The credits ran. Derek asked, “So which was better, this or Return of the Sith?”

To which I replied, “This, definitely.”

Nizzibet enjoyed herself. That was good. She’s often espressed a bafflement to the appeal of Godzilla. Godzilla: Final War did something that most Godzilla movies don’t. It never stopped moving. Scenes of people standing around talking, going over the latest pseudoscience, were short. Lots of action sequences. Lots of monsters.

Complaints? Too much Gigan. Godzilla’s head redesign gives him fragile looking duck jaws. Beyond that, why complain? It was a Big Loud Crazy Stupid Godzilla movie. Much as I love Godzilla most Godzilla movies are Stupid. Not all of them are Big and Crazy.

Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera Trilogy looked at kaiju through a serious, epic lense. Godzilla: Final Wars gets drunk and parties. If this really is the last Godzilla movie for a decade it’s a good note to end on.

There was an episode of the original Star Trek where the Enterprise landed on a world of superspeeded up people, people who lived their lives so fast that they couldn’t be seen by normal human senses. As a kid I thought that was pretty cool. There were plenty of times when I would have loved to be able to speed myself up so I could … well, as I kid I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking of getting more things done. I’m pretty sure I was thinking of using such a power for mischief if not downright Evil. I was a good kid who regularly contempted the violent death of most of the human race.

Now that I’m grown up and mature and all I’d just like some more time to get things done that I actually care about. Yeah, I know. Fuss. Whine.

Yesterday I got a couple of packages from Luvset that probably had my minicomics in them. I set the packages aside because I didn’t want to get sidetracked into going down memory lane. So much to do. Dishes. Making dinner. Finished the inking for the second page of the Strange Eggs story. Finished entirely the first page. Many illustrations to complete for Worlds of Cthulhu. Got a few more pages of script for Oz Squad. I’ll have to look through my back issues (and I’m missing #10 so I can’t be sure) but I think I get to be the first artist to draw Dorothy and Ozma kissing. Yay me!

I’m at work. One of my new responsibilities is to enter credit card charges into QuickBooks. It’s a responsibility that I acquired after our previous bookkeeper hadn’t gotten to it for almost three weeks. I’ve tried making entries here and there throughout the day but that really doesn’t work. There are too many to catch up on and during the day, while the phone is ringing and clients are stressed out because they are faced with computer, I’d rather not also be trying to remember where I left off in making entries. This morning I’m in early to get everything caught up.

Tomorrow I add doing credit card charges to my list of daily activities. That should make it easy.

I probably wouldn’t have remembered that today was my birthday if, last week, one of the techs hadn’t pointed out that the staff meeting fell on this day. I always remember when staff meetings are. I have to buy donuts and cut veggies. The last few years I’ve tended to not notice that the 23rd has any significance until well into the day.

The illustration work continues. Slower than I’d like but it goes. I’m almost finished with the pre-photoshopping for the first page of the Strange Eggs story. I’ve got some of the Worlds of Cthulhu illustrations down to final pencils. Much to do yet.

Revenge of the Sith – mostly I breathe a sigh of relief that the Star Wars saga is done. Marvel Comics and giant monster movies provided most of my personal mythology as a kid. Star Wars came too late (I was twelve or thirteen) to worm its way in too deeply. This movie was mercifully lacking comic relief. R2D2 gave us most of it. R2 rocks. C3PO wasn’t actually annoying. I hated him every time I saw him but that’s because, after five movies worth of his whining and fussing, I’m predisposed to hating him.

Anyway. Done. The saga of a talented but self-centered and selfish young man who becomes a mass murderer and the prime tool of genocidal fascist (and yet is redeemed by one rebellious (and self-centered) act) has come to end.

In chapter three of Zorro’s Black Whip, the Whip gets into a fight with a couple of the bad guys. She doesn’t punch either of them but she does slam them around a bit. I’m impressed. The Black Whip rocks.

I’ve begun reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire. It’s neither a sequel (prequel, whatever) to the Movie or Baum’s Oz novels. It’s “inspired” by both. The green Wicked Witch comes from the Movie. Maguire has obviously read at least some of Baum’s books but he doesn’t try to rationalize Baum’s Oz. He’s created his own Oz inspired by Baum’s map. This book is more Barnstormer than it is Emerald Burrito. I am enjoying it as itself. I probably would have hated it as a kid. I’m not too far into it but, as a little green baby with big vicious teeth, Elphaba rocks.

