Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Moving....yaaay

I'm in the process of moving, which is cutting into my production time for Hold My Life these past two weeks. Initially, I'd had a brief window during which I could've completed and posted a new episode, but the way it looks right now, it's probably gonna be Sunday.
Which would make Episode 3 officially two weeks late.
On the plus side, I'll be getting a spiffy new Qosmio laptop soon, which should enable me to work a little faster than my current, ancient PC I'm working on now.
Seeya Sunday, sorry for the inconvenience.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Slight Delay...

The next episode of Hold My Life will be posted by Wednesday. I'm running a little behind schedule due to the unfortunate viewing of Last Days, a horrible Gus Van Sandt movie that, as it turns out, isn't all that much about Kurt Cobain, but is instead about some guy named Blake who wanders around muttering for a couple of days and then apparently kills himself.

After watching that movie, I wanted to die.

Anyway, new HML Wednesday.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Army Of Robots

What with the whole walk-thru deal yesterday, I was feeling pretty drained late in the afternoon. We had been planning to go see Army of Robots play at the Rhythm Room, but it became blatantly obvious that I wasn't gonna make it to 11:00 when they went onstage.
AOR is a great band, especially to see live. I was bummed that we were gonna miss the show, but luckily they've got another one coming up at Last Exit on the 26th.

Artisan, We Have A Problem

Yesterday was the day our new place was supposed to be "released" by the builder. I guess that means it was supposed to be done. As it turns out? ...not quite so done as we'd thought.
The walk-thru, for those of you who don't know or care (I didn't, and still don't, really), is where you go through the place with someone who shows you how everything works. Pretty pointless all in all, (I know how to turn on lights and dishwashers already) but at that time you're supposed to point out the dings in the walls or little construction defects that you want them to fix before you close on the house and sign the papers. The place is supposed to be, essentially done and ready to go at this point.
This is our second house. The first place we bought, we felt like we'd kind'a gotten screwed by the builder, in the sense that we found out later about a lot of things that we hadda fix. Since the builder already had our money, fixing our plumbing went way down on their list of priorities. Like, all the way down and eventually off the list.
This time, however, we decided to do what we should'a done with the first house. Hence, Rhonda and I had decided to hire a home inspector to check the place over from top to bottom before we did the "walk-thru" with the warranty people. I'm glad we did that because although the place looked like it was finished, as it turns out it wasn't quite finished after all. The guy shows up at 11:30 as scheduled, and literally looks at everything in, on or around the house to identify any defects.
We found some interesting stuff, all of which is fixable, none of which do I wish to detail here in this blog. Nothing crazy. It's not like the building's gonna fall down, and I don't think blood is gonna rain down through the walls, but I have to wonder what the hell they were thinking with some of these things. Boils down to craftsmanship, basically. When we bought the place, I was sold on the craftsmanship of their previous projects, so naturally we're gonna hold them to a pretty high standard.
It's kind'a weird, because I'd have hoped that the place were a little more ready than it is. We have to move out of this apartment at the end of the month, and we'd been assured that it shouldn't be a problem. With two weeks to go till the end of the month, I'm wondering now what will happen when we come down to the end of August.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

The Annual Grant McIver Going Away Party

Yeesh, what a day.

I've posted a new episode of Hold My Life. Another brief episode might be up as soon as this weekend. I'm feeling productive lately.


Be warned, though, I am going to have to go in and re-work the Episode Guide this evening so it functions better. It does this weird thing that can only come from the artist (Flash Monkey?) being half-asleep as he was working last night. You'll see what I'm talking about if you read the webcomic before I've fixed it. I honestly dunno what I was doing when I was finishing that up last night, but when I looked at it this morning, I thought "what the hell is this?"

Fortunately, it's just the episode guide, not something completely jacked-up with the webcomic. And it'll take all of a minute to fix, if that long.

One reason I was tired was because, as I'd mentioned in my blearly late night blog entry from last night, the Flappybats jammed. We're gearing up for the gig that we're billing as "The Annual Grant McIver Going Away Party". We have a friend who just came back from 9 months in China teaching English. Before that, he'd left to travel through Central America (although I'm not exactly sure if he ever made it farther than Casino Arizona). On the 9th, he's gonna be making his way to Poland to try to do the teaching thing there. Poland in the winter, should be lovely.


The thing is, every time Grant takes off, there's a going away party. And hence, a joke was born in "The Annual Grant McIver Going Away Party". Grant hasn't seen us play in just about a year, and that was before Barry took up the bass and was reborn as Clyde Flappybat. We think we've gotten better. A little. Maybe. The two people who come to our shows say we have. Unfortunately one of those people is Rhonda, and the other is this crazy vagrant named Wes...

Well, at least this time we don't need the tabs for the songs we're playing, which is kind of an accomplishment for us. Lyrics are another story, though. We're covering a whole bunch of stuff, from AC-DC to the Buzzcocks to, of course, the Replacements. Maybe some Wilco, who knows?

Should be fun. If, for no other reason than to see Frank bust out his new Shark Guitar. The eye lights up, you know!

Monday, August 01, 2005

Episode 2 is up...sort'a

It's 11:30. Tonight, the Flappybats jammed for the last time before our show on Friday, the gig we're billing as "The Annual Grant McIver Going Away Party". I'll write about that tomorrow, though.

Ah Monday, My Old Nemesis.

Busy this weekend, but at least I managed to be productive.

Webcomics Nation launched last week, so I joined and set something up for Hold My Life on there. I've noticed that HML is getting more traffic as a result, and the services that Webcomics Nation offers seem great for someone just starting out. I'm gonna have to spend more time looking at them closer and seeing how I can use those features with what I'm doing. I'm gonna continue to host HML on karmiccalamity, but it's nice to also be a part of a webcomics community like Webcomics Nation. I don't feel like so much of an outsider now.

I set that up Saturday afternooon, and then spent Sunday working on the next episode of HML, which looks pretty cool if I do say so. I'm really happy with the way the art is turning out. I'd hoped to get that posted yesterday, but it might end up being tomorrow before I get that online, as we're practicing tonight. Last chance before Friday...