rossmay

Iron Man: Whoo! Stick around for after the credits.


Mario Kart Wii: I agree with most reviews on the net. The wheel thingamajig works pretty good and I guess it's impressive when you consider it, but analogue control is where it's at. Also, the Wii is all about inclusive games that you and your grandma can pick up and play, but understanding the mechanics of this game, both the gameplay and the menu options, have the steepest learning curve for any Mario Kart game I've played. I'm having fun now, but honestly was having a bad time when I first popped it in.

You know what else? The music isn't catchy or impressive at all. I didn't go in expecting much, but Mario games usually have some pretty good tunes (Mario Galaxy had some great ones), and even the previous Mario Kart games had something you could hum. The only music like that in this one isn't even original to this game, it's always on the retro tracks. You can tell Koji Kondo wasn't in charge. Speaking of the retro tracks, I was disappointed with half their choices. Sure, everyone has their favourites but really -- Ghost Valley 2 (SNES)? That's the only crummy Ghost Valley in the original. And Mario Raceway (N64) is the most boring course for the N64.

It is a good game, but it could have been better and didn't push the series forward like other installments.


Editors: Need to pick up the pace!

Today Yu Li and I saw Phantom of the Opera. I had seen it once before as a kid in Toronto and the recent movie as well, but this was Yu Li's first time and she really enjoyed it. Later we had supper at a decent Japanese restaurant.

After supper I needed to use the washroom. There was a Men's and Ladies' but they were both single-room facilities intended for one person at a time and there was nothing, apart from the names, that really made them different at all. You might as well called one "Washroom A" and the other "Washroom B.

I tried the Men's but it was occupied, but the Ladies' wasn't and nobody else was in the hallway to use either washroom. I figured it would be silly to wait around for the Men's to free up, so I used the Ladies'.

Well, while I was inside I heard the handle being tried. Apparently it was a little girl accompanied by her mom. "Someone's inside, we'll have to wait" the mother told her daughter. Then I could hear the man occupying the other room exit it and walk past in the hall. "Let's use that one," said the little girl to her mom, thinking the same thing I did - that it's stupid to just wait around because of an arbitrary sign on a door. But what did the mom say? "No, we have to wait for the Ladies' washroom. That one is for men."

So that was the scene. A mother was waiting with her kid outside a Ladies' washroom, telling her daughter not to use the Men's. And there I was in the wrong sex's washroom. I wondered how the scene was going to play out when I exited it and encountered the two, who had been following the rules and were obviously expecting a woman to come out. Then I heard the kid say, "I need to pooh."

Though it would be a wee bit embarrassing, at the same time I was looking forward to the humour of meeting the two when I got out. Didn't happen, however. No, the mom didn't relinquish when she heard her daughter "had to pooh," instead I heard her say that they should go back to their table and just wait until whoever was in the washroom had left. What? Why?

I think the little girl and I are the smart ones.

-Holy Cow! Yesterday I mowed the lawn for the first time this year, and over night we got a fresh blanket of snow. I don't mind it this time because I've got no place to be and it does look pretty.

-Should have news on my mysterious comic book career next week. If you're wondering why I'm so evasive about it, it's because while contracts have been signed, they only set up the relationship where I COULD work for this publisher. There is no indication that I won't be writing for them, but I'm wise enough to the publishing world that I don't want to go around saying "I'm writing for X" and then have the deal fall through and me explain why to everyone why it didn't happen.

-I've only got one final exam left. Woot. I've been dividing my time between writing, reading (studying and fun stuff), and video games.

Ever played Star Fox Adventures? I did for the first time. It wasn't bad, but it was basically a Zelda game only not as good. The fighting mechanics are kind of boring, the story was confusing in its details and the voice acting was laughable. I would not recommend it, not because it's lousy, but just because there are better things to play.