One of our recent discard purchases from Rain City Video is Zorro’s Black Whip. It’s a 12 part serial from 1944. We’re going to watch a chapter or two every few nights until we get to the thrilling conclusion! So far Zorro has survived a sex change, many gunfights and at the end of the second chapter she was trapped in a bank vault explosion! The serial is set in Idaho in 1888 (I think), just prior to statehood. The bad guys are robbing and pillaging the poor settlers and getting away with it because there’s no law to arrest them. Justice takes the form of Zorro! More specifically, The Black Whip. No body calls him/her Zorro. Everyone refers to him/her as the Black Whip. Zorro in Idaho sounds silly anyway. The first Whip gets himself shot and killed so his sister takes over the role. The movie was made in 1944 so Lady Whip can’t go around getting in fist fights (and a serial without fist fights is like Seattle without rain) so there’s an undercover fed in town trying to discover the leader of the bad guys. The two fights he’s been in thus far completely destroyed the rooms they happened in. As per serial rules of clothing physics, neither he nor his adversaries ever lose their hats no matter how much furniture got broken on their heads.

This serial gets us prepped for the upcoming Legend of Zorro, sequel to Mask of Zorro. Mask is one of Nizzibet’s favorite movies. Nizzibet is sort of a Zorro fan. As much as she’s a fan of anything. Zorro was one of the inspirations behind Billi 99. Coincidentally I discovered yesterday, in an interview at Salon, that Isabel Allende has written a Zorro novel. Sounded like fun so I ordered a copy for the Nizz. Shh! Don’t tell her.

The dream I woke from this morning involved getting these huge manila envelopes filled with something hard and mysterious. I was excited until I realized that the envelopes were filled with 3 1/2 computer disks. Lovesettlement was sending me the disks I’d been storing at my mom’s house.

I’m sure there are no disks at my mom’s house. Lots of other things. No disks. I’ve got one ancient Mac that might run them otherwise I’ve long since transferred everything important onto other media.

This is what I get from sleeping on Nizzibet’s side of the bed. She was feeling sick last night and needed to be able to get up quickly so she wanted to sleep on my side, the outside side. Whenever this happens I end up sleeping lightly and remembering my dreams. The last time I dreamed that a giant grizzly was trying to eat me.

The webmaster at Kaijuphile.com forwarded me a nice complimentary letter this morning. Ted A. Bohus, writer/producer/owner of the The Deadly Spawn saw my fan art. And liked it. Would I tell you that the writer of a movie I liked hated the fan art I did for said movie. Probably.

The monster in Deadly Spawn was designed by Tim Hildebrandt, one of the Brothers Hildebrandt, twin artists who gained their fame doing Lord of the Rings calendars back in the 70s. I’ve always been impressed by the critter. It looks like nothing else in the movies.

Got the specifics that the Editor wants for Worlds of Cthulhu. Looks like my biggest RPG illustration assignment yet. And the deadline is the end of the month. There’s a slightly earlier deadline for the Strange Eggs story. That one’s got a Lovecraftian riff. So I’ve got lots of tentacles and indescribable horrors to draw. Warms my heart.

Friday we’re seeing the new Star Wars. A friend has tickets already otherwise it would probably be a month before we got around to it.

Godzilla is coming to Seattle for the Seattle International Film Festival. Yay! Nizzibet was asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday. Why, watch Godzilla: Final Wars on the big screen of course. If she didn’t actually groan it was because she was practicing self control.

Now I’ve got illustrations to do for Worlds of Cthulhu #3. Still getting details on what and how many. Between that and the Strange Eggs work I’m having to push all my other projects back a bit. Those two have more specific deadlines than anything else I’m doing. As we move in to summer and closer to the time Nizzibet and I move I see myself getting busier and busier.

Saturday I spent sometime helping the Bombshell move some furniture. She found a buyer for her condo and now she’s moving her stuff to storage spaces until she moves in with her sister in Portland. Then Nizzibet and I went to the Soon-To-Be-Canadians for a while, drank wine and listened to the conversations swirling around us.

We finished the night at home watching Merchant of Venice and the first episode of Space 1999. I’ve no love of Shakespeare and this sumptuous production of Merchant didn’t change that. Too serious for some of the silliness that occurs.

Space 1999? Hmm. Between the first episode and the two (A Matter of Life and Death and Black Sun) we saw on Sunday night I’m afraid that the show benefitted from It’s-the-only-science-fiction-on status when I was a kid. I last saw these episodes when I was eleven in 1975. Star Wars was still two years away. The original Star Trek was in reruns. Space 1999 had much better special effects. But … The characters spend a lot of time looking serious and discussing the ramifications of pseudoscientific nonsense. I’m pretty sure I thought their science was crap when I was eleven. On an episode by episode basis anyway. For some reason I was never bothered by the moon’s ability to find a new solar system every week. I thought that traveling among the stars on a rogue moon was a great idea.