Thank you, Brian, for the most awesome poster ever. This makes me pretty much the coolest kid on the block. Serenity will be here for me soon…
In front of my house.
Another photo for my Mom and my bro. You guys have never seen me with black hair… until now!!!
The car flipped, we exchanged ground for sky,
and in that second, you and I
found the truth more solid than ever before.
My right hand gripped yours,
the other white-knuckled the steering wheel —
and the autumn sun tiptoed through the windows like
a disco-ball slow dance on fire.
Baby, the truth is
sometimes we’re a forty car pileup
and nothing will ever fix that.
(this is the first poem written for an exercise in my Poetry Writing class. I’m still kinda trying to crash it… I hope I get in)
UPDATE: I got in!!!! Yes!!!
Last night, Costco had a crazy open-house thing where they opened up the store, didn’t sell anything, and gave free dinner to whosoever came. I feasted on smoked salmon, buffalo wings, shrimp, hot dogs, pizza and all the broccoli I could stand…
You know, for an evil corporation, they’re okay in my book.
Sigh. That’s it. No more freelancing stuff from the summer. slolaw.org is up! I made the logos and the site.
And I’m beat!
The book I’ve been designing for months has been finally published, and you can see a lot of the details (including cover art and layout, done by yours truly) at BeanFit.com. Be sure to click on the “Excuse Examples” section to see some of the spreads I’ve been working on. Also, details on how to order the book are there.
If you’re in the SLO area tomorrow, check out the Book Fair at the Mission. I’ll be there with Jeanne Murdock, handing out postcards featuring the book and generally schmoozing, from about 1 pm to 4 pm. Say hi. See the book. It will be an exciting day for me.
It’s my last day at Pacific Beverage. I don’t think I’ve laughed harder at a piece I’ve printed until today:
The file came on a CD, I open it, and it says
Our drinking team has a skiing problem.
I love it.
Santa Margarita is a curious place.
There’s a general store across the street from Pacific Beverage, where I purchase my snacks for during work. It’s called the Margarita Mercantile And Company, and right over the door, it says “Provisions”. Real old-timey.
Perhaps what’s a little more old-timey is that next door, there’s an old abandoned office building. It has an old looking painting of an ad for RC Cola on the side, and a bath tub halfway filled with dirt and weeds in front of the door, on the street. I kid you not, an old dirty porcelain bath tub on the sidewalk.
So, I decided to shack up and buy a bag of jerky yesterday at the Provisions shop. It’s amazing how much that stuff costs: I mean, $5.99 for a 4 oz. bag?!?!?! Geez.
I take it to work, open it and start eating some of it. Thing is, fourth or fifth piece into it, I see some white stuff on a piece I pull out. Turns out that it’s mold. Looking into the sides of the bag, I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it before, but yeah, white hairy mold over maybe 3 or 4 pieces.
I take it back and get a different bag which is, thankfully, mold free. But that leads me to my next question: isn’t jerky supposed to last a very long time? I guess Margarita Mercantile and Company is more old-timey than I previously thought.
Well, most of you reading this may have heard me talk about Firefly before, but I figure I should give it a shot on here, for all of you who don’t see me too much.
Some of you may have seen the stunning previews for the upcoming science fiction/western movie Serenity. Turns out that movie is a continuation of the story set forth in Joss Whedon’s Firefly series, and I am in crazy anticipation for this movie. It’s not just because the Firefly universe is so dark and compelling, the characters are so real and human with senses of humor, the special effects are unbelievable, the storylines rich with actual character development, or that it has both a priest and a prostitute among it’s characters. It’s because of the promise that the success of this movie might fulfill for other beloved television shows crapped on by major networks.
This show has met it’s fair share of adversity on the corporate level. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy and Angel, decided to pitch a story of frontier living in space to Fox, and once they filmed the original pilot (also titled Serenity) Fox decided it needed more action and less storyline. So, Joss made The Train Job, a one-hour fantastic joyride in which the bandits rob a futuristic train but realize the cargo are precious medicines needed by a town on the brink of famine. This second pilot did a great job of reintroducing all the characters without making anything from the first pilot moot, and it was the first episode shown on TV.
After that, the story is a mess. Fox decided to air the episodes out of order or not air them at all. So, in the fifteen episodes on the complete series DVD set, three were never aired, while the others were in such an order it’s no wonder people trying to follow it week-to-week scratched their heads — they had no idea really what was going on. The original pilot, which was meant to introduce viewers to this complex universe, was only aired last, right before cancellation.
So, fans started buying the DVD’s, and sales went through the roof. Through word-of-mouth, the phenomenon grew. There were so many DVD’s sold, Fox decided to give Joss Whedon his wish: to make a movie and wrap up some of the threads running unanswered throughout the show. Now, Joss had a unique opportunity and challenge: to introduce newcoming audiences for a third time to this crew and to satisfy long-time browncoats (Firefly fans) with the same consistently good storyweaving and dialogue we have come to expect.
I can almost guarantee it will be a cash cow. They have shown an unusually high number of pre-screenings that have all ended with thunderous applause, so I hear. The three-part comic series, which bridges the six-month gap between the final episode, Objects in Space, and the movie is sold out online and in every comic book shop I’ve been to. If it does well, then perhaps it will come back to television or be brought back some other way.
If it does well, then perhaps other beloved series, such as Enterprise will have a chance at another go.
Right now, Firefly doesn’t resemble a bug as much as it does a phoenix.