Take Us To Your Japanese Schoolgirls

While feeling really bored in a meeting at work the other day I started doodling, and, for whatever reason, what I was doodling were little tentacled spaceships.
(I gave up trying to figure out how my brain works or why the thoughts that pop into my head pop into my head a long time ago and recommend that you all do the same. About my brain, I mean. Knock yourselves out trying to figure out your own, if that's what you want to do.)
Yesterday I started messing around with various filter effects for creating generic space scenes, and eventually the two different things collided, and this is the result:



Notthing terribly unique or original, I know, but at least it's something.
When I got home yesterday I decided to take a nap, then, after getting into bed, decided not to take a nap.
I got up and sat down to watch Shoot 'Em Up because it had been on my mind after talking about it to Scott, and also because why not?
After that I did the aforementioned messing with filter effects, and then decided to watch the Riff Trax of the 2006 remake of the movie The Wicker Man.
Watching that was inspired by watching the video below, which Scott had sent me a link to the other day:



It was pretty brutal, even with the Riffs.
I'd watched it operating on the assumption that it was Rated R, and that Scott was thus exempted from having to sit through the awfulness, but I've since learned that it's PG-13, so he's totally hosed.
Yes, it means that I have to sit through it again, but if I can share the suffering it's totally worth it.
And since he's made "too many exceptions" to his no R-Rated movies rule to be able to suffer through the brain-breaking awfulness of The Room, I have to find as much PG-13 pain to inflict on him as possible.
Last night The Last Starfighter, one of my favorite movies that I inexplicably don't own, was on HDNet Movies, so I recorded it and watched it this morning before venturing out into the world. There are so many things about that movie that I love, including the primitive CGI that still holds up reasonably well 25 years later. At the time it came out, though, what I loved most about the movie was its female lead, actress Catherine Mary Stewart.
From 1984 into the early 90s I sat through so many horrible movies simply because she was in them. Even The Apple, for god's sake. You know you love someone if you're willing to watch The Apple.
I looked her up on IMDb today, and was amazed to discover that she's 50 years old, and was pleased, based on the recent photo in her entry, to see that time has been kind to her.
Not that it really matters, because in my mind she'll always be that gorgeous 25 year old she was back when I was 12.
After watching the movie I headed out to pick up my comics and do a bit of grocery shopping. I also cashed in some change because I was curious to see how much I had ($120.58).
The most exciting thing that happened all day was that a bottle of Vitamin Water flew out of my hand while I was moving it from the cart to the belt at Target and the cap flew off as soon as it hit the floor. Given how much Vitamin Water I buy every week and the fact that my hands usually fail at performing even the most basic tasks, I'm frankly amazed that this is the first time that's ever happened.
Once I got home I ate lunch and took a nap, then got up and did the picture posted above.
And that pretty much brings us up to date.
Oh, and my insurance company finally got its money from the insurance company of the guy who wrecked my car, so I should be receiving a check for my deductible in a few days.

There Must Be Something In My Eye...

Over at Comics Should Be Good! there's a series of daily posts called A Year of Cool Comic Moments, detailing, well, cool comic moments.
I was thirteen years old when the comic that provided this moment hit the stands.
It choked me up then, and it still chokes me up now.
Overwrought? Sure. Melodramatic? That too. Talky enough to fill up five or six entire issues of a modern comic? Absolutely. Corny? Okay.
It is, in fact, almost an archetype of everything that a modern reader could find fault with in comics of the past, a collection of every flaw, criticism and negative adjective you can imagine.
Even so, the Perez art is so, so, SO gorgeous, and Wolfman demonstrates very clearly that he is a master of the medium, and even looking at it through eyes jaundiced by more than two decades of cynicism and the incessant deconstructions - of varying quality - of the super-hero, it's still heartbreaking, and undeniably cool.
Beyond that, it's a fitting end - and tribute - to a character who had a long, slow arc of character development that culminated in this moment.
I have a lot more to say on the topic of Supergirl in particular - and comics in general - inspired by this Cool Moment, which I will try to form into a coherent thesis in a future post.

The Biggest Thing To Happen To Me Today...

...didn't actually happen to me. Still, it was big news: Disney to Buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 Billion
Here's Mark Evanier's take on it.
As Mark points out in a follow-up post, I don't think this is going to have much of an impact on the comics.
I do, however, wonder what it will mean for the movies based on the characters.
Time will tell, I guess. Or else it won't. What am I, an oracle?
As a side note, really, New York Times? The best image you could come up with for the article was the cover for the comic that had the ill-considred and nonsensical guest appearance of that guy from Project Runway?
Other than that not much else is going on. I'm just counting down the days to the long weekend.