On the more classic and challenging side, I've been doing sort of a Kid Icarus marathon. I beat the NES original last night - TOUGH! Like everyone says on the net, it resembles Metroid most closely, but also resembles Super Mario Bros (there are definite "levels" and enemies to either fight or get around) and Zelda (buy items for upgrades). I can see why it didn't turn into a full series like those games, though. For one thing it's too darn hard - you can fall and die, or touch just a few enemies and your health bar is depleted. Your health bar can be upgraded later on, but you should really just have a full one from the start. That brings me to the other problem - there are too many upgrades that can be bought or won (around a dozen). Too many powerups doesn't sound like a problem, I realise, but over half of them must be bought. If there are two or three vital items that you'll probably need it sucks if you can only buy one of them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in dungeons. Like Zelda you can get a map (which you buy rather than win, which is annoying), but for it to be of any use you also need to search around the rest of the dungeon to buy a pencil AND a torch (to be able to look at your map in the start menu?). The dungeons are challenging enough and they should have just cut back to letting you win maps. It's an ambitious game, though, and I was really digging it at about halfway through. You just NEED to look at a copy of its instruction manual or a faq, because if you go in cold you won't be able to understand all its many little rules and such (even something as simple as the fact that hearts do not count for health or lives, but currency for shops).



Oh yeah, I'm in a Kid Icarus marathon because now I'm playing its Gameboy sequel. More adjustments were still needed, but they decreased the difficulty level so I'm having more fun early on. Guess I'll be all geared up to play as Pit in Smash Bros. Brawl!

Do you know what a “fallacious argument” is? It’s fancy, philosophical speak for a bad argument. An example of just one fallacious argument would be, “Cats have four legs and a tail. My dog has four legs and a tail. Therefore, my dog is a cat.” It’s obvious to see why that one is wrong, but I want to tell you about some others.

If you live in Canada you’ve probably seen several of Ontario’s anti-smoking campaign ads branded with its home website, www.stupid.ca. Am I anti-anti-smoking? (I’m, I’m trying to be funny there.) Seriously, though, am I against public service announcements on the dangers of smoking? Absolutely not. I had bad asthma as a kid, and still have it today even though I’ve largely overcome it. I think everyone should know about the dangers of first and second-hand smoking. I am also 100% behind legislation which prevents people from smoking in public buildings (yay, Saskatchewan!).

So why would I have a problem with Ontario’s anti-smoking campaign? Because it employs fallacious arguments! I looked over the net and on the campaign’s website, and while they have videos there they aren’t the current ones that make the faulty associations. So what happens in the ads?

-In one, a boy eats cereal with poison instead of milk. He says that since the poison is composed of just a few harmful chemicals instead of the hundreds of ingredients in cigarettes, it should be better by comparison.*
-In another, a girl holds onto a lightning rod during a thunderstorm and says that while this looks dangerous, it must be better than smoking because hundreds of Ontarians die of smoking while only two die from lightning strikes each year.
-An older ad no longer in circulation made the same argument as the one above, only the situation was a boy taking a bath with a plugged-in toaster oven precariously on the edge of the tub.

So what’s wrong with the ads? Several formal and informal fallacies, which can be broken down into the following:
-Appeal to probability
-Inconsistent comparison
-Cherry picking
-Dicto simpliciter (converse accident)

A looser, but more popular way to understand the problem would be to say it’s a case of apples vs. oranges. On the one hand you have smoking, which increases the probability of a person dying from lung cancer and other sicknesses. On the other hand you have the stupid acts that the kids are demonstrating in the ads. The connection the kids are making between the two is that:

Smoking kills more people than poison does.
I am going to poison myself.
In terms of percentages, my choice is smarter than smoking because fewer people die by poison.

Notice the problem? Death rates across the public cannot be compared to the probability of your death doing one of the acts. Drinking poison or intentionally electrocuting yourself are far more dangerous than smoking. They’re so dangerous, in fact, that fewer people do them, which is WHY THE MORTALITY RATE FROM THESE ACTS ARE LOWER. Maybe I should compare smoking to wearing a lead suit and going for a swim? I can assure you that the percentages of people drowning because they wore lead suits is lower than the mortality rates of smoking, but that is not to say that the swim is a better choice.

“But Ross, even if they are using bad arguments, isn’t it good if it stops kids from smoking?” – Everyone thinks justifying the ends with the means sounds scary when the means is people or their rights or safety, but when it’s more abstract like the truth nobody even recognises it’s the same thing. Listen, if someone told me “we can save X lives by telling a lie,” I would not be so hard-lined as to not listen to the idea.** But first you must prove to me these specific lies are saving lives. Are these ads more effective than simply stating how many people die from smoking? Let’s suppose, for a second, that they are. What if, instead of making the faulty comparisons, the kids just said something to the effect of “this is stupid, and so is smoking”? I believe it would result in almost the same emotional reaction in viewers, and your only comparison is that both the act and smoking have a high probability that they are bad for you (which they are).
As you can tell, I believe defending the truth means more than just stopping harmful lies.

