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Pamplemoussi, Maakies, and Satiro-Plastic

I just got home from listening to Geneviève Castrée, Tony Millionaire, and Gary Panter speak and display their work—a Harbourfront Centre International Readings event that coincided with this weekend’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival.

I now have a very serious crush on Geneviève Castrée.  Not only have I found a new comics artist I was unfamiliar with, but I found one who is incredibly cute (and that French Canadian accent! Swoon!).

Tony Millionaire read from some of his Maakies strips which were projected on a screen beside him. I am a big fan of the strip, and while you could tell Tony’s a very funny fellow, his work didn’t translate too well when spoken.  He made a point of saying how much he hated when the readers of audio books gave the characters voices and accents, but his reading could have used such flourishes, especially since his work is so flamboyant and irreverent.

Finally, Gary Panter showed a series of slides of his paintings while he read not from his actual comics, but from the introductions to his books, including a rather dry textbook introduction about Danté to his oversized Jimbo in Purgatory.  Although Panter was touted as the headliner of the evening, he was by far the least engaging, and left me with no interest to dig deeper into his body of work.

However, I consider the night a success as I ended up coming home with a signed book by Mr. Millionaire, and—as you can see—my very own drawing of Drinky Crow!

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Attack of the tweens

Earlier in the week, Drawn! was luckily enough to be made a Yahoo pick and editor’s choice for addition into My Yahoo. This is all great because it meant a lot of new traffic for the site, however I soon realized that the majority of people who turn to Yahoo for their surfing advice are clearly 13 years old.  Either that, or there’a reason the site is called Yahoo.

The commenters all put their Yahoo usernames as their e-mail address, and under website they either wrote Yahoo itself, or Drawn!, as if I was asking what site they were currently reading.  At first the comments were merely misspelled and wrought with mangled grammar:

“I loves those theme!”

“Aufully marvilous, why its a work of art i say”

“The picture i see i like it because it have some touches to it and it looks good”

“it’s hidious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Then, there were the few that believed themselves to be in some sort of Yahoo chat room:

“sex gone wild give me a holler”

“can i have id of eny girl plz im alone”

For the post about Star Wars production art, featuring a drawing of Darth Vader, I got these priceless gems:

“This one looks like a man or somthing from Star Wars.”

“TRILOGY OF STARWARS
IMAGINATION ,COLORS AND PASSION!!
TO FREEK 4 US!!”

“its cool but it kinda looks like a star wars character”

Some person had nothing to say, and simply wrote:

“nothing”

Another felt the same way but was slightly less elegant:

“ffggg”

They just kept coming and coming…

“Hi, my name is Brent I could like to learn about begin a great artist like you guys. I would like for others to send art for me to see how far I am in the world.”

“it’s preety
it’s u over the sky”

“i love your drawing its so expresible”

“THIS PAINT IA A COMBINATION BETWEN NEW & OLD IIS SOME TIPE OF hOLOCAUST NICE WHAT CAN i SAY!:)”

“Cool you had a pretty cool ida! i think you should go in on this art”

“I LIKE THE WHOLE PICTURE ITS SELF ITS A GREAT PICTURE”

“Its great, but I think it look better try with planet saturn, I also like drawing it in my imagination.  I also like the stars around it.”

“hello i am aarya,how are you? be happy in your life. bai”

“its nice but not all that so dont get all happ go lucky!!!!!!
if any body dont like what i said holla at me bitch!”

“it looks really cool-NOT!!!!!!!!!!!”

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Hit me with your rhythm stick

Oh no! I’ve been memed!  Both Mélanie and James have passed me their musical batons, and so now I must run with both of them.

Total volume of music files on my computer...

81.33 GB (That’s 21,654 songs, clocking in at a svelte 52.3 days long)

The last CD I bought was...

Ben Folds - “Songs for Silverman”

Song playing right now...

You Still Believe in Me - M. Ward, covering The Beach Boys

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me...

1. Do You Realize?? - Beck, covering the Flaming Lips
2. Shady Lane - Pavement
3. Still - Elvis Costello
4. I’ll Be Your Mirror - Clem Snide, covering the Velvet Underground
5. Big Dipper - Cracker

And if you just have to know more, there’s always my Audioscrobbler Profile which has stats about my listening habits coming out its digital wazoo.

