Tuesday, June 22, 2004
First things first: a slightly belated but still enthusiasitc Happy Birthday! to Jason, Leslie, and Katy, in that chronological order.
All sorts of things have been happening since I last blogged, and I simply haven't the space to relate them all here. I saw Saved (which was hilarious and you all need to see, right this very instant), Mean Girls (which was funnier than I had been expecting, but not funny enough to make me leap upon the Lohan Lovewagon... still go see it), and Welcome to the Dollhouse (which was good and funny, if extremely uncomfortable at times).
Things of an artful nature have been occuring. Down on the Farm (aka Ed), the Best Cartoonist I Don't Know in Real Life, made my month by sending me a couple of his drawings through the Honest to Gosh Not Email Mail System. I danced around for sheer joy all day. Hey, it was exciting, ok? Not only did I get Real Mail, but I got mail from England, and I got awesomely good original artwork. Admit it, people, it doesn't get any better than that.
DotF sent me a lovely big picture of his interpretations of the Birds of Britain, which I loved muchly. The shuffle budgie was one of them. So I mailed him back my own personal take on the shuffle budgie. I think it's relatively obvious which one of us makes money cartooning, and which one of us will never make money doing scientific illustration :)
Except, you know, if it were to happen again. Today I got my work back from the Envelope show. Very exciting, as I can now get some nice detail shots of it and put them up on my main site whenever I suddenly start having the ability to do that (i.e. when I get back to school in the fall and have tech people conveniently located for harassment). The best bit, however, was the fact that the immensely skilled gentleman who ran the show, Ryan, had slipped one of his own entries to the show in. I did my sheer joy dance again.
If it is my fate to meet such damn nice artists over the magical Internet, then gosh darn it, I'm happily resigned to my fate.
I did manage to get my entry for Les McClaine's pet jam comic project done more or less on time. Perhaps not my best work, I'll readily admit, but it's nice to see it up there. I need to learn how to purge the dreaded crosshatching from my comic book stuff. The silly thing is, of course, I can draw perfectly well without out, and I've got numerous examples of comic book work with just solid blacks that look infinitely better than they would have had they been crosshatched. Alas, if I'm not making a conscious effort to exclude them, they creep insidiously back into my work. Gah.
Anyways, the jam comic is called Gran'ma Evelyn's Old Fashioned Pudding Treats Wrestling Theater for strange, occult reasons of the creators. My contribution may be found somewhere down the page here. It's the crappy crosshatched one that looks like it was done in less than hour late at night (all accurate except for the 'less than an hour' bit).
I've been up to a moderate amount of things outside of artsy crud and calculus classes at Salem State (which are going fine... the individual classes are, in my humble opinion, too frikking long, but at least my grades have been pretty good thus far). I went up to Plum Island again, and saw a great many egrets of the snowy variety. There was also a kind of duck I'd never seen before (it had a black posterior... I forget what it's called, something like a gadwell) and a number of other cool birds. The osprey was on its perch but didn't get close enough to really be seen. The swans were back, and the warblers have all gone, except for the yellow warblers.
There have also been a couple of nights of Swampscottian joys. A few nights ago (see, I don't blog long enough and I completely lose track of what happens when) we had a lovely laid-back evening of frisbee on the lawn by Town Hall. We played a game of Ultimate Frisbee until we collectively decided that we were too tired to go on. Corey and Kate lost to me, Jess, and Jason, but that was mostly some sort of fluke, as I have zero aim with a frisbee and Jess claims she can't catch, so it was really more like Corey and Kate versus Jason and a couple of slightly animated lampposts.
After frisbee we decided to walk along the seawall, since it was almost criminally nice out. The state trooper police horses were out, so Kate and I went up to say hello. They were named Dmitri and Magnum. Very nice horses. Everyone else was cowardly and wouldn't go up to scratch their noses. Following horse revelry, we went to 7-11 to get beverages. I got one of those 7-11 Slurpee things, which I hadn't had in ages. It was surprisingly good.
A few nights ago (this past Saturday, unless I am much mistaken) was one of those ridiculously surreal evenings one occasionally has the priviledge to experience in this delightful little town. As usual, we had no where to go. It was another nice night out, so we decided to spend it outdoors. After much debate and several ulcer-causing arguments (including one with a certain town resident who told us off for parking outside his house, which was rather rich coming from him, seeing how his son is an actual underage delinquent) we chose to station ourselves on one of the rocks in the forest-y area up behind the high school.
Naturally, of course, we had to walk up to the rock in question. This turned out to be something of an adventure, since it was a ways through the wooded area, and it had somehow slipped everyone's minds that the way there was going to be completely pitch black. Ever the improvisational bunch, we all whipped out our cellphones (or, in my case, digital camera) and held them up so that their little screens would light the path (such as it was... i.e. occasionally nonexistent). These cast a sort of diffuse, pale light that wasn't wholly insufficient, but wasn't strong enough to make travel easy either.
It didn't help matters that, somewhere along the way, we got turned around and lost.
Imagine the scene, if you will. Five or six college students, stumbling about in a darkened forest, holding cell phone screens up and peering carefully around in the resultant pale blue glow. It was only natural that someone would make the connection and flourish a cellphone to the dramatic whisper of 'Lumos!' Yes. We are geeks.
Once we found our way out of the trees and onto the rock it was actually a good time. It was a very clear night, and there was enough ambient light on top of the rock to see by. Stephanie came a little bit later with a couple friends of hers from school and made us feel better about not having been able to find our way, as it allegedly took them 'forty frikking minutes to get to this place!' For lack of better glassware people drank wine out of beer cans, which was the very height of classiness. It was an amusingly good time all round.
Despite the fact that I was quite ready to kill someone during the debacle leading up to it (what with the arguments of where we were going to go, how we were going to get there, and the trek up). Hmmph. I worry, so sue me.
In another, lesser adventure Corey and I went to Christy's, that diner-like affair with the 50's styling that sits right in front of the Nahant rotary. It's been there, so far as anyone can tell, forever. Yet we could not find a single person who had ever been inside it. Naturally, this had to be recitified. So we went in one day around 2:30 (we were the only people in there) to eat french fries and giggle at the decor.
Dark wood panelled walls, orange seats, harpoons on the wall, yellowed venetian blinds on the windows that came halfway down and were adorned with signs reading 'Please don't try to move the shades, they don't work'. Moody stained glass 'Drink Coca Cola' hanging lights. Wrought iron separating the dining side from the take out side. It was fantastic. We need to go back during regular meal times so we can gawk at the patrons.
And that, I think, is rather enough. Many more things have occurred, but space, alas, is limited. Until the next, mes amis.
8:35 PM
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