Jul 1
Apologies for the lack of updates on ye olde Shawntionary lately. Most of my online time has been consumed with either the comic or Twitter. I have a few ideas that I’m planning on rambling about, so soon you’ll be able to see my exciting take on Biological Psychology, How To Succeed At Webcomicing, Post Post Modernism, and Bad Sci Fi Channel Movies about Gargoyles.
Oh yes.
Jun 25
First up, new Clockworks comic today! Now there are two comics for you to read, meaning you can spend a whole minute on the site! I’m really excited by the positive reception to the comic so far. It’s going to be a huge project, and it’s off to a great start.
Second, I wanted to thank everyone for the comments to yesterday’s Depression post. It’s always a little scary opening up about something like that, but from the positive reaction I’m definitely going to be writing more about my attempt to change the way my mind and body work.
And on a completely random note, looking over the site stats I noticed that one of the main referals coming in to Shawntionary.com are from mp3 search sites in Korea and Russia looking for the Milkshake remix I did. On one hand, these guys are largely just eating up my bandwidth and aren’t ever likely to read the blogs or comics or whatever. On the other hand, I can’t help but be amused that there are a bunch of Koreans listening to the industrial version of Milkshake.
Jun 24
So, I wasn’t sure if I was going to discuss this here, but (clearly) I’ve decided I will. My therapist noted that talking about my depression has helped me, and he suggested it would be healthy to write about it. I’m not looking for sympathy or even really support here. I just want to share my story, share my mental travels, and maybe this will connect with some of you.
For pretty much my entire life, I’ve had Moderate Depression, Major Depression, and ADHD. (Good times.) I was only recently diagnosed with the ADHD, but it’s something I’ve suspected for a while. After a life time of trying to ignore my depression or half assed attempts at recovery, I’m finally making a real and serious attempt to get better. I realized that this is never going to fix itself, and if I don’t work on things now I’m going to have to do it eventually. Detailing my past and present here is going to be part of tackling this.
So the thing with Depression is that if, like me, it’s something you have pretty much permanently (as opposed to one that lasts a few months say brought on by a death in the family) you are never going to cure it. It’s like Diabetes or Asthma, you just have to learn to manage it. I am going to have to deal with depression for the rest of my life, I just need to work so that I can still have a real life.
Here’s a basic rundown of my symptoms:
The Moderate Depression is pretty much there all the time. If you imagine a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is Kurt Cobain in 1994 and 10 is that dude from Yo Gabba Gabba (Alternately, 1 is Robert Smith circa Disintigration and 10 is Robert Smith circa Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me), your average person goes through they’re average day at like a 5. For me, my average day is about a 3. Thsi means I can be sluggish, irritable, distant, withdrawn, and all around super fun to be with.
The Major Depression kicks in whenever I’m overly stressed or worn out or anxious. It’s more of your full blown, classical catatonic depression. The sort of mood where forcing yourself out of bed takes every bit of effort you have and every problem or obstacle seems completely insurmountable.
And finally, the ADHD mixes in to this lovely stew by making it harder to focus on work, to start or finish projects, to remember to do the things that need to get done.
You can see why I’ve decided I need to change this. You can probably see why working up the motivation and focus to begin was so hard for me. We have a proud family tradition of not talking about problems, just ignoring them until they go away. For a long time that’s what I did, and this is certainly a case where that strategy did not work out for me.
One of the trickiest thing about Depression is how easily it can lead to negetive feedback loops. You’re depressed, so you unplug the phone and stay home instead of going in to work. Now you’re out of a job and even more depressed, so you stay in bed and don’t go looking for a new job. It’s the sort of scenario that’s played out in my life over and over and over again.
So, what am I doing now? Well, excercise is a big part of it. Depression is weird in that it’s mental, emotional, and physical. So the more lethargic your body is, the easier it is to slip in to. I’m hoping that as I lose weight and get my body used to being active again, that my brain and mood will follow suit.
Thanks to the magic of insurance, I’ve been seeing a doctor and a counselor. I’m currently trying Lexapro, which I’m not entirely sure if I’m a fan of. I was on 10mg a day, which certainly wasn’t working. Since moving up to 20mg a day, things seem to actually be improving, but it’s way too early for me to really know. I’m also supposed to be taking Ambien to help get my sleep schedule around to something resembling a normal person’s, but it’s not covered by my insurance and so I’ve yet to be able to afford it.
The counselling has really helped, even if the changes so far haven’t been drastic. I’ve talked to a couple of therapists before over the years, but never stuck with it. I think part of the difference now is my own determination, but I think part of it is that I click with my counselor. He’s male, and the first couple of counselors I spoke to were female, and to me that’s really made a difference in how easy it is for me to relate to him and to build a rapport.