Phase 2: ?

Beyond doing the laundry and working on a picture that didn't turn out for crap, I haven't done much today. That is, however, hardly surprising.
Speaking of pictures, I'm not 100% (or really even 90%) pleased with how yesterday's Carla Gugino picture turned out. Certainly it didn't turn out as well as the picture of Wendy as Queen Etherea, but in fairness to me, I did actually have some time constraints on the Gugino picture - I wanted to have it done in time for a relatively early posting - whereas I was free to work on the Wendy picture at my leisure.
I also think that the white outline that worked so well in the picture of Wendy didn't work out so well with the Gugino picture. Looking at it now, I might have approached that a little differently and gone for a different effect.
My approach to that picture was almost the exact opposite of the Wendy picture. With the Wendy picture I did the painting first, then brought it into Illustrator to add the line art. With the Gugino picture I did the line art first, then did the painting.
Ah well; it is what it is.
Yesterday when I was in line at Target to pay for my groceries there was a girl in front of me who looked rather disheveled, rummaging through her backpack for any stray change she could find. She looked to me as though she was following something, like a festival (a la Dead Heads and Phish Phanatics or whatever they called themselves). In any case, it seemed clear that in her recent history, and for the foreseeable future, she had been living out of her backpack.
After dredging up as much change as she could find, she asked the cashier, in reference to the top she was buying, "Is there going to be tax on this?" The cashier responded in the affirmative, and gave a percentage when the girl asked how much. This sparked the girl to engage in more furious digging in her backpack.
As was to be expected, when the time came the girl came up short. She told the cashier that she had a friend who had some money, but she didn't know where her friend was. I said, "How much do you need?" She said "Twenty-three cents." I dug in my pocket and pulled out a paltry eighteen cents, put the change back, got out my wallet, grabbed a dollar, and said, "Here."
She thanked me multiple times, collected all of the change she'd dug out of her backpack and tried to hand it to me. I said, "Keep it; I think you need it more than I do."
She thanked me again and went on her way.
After I'd been rung up I was on my way out the door when the girl came running up to me triumphantly clutching a crumpled single in her hand. I tried to wave her off, but she forced it onto me saying, "I insist," and then went on her way.
Before you say anything, no, I didn't do this just because she was cute...because she wasn't.
(The pierced lip and the fact that she looked like she hadn't bathed in a few days didn't help matters any.)
I did initially think that she was wearing a Coraline T-shirt, which made me slightly more inclined to be charitable, but it turned out to be something else.
Mostly I did it because I remember what it's like to be stuck scrounging for pennies and coming up short when trying to buy someting...though in my case it was usually when buying cigarettes or booze, so I couldn't help but be moved to a tiny, almost non-existent act of charity.
Last night I watched Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. From the title alone I knew it was going to be bad - indeed, that's why I'd decided to watch it, though having previously seen a clip of the titular Mega Shark leaping out of the ocean and taking down a jetliner added to my desire to endure the cheesiness - and the fact that it "starred" Deborah Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas prepared me for just how mind-numbingly bad it would be.
Or so I thought.
As bad as I knew it was going to be, it somehow managed to be even worse.
I think my "favorite" scene was not the bit with the shark taking a bite out of a jumbo jet, but the montage of the "scientists" busily engaging in "science," mixing colorful liquids together, then shaking their heads in disappointment. That we were given no indication of what the hell they were supposed to be doing only made it that much more entertaining.
The title characters really didn't get all that much screen time, and when they did, it tended to be repeats of the same handful of shots of the poorly-CGI-ed ocean dwellers swimming around not doing much of anything. Most of the "action" occurred off-camera, and rather than seeing some exciting tableau of mass destruction we got treated to scenes of the principal characters reacting to the devastation...despite the fact that in most cases there was no possible way for them to actually see the devastation in order to react to it.
Still, as I said, I knew it was going to be bad, and I went into it wanting to see a terrible movie. It's just that I got more than I bargained for.
In any case, that pretty much wraps up this entry. Yet again my plan to spend a weekend doing nothing and having that somehow result in me becoming independently wealthy* didn't quite work out, so I guess I need to start preparing for another week at work.

*It's kind of like the business plan of the Underpants Gnomes: Phase 1. Sit around doing nothing. Phase 2. ? Phase 3. Profit!