*This ad in particular has an additional fallacy in that it is implying the numerous chemicals in cigarettes make them more dangerous than drinking straight liquid poison designed for cleaning. But the quantity of bad ingredients does not necessarily make something more dangerous, but rather it is the severity of any one of those ingredients and the volume ingested that matters. It is obvious the poison in the breakfast cereal can result in immediate death while smoking would not, yet the boy tries to say otherwise.
**Anybody remember the heroes’ decision at the end of the graphic novel Watchmen?

I have new contracts to sign from a certain comic book publisher. Woo! Once they're signed and away I'll tell you what's going on.

Gah, I share the pain of many gamers for the first time ever. See, before my Wii the newest piece of gaming machinery I owned was an N64. I have never lost saved game files and if I ever did it would only be one game. It's not like every single thing could die... Well I've had a Wii for a year now and a Gamecube memory card for just as long (the biggest version officially made by Nintendo, too) and now it's all corrupted to hell. So game data is lost, which just annoys me, but I'm really pissed off that even after wiping everything off of it it still can't save anything. So that memory card lasted me a year. Damn. So I guess I'll get a couple used ones (a couple so I'll be backing up the data) but I won't be able to trust these things anymore.


Saskatoon (where I currently live, if you're keeping track) is one of the top three crime infested areas in Canada. Go Saskatoon!

I saw Superman: Doomsday on television yesterday. I realise anyone who was planning on buying this direct-to-DVD movie probably already has, but then I don’t want to persuade or dissuade anyone from getting it, I just want to explore it with you.

In terms of final product I guess these DC Animated movies are off to a solid start. The story and animation come together well, but not theatrical release quality by any means. And despite animators being able to do more things thanks to computers even in just the past ten years, I miss the early nineties when Warner Bros. was going through an animation music renaissance with full orchestras for shows like Animaniacs and Batman: The Animated Series. If you’re trying to impress people with a score at the start of a movie with fake strings played on a keyboard then you might as well save it.

What I really want to talk about is how this movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of an illegitimate child. The plot is, supposedly, a stripped-down version of the comics’ “The Death of Superman” line and culminates when he turned out to be not so dead after all. And I get the need for the changes, absolutely. There are things in those comics like mutants living under Metropolis, a Supergirl from an alternate dimension and Lex Luthor pretending to be his own son that would be far too cumbersome to bring over into a single movie.

The weird thing is how these problems were solved. Taking the basic outline of Superman fighting Doomsday and dying, coming back and fighting a badass imposter, the creators just ended up stealing liberally from Superman: The Animated Series (and Justice League and Unlimited I suppose by association). And that’s cool, I love those shows. But if they’re going to do this then you almost wonder why it didn’t just remain a Superman: The Animated Series’ Movie right from the get-go. Even the whole “Superman’s evil clone” plot seems more reminiscent of the television show’s origin for Bizarro than the Super-pretenders in the comic story.

The character designs are basically the same as the show’s, only worse. The voice actors are different for the sake of being different with good and bad results, and even some locations like Lex’s office is just a redesign.

The more I think about it, the more I wish this had been based in the Superman: The Animated Series’ continuity. At the start of the movie Superman and Lois are going steady but he still hasn’t told her he’s Clark Kent. It’s an angle I’ve always thought to be an awful idea, not to mention counter to the John Byrne version of the character that this movie is supposedly imitating, but I digress. I might not like the idea, but I’ll admit at least that the resolution to this relationship problem was amusing and had closure. The thing is, this also happens to be how Lois and Superman’s relationship was left off in JLU, with them dating but she still unaware that he’s Clark. I didn’t like it there either, but now this movie has missed the opportunity for that relationship issue to be closed. If they had just used the regular character models and called the old voice cast it would have worked perfectly.





I realise there are all sorts of things in the Fortress of Solitude from Superman's many appearances, including a mechanical monster from the Fleischer cartoon serials, but when you see several items from the 90s cartoon show it just makes my point more apparent that there's no reason why this movie had to be unconnected. If it was ten times more faithful to its comics' source material then fine, but it isn't and I don't see why it should be reinvented as a piece all on its own.