We haven’t done anything yet to try and tackle the ADHD. Depression meds can be something of a crapshoot in terms of effectiveness and side effects, so we wanted to settle in to a more permanent treatment for that before beginning any sort of ADHD medication.
If anyone’s interested in reading me ramble on about any specific topics related to depression or my dealings with it, let me know in the comments. Otherwise I will ramble on at some point in the next week or three.
Jun 23
Random Thought:
If Doors and Windows was my Clerks, and Chainmail Bikini was my Mallrats, then Clockworks will be my Dogma.
I can live with that.
Jun 23
Have you seen the preview site for War of the Worlds: Goliath yet? If not, click the link and then come back. Be sure to check out the gallery.
Done? Ok.
Sweet zombie Jesus that looks awesome. I don’t care if it’s as bad as Heavy Metal 2000, I will see it just for stompy robots and some dude voiced by Adam “The Man They Call Jayne” Baldwin. Also, stompy robots. And aliens. Fighting giant robots. Add Teddy Roosevelt kicking Martian ass. Fuck yeah.
I don’t care if this desecrates the spirit of the original novel (it can’t do any worse than the Tom Cruise movie…) or if it only appeals to my inner 12 year old. It looks freaking sweet, and I’m looking forward to February 2010.
It does suddenly occur to me that it’s possible this movie will be as bad as the Dragonlance animated film. Which would pain me greatly. Hopefully it will be at least cheesy and fun.
In other steampunk news, don’t forget that Clockworks begins today! Please, go leave me some comments on the first strip! Me ego demands reward.
Jun 22
Like many a geek or nerd, I have become a big fatass. When I was a young man, I was the pale skinny guy wearing the Joy Division t-shirt. Now I’m a pale fat guy in a Joy Division t-shirt. It’s not as cool.
To counter this, a bit over a month ago I picked up a Wii and a Wii Fit. Unlike my former Chainmail Bikini partner Shamus, I’ve found it pretty damned enjoyable. I thought I’d start the week off and share a few thoughts.
First up, the exciting news: I’ve lost 13 lbs in 5 weeks. This isn’t exactly earth shattering, but for me it’s pretty damn cool. This puts me down to a svelte 225. I’m 6′1, and I’d like to lose another 25 lbs and get down under 200 again for the first time since I was 22 or so. If we shoot for two pounds a week, that means I should hit my ideal weight just in time for my birthday.
I’ve also noticed my balance, strength, and endurance have all improved considerably. I’m still overweight and weak, but I’m a good deal less overweight and weak than I was two months ago.
I think the reason the Wii Fit works is because it hits the same achievement and reward centers video games do. I have a lifetime of unlocking stuff and learning new powers and trying to get better scores and watching my level go up. The Wii Fit does the same things. I don’t know that this would particularly work on people who haven’t grown up on Mario or WoW. Plus, you can chose the gender of your trainer, so I went with the woman. And every once in a while, pixelated T&A gives just enough excitement to help me work out a bit more.
The only real problem I see is that it takes about four weeks to unlock pretty much everything. (Although tonight my little piggy bank workout timer just turned gold, so that was exciting.) This means after the first month you really have to keep in the habit, as you’re not likely to find cool new stuff to do. The good news is that by now, if I did everything on the Wii Fit I’d be working out for about two hours, so I can pick and choose stuff for a half hour or an hour and not do the same things every day.
I checked out the other games for the Wii Fit Balance Board,but I’m not impressed. It’s all Super Cardio Blast and Mega Ultra Workout 9000 and That Chick From TV Will Make You Do Super Aerobics And Shit. In other words, the same crap that’s on the fitness DVDs I’ve ignored my entire life.
What the Wii needs is Wii Fit World of Warcraft, or even Wii Fit Legend of Zelda. I want something I can fire up by stepping on and off the board, hold yoga poses to cast spells, and punch with the Wiimote to kill my enemies. It would be the best thing ever, an entire generation of nerds would get in to shape. It would be even better than Dance Dance Revolution. (But you know there’d be some shitty quests. You arrive in town and the blacksmith wants you to do 20 pushups for no damn reason…)
Later this year, the Wii Fit Super Advanced Ultra 2 comes out. I’m curious to see what activities are going to be on it, but I’ll probably pick it up just to switch up the pace a bit from the Wii Fit classic.
Clockworks starts tomorrow, and I have a whole week of exciting crap planned for the comic and this blog. See you soon.
Jun 18
Gryphon is going to be on Thursday and Friday night on the Chiller network, if you get it. It’s terrible, and amazing.
One of my favorite not terrible movies will be on TCM this weekend, The Bad Seed runs Saturday at 10:15 est. If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it. Then come back here and tell me how right I was.
Jun 16
The new comic goes live Tuesday, June 23rd. One week from now. Set your calendars.
I figured now would be a good time to ramble a bit about the comic and what it will and won’t be, my hopes and plans for it, etc. Let the wankery commence!
