It's only polite, 1 of 5

Although my real life has been abhorrent the last few weeks, my online life has more than made up for it. So I’ve been thinking that a small show of thanks is in order for the people who have made it possible for me to keep my sanity. Therefore, I'm going to run a small series of blog posts, hoping they won't take too much time.

So first on the list (which has no particular order) is The Gennies!

Of course there’s more than four,
but I never would’ve finished the drawing
if I had tried to fit them all!

Review: The Paper Wings podcast

Text-only version

Sometime in March, I was pointed to the Paper Wings Podcast. Hosted by Lora Innes and Chris Oatley, The podcast brands itself as “the show for visual storytellers” to “help [them] find the time and energy… to finish their personal project”. However, I didn’t think this was my kind of thing because, at the time, they were focusing on what people should do if they wanted to become full-time illustrators for a major corporation.

In June, I was pointed to it again, so I skeptically returned to the site. This time, their focus was on how to make time when you fell you had none. “This is exactly what I need!” I thought, so I downloaded the podcast. Ironically, I didn’t have time to listen to it until about three weeks later. See, I don’t have a portable mp3 player of any sort (that includes my cell phone, which won’t even let me download new ringtones to complement its default three horrible buzzings) so the only way I would be able to listen to it would be when I had my laptop out. Unfortunately, whenever I have my laptop out I’m writing in it, and I honestly can’t write and listen at the same time.

Review: Chim Chum and the Portly Samurai

Now that I’ve told you How I started reading webcomics, I can start doing reviews of the webcomics I read. I’m going to start with Adrian Ropp’s hilarious comic:

Why?


Why, you ask? Oh, uh… no reason.

After 22 years, I finally saw it

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On Sunday, I finally saw Don Bluth's All Dogs Go To Heaven (henceforth ADG2H, because I'm in a bit of a rush). I had never seen it before: whenever it was in stores, I never had the money, and on TV they only ever showed All Dogs Go To Heaven 2^*. Since I "got" the jokes in ADG2H 2, I had, until now, considered my knowledge of that part of pop culture complete. After all, you're supposed to know what the first movie is about to "get" the second one, right?

But recently, Rick Griffin started a story arc explicitly referencing ADG2H on his webcomic Housepets!. Of course, there were many things I didn't get.

A watch from Heaven, WTF?

How I started reading webcomics

Yes, that's supposed to be me at that age.
Wasn't I cute?
No?
Okay, I suck at drawing children.

In About my display picture, I noted that I started reading webcomics in 2008. Those of you who read webcomics or know me from commenting on them are probably wondering how I could have lived before discovering them. Those of you who don't, are probably wondering how I got sucked into such a big and convoluted world.

To answer these questions we must go way, way back; back to when I was 10 years old.

Happy St. Patrick's day

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Today, I'm commemorating St. Patrick's day with a strip from Tracy Butler's excellent comic Lackadaisy.

Apreciation never comes too late

It really is things like these that make it all worthwhile:

Those naughty not-ty prefixes

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Don't you hate it when there's a word that seems to start with a negation prefix, but doesn't? It leads to all sorts of confusions! Take the following, for example:

by David Morgan Mar.

Summer vacation: 29.4% over

So, it's over. I miraculously passed all my courses, and am officially on summer vacation now. It's a wierd feeling; I've been taking summer courses ever since I started college. I'm finally free to do whatever I want.

Looking at the days gone by, I can't help but wonder, what have I accomplished? What have I been doing since the start of my "vacation"? I know I haven't been blogging, and that I've watched way more TV than I ever have (mostly because the computer is too close to the TV for me to be able to ignore it when anyone else turns it on) but have I just been lazing about?

Happily, the answer is no.

About my display picture

You've probably been wondering about my display picture, and why it's a drawing and not an actual photograph. What's that? You haven't? Well, tough luck, it's what I'm blogging about today anyway. It's part of my introduction to you of who I am and in what world I live in.

When I started posting on the Internet (see the "you may know me as" list in the "About me" gadget to the right) my camera was broken. Even though I did have some old photos lying around, I was forbidden by my mother from posting them online (and was still young enough to have no choice but to obey). So I did what I noticed most sensible people were doing at the time (remember that this was a time when webcams and scanners were luxuries). This meant Googling for your favorite TV show or similar, and using a character from it as your display picture (or, as it was called on the forums I was in, your avatar).

My avatar was usually a playable character from one of the Pokémon games. This seemed like a fine idea in the year 2000, but by 2003 Pokémon was already being called gay, geeky, and by other descriptors whose sole intent was denigrating it. By 2006, with no news of new games reaching me, Pokémon seemed dead and I felt a need to dissociate myself from it. I did still like it and I knew that changing my name could make it harder for the people I formerly posted with to find me, but I wanted to avoid being pigeonholed. My first feeble attempt was to try to find something neutral, yet identifying, in the concept art for the games, so I devised an avatar which contained only the eye of a character; a character which just so happened to look like me.

This worked for a while, with nobody judging me by, nor asking me about, the eye. However, in 2008 I was pointed to the wide world of webcomics, and couldn't resist the temptation to comment on one or two. I continued like this for about a year and a half, when I finally noticed that my avatar wasn't working properly due to a technical issue that wouldn't be fixed (I was known as "the guy with the black avatar" because of this).