Still more enjoyable than Superman Returns, though.

Spider-Man’s costume is the most impractical design considering his powers.




Don’t get me wrong, it (the real one, not this atrocity that can be rented from Costumes Galore for $45) is the coolest super hero costume ever. Of course, and it was created by my good pen-pal, Steve Ditko. Spidey also happens to have the coolest super powers ever, so I guess if you’re talking thematically then they’re perfect.

But it’s a good thing his costume works for him in the comics and movies, because it sure would be impractical in real life. For starters, one of his most basic powers is that his hands and feet can stick to walls. What’s the first thing he goes and does? Starts wearing gloves and... socks? Leggings? I’m not too sure about his feet. OK, forget about his feet. My point is that he figures it would be a good idea to wear gloves. Good thing it works for him, I guess. If anybody else rubbed a glue-stick over their fingers and stuck their hands into gloves I don’t think they would get the same result.

There’s also the matter of his web shooters, both the movie version where his body creates them and Spidey-classic where he has mechanical devices to do it. In either case his suit requires him to have a tiny hole sticking through his costume, just enough for the webs to come out. Wouldn’t this power naturally lend itself better to just wearing a t-shirt instead of dealing with specially placed holes in your clothing? And sure, you can say “it works, so it doesn’t matter,” but have you ever worn long sleeves and have the ends twist around either clockwise or counter-clockwise? I’m not meaning in a big way, even if it’s just an inch or two. If that happened to Spidey’s costume even an inch, which I believe happens to pretty much all long sleeved clothing no matter what the material or closeness to the body, his web shooters would just go off in his costume. Eww.

Spider-Man’s costume, you’re magic.

Shouldn't Supergirl have an accent?

Unlike Superman, who was raised in Kansas, Supergirl grew up with other Kyrptonians until she was a teenager. So for one thing we just assume that she that she learned English when she got to Earth, but I’m wondering if she shouldn’t have a “Kryptonian accent.” And then what would it sound like? Coming from an alien world as opposed to just a foreign country, it would have to sound more alien than any other accent we have ever heard.

I'm only guessing that's how you spell the words. Anyways, I can actually say "happy new year" in Cantonese. And it's my year too! I'm a rat... I always joke that the Chinese zodiac doesn't go over well in Western culture (calling someone a rat, snake, pig or goat just isn't very flattering).

Frustration, first off. Remember my novella that an editor at a publishing company liked? Well the company said they would forward it to another editor (the right one) to review it, but the deadline came and went and it turns out they either forgot to do so or lost my manuscript in their offices or somesuch. Sigh. There's not a lot I can do, but I want to get in touch with a couple people there just to make them fully realise that they messed up. As time goes by I'm seeing editors and publishers not as partners, but obstacles.

Better news for comics, though. A publisher (maybe this one can redeem all of them for me?) wants me to send a sample script. If they like what they see, I might be writing for a very familiar and longstanding comic book character. I'll tell which character and publisher later.

I guess the third issue of cereal:geek is coming out soon. I haven't talked much about last issue because I still need to get copies of it. Apparently I'll be getting issue 2 and 3 at the same time shortly.

Oh yeah, and I'm helping to teach at a high school in Saskatoon. It's fine, and the students are all pretty good kids.

-Turns out I can comment on blogspot posts just by signing myself in using my gmail account. Whaddya know?

-I saw I Am Legend tonight. Will Smith’s acting was good (and so was the dog’s), the special effects of an empty New York with fauna growing was great while the special effects of the creepies left inside of it were lame.

What I really disliked was the ending. It was a generic action movie ending and had no poignancy or poetry, unlike its source material. I would advise people to instead read the original novel of the same name or watch The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price (I have not seen the other adaptation, Omega Man, but I intend to). They’re both great and give an entirely different, and better, meaning to the title.

-Merry Christmas!

Over on Steve’s TMNT blog right now you can see an interesting bit of information followed by a discussion. Read it for yourself, but the gist is that Steve and Peter rejected a request (but is it really a request if there’s a threat involved?) to approve camouflage style shirts with militaristic symbols and the Ninja Turtles on them. The threat in the request was from a major retailer who said they would stop doing business with Mirage, which they now have, and Mirage stands to “lose” (actually not earn in the first place) a lot of money.

