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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: January 2013

  • One Saw Weak

    And this makes once a week every week in January of Twenty-thirteen that I’ve managed to crank out a post of some sort.

    I’ve set myself a few small goals and limitations for the time being. One, I need to get something posted here once per week, more if I can manage it, but no less barring catastrophe. Two, I’m allowed only one breakfast and one lunch “out” on working days per week to cut back on the huge monetary outlay that I’m sure the fast food places near my work are now sorry to be deprived of. And three, I only need to produce four more months’ worth of the webcomic before completing its official run at the end of May. (I might later do some one-off comics, events, that sort of thing… but twice-per-week-like-clockwork will be over.)

    Mind you, I don’t know what I’ll do for a creative outlet afterward. I’ll need to do something or I’ll go nuts.

    Okay, nuts-er.

    One idea I’m tossing around is that of a radio-play type thing, get a few people together to record dialog, insert some sound effects, something along those lines. If I do this, I’ll start small with a one-off half-hour episode and get a feel for whether I can make a story work and whether I can handle the workload involved.

    Anything’s possible, yes?

  • Dervish D.

    If I keep this up, January 2013 will see more posts here than any two months in 2012 put together…

    At any rate. The last song to come up in Poweramp on my tablet last night (why pay for a separate MP3 player when I have LG Tone headphones and a nice big tablet?) was… this:

    [audio:Vangelis-DervishD.mp3]

    And that got me thinking about how my musical tastes went from mostly-classic-rock to include so much electronica like Pet Shop Boys and BT. I have my great-granddad to thank, in this case.

    Great-Grandpa George was a tinkerer, a packrat, a storyteller, and a very strange sort of audiophile. Like many such folk in the early 1980s he believed that the LP was far superior to any new-fangled digital compact disc nonsense. Unlike anyone else I’ve ever met, however, he believed that cassette tapes were also superior to CDs. (He was also an Edgar Cayce fan. Ah, well.) Either way, he had multiple turntables and racks of tape decks and several open-reel rigs in the house, most of them in the upstairs living space of the house.

    Luckily, when I had to sleep over at their place, I got to sleep upstairs with all the cool toys. (This explains so much, doesn’t it…?)

    This being the early 80s, and me being around 10 years old, my musical knowledge was limited to Top 40 radio, whatever my parents listened to, and… Grandpa’s tape and record collection. Not much of his available material stuck with me for very long, but man, I loved the Vangelis tapes like “Opera Sauvage,” “Mask,” and especially “Spiral,” from which the above track is pulled. Much like the Genesis stuff I’d get into a few years later, this was rich and complex imagination fuel for my little brain, and I ate it up.

    My father remains unamused by Vangelis, by the way: The notion of one man looping instruments and samples in a studio is what he describes as “musical masturbation.” I see his point, but I also sort of don’t care. (Love you, Dad!)

    There’s a direct, if unusual, path from that Dervish D song to the Jan Hammer and Tony Banks and Pet Shop Boys and KOTOKO and BT and Venus Hum pieces which form one of the pillars of my musical collection today. So, thank you, Grandpa George, for all those tapes we made all those years ago.

  • Eleven Years Of Grey Duck Dot Net

    I registered this domain eleven years ago today.

    Time flies when you’re… doing whatever it is you do when you start up a blog, then partially abandon it several years later, eh?

  • I’m the only one who’ll notice.

    When building the comic, sometimes I fret about the fact that I don’t have a set style guide for things like (let’s say) the struts that connect word balloons within a comic panel. They tend to come out in varying widths and not always aligned perfectly. Shouldn’t I set some rules, make sure everything is uniform and neat and tidy?

    Then I remember that this is just a silly webcomic read by maybe thirty people around the world (on a good day) and I should just relax…

  • Ten Films I Love Best As Of This Writing

    Inspired by a Twitter discussion, here’s a list of 10 favorite films, not necessarily in order of importance or quality, as of right now, subject to revision when someone jogs my memory of something even better that I’d forgotten seeing but somehow actually loved even more than anything already here, and this sentence may have run on long enough, and carries too many commas, don’t you think?

    1. Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind – Miyazaki has made “better” movies, but I don’t love any of them the way I love this. No, not even Spirited Away. This is the movie that made me fall in love with anime.
    2. The Princess Bride – Put aside for a moment that this is a painfully over-quoted cult favorite. (Guilty as charged, m’lud.) It’s still one of the great action comedy satire romances of all time.
    3. Die Hard – I’m less enthusiastic about the franchise it turned into, but that first out-of-nowhere movie is utterly brilliant. There are zero missteps, and almost every action movie since owes this film a huge debt. It’s silly, it’s clever, it’s over-the-top where it should be yet subtle at just the right places.
    4. The Incredibles – It’s not that this is one of the most fun, clever, family-friendly, exciting, and funny animated features ever made. It’s that this is one of the most fun, clever, family-friendly, exciting, and funny features of any kind ever made.
    5. The Bourne Identity – I’m not putting the whole “trilogy” in here but I do really like the three Damon-led movies quite a lot. (I have Thoughts regarding the fourth movie which I’ll have to post soon, come to think on it.) This first movie is a revelation, though. Very little bumbling going on, lots of smart people versus smarter people, and for once the trend toward “gritty realism” (well, such as it is) doesn’t drag down a story and make it too grim & depressing.
    6. The Hunt For Red October – Still the only Tom Clancy “Jack Ryan” movie I actually like, this one is chock full of great character actors chewing marvelous scenery marvelously. And Alec Baldwin is a genuine hoot, too. “Some things in here don’t react well to bullets…”
    7. The Castle of Cagliostro – Look, it’s no less absurd than any number of other caper flicks out there. Lupin III as seen through the lens of Miyazaki, this movie’s a charmer through and through.
    8. The Fugitive (1993) – We’ve grown used to Tommy Lee Jones’ schtick in the years since, and the “henhouse, outhouse and doghouse” riff spawned some parodies indeed, but you have to admit he absolutely steals this movie. Also notable for Andreas Katsulas, otherwise known as Babylon 5’s Ambassador G’Kar, as the one-armed man. Oh, I guess Harrison Ford’s in it, too. Shrug.
    9. Iron Man – Remember back before the whole multi-picture pyramid leading up to The Avengers was a “thing”, and this was pretty much just one of the best superhero movies ever made? Simpler times, simpler times indeed.
    10. Chicken Run – “We’ll either die free chickens, or die trying!” “Are those the only choices?” While the rest of the Aardman run of feature films is a bit hit-or-miss (I wanted to like the full length Wallace & Gromit movie, but those characters just don’t seem to work in anything beyond short films), there’s almost nothing wrong with this movie. The peril, the heart, the cleverness, the references to other movies, the madcap contraptions… it’s all there.

    And there we have it. You have opinions, I have comment threads. Fire away!

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