My Blog

A Buncha Blogs

Christopher — Tue, 01 May 2007 15:40:46 GMT

Shortly after joining Tribe, I got involved in blogging - heavily. I was running about 7-8 blogs for a while, mostly on community sites, but then scaled-back and now have just 4 I post to regularly. They get some pretty decent action and it's a lot of fun. I have them associated with the website, http://theweirding.net, which I haven't been able to update since my damn computer broke! Anyway, the blogs are: http://manodogs.blogspot.com The Rundown - A rambling melange of all things sci-fi, fantasy, superhero, and horror, with a focus on comic books, RPGs, and related TV and movies. http://theweirding.net/blogs/odd The OddBlog - All things paranormal, Supernatural, unexplained, and unknown. Ufology, religion and spirituality, cryptozoology, and much more. http://theweirding.net/blogs/ink Weird Ink - All about writing and why you probably shouldn't. Includes the "Blogging the Write Way" series. http://theweirding.net/cgi/wp The Wording - The Weirding weblog, as well as personal observations on politics, current events, news, and more. I hope y'all visit, bookmark us, and check back often. They're all updated on a regular (generally daily) basis. Feel free to send me links to your own blogs and websites and I'll be happy to trade links and so on!

My Own Domain!

Christopher — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:41:49 GMT

I finally broek down and did what I've been talking about doing for nearly 10 years now: registered my own domain and got site hosting. I can't get into all the details just yet, since everything is still very much in the development stages, but I have been spending a lot of time working on it. I'm hoping to be able to use it to publish more of my owrk, as well as help out other fellow writers, artists, and creators. I'm not yet sure the thrust of the site, but I know it will focus on comics and sequential art, RPGs, sci-fi/fantasy and horror, and all the other things what interest me. I'll keep everyone informed and be sure to let you know as things start coming together. The first thing I intend to do is set up a mailing list where you can sign-up for more information as it becomes available. Later!

English Comics - The B-Boys on Conan

Christopher — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 06:00:32 GMT

The Beasties were on Conan tonight. They did a pretty cool remix medley of Root Down, The Maestro, and something else off Ill Communications. They have a new DVD of a concert or some live act being released I guess next Tuesday or soon. I am trying to find some inspiration for my new project. I actually have a handle on what I want to do, but it's been a while since I was really into comics, so I want to get back into them a bit, remind myself of what I've been missing. So I picked up Nemesis Book One (Mille and O'Neill, of Marshal Law fame), which I've had for a while but only ever flipped-through, and I have several 2000 AD issues from years past, a short run of early Judge Dredd, and I have to be honest: British sequential art is just too busy for my taste. And this is really pretty much a constant. Marshal Law was busy, but it made sense to be so (most of the detail came in the form of grafitti and general squalor), but British comics artists really like a lot of detail. I mean TONS. And it's usually stipple and tone -- lots of busy, little lines and dots all over everything. Think of Warhammer FRP and the books in that line, Warhammer 40K, and so on. While great art, a lot of it reminds me of an aspiring tattoo artist's sketchpad -- just a bunch of doodles that have no real focus or specific composition. Busy, busy, busy -- you really don't know where to look. Heck, I can barely get through 3-4 pages of this stuff without getting plain old-fashioned tired of looking at it and trying to figure out what the hell's going on!

