Oh Yeah...

Since he was leaving town today to - among other things - deliver the Heroic Portrait I did for him, I suppose it's safe to mention that my mystery customer was David, my Realtor.
The requested Portrait was a gift for his brother-in-law, and can be seen below:



The woman in the Lois Lane role is David's sister, and she's wearing a pin with the initials of her children.
When David requested the addition of "Mark 9:23," I kind of puzzed over it, as, heathen that I am, it didn't initially occur to me that it was, as Shirley Manson from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles would put it with her distinctive brogue, "Froom the Bible."
Naturally I didn't actually draw the NASDAQ building in the background, otherwise I wouldn't have finished the picture anywhere near as quickly as I did.
After sending me the images to work from, David asked me if he needed to pay me first. I said no, and he responded, "You know where to find me, huh?"
I said, "Oh, yeah, because I'm just so intimidating."
(Note: David is a giant of a man. When you haven't seen him for a while you kind of forget just how enormous he is. When he stopped by on Wednesday, my internal response was, "Holy shit! I forogt how big he is!")
He responded, "I've read your blog; I don't want to be the target of that venom."
Anywhere, that's my second-ever Heroic Portraits sale, submitted for your whatever.

Scratching The Surface

I have to say that going grocery shopping this morning was…well, not a pleasure, exactly, but certainly much more pleasant than usual: minimal crowds, hardly anyone getting in my way, and pretty much the bare minimum of crying/screaming children.
(Crying/screaming children are pretty much a given in any public space.)
I’m not sure if it was because people are all shopped out, are still off visiting family, or if it was just a fluke, but whatever the cause, I was happy with the effect.
After getting home and putting everything away I watched TV for a while, ate lunch, and took a nap.
Then I got up and…honestly, I’m not sure what I did. I guess I watched more TV.
Meh, it doesn’t really matter.
Eventually it occurred to me that I should probably write a blog entry.
So here we are.
In my entry about seeing The Day The Earth Stood Still I mentioned that significant portions of the movie seemed like a commercial for Microsoft Surface, and I said that I had some more thoughts on Surface that I would post in an entry.
Today the prophecy will be fulfilled.
If you haven’t clicked on the link above, Surface is a multi-touch screen technology developed by Microsoft that, honestly, is pretty damned cool, especially for Microsoft.
Microsoft began publicizing Surface at around the same time that Apple released the iPhone, so naturally it was met with a lot of jeers by Apple fanboys, including some parody videos, which essentially boiled down to “You can’t carry it in your pocket!” and “It can cost as much as $10,000!”
Both of these things are true, but to the first one I say, “So what?” Are you suggesting that every technology has to be pocket-sized in order to be useful or cool? Really? Okay, well, you’ve got your iPhone, so I suggest you get rid of your TV, your MacBook, your DVD player, and anything else that won’t fit in your pocket. Apparently you don’t need them and they suck.
Honestly, don’t be a retard. If you can’t see the possibilities of such a technology, you’re the one with the problem.
As for the second point, yes, Surface products are ridiculously expensive, but what new technology isn’t? Browse the Web sometime and see how much a hard drive cost back in, say, 1987.
For that matter, there are still flat panel TVs that can cost as much or more than Surface.
Beyond that, in its initial deployment, Surface isn’t really intended for home use. The target markets are for commercial uses, such as information kiosks at retail outlets, and in the hotel and gaming industries.
Here’s a demo of one of the commercial applications of Surface:



(More videos can be seen by following the link above)
Undoubtedly over time the technology will, in one form or another, find its way into consumer level devices and have a much friendlier price tag.
While some of the demo videos I’ve seen have shown off some of the creative potential of Surface, such as “finger painting,” I haven’t seen anything indicating that Microsoft has any plans to develop Surface specifically for graphic design and image editing, but it’s my hope that they will.
It would be seriously cool to have Surface in a drafting table form factor running a version of Photoshop designed specifically for the Surface interface. My mind boggles at some of the possibilities: using real paintbrushes whose real-world effects are simulated on-screen, keeping a “stack” or images off to the side and sliding them over to your workspace for editing, having the ability to mix colors on a virtual palette…the list goes on.
So, yeah. The possibilities of Surface are extremely appealing. And, again, it pretty much amazes me that it was Microsoft that came up with this product. Not that they’re alone in this. I’m sure Apple intends to do more with multi-touch screens than what they’re doing right now, and I know there are other companies working on similar technologies.
Despite the fact that I think it’s cool, the lengthy commercials for Surface in The Day The Earth Stood Still were pretty obnoxious and obtrusive.
And don’t take this as being an extended commercial for the product, or me shilling for Microsoft. I’m sure they will, as has been the case with pretty much every product they’ve ever developed, find some way to totally cock it up.
Even so, I just find the product and the concept genuinely interesting.
Anyway, that filled up an entry pretty quickly.

Random Post-Christmas Blathering

One of the advantages of no longer feeling all of the excitement and anticipation that leads up to Christmas is that you don’t have to suffer the crash that often results once Christmas finally gets here and is over.
So for me today was a day much like any other, most of which, if I’m honest, generally tend to be a bit of a letdown anyway.
I really didn’t do much of anything today. I signed onto AIM and logged into my work e-mail and no issues ever came up. At the end of my “work” day, I took a nap, most of which I spent dreaming that I was getting up from my nap.
Then I planted myself in the recliner and dozed some more while watching a marathon of UFO Hunters on The History Channel.
Anyone know what the deal is with The History Channel and UFOs? UFOs seem to have taken the position once held by Hitler.
After that I watched a bit of a show on The National Geographic Channel focusing on the Book of Revelation.
Among the people interviewed was Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind books. Calling him the co-author is a bit of an overstatement, actually, as he mostly provided theological guidance to Jerry Jenkins, who did all of the actual writing.
I’ve seen pictures of LaHaye, but this was the first time I actually saw a moving image of him, and I have to say that he’s really damned creepy.
The man is in his 80s and has fewer gray hairs than I did when I was in my 20s. It’s a clear sign of vanity, as it looks utterly unnatural in a way that makes it obvious that it’s either a dye job or a toupee.
Why would someone whose sole focus is supposed to be on glorifying God and who believes that we’re living in the End Times ™ bother trying to mask the signs of aging? It’s rather unseemly, and, quite frankly, a little on the feminine side, which seems a little shocking for such a manly man.
Of course, it led me to wonder about something. Over in the comments sections of the Slacktivist dissections of the Left Behind books and movies we often speculate on the specifics of the Rapture.
When the believers are sucked up from the Earth by Jesus and his magical Dyson (the expensive pet hair one) – I imagine it looking rather like the scene in Spaceballs when the giant vacuum sucks up the atmosphere from the planet Dryad* – so that they can skip out on that whole “dying” thing, which they get a pass on because they’re just that much more special than any and all believers who came before them, they will be naked as the day they were born.
All their clothes will, like the rest of the non-believing – or not correctly-believing – populace, be left behind.
One assumes that this means any jewelry they’re wearing will be left behind as well, and so will any sort of implants, dental products like dentures and braces, and other things that aren’t natural parts of their bodies.
So what about hair dye? Will Tim LaHaye leave behind a pile of clothes and a puddle of dye?
And what about the contents of bowels and bladders? All the germs, bacteria, and mites living in and on the human body? Tattoos?
There are no answers to these sorts of questions in the books or the movies – or in the Bible itself, where there’s also no mention at all of the Rapture – because neither LaHaye nor Jenkins were bright enough to even consider that these sorts of questions might even arise**.
Fred, the titular Slacktivist, often refers to the Left Behind series as “the worst books ever written.”
His problem with them is not just the horrific characterization, the utter lack of understanding of how the world works or the nature of the human condition, or even their frankly baffling obsession with telephony and travel arrangements, but rather with the insane, puzzling, and, in his words evil theology upon which they’re based.
Obviously I’m not a theologian, but I do have a more than passing familiarity with the Bible and with a lot of theological theories and with history, so while I’m not really in the same position to judge the validity of the theology presented in the books that Fred is, I can certainly understand his perspective.
Even so, I don’t exactly have a horse in that race in the way that Fred, himself an Evangelical Christian, does, so most of my outrage over the books is reserved for the bad writing.
It all brings to mind a line from the song Sweetheart Come by Nick Cave:

