Mood: Productive
Music: The Enemy Guns; by DeVotchKa

I'm totally going to jinx it, but have you noticed how I've been updating more frequently? Almost three times a week nowadays. I was busy the last couple of weeks; camping, etc.

Also the comics are being made on a new computer, with a new scanner, and a new version of PhotoShop. Add to that my favorite drawing paper that "Anne" tracked down for me for my birthday, and we're talking super happy fun comicing times.

In other news, I've got a ticket to PAX. Is anyone else going? It seemed silly not to go, as it is just two blocks from my apartment.

Ending Music: Tristan and Iseult; by Tarkio

Mood: Irrelevant
Music: Intervention; by the Arcade Fire

The majority of this chapter is going to be a flashback. We're going to see a lot of the reasons why Terry is... the way Terry is. An alternate title for this chapter was "when it started."

And I am trying to get back into the swing of things as far as doing comics more regularly. Seriously, I swear to god. I find one good trick is to not come home after work. Instead I go to Coffee and Comics, a local shop that sells exactly what you'd think it would. (If you're ever trying to find it, Google has for some reason listed it as being on 42nd, when it is in fact on 45th) If I come straight home, I immediately cook dinner, feed the cat, do laundry, etc... But if I go to Coffee and Comics, I just drink coffee and draw. Jittery, caffeine fueled productivity ahoy!

And now, we're going to talk about TV for just a minute. Everyone should watch the show "Life." It is freaking brilliant. One way in which I measure the value of a tv show is how the time passes. Basically, it can be pretty easy to fill the 42 minutes of an hour long drama with not much substance if you're a lazy writer. Most tv shows move along at a slow pace for this purpose. Lot's of long slow takes and pauses can fill that time pretty easily. The shows I used to see breaking that pattern are those written by Aaron Sorkin. An episode of the West Wing or Studio 60 would be so densely packed that I'd often find myself thinking the show must be about over when it would in fact be only half done. I get the same thing with Life.

As far as the content is concerned, it is true that it's one of those "here's a detective who does things differently" kind of shows. But the big advantage that Life has over other shows in the same vein is that it's detective has an actual reason to be so different. Twelve years in prison, falsely accused. Awesome. They've also got a firm grip on how to balance the mystery of the week with the ongoing story.

Visually and story wise, it reminds me a lot of the show "Boomtown." Which had the brilliantly done trick of breaking the Narrative into the many perspectives of everyone involved. I wouldn't be surprised if there was producer/creator or at least director of photography in common between the two shows.

There's also an excellent bit of song choice going into this show. We've had the Frames and the Raconteurs, and a smattering of other excellent rock.

You know, I'm gushing about a tv show, but I shouldn't be judged for that. My friend and I were talking about a school assignment he had the other day. Basically, he was supposed to respond to an article that was pretty much just whining about people not reading as much these days. It sparked a discussion. My feeling is, things like tv and movies can get a bad rap here. I think the term passive entertainment is unfair. Ideas can be delivered through a great variety of mediums. Just because they're not printed on a page doesn't invalidate them. And besides, I used to work in a library. I can assure that there just as many shitty, empty, pointless books as their are pointless tv shows or movies. I mean, just look at, say, the collected works of Dean Koontz, Nora Roberts, and those fuckers who keep writing "Left Behind" novels.

Ending Music: A Caution To The Birds; by the Frames (this was a happy coincidence, as iTunes is on shuffle)

Mood: Hello
Music: Memory Machine; by the Dismemberment Plan

To play license plate tag, simply create an unholy union between the classic road trip game of finding license plates from out of state and slug bug.

When you see an out of state plate, you can call it's state and punch the other person on the arm. If you get the state wrong, the other person is allowed a penalty punch and can also punch you again for the appropriate state, providing of course that they can correctly identify it. Hawaii is two points, because it's silly to see them on the mainland. Hawaii plates would not count if you already live in Hawaii, but then, this game could be pretty slow going in Hawaii anyway. There are, however, a variety of other things you can punch for, many of which are available in Hawaii:

1. Vanity plates. You have to be able to decypher the plate to punch. If it's a name, that's fairly obvious. Other things can be tougher to decode.
2. More than ten bumperstickers on the back of a car, though not counting window decals. If they have more than ten window decals on the rear window, that's a fair punch.
3. You can call police cars, but you have to have a new name for them each time. Favorites include "fuzz" "po-po" "five-oh" etc. These reset the next day, so you just can't re-use the same name twice in one day.
4. Once a day, you can call the plate of the state you're in, though only one person can call it for that day. It's fair to call other states as often as you see them on different cars.
5. Taxis that are out of their home state count for two.
6. More than five representations of patriotism can count. In addition to a variety of flag decals, stickers, antenae accessories, and paint jobs, you can also count bald eagles, and anything that says "support our troops" that is not also ammended with "bring them home."

These do stack. So, if you see an out of state vanity plate, that can count as two punches. If you see a vanity plate with 11 bumper stickers surrounding it, that can be two. If you see a Hawaiin taxi with vanity plates, 15 bumper stickers, five of which are american flags, and a police siren on top, you've hit the motherload.

There are numerous other rules, but they have little to nothing to do with cars, and are based almost entirely upon in-jokes. Thusly, I do not consider them part of the "official" rule set. If you play this game, feel free to add more rules as you see fit, but I recommend against letting it get out of hand. Keep it simple. Don't turn it into a walking version of the card game Mao.

The "real" Anne and I play this game, although we have discovered that it is both unsafe and unfair to play it while one player is driving. Therefore, this is a game best played as a pedestrian in a metorpolitan area.

Also, it is not recommended that you play this game with anyone who's friendship could be seriously damaged by the sporadic dispensation of sudden violence.

Ending Music: To You Alone; by the Beta Band