I can’t post on Steve’s comments section (I could if I signed up for blogspot, but I don’t want to and I can just plain email him already) so I thought I’d do my talking here. Like the posters on his blog I’m impressed with both Steve and Pete for standing by their convictions and not moving despite a lot of money being involved. I’m just musing about those convictions at the moment, however... The Ninja Turtles go around fighting bad guys with weapons (including potentially lethal sais and swords), so they by no means stand for pacifism. Granted there are significant differences. By drawing a positive connection between the TMNT (heroes) and the (presumably US) military you’re making a subtle statement that what the military stands for is good, and good according to the turtles, which might include the military-industrial complex and current action by that military (Iraq). On the other hand you can get stymied thinking whether the fictional Ninja Turtles should be considered morally better than members of the military seeing as how the main argument a person could make against a soldier (they kill people) can equally be said of the TMNT in some incarnations. But then, of course, most kids aren’t familiar with the TMNT-as-killers continuities. I’m not criticizing Mirage’s decision, just thinking out loud to you people.

This brings me to another point I’ve mulled over with the Ninja Turtles, and one that came up in one of my stories (one of my two unpublished but sold scripts that are crying in a corner by themselves somewhere). In the story some humans, both good and bad guys, use guns. I wrote the scene, Leonardo is the focus for the page and Pete’s comment was that he wanted Leo to make a mention of his dislike for guns.

Now this is something only us diehard Ninja Turtle comic fans will notice. Leo (and I think on occasion his brothers as well) has something of a catchphrase with saying, “I hate guns.” You see it in the second half on of the Archie run, maybe a few times in the old Mirage comics, and maybe a half-dozen times in TMNT Vol. 4 and Tales Vol. 2. I go back and forth on whether this line, and Leo’s sentiment, is valid or not. I mean the dude carries swords! Guns versus swords, in both cases the end result is the same – dead enemy. You can make a bit of a different argument with Archie-Leo because I don’t recall him ever killing anyone, but it’s almost moot because his weapons are still designed to be deadly. You might as well have the Lone Ranger (who impractically only ever shoots to maim) say that he detests katanas. Hah, take that!

Mirage Leo can’t detest firearms on a moralistic ground because he himself is a killer. OK, now you’re going to say, “Then obviously his hatred for guns stems from them being ‘dishonourable’ weapons or some-such Japanese bushido type thing.” Yeah, and I get what you’re saying, but it’s pretty tenuous. Honestly, should anyone be making the argument that warfare was more civilised in X time? That using a canon on the Plains of Abraham is morally better than firing a rocket from a fighter jet? People who say that “killing is too easy today” are right, and it’s disgusting with that whole “push of a button” thing, but that’s not to say it wasn’t just as reprehensible X years ago with the technology available then. I’m not a pacifist and I’m not condemning warfare for the right actions, and in fact I would argue that in war it is natural and - if you are on the morally right side – justifiable to take certain advantages. To think that guns are an unjust, unfair, or un-whatever form of combat while swords are fine seems silly to me. And leaving behind philosophy for a second, what the heck is Leo following bushido for anyway? The dude is a ninja, not a samurai. Western people seem to confuse the two and make out ninja to just be a stealthy samurai, but there’s more to it than that. Having the Foot Clan using machine guns or the dirtiest tricks available is actually in keeping with the ninja idea; they aren’t supposed to have honour when it comes to combat, and are to win by any means necessary. That’s why ninja use poison and smoke bombs and all that, not even so much for stealth as they are extra tricks that samurai would not resort too.

So just some of my thoughts.
1. Should the Ninja Turtles not be associated with the military ever despite being similar on some key moralistic points?
2. Is Leonardo justified if he says, “I hate guns”?