So let’s not weep for their evil deeds but their lack of imagination

In any case, pretty much most of the above was simply the result of feeling like I should post a blog entry but not really knowing what I wanted to blog about.
For the record, my favorite part of the Nick Cave song I mentioned is

Walk with me now under the stars
It’s a clear and easy pleasure
And be happy in my company, for I love you without measure
Walk with me now under the stars
It’s a safe and easy pleasure
Seems we can be happy now, it’s late, but it ain’t never

Some of you may have noticed that the guy in my wildly inappropriate Christmas picture appeared to be wearing a tux, and if you did, you may have wondered why.
So, what, you don’t dress in formal attire when opening your Christmas presents? Heathens.
Actually, the reason for the tux is that the reference image I used was a picture that was part of a pictorial featuring Barbara Bach that ran in Playboy 30+ years ago, back when she was a Bond Girl. Hence the tux.
So now you know.

Not Exactly A Spoiler Department:
To provide some further thoughts on the movie version of The Spirit, I felt I should mention, for the benefit of the haters, that Frank Miller has a cameo in the movie, and, as has been the case in pretty much every movie cameo he’s had, he gets killed. Brutally. So there is that.
In Sin City, he gets his brains blown out. In Daredevil, I just noticed, he apparently gets killed by Bullseye with a pen, as he’s credited as “Man with pen in head.” I don’t remember that, nor do I remember his cameo in Robocop 2, but he probably bought the farm in that, too.
Appearing as himself in the movie Jugular Wine: A Vampire Odyssey, he gets killed by a swarm of vampires, while Stan Lee, who compares the vampires to “angels,” looks on.

*In “fairness” to LaHaye and Jenkins, in writing Left Behind their only real consideration was the “message,” so any other considerations – pacing, plot, creating characters who even remotely resembled human beings, etc. – would be looked upon as irrelevant and frivolous.

**It’s worth mentioning that when we watched Krull the other night Scott referred to this scene during the bit when the Black Fortress flies off into space piece by piece.

Getting Into The Spirit

Sometime around 2 AM on Wednesday morning I found myself half awake and wondering, “What’s that noise? And where is that breeze coming from?”
Driven by curiosity, I forced myself fully awake and discovered that my ceiling fan was on full blast.
This was puzzling enough on its own, but became even moreso as I fumbled in the dark in search of the remote. After all, if I turned it on – via the remote, which is the only method – I must have done so in my sleep, and given the difficulty I was having with finding the remote while fully awake I can’t help but be baffled at the thought that I was somehow more adept at finding and manipulating the remote while not actually conscious.
So I don’t what the hell was happening there.
Yesterday I headed down to Manassas to spend Christmas Eve at Scott and Stacy’s. I brought along the Riff Trax version of the movie Crossroads – the Britney Spears movie, not the Ralph Macchio one – as my way of repaying their hospitality with something dreadful.
And – apart from the various scenes featuring Britney prancing around in her underwear – it really was dreadful.
After that we watched Krull, as it’s been years since I last saw it, and, really, why not?
This morning found me on my way to Manassas once again for Christmas breakfast. While there, I got this from Scott and Stacy:



