Hiatus

Happy Halloween!

Been mildly busy with job-hunting (NO LUCK!) and a couple small projects, plus I've been ramping up for my November hiatus from blogging, also known as National Novel Writing Month.

I'm pretty excited to have the challenge, but as I've said before to various people- I really would much rather fail this month because it would mean that I had a job that took up all my time.

I try to make each day a chapter so there are easy breaks between days. I couldn't continue a thought after letting an unfinished chapter sit overnight. This year, I've got a brief chapter by chapter (title only) outline for a dramatic science-fiction novel. I found out last year at the NaNoWriMo(abbreviattion!) "wrap party," which was another story all together, that apparently they've changed the genre of the kind of science-fiction I like from science-fiction to Speculative Fiction.

I love sci-fi that takes place in the near future with robots and laser guns and space ships, but has to do with human problems and the like. Like Blade Runner. I guess that is now speculative fiction, rather than straigh up science fiction.

So is science fiction like Star Wars? or Star Trek? because if we're really dividing sci-fi up, I would place Star Trek into SCIENCE fiction, which means Star Wars is placed in the category of Totally Sweet Laser-sword Fiction.

Right, literature? Am I doing this right? Is that where we're going you snobby, Nathaniel Hawthorne loving, tricorder-festishizing, dildo?

I should save my razor sharp wit for the NOVEL I am about to write. See all you hiney-touchers in a month! Have a safe and happy halloween and a dangerous and sorrowful Dia de Los Muertos!

Another Year Another Novel

Last year, I signed up for and successfully completed Nation Novel Writing Month. It was lots of fun and definitely exciting. Very tense trying to tap out 2000 words a day to meet the deadline of 50,000 words in a month. That's about a hundred single spaced pages for anyone keeping track; no Jodi Piccoult or Johnny Grisham, but a solid effort none-the-less.

I can't remember if I ever posted an excerpt from my novel last year, but…I probably should- if I remember it seemed to have some good passages. To be honest, I never fully finished the thing beyond the first slam-bang super-rough draft. I have it printed out and literally sitting on my desk with a red pen clipped on it, its just hard to get motivated to sit down and EDIT A NOVEL. The catch22 is that I want friends to help with the critique, but only after I've made the first pass, but I haven't made the first pass so I can give it to friends. Lame.

Also, this year I think I wouldn't mind failing, quitting, and coming up short if it meant I had a job and was working and making money, because that is NOT HAPPENING right now and it needs to start happening. I want writing a novel to be the thing that gets sacrificed, even though I hate stopping work on anything, I'm going to make an exception this November.

But the possibility exists that I might complete the novel AND find adequate employment, however, if its got to be one or the other- the words will still be available when I'm dead fucking broke.

At least let me pass the mantle on to all of you! I highly recommend you head over to http://www.nanowrimo.com and sign up for something that will be a huge accomplishment in your life. If you do it and complete the task(2000 words a day isn't as hard as you may think if you are regular typist), then before the end of the year you will have written a novel; which is something that not everyone can say they've done. Go for it!

The Big Pancake

When I was young and going to school every day of my life, my mother woke up at the crack of dawn, before me, and made pancakes for breakfast. She did this almost every single day. She would often mix it up during the week and the different pancakes ranged from buttermilk and whole wheat, to matzo meal and corn meal pancakes. I think this may have been what caused my undying love of pancakes as well as my desire for having constant variety in my life.

As I grow older, whenever I can, I mix up some batter, fire up the skillet and fry up some pancakes. They aren't my mom's pancakes, but it's a comfort food I can always enjoy.

But in the process of making pancakes I can always see an important aspect of what it means to be an artist, and there aren't too many foods that you can create where you get to enjoy the concept of "The Big Pancake."

"The Big Pancake" is exactly that; it's the biggest pancake in the batch made from the batter at the bottom of the bowl that you pour onto the griddle at the very end of the morning(or beginning, if you've been up late). "The Big Pancake" represents the final salvo of pancake making; the big finale of your griddlecake show; the home run knock-it-out-of-the-park pancake that- you get the idea.

You can't do that with steak.
You can't do that with a salad.
You can't do that with macaroni and cheese.

When you're making pancakes, when you get to the end, you pour the rest of the batter onto the sizzling griddle, scrape all the last buttery, milky, eggy, drips onto the pan and you grip your spatula with anticipation for the flip; and when that last pancake is done, golden brown on both sides, and you are already full of the other 15-some-odd pancakes you've wolfed down, you look at that Big Pancake and you know- it may be from the bottom of the bowl, it may not fit in your stomach easily, but that pancake has got to be the best one of the whole batch.

It's the credits rolling.
It's a standing ovation
It's happily ever after. With butter and syrup.

