Okay, I typed up some stuff I’m working on for the review blogs. So far the only one that’s up is one about the movie Trancers.
I’m on the road with The Independents. This morning during some down time in Tupelo, Mississippi we went to Elvis Presley’s birth place. Here’s a photo:
I’m trying to work up some comic scripts here on the road. We’ll see what happens as far as getting them done.
I just read this pretty interesting article by John Ostrander (he wrote the comic I dig called Grim Jack in the 1980s) on how to be a good story teller.
Here’s an interview with Eliza & Mickey of Plumerai about their Kickstarter campaign & more on The Seekrit Projekt.
I came up with some new ad rates for more traditional ad placements on QRD as well as lowering some of the old ones if any of you might be interested. In addition I am getting ready to seek out some new interview subjects for the guitarist interview series, musician dad series, & the label owner series if you have any suggestions where you have the person’s contact information.
I go out with The Independents for a few days in a few hours. We’ll see if I get much work done in the van. Taking my laptop along in hopes of getting some things typed up for Finally Checking It Out & Nostalgia Equals Distortion.
I just stumbled across this little video explaining how to actually use Klout. Mystery solved!
So I was going over my web stats for April & I have to say the oddest thing was that there were a lot of referrers for the Plumerai Marco Polo EP from people looking for Polo shirts. Kinda funny. Maybe the next Remora record should be called Colgate or something.
Today when I was going for a walk at the dumpsters behind an office building there were a dozen coin-op candy machines (the kind that kick out some kind of energy boost B12 filled starburst). I spent about twenty minutes staring at them trying to figure out if I had anything I could use as a product to vend in them. In the end I realized I’d need to make a special product to be able to sell in them & so I left them there as trash rather than bringing them home to never actually be used.
I mastered a record for my son Andrew this afternoon. It feels good to help someone.
I went through a bunch of live recordings & tossed out the stuff that is clearly totally valueless to anyone. I had a 4 gig card for my recorder that cut off in the middle of a recording a few weeks ago because it was 100% full – which means around 8 hours of recordings from the past year or so that I had never listened to. To be honest I don’t know what to do with the stuff. I mean, if no one cares about listening to the albums, who wants the live shows? Anyway I think I found a track I can use for a compilation appearance that I’ve been meaning to record (I’ve been having trouble getting motivated to clean my work space enough to really be ready to record), so it’s good to have something ready that I don’t need to work on.
Recent Dreams:
One of my friends who works two jobs found out his wife was having an affair. In fact she has a second home & is married to both of them. Her other husband is moving for a job & so she told my buddy that he can move with them if he wants. He can’t decide what to do about the whole situation.
I’m going to my high school reunion for some reason & I’m scared of running into people who I don’t want to talk to, so I end up just going in a dark corner & sitting by myself just like in high school.
My car is stolen & I get a call saying it’s been found at an apartment complex only a couple miles from my house. I go to where it is & it’s not close to a condition where you would really call it a car anymore. I don’t want to deal with this….
I’m going for a walk with some friends during lunch. There’s a bridge that’s knocked out on a creek, but I can see that there’s a dollar bill stuck on it in a pile of leaves. My friends act like I’m a total crazy person because I take a running leap to land on the broken bridge. I grab the dollar & stuck to the back of it are three one hundred dollar bills & a thousand dollar bill (which I have never even seen before). Trying to get back off the bridge I realize there’s some alligators in the water, but I get up on one of the rails so I’m as high as I can be & I jump to the shore. I tell my friends, “Let’s go out to lunch!” & we’re trying to figure out a restaurant we would all like.
I’m late getting to class in university & when I sit down at a free desk a waitress comes up & ask if I want eggs & I tell her that I’m fine & I’m trying to pay attention to the lecture. During the middle of the lecture I notice a vending machine starting to tip over on a sleeping student & I brace it so they can get out of the way before it falls on him. He wakes up for a second & falls back asleep with me holding up the vending machine.
GoddakkAttack says: are you say ing your minicomics couldn’t be dispensed if you shoved them into a little plastic ball?
it may be fattening but you should buy a bunch of kinder eggs and toss out the prize and stuff them with your comics. then stuff them in tailpipes around town….
maybe not the last part.
These candy machines aren’t the kind that use the balls. The mechanism in them is designed to only spit out one inch squares that are a fourth of an inch thick. So I’d need to make comics in that format & wrap them in foil or whatever so they don’t get damaged.
I actually have something I came up with yesterday related to the easter egg idea. But I don’t want to talk about it too much because I want to be the first one to do it.
So my Kickstarter orders are more or less all out. I still need to get the paperwork done & get the artists paid for the work they’ve done on the comics. But I feel a lot less stressed out having finished that.
So I got some news that the tour I’m doing with The Independents has been greatly abbreviated. I’m fine with it because it will give me more time to work on my own stuff, though I do miss the idea of getting to go up to Canada & just forcing myself to be out of the house is probably a good idea as well. But I’ll try to make some cool stuff happen in the mean time. Get a couple comics done & maybe an album or two instead.
Here’s another video of new stuff from mwvm.
Last Night’s Dream:
I look out the window of the kitchen on the second floor & near eye level is a fox sleeping on a branch of a pine tree. I didn’t even know foxes could climb trees, much less that they choose to sleep in them. I wish there was someone to show him to.
So I thought last week that I had printed up enough comics to fill the orders for the Kickstarter. & maybe I had, but with the couple additional box sets I sold & all the comics I unloaded at SPACE I’m a couple hundred comics short. So today I needed to print some more up, but I needed to take the printer apart & clean it to get the print quality I wanted & now I have to assemble them all & try to finish things up with getting the packages assembled & shipped out.