For the record, that’s Starfire.
I commented that at least this time around I don’t have to worry about Kathleen breaking Starfire’s fingers off the way she did with the Black Canary figure I got from them last year.
While I don’t have much Christmas spirit, and I was not visited by any spirits in the night – unless it was a spirit that turned on my ceiling fan, but that was a little too early on Christmas Eve morning to be a very well-timed visit – I did get some Christmas spirit in the form of seeing The Spirit this afternoon.
The earliest show was 2:15, and given that by 11:30 we’d finished the breakfast, everyone else there was eager to get into some sort of gameplay to pass the time. Because I didn’t want to suck the fun out of the room, which was rapidly filling with dog hair that was starting to overpower the generic Zyrtec I’d taken, and I had to give my family a call, I decided that I would head home and just meet them at the theater.
There wasn’t much traffic on the road yesterday or today, but driving still managed to be annoying, as the people who were on the road were uniformly driving well below the speed limit. I don’t know if they were all just being hyper-cautious for fear of being pulled over in some holiday sting operation, or it was just that the more reckless and aggressive drivers had decided to take a couple of days off, but either way it was irritating as hell.
Though I left for the theater with what I thought was plenty of time to spare, I didn’t get there until 2:00. I wasn’t expecting the theater to be as packed as it was – at least not that early in the day – and neither, apparently, was the theater management.
The people working there were overwhelmed, the ticket kiosks weren’t working, and between buying tickets and a drink and some candy I spent nearly 20 minutes standing in line.
When I got there, Scott and Casey were nowhere to be found. I thought about calling them to ask if they wanted me to just buy their tickets for them, but this thought didn’t occur to me until I was near the front of the ticket line, and the theater is a total dead zone for cell phone service.
I saw them come in while I was at the concession stand and met up with them while they were getting their snacks.
We ended up missing all of the previews and the first couple of minutes of the movie.
As for the movie itself, there’s been a lot of hate for it online for months now, as with The Day the Earth Stood Still, and as with that movie, once again, I don’t get it.
What the hell do you people want? I mean, seriously, The Spirit was a hell of a lot of fun. Sure, it looked a lot like Sin City, but personally I don’t view that as a bad thing.
Admittedly, in his comics work, for years Frank Miller has been showing signs of, to put it delicately, being bug fuck insane (The goddamn Batman, I’m looking at you…), but this movie had the right kind of Miller insanity.
I suppose that’s the problem with the haters; if you aren’t wired in such a way as to appreciate Miller’s sense of humor, then yeah, the movie is going to fall flat. But if that’s the case, what the hell are you going to see it for in the first place, or even bother reading about it and watching trailers?
I mean, there is no force on earth that could compel me to see Marley and Me – multiple showings of which were sold out today, by the way; when Scott mentioned that I said, “People are…well, you know what I think about people” – so I don’t see any point in agonizing over how awful it’s going to be and subjecting myself to the torment of watching clips or reading about it just so I have something to bitch about on some forum.
On the other hand, apparently a lot of the online outrage is a result of how much the movie differs from the source material. The Spirit is considered a classic, and its creator, Will Eisner, is a legendary comic book icon. In fact, one of the highest industry honors is the Eisner Award.
I can’t really speak to that, as my exposure to The Spirit on the printed page has been limited to seeing pages reprinted in articles about how great The Spirit is. I’ve meant to read more, but, well, I haven’t.
Beyond what I’ve read about The Spirit, my only other exposure has been the god-awful 1987 made for TV movie – which was undoubtedly a failed pilot – starring Sam “Flash Gordon” Jones in the title role.
So basically, this is what I know about The Spirit: it had a lot of femme fatale characters with goofy names who pranced around in skimpy outfits, the main character was a cop who died and somehow returned to life, one of his principal adversaries was someone called The Octopus, and he had a horrid, racist caricature of a kid sidekick named Ebony White.
As far as the movie goes when it comes to those elements, it’s check, check, check, check, and thank god, there was no Ebony White.
So…what’s to complain about?
But, if you don’t like it – even if you preemptively don’t like it – you don’t like it, and, so, whatever. Good for you. Storm every forum you can find and unload all the bile you need to.
I, however, enjoyed it immensely – as did Scott and Casey – and that’s just how it goes.
And for the record, Scarlett Johansson is positively inhuman in her hotness, and I wouldn’t mind having a photocopy of Eva Mendes’ perfect ass.
So yeah, I think it was a good directorial debut for Frank Miller, and the perfect vehicle for him, but I do hope that if he moves on to other projects he’ll move away from the Sin City style a little, as a little really does go a long way.
As a random aside, regarding that 1987 Spirit movie, I distinctly recall having difficulty setting up the VCR to record it. We had just gotten a satellite dish, which added another layer of complexity to setting the VCR to record, which was already complicated enough. In those days there was no such thing as on-screen programming. Setting the VCR to record at a specific time involved turning this array of weird little plastic dials into the correct position to set the time, date, and channel.
Anyway, that was my Christmas Eve/Christmas. I hope yours were at least as good.

