Okay, maybe without the heroin drag. But basically I know a few simple codes and I find myself typing them over and over. And then correcting the darned things when they don’t work. Unless I’m working with a template my webpages all look very plain. Plain is good because plain isn’t as ugly as complicated bad design. I’m not a good designer. Not a horrible one, just not a particularly good one. What little design sense I have comes from hanging out with people who are good designers.

All of which means nothing other than I spent the morning working on the Oz Comics page and then didn’t post it before I had to go to work. It’s still a sloppy mess. Better (at least wordier) than what’s up now but so what? You can’t see it.

Blah blah. Happy Tuesday.

Finished posting all the sketch images to the Oz Squad sketch pages. Created an Oz Comics page – mainly because I couldn’t find a webpage anywhere that was dedicated to Oz comics. Same reason I created the Oz Squad page to begin with. Just a first half assed draft so far. There are some links that need fixing. Lots of images to hunt down.

I should also go back to the sketch page later this week and add some more text. I do most of my writing during dull spots at work or before seven o’clock in the morning so I’m sure it will be brilliant.

I’m in the process of updating the Oz Squad page over at my Keenspace site. Nothing huge. A jpeg of the first cover for Oz Squad #1. A tweek of the text. A link to a sketch page. The first draft of the sketch page with the first sketches.

I’ll post again when I’ve made more changes.

From the Killing A Few Seconds Online Department – the Wu-Name Generator.

The Perry Bible Fellowship

Nizzibet has taken to herding geese. Most mornings we drive down to Golden Gardens, park, eat some sort of breakfast and stare at Puget Sound. The parking lot and lawns have a small flock of Canadian geese wandering on them. After breakfast, if it’s not raining, Nizz picks a goose, usually one of the males, and chases it. It’s not much of a chase. Nizz can’t really run. Neither can the goose. If it were a seagull it would just fly away as soon as it started getting annoyed. Geese would rather walk away from trouble if they can. So Nizz walks a couple of feet behind the goose. The goose walks away, swaying back and forth and twisting its neck to keep Nizz in sight. A very slow ambling sort of chase ensues.

Nizz usually ends up boxing the goose up to the edge of the sidewalk where the land turns to rocks falling down to the Sound. They poke along, back and forth for a time before she decides to let him slip past. Once he gets back to his mate he puts on show of honks and hisses and neck bobs. Victory over the human!

There’s No Place – another one of those grim Oz stories, this one with a rhyming psycho Scarecrow. I’d probably buy the series if I ran across it at a con (because if I could afford to go to a con I could afford to buy stuff, especially stuff that puts its hooks in my completist collector mentality) but I just can’t see myself making the effort to order it.

Oz/Wonderland Chronicles –

Says the promo copy – “Oz/Wonderland Chronicles takes Dorothy and Alice (now college students) on an adventure, back into the realms of their childhood. Even though Dorothy spent time in Oz, she has forgotten about it. Alice attributes hers to daydreaming, or childhood dreams. But what neither of them realizes is that Oz and Wonderland, and the creatures that inhabit those lands, are real. The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles is set in modern day Chicago, it will be a blend of the 3 worlds as Dorothy and Alice set out to find the cause of the disruption. Somehow, creatures from OZ and Wonderland are finding there way into downtown Chicago.”

Um. Blah.

I’ve updated the My Life in Comics essay over at my Sentient 39 site. Corrected some spelling and punctuation. Added scans of the covers for Dangerman and some of my minicomics. (Thank you Jane for the copies. Did you want them back? I do have copies in storage.)

The “missing image” spots are on purpose. I’ve still got a minicomic or two to scan. I am without the other minis at the moment though. I’m debating whether to leave those broken links in place in order to nag myself or whether I should take them down until I actually have the rest of the issues available.

I should also be updating some of the other pages at Sentient 39 in the next few days. No new Lado Perapek I’m afraid. Sorry. I’ll make note of the updates as I post them.

Oz, the Manga.

Looks pretty. No prose or dialogue in the preview so I can’t tell how faithful David Hutchinson, the adapter, intends to be.

OzF5 – that’s Oz Force 5. I think.

The art is nice. Can’t say that that the premise looks very original.

Dorothy of Oz

I think I posted a link to this site (or at least a site previewing this comic) many months ago but today is a new Oz comics day so … there.

Interesting combo of movies this weekend. Nizzibet and I watched The Final Cut on Saturday. On Sunday we went to JayDogg and TwoM’s new place to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on their ginormous TV. Both movies feature a technology that deals with memory.

In Cut there is a biological implant that records the sights and sounds of a person’s life. The story concerns a cutter, a person who edits the recorded memories into a presentable “rememory” after the person’s death.

In Sunshine there is a doctor who has invented a technology that he uses to erase unwanted memories.

Both movies are basically set in the present. There are no other special technologies in the stories, no evidence that the stories take place in “The Future”. Of the two, Sunshine is the prize. Its characters are messed up in the way people I know are messed up. Its story deals with the implications of erasing memories in ways that are surprising and clever and very well thought out.

In contrast, Final Cut occurs like an early draft for a better story. I enjoyed it and I spent a good chunk of Sunday thinking of implications that the movie doesn’t consider. (I won’t go into the character of the protagonist. He’s a cutter. A man who takes the lives of others and edits them into brief good times highlights. Anybody guess that he is distanced from his own life, only alive in dealing with the recordings of the lives of others?) Thing is, the memory recorder implact has apparently been around for at least 50-60 years. But –
Only one company controls the technology.
The memories are only accessible after death.

Not likely. No technologies last 50 years without being hacked and copied and built on. The original premise is weird too. The implants are biological. They are put into the brains of the unborn at some unspecified time prior to birth. The memories are then accessible after death. In normal circumstances that means that the persons who decide to put in the implants will be dead by the time the implants recordings are available. It’s grandparents having themselves recorded for their grandchildren. That’s some interesting long term planning.

Humans are egotistical. Humans play with technology. In fifty years someone would have figured out ways to access and download the memories of living people. Wills and contracts would deal with memory ownership. “I give my children access to memories of their childhood but to my rotten ex-spouse – NOTHING!” There would be memory artists – people who live exciting lives for the rest of us to experience.

Strange Days deals with some criminal possibilities for memory technology. It’s also livelier film than Cut. Not necessarily better but definitely livelier.

Aside from world building I spent time considering what I would remember. And I spent little time considering what I would forget. There are things I’d be happy to forget but nothing that I need to forget enough to have somebody else hack my brain. Lots I’d like to remember more clearly than I do.