Stumptown

We went to Stumptown this weekend. It was awesome.

Google maps estimated it would take us 4 hours to drive to Portland. Angela totally freaked out cause I'd told her it would take like 3 hours. We left at 6:45 and got there at 9:45 :-) I'm pretty sure the estimate was assuming traffic and there was none.

We walked through the booths on the main floor but neither of us particularly enjoys large crowds of people so we went straight to the seminar things that we were really interested in. We saw one about digital painting which was primarily for Angela but I found it to be fascinating. Then we went to one on copyright and IP law. It was long, like 2 hours, but very interesting as well. Next up was one on story telling without words that turned out to be a dud. It was more like a low quality free college class than a seminar. We left early. Last up was Self Publishing like a Rock Star which was both funny and interesting.

Then we spent all day Sunday sitting around the house recovering :-)

For the next few weeks I'll probably be the only one posting because Angela is heading to Lake Quinault for a much deserved and greatly needed vacation.

--Abe

Outage

Sorry about the outage over the weekend. Our DNS service expired and I didn't get any sort of notification about it happening. Then, when it expired all the settings got wiped and I had to re-figure out how to set it up. Of course I set it up wrong the first time but it took 48 hours for the dns settings to work so I didn't find out till this morning. It's all good now though.

--Abe

Volcano pics

Check these out! Straight from Iceland. Those pictures are just amazing.

We're headed to Stumptown this weekend. Going to drive down to Portland in the morning and drive back that night. It's going to be a really long day but should be a lot of fun too.

I've been working on one of my stories a lot lately. I'm super happy with how it's coming along. So happy that I want to talk about it and tell everyone about it but instead I'm going to just get back to work on it. You all can read it when I'm done :-)

I thought that this interactive chart was very interesting. You don't often see this type of unemployment data broken down by metro area. According to that chart the number of people employed in the Seattle area has decreased an average of 4.63% per month for the last three months. That's just scary.

--Abe

Dino-Vamp - now in color

Fun weekend. We went to this month's Cartoonists Northwest meeting. They are very nice. The lead lady even recognized us from last month. This month, we listened to Michael Foster, who does a comic called "Larry's Cafe." It is fun and inspiring to hear about other people who are doing art.

I have been watching Arrested Development on the weekends, since I finished Law and Order: Criminal Intent. That show is really funny. I have been having a hard time drawing the last week, but I did draw The Creeper this weekend, which was last week's challenge on Ten Ton Studios. I think he turned out OK. Could be better, but that will just happen with practice. What I have been trying to get the energy to do for the last week is start the thumbnails of the Gardner story. We have most of a script. And I basically know how the ending goes. There are a few frames I know almost exactly what I hope they will look like. I need to do character sketches (a lot) of the two main characters.

Finally, here is a color version of the Dino-Vamp cartoon. This is my first real color job in Photoshop, so please forgive.

So this weekend, I also watched Superman Doomsday. I thought it was weird how much he tore up the city when it was completely unnecessary and in a real situation, some of his fighting tactics, like throwing a bad guy through a building so the whole thing collapses (at the end of a work day) would have killed a heck of a lot of people. At one point, he even has the option to move the fight to outside the city and brings it right back to the center. One thing though, I loved was how they animated Superman taking off for flight. I think that is exactly what it would look like and it was so graceful. Make me want to be able to fly. :)

I also watched The Devil's Own. That was pretty good. Not much to say about it though. The description on Netflix is terrible. Has hardly anything to do with the actual story.

And I watched The Sasquatch Gang, which was pretty funny. It has a very similar feel to Napoleon Dynamite, which makes sense, since it is the same director.

And finally, (this is actually in reverse order) I watched School Ties with a young Brendan Frasier and Matt Damon. Matt Damon was not famous at the time and had a main role, but not the biggest role. I liked it, actually. I really like Brendan Frasier. He is usually really funny. This was not funny, but I think he did the part really well. I think he probably could have been a more serious actor if he wanted to, but he really seems to like making dumb comedies, which is not a bad thing in my opinion.

Here are some comics I found recently:

• The Intrepid GirlBot - So far, I like it a lot. It is very cute. Along the lines of Abominable Charles Christopher, it seems to me. Just in orange instead of blue and a girl bot instead of an abominable snowman.
• Gunnerkrigg Court - I love this one. I think it is in print too, but I have to save my money, so I can only read it online for now. Though perhaps I will buy a commission or something. I might start doing that. I was thinking of starting a collection of different characters knitting. :)
• Love me nice - Hilarious. What a funny idea for a comic.
• Heropotamus - I haven't read too far in this, just the new posts for a week or two, but it seems pretty funny. Light hearted. So far.

Don't these look like fun?! Too pricey for me right now, but maybe some time in the future.

Funny and terrifying

This out http://crackshackormansion.com/ It seems that Vancouver Canada has been having a little real estate bubble. I thought the crappy run down houses with asking prices in the 300Ks in Seattle were ridiculous!

--Abe

this is awesome

Take a look at this. That's just crazy!

--Abe

Whoops

Well, this weekend was fun. We went to greek and mom and I split the Rack of Lamb again, which is always amazingly good. But I never have clean dishes at the restaurant we went to. Oh well.

This weekend my mom also showed me how to color my comics in photoshop. And I went, "Duh. You should me that last time I was here. I will remember this time." And I did. I have started on coloring the Dino-Vamp. I will post it when I am done. But that will probably be next week. Might have been today had I not been totally distracted by Corgis on You Tube. I looked up Talking Corgis and found this:

That was so funny. Then we finally hooked up the Web cam and started recording the corgis. Not a very good camcorder, but better than none.

Also, our dogs totally do some of that. Nisa also does a funny little growl while she stands up next to Abe. Here is a quick little video of me making Nisa sit up and lay down. You can see how bad Abe's camera work is. And that Nisa moves far too fast for the camera. Watch her tail, too. Very funny.