Highway 62

But it’s not Xoo.

So I’ve gone ahead and moved the old Highway 62 from Moveable Type over to Wordpress.  Other than the fact that I love to make extra work for myself, I did it for a couple of reasons, primarily to make this more webcomic-hosting ready.  But also so I could mess with the back end a bit more, as well.  There’s a couple results from all this.

1) The old posts now have a funny formatting.  Particularly with the line-spacing.  As much as I’d like to fix this, it’s likely not ever going to be fixed.  I have nearly 800 old posts to fix and not a lot of demand to read them, and some of them are pretty darn long as these things go.  So they’re likely to stay as is.  Perhaps I’ll go back and fix all the old con reports, since that’s what people like to read the most around here.

2) I’m likely to be more diversified in the kinds of things that I post about.  If this upsets anyone, well, I don’t know what to tell you.  I haven’t been doing this blog for anyone else for the last several years, and I’m not likely to change that right about now.

3) This stylesheet is likely to go through some changes as well.  It’s readable now, and that’s a bare minimum.  But every moment I spend working on .css files is one less moment spent writing (whether it be actual writing or blogging, and I’m still vain enough to see a difference between those two.)  Don’t get too attached to anything you see here, ’cause this place is built on quicksand.  And even worse, it’s subject to my whims, which are erratic and unpredictable.

If you haven’t visited before, well, welcome aboard.  I talk about comics, some movies (since I don’t see a lot of them), a couple particular forms of genre entertainment (horror and westerns, science fiction and mysteries–hmm, that covers just about all the big genres, don’t it?)  I would like to tap more into the weird science side of things, as well as a lot of my own work and experience, though hopefully not so much or in such a manner as to bore anyone.  Too quickly.

This, obviously BLADE RUNNER-inspired dystopian vista was created in the early nineties by myself using a 3D landscape/rendering package called Bryce. Engineered by Kai Krause (who was kind of a big deal in Photoshop dabbling circles and weird U/I geeks), Bryce was an intuitive 3D design package, pretty unsual in that it preferred to hide all the twiddly numbers and math stuff behind a friendly interface that emphasized feel over precision.

The scene itself is pretty simple, one object for the ziggurat and a few subdivided planes with grayscale height maps (aka G2H) to give the appearance of cityscapes from a distance. Move the camera in too much and it’d fall apart pretty quickly, but at this distance, works fine. Remember, this was in the infancy of 3D programs, at least as we know them today. These sorts of programs are resource-intensive and most consumer desktop computers back in the day didn’t have what it took to make working with these anything less than a chore.

I’ll probably continue to put up some of this old stuff over the next several months. I find it interesting to see what collaborating with these programs asked of the artist. Sometimes, by trying to satisfy the demands of the software, you got interesting results that may not have been strictly what you were after, but intriguing nonetheless.

I provides it to Mike Sterling in today’s Progressive Ruin.

Something about the cover of DEFENDERS #98 and its utter awesomeness, wherein a demonically-posessed Man-Thing (replete with hypnotic eyeballs and death-beams emanating from his facial tentacles) makes short work of the eponymous Defenders.  Pretty sure it was written by J.M. DeMatteis, leading up to the big 100th issue blow-out, which featured Damion Hellstrom (the son of Satan) and Satannish (the dad of the son of Satan–don’t ask) coming to terms with one another, thus saving the earth in the process.  Since it’s late bronze-age-Marvel, the story has the density of a dwarf star and more crazy than you’d find in the skid row of your average city.

I’d use “Changes” instead, but that’s just hackneyed by now.

This is a test of the new wordpressing system. Do not panic. This is only a test.

You no can be here!  Very dangerous!  Go away!  Go away now!

Let me show you it.

“Appalachian Grove” by Laurie Spiegel, apparently based on the same piece by Aaron Copland. Can’t say as I’m familiar with the original, but I’ve been in love with this version since I first heard it on the OHM: MASTERS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC compliation. That comp itself has held a special place in my heart since I got it in the last couple weeks before I left my animation job at Netter Digital back in the late spring of 2000. I used to go in early, when there were only a couple other guys there, and play this at pretty high volume (because I’m a geek, and unlike other geeks at the time, didn’t want to blast THE MATRIX soundtrack to get my groove on.)

It still takes me back to quiet mornings, surrounded by desks cluttered with other people’s toys and christmas lights and the feeling that this was all going to change in shorter order than perhaps anyone wanted. Indeed, Netter Digital didn’t last out the summer, and went through a major layoff some six weeks after I left, shutting its doors not long after.

Granted, I’m probably the only guy who hears it anything like that.

So I’m looking at a number of changes for this place. That being the blog in particular and my online presence in general. Nothing particularly drastic.
Unless you count migrating to a new blogging platform as drastic, that is. Will probably go from Moveable Type to WordPress, mostly because it looks like WordPress has a bigger selection of tools for managing content, and webcomic-based material in particular.

Of course that means a lot of work if all the internal links are going to work. And really, I’m wondering about how much effort ought to be expended on this sort of project or if I should just keep a handful of old posts and then nuke the site from orbit. How much of this old stuff is worth keeping and how much should be jettisoned? I wonder about that sometimes.

Back to shovelling papers around the office and trying to tear myself from random YouTube videos or finishing re-reading V.2 of ALL-STAR SUPERMAN.
Aw hell, too late. Here’s some Talk Talk for your troubles.

WE’LL SIT ON THE PORCH AS THE GOOD MEN STARE

As a matter of course, I attend a lot more comic shows than I used to. That’s the way things work now. I used to do one. That being SDCC. Then I started hitting the Bay Area shows: Wonder-Con (Oakland in exile) and APE. And one other, the San Jose Super-Con.

My first trip there was a Sunday two years back or so, at what might have been the nadir of my efforts into putting STRANGEWAYS out. The year before that, I’d watched Speakeasy go the route of the Titanic, even though nobody could point at one particular iceberg. The ship went down, but I managed to get onto a lifeboat safely and before the vortex of the ship being sucked under drew me in. In that I was lucky. But moving and trying to sell the book to other publishers and life in general got in the way for much longer than I’d have liked. It was at that show that I was asked by my friend James (Sime of the Isotope) if I was still planning on putting the book out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources - Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment - Strangeways: The Thirsty - page 070
Like every Wednesday, we’re giving away another copy of MURDER MOON. You can get your chance into the drawing by reading along with the book at Robot6 today. Just hit that link.

Full Bleed 41
It’s FULL BLEED #41! And it’s COMING RIGHT FOR US! FLEE!
Wherein I discuss the sexiness of catastrophism, its wrongheadedness and why comics will probably be okay anyways. Bonus Morrison and Quitely action!