And what could possibly be better than that.

From Adult Swim For Your Viewing Pleasure

Here are some of the most recent "Kitten Vs. Newborn" episodes from Adult Swim:

Watch 'em, share 'em, leave a comment.

(I'm particularly proud of the graphics I did for the last video, as well as the insanity that is Campaign Hat!)

He Won’t Be Ready This Time

Conversation with a young man(5 years of age, more or less) last night at the Edendale bar:

BOY: (something incoherent)
ME: I'm sorry?
BOY: What're you going to be for Halloween?
ME: You know, I was thinking about going as an army guy.
BOY: I'm going to be Darth Vader.
ME: Nice. That's a great costume.
BOY: Darth Vader has a lightsaber.
ME: Yeah! That's awesome.
BOY: I'm also going to have a blaster.
ME: wait, what...?
BOY: Darth Vader has a lightsaber but I'm also going to have a blaster. Because I have a blaster gun at home.
ME: Blasters are awesome but isn't a lightsaber more awesome?
BOY: Yeah. I'm going to carry the blaster in my back pocket.
ME: ....so...you're going to conceal it?
BOY: Yeah.

Something tells me that Luke Skywalker isn't going to be happy by this sudden turn of events in the Star Wars story. If any of you see Luke, you might want to recommend he pat down Vader before they walk into the Emperor's Throne Room.

Sarah Silverman Programme Promo

Schrab asked us the loyal viewership to make promos for the new season of the Sarah Silverman Program. This is an effect that I have been meaning to try for a long time and I'm pretty happy with the outcome. As always, I'm already figuring out how I can make it better, faster, stronger...in the mean time, enjoy the coolness.

Sarah Silverman Programme Promo

California Cooking with Claymore Cleveland (SuperEgo)

Superego Supershort 4 • California Cooking with Claymore Cleveland from Superego on Vimeo.

New SuperEgo SuperShort! Starring Matt Gourley, Ryan Harrison Big Bill Babyman Tootsmajian Carter, and five kittens. Directed by me.

GoSuperego.com just got a facelift with embeddable video and other fun thingies. Download the new episodes, subscribe via iTunes, and if you leave a review on iTunes we'll read your name on the next podcast! INSTANT FAME!

CarBot: The REAL Transformer

This has been a long time coming- like, a year. (I should know by now that it takes me about a year to finish most personal art projects, because I need to put something down for the Crocker Standard Artistic Gestating Period (CSAGP) of ten months.)
(MORE, FULL SIZE PICS ON MY FLICKR PAGE)



Anyway, the challenge I posed to myself after being underwhelmed by the design of the robots in Michael Bay's Transformers was to build a model as close to an actual Transformer as possible; meaning, NO MAGICAL PARTS could appear to bulk up the end result.

What makes Transformers so amazing (for me) is that an inventor, took a physical toy car and created a puzzle that every little boy has to solve to get a robot and back again. It's so impressive and fun. To me Tranformers have always been about the toys, rather than the cartoon or …that movie, which is really based on the cartoon.*



I bought a plastic car model, sketched a quick, basic design, and set to work chopping the car up and piecing together a physical robot where the feet transformed from the back half of the car, the engine became head, and the doors opened into arms. I did, in fact, run out of pieces to make the robot have any limb definition, and as a result, used up the plastic frames the pieces came from, cutting them into conduits and skeletal components where needed(mostly the legs and forearms).



Painting is a struggle for me, mostly because I always change my process and can never decide on colors. For this guy, I primed him white with Krylon flat white, and then masked off the panels that would have the car's color and sprayed the rest of the undercarriage and inner parts black. Some of these components should have been painted before gluing, namely the interior of the car, which was a colossal headache later on in the process (two-fold really: I didn't spray it darker earlier and then when I DID start painting it, I was paying far too much attention to detail for something that was going to be completely covered up and obscured.)



What you see here is the original light blue color I mixed. My thought process was this- I didn't want to do yellow like Bumblebee and I didn't want to do the nice dark purple from the model's package; I can't do white because it would look weird and silver was too close to white. I started with blue and then after letting the model sit half painted for months, changed my mind and settled on the semi-drab metallic green you see here. I feel much better about the green because I remember my mom's old Carmen Ghia having this faded green color, as well as a Mustang on the street where I grew up.




So there you go. Mission Accomplished! A 1971 Plymouth Barracuda Transformer that is built (theoretically) using only machinery available from the mass of the actual car.

MORE PICTURES AT MY FLICKR PAGE




*The animation that ILM created for the movie's transformations was really cool. However, if you pay attention, you can count on one hand the number of actual fully-on-screen transformations that take place. Most of them with Bumblebee.