A Christmas Reminder

Remember kids....



...unwrapping your presents is half the fun.
Merry Christmas from Threshold!

Reading Comprehension: I Don't Has It

I worked from home today (and will do so on Friday). I'd asked my boss if I could yesterday, and she said, "Yeah, I was going to come around and tell you to do that."
Not that there was much in the way of work to do; I don't have any urgent projects going on right now, and other than an automated report, I didn't get a single piece of e-mail all day.
Tonight is typically Riff Trax night, but given that it's also Christmas Eve, I figured that Scott wouldn't be coming over tonight.
I was going to ask him via IM what, if anything, he wanted to do about it, but before I could he asked if I wanted to go to there place to watch a movie and order a pizza.
I misread his message and thought that he wanted me to do so that night. Initially I was reluctant, as I wasn't sure if I'd be going in to work today or not, but then I decided I might as well.
When I texted him to tell him what time I'd be there, he responded, "Tomorrow night?"
I replied that I thought it was tonight (Tuesday). He responded back with, "Sorry for the confusion," which actually left me more confused.
So I called him and found out that, in fact, he had meant tonight.
Anyway, that's straightened out, and that's what I'll be doing tonight.
When I got up this morning I had a response from my latest (and second ever) Heroic Portraits customer with some praise and criticisms/requests. So I set about making the changes and sent out a new proof. Shortly thereafter I got a call from him saying he was just around the corner and could he come pick it up?
So he came over, I printed it out, he wrote me a check, and he was off on his merry way.
With this breezy rate of business - Two customers in a year after two years of nothing! How will I keep up with the overwhelming demand? - I might actually turn a profit on the whole thing by 2014, which is even sadder than it sounds when you consider that I really haven't spent that much money on it, just the cost of the domain and hosting and the large format printer. Yet I'm still in the red. Or, you know, I would be if I actually kept any books for it. So I suppose that's one way of avoiding having to look at the depressing numbers: don't write them down.
Anyway, I hope you all have a nice Christmas Eve with your family and friends.

Quick Post

It's pretty cold in these parts today. Never got above freezing, and it's only supposed to get colder tonight.
Of course, "cold" is a pretty relative term. Consider the following conversation I had with my mother yesterday:

Me: It's supposed to get down to 14 degrees here.
Mom: It's supposed to get up to 14 degrees here.

So there you go.
Of course, some people think that once yout get to a certain level of coldness the numbers don't matter anymore. I think those people have never experienced a wind chill factor of -80.
Right now it's 19 degrees, though, and I'm thinking that they might have a point.
Not much new or exciting going on around here. I came home, dozed in the recliner for a while, ate something, sat around, wrote this.

Truth In Advertising

(From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

Because I'm Just That Awesome

I didn't go grocery shopping yesterday because...well, because. After my furniture got delivered I just didn't feel like venturing out into the world.
To break in my recliner, I finally got around to watching The Dark Knight on Blu-ray. The movie is just as awesome on its third viewing.
In any case, after talking to my mother this morning I ventured out to do my grocery shopping and to gas up the car. Usually on Saturdays and Sundays there's a "noon rush" at the gas station that forces me to circle around a couple of times in search of an open pump.
That wasn't the case today; almost all of the pumps were open. The rush arrived after I'd already started gassing up. So I actually beat the rush. Not sure how that happened.
When I got home I had several e-mails from - *gasp!* - a Heroic Portraits customer. Lucky number two!
It's someone I know, who will remain nameless for now, as the Portrait is a Christmas present for someone, and though there's almost no chance of the recipient reading this, I figure it's better to be safe than sorry.
This mysterious customer actually contacted me about it last week, and when I didn't hear anything more I figured that the deal was off. However, today I got the reference images and a little more information.
I wanted to make a quick turnaround, so I got to work on it right away, and actually managed to finish it in under 6 hours, while also managing to do the laundry and feed myself. How is that possible? I'm just that awesome.
I've sent a proof off for approval/disapproval, and I supplse we'll find out then whether I'm as awesome as I think I am...