Sunday, April 05, 2009

The Best Laid Plans

When I decided to take two days off and make this a four-day weekend, my primary intention was to not do anything.
That's hardly unusual for me, I know, but you stick with what works.
Still, I had intended to spend a fair amount of the time doing some drawing. In fact, my plan for doing “nothing” was actually to do “nothing but drawing.”
That didn't happen on Friday, of course, as I spent much of the day out doing things, and then most of the evening watching TV, so Saturday was my target day for getting started on doing nothing but drawing.
Of course, it was easier to just do nothing, so I found myself putting off the drawing, eventually settling down to start watching The Venture Bros. Season 3 and putting off the whole drawing thing, figuring I had plenty of time.
On the DVD releases of previous seasons of The Venture Bros., the broadcast censorship - bleeped out swear words, pixelated or black-barred nudity - were carried over.
However, when I watched the first episode and heard the Monarch say “fucking” instead of “bleeping,” I realized that such was not the case this time around. I wondered if it was Blu-ray thing, so I sent Scott a text asking if the DVD version was also uncensored. He responded back that he thought so, and wondered how bad it was. I responded back with some examples of language and nudity, and somewhere along the line in the text conversation he said that Stacy wanted to invite me over for haystacks dinner. I said that I didn’t know what that was, and he responded with the details - the incorrect details - and I decided to think about it.
On the one hand, I’d have to shower, get dressed, and drive to Manassas. On the other, I wouldn’t have to bother feeding myself, and leaving the house gave me a good excuse to not do any of the drawing that I’d supposedly intended to do.
While I was deliberating, Stacy called to telephonically twist my arm, and I decided to make the trek.
After dinner we headed downstairs to see if there was anything worth watching on Pay-Per View, and discovered that there had been a Dead Like Me movie released this year, so we watched that.
The movie served as something of a coda - or possibly the first of more direct-to-DVD sequels to come - to the late, lamented series that was taken from us far too soon.
Overall it was entertaining, but it was kind of weird. Mandy Patinkin did not reprise his role as Rube, nor did Laura Harris reprise her role as Daisy. While they were wise enough to not have another actor replace Patinkin, they did bring in someone else to replace Harris, which, along with the lack of a Stewart Copeland soundtrack, added to the overall weirdness.
Still, it was good to see some old friends once again.
After that the dog dander was starting to get to me, so I headed home, and actually did start doing some drawing, and I spent most of today doing the same.
I haven’t really managed to draw anything I’d be willing to post, as I’ve mostly been doing some experimenting to get used to the Cintiq. While it’s a more natural interface than the tablet, it’s taking me a while to unlearn the habits I picked up using the tablet, and getting used to actually watching what my hand is doing - and getting used to my hand sometimes obscuring my view of what I’m drawing.
Still, I’ll keep at it, and eventually I’ll probably crank out something worth posting.

1 comment:

Merlin T Wizard said...

Thanks for coming over, Jon. It was fun. Plus, we may have never known about that Dead Like Me movie-ette if you hadn't.