Clockworks will be a steampunk/fantasy story. It will be one big overarching story, and will eventually end. My guess is it will take me about two or three years to tell the whole tale. When it’s over, I’ll probably fire up a new comic, maybe one in the same setting as Clockworks.
The idea is to make something that’s interesting, exciting, and humorous; with characters that people become overly attached to, deep resonating plotlines, memorable villains, and stylish, evocative art. It should be easily accessible to new readers coming in 200 strips from now, and rewarding to readers who have been there since day one. The goal is to create the greatest anything ever, a poignant masterpiece of heart wrenching beauty. With airships. And giant robots. And a troll named Toby.
So, I may not succeed at creating the next Bone or Sandman, but that’s the plan. No sense in having modest goals.
Clockworks is sort of a gaming comic, in that it’s going to be loosely based on the game I’m running. As last week’s Dork Tower points out, this is a horribly original concept. Oh yeah. I’m not really intending on making it read like a gaming comic though. No jokes about Notice rolls and Experience Points. I don’t think the world needs the Savage Worlds version of OOTS. It will hopefully play out more like Artesia or Perdido Street Station: a story set in a world where you go “Damn, that would be cool to play a RPG in!”
I have a few other goals as far as art and story go. One of the things that bugs me now looking at old CB strips is how no one’s mouth is open when they talk. I blame Marvel Comics for that bad habit. It works in Doors & Windows, Chainmail Bikini not so much. So I’ve really been working to draw people who aren’t yelling through closed mouths and gritted teeth all the time.
I also want to format things from the get go so that I could one day compile everything in to a physical book with a minimum of fuss. This has been a fun challenge for me to figure out ahead of time.
My other big goal is to offer bonus content on the blog to flesh out the world, but to let the story stand on it’s own without having to read the blog as well. I want the comic to be the Hobbit, and the blog to be the Silmilirilmililion. If you want to know all about the political structure of the Great Republic or the history of the Ironian Empire, the blogs will be where I can do that kind of world building fun. But the comic should still make sense if you have no idea who Halomel Landadon I is.
I’m not really planning on a huge amount of pre-release promotion. I’d rather roll the comic out a bit quietly and build an audience as the story grows. But if thousands of people come knocking down my virtual door, I won’t complain.
Anyway, that’s about it for babbling and wankery out of me. See you next Tuesday for the first comic!
Here’s an idea I’m kicking around in relation to last week’s ranting about Bad Sci Fi Channel Original Movies and other B films. Now, this is just me brainfarting around, as I’m not going to organize this sort of endeavor. But if someone like say Spooky Outhouse Productions wanted to get in the B Movie RPG business, go for it. (They’ve got a good name for it already.)
What are the traits of good B movies? They’re made quickly, and cheaply, starring either nonames or hasbeens, and they’re designed to grab your attention. Hopefully there’s also a good movie in there, but you know that’s not necessarily the case.
I’ve seen a few B movie RPGs over the years, and they’re generally campy and cheesy and meant to be humorous. That’s not really what I’m talking about here. The basic idea is to attempt to make something good, but to do it insanely fast and cheap and eye catchingly. The only thing that really jumps out at me as similar would be the Goodman Games line of Dungeon Crawl Classics, and those have become all super fancy lately.
Here’s my idea for a B RPG Studio: make a series of adventures for a game that already has fans. (Savage Worlds would be perfect here.) Churn out a new one every month or two. Don’t charge a lot, and hire new writers or the occasional slumming old pro in need of a pay check. Pay them nickels. Try to make a quality adventure, but not at the expense of getting it done in time. But here’s the fun part: do whatever you can to make people go “what? I have to play that!”
Think about BSFCOMs a moment. As terrible as the movies are, they have some great hooks to draw in an audience: ridiculous premises, cleavage, aging has been actors, topical and timely plots, monsters, explosions, and also cleavage.
So, one month you could publish Biker Sluts of Mars, followed by The Lair of Dr. Gorilla, then Zombie Ninjas VS Robot Pirates, and the next month The Revenge of Dr. Gorilla.
The trick here though is once you have a title with a horrible pun or some goofy over the top premise, don’t ham it up. Play it straight, as if martian biker sluts was a totally legitimate premise for an adventure. Think of Mansquito. Mansquito is basically a low rent remake of The Fly, but you know they came up with that name first. I’m imagining a couple of guys cracking up everytime they say “Mansquito” and deciding it has to be their next movie. But the thing is, aside from the lame ending and the really goofy monster suit, Mansquito is way better than it has any right to be with that title. The first fifteen minutes or so have some really cool and effective body horror, and the rest of the movie has the occasional flashes of brilliance. (And the not so occasional flashes of a terrible, terrible movie.)