After all my troubles with my old laptop I ended up getting a new one. Ye olde lappy still got fixed, though, as it is back from repairs in Toronto and will shortly be working for my dad. Working on a new laptop brings me to Windows Vista, and an understanding with the techno-nuts out there who have been complaining about this operating system. XP was pretty darn good, and it turns out that a lot of the changes made for Vista were lateral ones, really just different for the sake of difference (and security, I guess, but honestly if you're smart and use a good 3rd party firewall and virus scanner that problem was nullified, at least for me), which is always bad news. I spent a lot of time after getting it making numerous cosmetic and functional adjustments to make it more like XP, which tells you something. Fortunately I'm more techno-proficient than techno-savvy (which is +5 intelligence), so I'm only mildly inconvenienced by some of Vista's quirks than pulling my hair out over its inablity to let me add applications directly to the "program files" folder, which I must admit is still really bizarre. Vista did do an upgrade recently, though, and afterwards lost track of my printer. Grr.

Yu Li has been teaching little kids art for the past few months (I need to post some of her art, as it's very cute and cool)(too bad my scanner is part of my printer...). Yesterday she had me come to class, show off a comic book and help out as the kids were making their own comics. Pretty fun.

If you know who this man is, you'll know how wonderful a thing this is.

I got a letter yesterday from Steve Ditko.

Really. STEVE DITKO.

In the past year my laptop has already gone in for repairs twice. Once it was to replace its completely fried hard drive (fortunately I back up all my important stuff, which is mostly word documents - phew!) and again just recently to fix its speakers and touchpad. NOW it's acting up again, sometimes shutting itself off, telling me to back everything up because another crash is likely, and unable to operate on its battery. So yeah, I figure my computer is dying. I've had it for three years... which I guess is a normal life for laptops, though it sounds really crappy to me. As if THIS wasn't enough, the place that is supposed to honour my warranty until this December now says they won't work with this type of warranty I use, instead telling me to call the warranty provider and find another place to get it serviced. What the hell?! I won't take this lying down, and hey, if they can't work out a way to get it serviced I'm just going to have to insist that they supply me with a new laptop.



By the way, Happy Thanksgiving!

Long time no see, everybody.

I'm keeping busy with classes these days (and being kept not-busy with writing no comics). Here's something cool, though:

The second issue of cereal:geek is on sale now. It includes two big articles by me plus some smaller pieces. Apparently if you're not in the UK then you can't buy it directly off of this website anymore, but don't fret because you'll be forwarded to a site where you can purchase it just as easily. Heck, I'll even give you that link myself:

Buy issue two here.

I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows a few days ago. I won’t really review it here, but it was a satisfying read. Rowling is especially good at incorporating past elements, including darn near every single character that had appeared or been mentioned in the previous books. The battle scenes in particular were a lot of bright fun, even if some characters got the axe.

What I was really struck by reading it, and which made me want to talk about it here, were the many parallels to ideas and themes in the King Arthur/Holy Grail legends. I’m not going to get all super-scholarly on you and say that Harry Potter seems to be one big veiled attempt at re-telling these legends (they’re not, and that’s a good thing), but there are so many neat things happening that I think someone COULD write a scholarly essay on the subject and how Rowling was probably inspired by the stories.

In the Arthurian legends there are several magical and/or holy objects that people seek out, the two biggest ones being Excalibur and the Holy Grail. Unlike real life where a powerful object can be conceivably claimed by anyone who can get their paws on it, a major point in the stories is that only someone in particular can claim these mighty objects. Arthur gets Excalibur because he’s the rightful king, and Sir Galahad gets the grail because he’s the only one able to see the quest to the end AND the only one holy enough to acquire it. There are other, foil-like characters to Arthur and Galahad (for Galahad the biggest one is his dad Lancelot, who WAS the best knight in the land but he just can’t be as holy due to being a romantic). Even when other characters acquire a magical object they find out one way or another that they can not wield it – the objects frequently “choose” their wielders.

The final Harry Potter book introduces a new set of powerful magic items that several characters at one point or another seek (Harry Potter, Voldemort, Dumbledore, and more). All of them also go on quests quite similar to the knights, and it is only when you have noble reasons for using the objects that it even becomes worthwhile having them. By the end it’s flat-out said that Harry’s quest seemed unnecessarily arduous (ex. a person who wants Harry to succeed could have provided more aid, but didn’t) but the justification for it being so is apparently because if he did NOT go through so much extra effort then he wouldn’t be the person he NEEDS to be for the objects.

I could actually go on, particularly with details regarding the ending, but I won’t spoil it for anyone. Enjoy!

