophie’s turn as head-writer over on 9to5 (illustrated) is coming to a close and I’m next in line, so that meant for the first time in a very long time, it was my turn to helm the strip for a while.
I looked it up, my last run as head writer was my “True-Er Detective” story that we published back in January of 2015. Which means I probably wrote them around November or December 2014. Wow. It’s been 2 years.
Let’s get this show on the road, it’s almost 7:00 pm as I write this and I just finished editing this week’s episode of Go Plug Yourself and contemplating, as ever, why I do any of this when I could have just come home and played video games. Especially considering I’m fighting off a cold because there’s nothing more cliché than battling a cold right before your winter holidays. It’s like a very special 9to5 (dot cc) Holiday Special trope or something.
Did I Write This Week?
Yes! I laid out the second to last part of the zombie story, which means I am almost certainly on track to have it completed by the end of the year. Now, I know that I said I was going to start releasing it when I got close to completion. But, if you’re among the 3 people who read this column who actually care about when it gets released, I will reveal to you why that’s not the case. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I sure did! If you zoom in on that picture you can in fact see exactly what I wrote! The 18th part of my Zombie story. In theory, it was supposed to end at Part 19, but based on a few last minute revelations and the natural length Part 18 (which wrapped up somewhere around 1200 words) I’ve discovered that I’ll probably end up with 20 parts (or chapters or whatever). Which is nice. 20 parts seems like a much nicer number to end on. If all goes well I’ll have this whole thing wrapped up in the next week or two and will start releasing one or two parts a week while I figure out how to convert the whole thing into an e-book to give away to you for free! Won’t that be exciting! Everyone likes free things. Probably.
What’s Up With Writing This Week?
Finding the right music to write is a huge pain in the ass.
Sometimes I’ll take 10-15 minutes of just clicking through playlists on Google Play Music before I can actually settle down to write anything. It’s strange how much of an impact on my creativity the right song choices can have.
The first thing I try to do is to think about the tone of what I’m about to write. Now that I’ve worked out my story progression and I have a rough idea of what is going to happen in the part that I’m writing, I generally know the gist of what I’m going to be shooting for. For St-Brigid I tend towards a lot of 90’s Grunge Rock, but that’s not always the rule.
Lyrics can also be tricky. Sometimes I’ll get too wrapped up in listening to the lyrics of a song and just stop typing altogether. That’s not good for anybody. So yeah, I open up Google Play Music (because that’s who I signed up with ok, they’ve got all my preferences so that’s who I’m going to stay with forever) and start clicking around. Curated playlists, albums of artists I like, new releases. Whatever I think might sound like something I want to hear for the next hour or two while I hammer out some words.
Often I’ll use the “create a radio station” feature based on a particular song. Since sometimes I know exactly what I want to listen to, but it’s only a 3 or 4 minute song. That’s not really going to work for an hour long writing session (or longer). So I trust the algorithms. What a time to be alive.
Usually it goes something like this: mess around with the albums I’ve been listening to lately to see if there’s anything that fits the vibe that I think I’m going for, listen to it for about a minute and get frustrated that it’s not clicking. Repeat until I lock into something I like.
Anyhow, I have no idea if everyone listens to music if they write, but I find that it can really motivate you when you get the right matchup of music and subject matter. When I click into that magic zone I have so much more output.