New to Everything

Christopher — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 05:53:20 GMT

Well, that's not exactly true, but I did just move to where I now live and I did just join Tribe.net, so it's not completely wrong and it's something of an attention-grabber. I've been a member of MySpace for a while, tried Craigslist, and did the chatroom and newsgroup thing for years, but even with my own website, I have only ever met one serious party for collaboration or discussing anything other than hot-button "troll" issues (politics, religion) or sex. I ran a BBS way back in the day and all anyone ever did there was play doors and leech files, so I'm not really expecting anything -- just hoping for more than what I've found online, so far. I began collecting comics as a child and loved them so much that I began writing and drawing my own (though never finished any). Soon after, I found Stan Lee & John Buscema's seminal "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" and was off and running. But still never finished any story I started. I was also very much into role-playing games and got deep into Champions. I amused myself by creating cool character names and often statted them up with the Champions system. This was the Day of the Independents -- back in the late 80s and early 90s -- when Cerebus had begun a whole cottage industry of mostly black and white, mostly lousy, independent titles, and the big thing in comics then was having your own "universe." Between the list of names, sketches, and storylines (all original, though some were role-played with others when I GMed -- which only happened a few times due to the fact that I was the only one who owned the Champs book and it is a pretty involved system), I eventually created just that: my own "universe" of costumed crimefighters and villains with in-depth histories and criss-crossing paths; supporting "mortals" and hapless victims; a fictitious, crime-ridden, urban sprawl in which they could interact... and never finished any story I started. Then came music. I learned to play the drums from the time I was in the second-grade (my dad had played in a band when he was a teenager and had a drumset), so by the time I was in highschool, I was pretty good. And since I'd been listening to Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax, and so on since the 7th-grade, I was one of the very few around who could play well FAST. So I got involved in a number of bands, won a few contests/talent shows, and turned a hopeful eye toward possibly making a career of such. But I never completely let go of my childhood dreams of doing comics and started a Comics Club in highschool and then attended a Joe Kubert School of Art workshop in Nashville in the 10th- or 11th-grade. My parents owned a ballcards & collectables shop and my bass player owned a comics shop at which I often worked, and then Image came along and screwed up everything. Glutting the market, driving prices into the ridiculous range, robbing all the decent titles of talent. So I ditched comics and went into music. And the music industry is an ugly, ugly beast. While I had limited success, the bitter reality of the situation is that, much like the comics industry, only the very lucky (note I did not say "talented" or "good") get a chance to do what they really like; the best way to make money in either biz is to work behind the scenes and work your way up, which often means working on projects you don't really care about. The thing is, you are able to do what you want to be doing, and it is steady work (unlike the vaunted dream of rocketing to the top -- which always includes a slide back to the bottom), even if it's work for which you rarely receive the credit you honestly deserve. But at least the comic book industry is actually somewhat structured, whereas the music industry is nothing but a whore's business filled with shady deals, shady people, and sometimes outright criminals. I had been into computers since elementary school and when the family got one (a Tandy, which still sets under my bed!), I took to it like a fish to a bike. Turns out Rdio Shack and erroneously installed Win on the thing and after two trips and too much money, still hadn't fixed it. A blessing in disguise, as it forced me to sit down and figure it all out on my own. I started my own BBS and eventually got an Internet account. Several years ago, I signed up for Geocities and learned HTML in a single night (there wasn't all that much to learn back then, honestly). I made a few pages, eventually got better at it, then got a GUI program to do it all for me (Netscape, then Dreamweaver), and eventually set up a fairly decent site dedicated to RPGs and my own bloggy musings which originally looked exactly like Suck! (which is the site I idolized) -- this was right at the cusp of the blogging craze. I have yet to actually finish a comic project, largely because I live alone and real-life always seems to intervene and rob me of the impetus, but I have a lot of ideas and a stable of characters, locales, and storylines, so I am hoping to find like-minded people to chat with and maybe even with whom to collaborate. As a published writer (in fact, I was a runner-up in one of those b&w indies from Back When -- Warlock 5), I know how hard these kinds of large projects can be and it's very easy to lose the steam if you don't keep at it. I see it a lot like working-out: you miss one day and it gets incredibly easy to miss another (usually without even realizing it!), then a week's gone by, then two, and when you get back to it, you feel so overwhelmed that you don't even want to bother -- so it's best to have someone you can turn to that will back you up and push you when you need it, to get you back on the horse and keep you going. Which means something completely different for most people in the music industry...