-Have you read this month's issue of "Tales of the TMNT"? It's written by my friend Tristan Jones, and in all honesty it is one of the best Ninja Turtles comics ever and definitely the best this year. His website is here: http://tristanhuwjones.blogspot.com/ and it also includes some cool stuff, like a creepy movie he did and what I think is a hilarious puppet project he's working on.

-In other news I have been accepted to the University of Saskatchewan's Education College. This doesn't mean much to you cyber-people, who I'm pretty sure are just figments of my imagination, but this means I get to stay at the house I like and stick closer to friends and family. And THAT all means I won't subject you to horribly overwrought and depressing emo poetry on this blog. Now we're all winners!

A crazy thing happened to me the other day while I was walking in Saskatoon. A crow started cawing up in a tree as I was walking by, but I didn't think much of it. A few seconds later the darned thing zoomed by my head less than a foot away. I kept my eyes on it as it proceeded to land on a tree branch and caw loudly AT ME. I'm serious, this thing was interested IN ME for some reason. I kept on walking and the crazy bird then took to the sky and did this dive bombing manoeuvre at my head. My description here does not do the scene justice; think about a big crow going top speed downwards, then pulling up at the last second so at the bottom of its flight it could collide with your face like a large, ugly black bullet. Seriously, it was going FAST and I could feel the wind from this thing. The bird took high to the sky again, CIRCLED ME LIKE A VULTURE, then did the dive bombing tactic again. All three of these instances it got in around a foot from me, and on the second and third times I had to dodge it.

That was pretty freaky. It's not like I had food hanging off me or anything (or even weird cologne), this bird just decided to try attacking me.


PS
Sorry about the ALL CAPS in places, but it's just simpler right now than putting text in bold, and I really wanted the emphasis.

PPS
Happy Canada Day.

Sorry to all my fans out there for not posting for so long.

Snicker…

Haha. Couldn’t even keep a straight digital face typing that.

Seriously though, I suck at blogging. Just a few things to tide you over, if’n you want to know.

-Did I mention that I sent a novella in for publication? Well I got word back from the editors that they liked the story, but they don’t generally publish novellas, something I knew right off the bat. However, for the first time they’re starting to put together a science fiction anthology book, and my story is now being considered. The reason it hasn’t just been approved is because it now needs to be read by the editors actually working on this project. Not exactly the most exciting news, but I’m optimistic and it’s nice to hear that some editors actually thought well of my work.

-The next issue of cereal:geek is coming together and there will be even more articles in there by me than originally planned. I’ll let you know when it nears completion.

-Did I also ever mention that Juan Saavedra (one of artists on the TMNT movie-comic adaptation) and I are putting together a comic proposal? Unfortunately I can’t tell you much about it other than it’s a comedy, and I also can’t share with you Juan’s fantastic artwork for it. What I can do is show you his studio’s blog. His artwork for our comic is kind of similar to the soccer kids’ comic they’re working on. It’ll be manga-styled, and very very awesome.

-Saw Spider-Man 3 on opening night and I thought it was a blast! I don't understand some of the negative reviews it's been getting. Sure, it's not perfect, but what movie is? I myself was concerned going in that with three villains and a new love interest it might have too much content and not enough time, but I felt it all worked together excellently. I guess my foundation for reference was the nineties' Batman movies where they would shove in two villains with little thought to the pairings (I've never seen Batman & Robin, but isn't the idea Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy working together, if even temporarily, ridiculous? One wants a tropical paradise and the other wants to freeze everything - yeah, they're like mashed potatoes and gravy, those two.). This movie showed a super hero flick could have lots of threats in it and be awesome.

Best (geeky) part: Stan Lee's best cameo, including "'nuff said." It was lost on most people in the audience, though. I swear, only me and another guy were laughing, but we were busting our guts out.

Worst (geeky) omission: No version of Spidey's theme song during the closing credits! At least that marching band played it on Spider-Man appreciation day, though.

-Free Comic Book Day has come and gone. Got Tom Grummett to draw me a Question this year (the REAL one, by which I mean Vic Sage). Man, what's up with characters I like being killed off? Enough digressing, it was a fun time and I talked to him and the White Ninja guys again. I got the Mickey Mouse comic (still need to read it) and Yu Li got the Peanuts one, which after having read it I'm pretty confident was the best freebie available. Hope everyone else's day was magical as well!