I hereby (unh unh!) pass it on:
Sarah
Matt
Eva

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Pangram haiku

A pangram is a sentence using all 26 letters of the alphabet.  Mark Simonson has a list of pangrammatic haikus on his site.  I couldn’t help but create one of my own…

Betwixt the teeth of
My jeans’ zipper, I quickly
Severed my ding-dong

Oh, and be sure to check out Mark’s gorgeous typographic tees!

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Blogtionary

Since Michael Hanscom thinks I’m making it up, here’s a screengrab of OS X’s dictionary definition of “blog”.  In fairness, the quote about unhealthy interests in computers is given as a usage example, but still.

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Mischief

For this week’s Illustration Friday entry (the theme is “Mischief") I decided to show my rough sketch along with the final image. Click on the images to enlarge.

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Mountain Goats and comics

Last night Matt invited me to go see the Mountain Goats with him at Lee’s Palace.  It was great to finally meet in person.  We met up first at the Green Room for a few pints along with Kean and Ryan, whom I had also never met.

We joked that surely one of us would blog about the evening, and when at the end of the evening Kean said he was going home to work on comics, I was guilted into drawing the above cartoon of when I got home.  When I finished it, I thought it was crap, but this now it looks better than I remembered—although it’s still kinda sloppy.  For example, I don’t know why it looks like Matt is playing an invisible piano.  But give a guy a break; it was 2 am.

From left to right that’s me, Ryan, Kean and Matt.  I figure by documenting Ryan’s disregard of journal comics IN a journal comic I am somehow trumping him. But I’m probably just proving his point.  (Click the image to enlarge)

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iTunes 4.8

So Apple released the latest version of iTunes this week which gives my music player the ability to archive and play video.

When you’re done adding useless features, Apple, could you find the time to add nested playlists with folders?  Would that be too hard?  Thanks!!

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Doing my part for solid waste management

Last night I put the finishing touches on a wee redesign for my friend, the Armchair Garbageman.  Perfect opportunity for you to add him to your blogroll.

And apparently I’m getting paid in meat, so that’s a plus!

Also, as a side note, due to the popularity of Drawn! (we’ve even been blogrolled by the celebrity-fueled Huffington Post), I’m being forced to move my sites to a dedicated server, so don’t be alarmed if you see a little extra advertising (there and on this site).  These things don’t pay for themselves y’know!  I’m just glad I don’t have to pay my webhost in meat!

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And what’s the deal with airline peanuts?

Kat and I went to a friend-of-a-friend’s comedy show on Friday, and while we had fun, I think the majority of our entertainment came from mutual glances at each other with expressions on our faces as if to say, “are you kidding me?”

We realized that people who aren’t funny have only a few methods of telling jokes: for example, talking about their penises.  Or speaking in acccents.  Or by sharing their brilliant, entirely unique observations.  “Hey if Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to be the governor of California, shouldn’t he be able to pronounce California?  Yuk yuk yuk yuk yuk!”

Painful.  Absolutely painful.  One guy’s entire act was getting up on stage and speaking in a German accent and improvising about how Germans don’t have senses of humour.  I know.  Brilliant material.  As if on cue, Kat and I turned to each other in unison and in our best McBain voices said to each other, “ZAT’S DE JOKE!”

One of the perfomers actually told the following:  “I was thinking I’d write a new adult version of Winnie the Pooh. It’s going to be called Winnie the Shit!”

Seriously.  A grown man.

At least I won a raffle prize: a brand-new top-of-the-line Jennifer Garner Elektra bobble head.  Oh yes.

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Tiger Beat

As you can tell from my ridiculous Tiger-themed-pun of a headline, I’ve upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger.

I’m not usually such an early-adopter of the OS, but I was feeling techy and wanted to get my hands dirty with Spotlight and Dashboard.  Dashboard has already become an intuitive and regular part of my computing experience, even if only to watch those little widgets zoom in and out of the screen.  That’s really the most immediately noticable thing about Tiger: the little graphic touches.  Image slideshows, fancy transitions, resizable video windows… it all makes for a very pretty operating system.

I haven’t had a chance to fully take advantage of the meatier applications of Spotlight, Automator, Smart Folders, etc., but I can see them coming in handy. I’ve already ditched LaunchBar in favour of Spotlight, even though it seems to run a bit slower so far.

And the built-in dictionary look-up is very, very cool, even if this definition of “blog” does seem like a sort of a challenge: 

blog |bl�g|
noun
a weblog : blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers.

It’s like it’s saying, “Blog, THIS, nerd!”…

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