One major element here that I’ve really only mentioned in passing is B movies frequently use some current news event as a plot device. Mansquito becomes a monster because he’s caught in an experiment to cure the West Nile Virus that goes horribly wrong. In Manticore, our heroes are a group of US soldiers who deal with a demon monster unleashed by a vengeful Iraqi sorcerer. Classic B movies dealt with the 60’s drug culture, transvestites, nuclear waste, you name it.
So, make the villain of one of your adventures a psycho rogue CIA interrogator who is torturing Americans. Set another adventure in the battle for Prop 8 in California. Do another about unemployed auto workers who get roped in to an evil experiment and turned in to zombies because the pay was good. Maybe a greedy and corrupt wall street schemer is after the fortunes to be made from Dr. Gorilla’s secret lab. We deal with the world around us with entertainment, and B movies are often one of the first kinds of entertainment to tackle issues. They don’t necessarily do it elegantly or with nuance, but it’s there.
This is a topic I could ramble about at great length if given the opportunity. If there appears to be any sort of interest in people actually taking this and running with it, I will be more than happy to ramble on for many more blog posts. If not, I might do it anyway.
Jun 12
Because you demanded it, here’s more ranting about the BSFCOM Gryphon. Once the producers have decided that the Sci Fi channel really needs a movie about an evil gryphon, they hand things over some guy who’s directed a few episodes of Stargate and the guy who wrote Mansquito. The following conversation ensues:
“So, evil gryphon movie…”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if we do a period piece, they’ve agreed to send us to Romania for a month to film.”
“So, modern setting it is then?”
“No way! Have you seen those hot Transylvanian girls?”
“I wrote that movie.”
“Ok, so… we have a medieval fantasy kingdom terrorized by an evil gryphon.”
“What if there are two kingdoms, and they hate each other, and they unite to defeat the gryphon?”
“Only if we have a prince from one nation hook up with the princess from the other kingdom.”
“Done! Oh! I’ve got it! What if before they hook up they really hate each other and that fiery relationship turns in to love?”
“Brilliant and original! Is that chick with the googley eyes from Buffy available?”
“I can’t imagine she’s up to anything important.”
“Score! There’s our princess!”
“So, why is this gryphon terrorizing both nations?”
“A wizard did it.”
“Perfect! We’ll have an evil wizard summon the gryphon so he can destroy both nations so that he can acquire the magical scepter of something or other and then rule both kingdoms!”
“I like the way you think. Who has the gravitas to play our evil wizard?”
“How about the mentally challenged guy from LA Law?”
“Wait, wasn’t he special in real life?”
“No, that was Life Goes On.”
“Ok then, he’s in!”
“Hmm…. Romanian whores don’t come cheap. We better shave some of our budget down on the Gryphon.”
“Well, the monster is the title character of the movie, and the entire purpose of our film. I don’t know if it makes sense to skimp there. On the other hand, I do love Romanian whores…”
“Ok, get one of the interns to download a gryphon from one of those 3D Animation fan sites, and then plunk it in to 3D Studio Max and we’ll add it in.”
“Sounds great! Does our movie need anything else?”
“The wizard should have a couple of slutty side kicks,”
“Already written in.”
“… in that case, I’ve got nothing.”
“Great! Let’s do this!”
***
The strangest part of Gryphon is there are parts that are really quite good. The locations are awesome, and the movie is filmed very well. The prince from We’reBetterThanYouonia is a pretty decent actor. Unfortunately, Tara from Buffy is fucking horrible as the princess from WeHateYouistan.
As mentioned above, the gryphon itself looks like complete and utter ass. At one point, we see a close up of the monster and I swear to god there were pixels as big as a man’s fist. Think of the worst CGI monster you’ve ever seen in a movie, now dip lower than that. It was as if a Playstation 1 character was on the screen, in some sort of horrible medieval videogame version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Additionally, the plot makes no fucking sense. Ok, I get it if you had a dragon that decimates two whole armies and terrorizes two kingdoms full of peasants. Dragons have fiery breath and look scary and all of that. But the gryphon has to swoop in and claw his way through the troops, and still manages to kill hundreds and hundreds of armed soldiers with fucking bows and arrows. Seriously, you’d think this movie would be about 5 minutes long as the gryphon swoops in and 200 guys fill him with arrows. But now, they all miss horribly and then fall over dead as the monster flies near them.
To make this worse, whenever someone does hit the gryphon, the wounds also hurt his evil wizard master! So one well placed cauldron of boiling oil could really solve this entire problem.
Instead, our heroes team up, overcome their differences, fall in love, fight the wizard as he collects the Great And Magical Doodad and then go on to have stupid, stupid babies that can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a bow.
Gryphon is showing in the next week or two on Chiller. So if you get that channel, you know you want to set aside some time to watch this awesomeness in person. Despite the above ranting, the movie is actually enjoyably terrible, as opposed to just terrible.