In other comic news I realized I need to increase the prices of the comics when people order them online. Paypal takes a fee & then there’s shipping of course & I was only going a nickel over expenses (given my time is of no value). So soon I’ll be increasing the prices to $1.50.
Lately mwvm has been putting up songs as they’re recorded rather than waiting for an album. I’m still undecided about the no album format so many musicians are adopting, but more good music is more good music.
So a few weeks ago at the Blondena release party I performed a trio improv collaboration with my Small Life Form rig & Peter Aldrich performed in a separate trio. Here’s the audio artifacts of the event.
I watched this movie Dagon today while assembling my comics. I hadn’t watched it because though I’m a fan of the Lovecraft mythology, I saw a bunch of the movies based on his work that came out in the 1990s & they were all pretty awful. But this one lives up to the hype of a decent little Lovecraftian horror movie.
michael says: i still believe in the album concept brian, i’ve always uploaded WIP stuff since the very early days.
Hmm… I guess I just didn’t notice it as much when it was new stuff every three months instead of every three days!
michael says: i like the sarcasm :)
So today was my birthday. I celebrated by assembling comics & going to the post office to ship a bunch out. Anyway, I did somehow get 103 people to post “happy birthday” on my wall on Facebook & that felt pretty weird. I don’t know. You see, my birthday is the same as my mom’s & it being her birthday has more or less trumped mine since I was ten or so & then when I was 25 my nephew was born on my birthday which also kinda knocks my birthday down a peg, so I don’t really have this big deal thing like most other folks seem to have. I guess I don’t even know what I’m missing.
I am about halfway done with getting the comics packaged up & shipped out for the Kickstarter. After I finish that I’ll get to work on making another fan funding project.
I have some reviews I need to type up for N=D & FCIO. Also I have a couple of entries I want to do for the blog to generate some fairly random traffic (just articles on life in general that I don’t know where else to post). We’ll see what happens.
GoddakkAttack says: yet 103 people aren’t willing to post a hey great album or whatnot…. FBook rules!
Back from the comic convention. It was fun. Made enough to cover my table (though not enough to cover gas), so in general a success. Now I’m back home & trying to get more promo follow-up done for the Northern Valentine & to finish making up all the comics for the Kickstarter thing before I go out with the Independents for a month in two weeks. It’s a race to get it done. Which is keeping me from properly blogging these fine bits of entertainment for you.
Recent Dream:
I wake up & I’m unable to get control enough over my body to move in the bed or call for help. All I can do is blink my eyes. I guess this is how it ends.
Hey, I just finished reading “Just a Man” 1-4. I really enjoyed it! I hope you’ll continue the series. I really like your sparse prose. Reminiscent of some of my favorite pulps.
Thank you sir. I need to get back to work on that series. I got to a point where I couldn’t figure out which of two things was going to happen next. I suppose I should just write them both down & go with whichever seems stronger.
I posted up reviews of Cyborg 2 & Cyborg 3 on Finally Checking It Out as I watched them while making the comics.
Still spending more or less all my time assembling the comics. I’m leaving town tomorrow for the comic convention & I suppose I should spend thirty minutes playing guitar & it’ll take an hour to pack. I’m going to stop in Greensboro to visit Will Dodson on the way up & stop in Lansing, NC to visit Nic Slaton on the way back. Then finish up the packages to mail the comics out & then get back to work on music stuff.
I also stumbled across this pretty great kitty cat short today.
GoddakkAttack says: just thinking you should do a comic called “More cyborgs than cats”
about a slave class (cyborg) in future america. maybe from the cat perspective.
DistortedHorizon says: Battlestar Galactica with cats in charge?
GoddakkAttack says: i’ve only seen the original :/ and can only think of the cats as that goofy dog thing Muffit
DistortedHorizon says: Just saw Muffit for the first time in my life thanks to Google. It reminds me of ALF… I really have to watch the original series :D
That does sound like a good idea. Would a cat’s quality of life improve by being owned by a robot instead of a human? Of course as a super serious drama social commentary instead of as a comedy…..
Assembled a couple hundred comics. Reworked my comic display to hold the new books. Everything takes longer than I anticipate. Also spent a couple of hours on an interview about the comics (I’ll put up the link when I get it). New shirts & buttons came in. Restrung my guitar (strings too dead even for me!). Possibly booked a show for the way back from Columbus. Completed more paperwork for the Kickstarter orders. I need interns….
Northern Valentine, mwvm, & Electric Bird Noise are all on Top Choons trying to get voted into the top of the charts if you have a few seconds to vote for one of them.
I got the digital comics done & uploaded. It took a while as one of the zips is 350 megs. Sent an email out to the first tier of supporters about it. I still need to send stuff out to the other backers about them being available while they wait for the physicals to come. Speaking of which, I got about 100 assembled today. I’m letting myself get embarrassingly far behind on my goals for getting all the comics ready. I got my first credit card bill with some of the supplies for the comics on it. It’s funny how money coming in doesn’t seem like as much when you see all the money going out. I’m probably making $2 an hour or something on this project in the end, but that’s okay. It’s better than nothing.
I checked out my Google Adsense account (for the ads on QRD & such) & I finally passed their payment threshold. Pretty stoked about that. I think it only took five years!
Planning on doing another musician dad interview series on QRD if any of you have any people you think I should make sure to contact for it.
Little Elvis looks excited to see you.