pfarley

• Upcoming with the Gang: Team Seattle is off to Salem OR by way of Portland to join Devon Monk for mass signing at Escape Fiction in Salem [3240 Triangle Dr SE, Salem, OR 97302 (503) 588-5865] from Noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 18th. Come on by! We will have fun; and we always do our best to be clever and informative … or at the very least, entertaining.

• New Coilhouse is in production: And I, for one, could not be happier. It’s a damn fine publication — beautiful and smart, and fierce.

• Fifty States Pledge: My lovely buddy Trixie Bedlam (aka Sarah Sharp) has traveled to 36 out of 50 states so far this year. You can see some of her photos from the road in this flickr collection. Now she has 14 states left, and two of them - Alaska and Hawaii - are hard to get to! She’d like to be able to take the rest of them out in a single trip, and she’s looking for sponsors. Check out the link, check out her pictures. See if you’re not interested in helping (she’s really marvelously good).

• More Bling: If you’re a fan of Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series, or of Psynde’s bling in general, now’s a good time to get grabby. The themed stuff is sometimes selling out before it even hits the site. (Because it’s just that awesome, that’s why.)

• Clockwork Thanks: Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who’s helped spread the word about my new site and the Boneshaker prologue/introduction. Seriously. I can’t thank you enough. Word of mouth is virtually impossible to buy, which makes you people priceless — and I appreciate every single link. [:: sends everyone virtual cheek smooches ::]
  

[Crossposted to/from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]

Okay, so I've got Sotomayor on the brain today, but her personal story is important to me, because it's almost identical to that of one of my old roommates and best friends. Like Sotomayor, he is Nuyorican and raised by his single mom in a rough part of the Bronx. He went on to Princeton and then Harvard for grad school, and really did well for himself, both personally and professionally. I met his mom many times, and even though she didn't speak any English, she just radiated pride and happiness over how he and her other kids turned out. Of course, it was all because of what an amazing woman she was!

Anyway, when I saw this picture of Sonia Sotomayor and her beautiful mother, she reminded so much of my friend's mom that it brought a tear to my eye.

So here's to her, to Sotomayor's mom, and to all you awesome moms out there.

There have been some major, but *very* welcome, changes in process for our web space here at The Job... and, apparently, some even bigger changes are slated for our physical space now, too. I'm actually really surprised at how bleeding-edge these ideas are, and I suspect they won't be as easily accepted as the website/branding changes will be.

I'll be watching the planning, plotting, and complaining phase of this project with equal parts interest and amusement. XD

Last week's 2-day Teen Workshop at the Cape May County Library went off without a hitch.





I can't tell you how proud I am of those kids (I think we had 17 or 18 in total!)--they worked so hard, did such great work, and had a great time talking comics with Dave and I!

Our Flickr set from the workshop...

...and the Library's Flickr set.

And if you still don't believe girls read (and really, really want to make) comics, look no further than these photos.


Neat: here's a short YouTube video of me, helping one of our students come up with story ideas! I die of embarrassment when I hear the sound of my own voice, but this is a good snapshot of how the whole thing went.

Related: Another of our students talks about the mini-comic she wrote and drew. Like everyone else, she did an AMAZING job.

My utmost thanks to Librarian Justin Hoenke, who spearheaded this event and worked with us to make sure we'd be well-taken care of while we were in town. He and his wife Haley were fantastic hosts (and they let me play with their fantastic baby, Finn), who made sure we had lots of suggestions for fun things to do with our evenings!

Some of the fun we got up to can be evidenced in this Flickr set: cute shops, boardwalk, a visit to a small waterpark, and looooads of ice cream!

I came home about as optimistic as one could be about the future of this medium I love so much. I won't be at Comic-Con in San Diego next week, but I'll be working on comics the whole time! Hooray!

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion." - Sonia Sotomayor

I find it amusing that one of the few criticisms that conservatives can find for Sotomayor is her repeated statement about the particular viewpoint that a Latina can bring to jurisprudence.

It seems part of conservative mythology that there is no such actual thing as bias in law and government, either in theory or as practiced. It is a matter of faith that a person like Jeff Sessions (R-Ala) is a paradigm of impartiality, that the laws as created, interpreted, and enforced by people like him, John Roberts, and all of their homeboys from 1776 onward could have even an ounce of bias in them. To them, claiming the existence of systemic bias is like saying you've seen Bigfoot or been abducted by aliens.

Otherwise, what could be the objection to the notion that someone who differed in gender or race could offer something different and perhaps relatively valuable, if for no other reason than it provides input from an alternate perspective. I do think she chose her words poorly (and repeatedly) by verbally confusing something being valuable because of its uniqueness vs. being intrinsically superior.

Well, here is news for the honorable gentleman from Alabama: there is bias in the system. This has been empirically proven time and time again. Not that Sessions would have any personal experience with discriminatory bias other than trying to increase it, e.g. describing the Voting Rights Act as a "piece of intrusive legislation." Not surprising considering he was a Young Republican when it was passed.

I find it a bit sad that Sotomayor is forced to qualify her beautiful, proud statements. But that's the way the game is played. Sotomayor has to deny being a proud Latina, just as Clarence Thomas had to deny being a sexual harasser, and Scalia had to deny being an asshole. Oh, wait, Scalia never denied that.

Ultimately, the value you place on diversity is a litmus test on how fair you think the system is. Jeff Sessions obviously thinks things are working fine, or more precisely, were working fine before that pesky Civil Rights movement, so of course there's no need for alternative viewpoints and certainly not from a wise Latina.

hello lj. life is busy. have a picture of a chick and a kitten. this chick's name is tempura. the other chicks are as follows: eggo (waffle), brwack obrahma (or mi shell obrahma if it does turn out to be a hen) and kamikazi. kamikazi feels like the rooster so far. i will post corresponding jpgs of chicks + names at a later date. enjoy.

also this article pisses me the fuck off:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8147534.stm

a) power socket != power cable != keyboard cable. yes technically the keyboard is powered thru it but that is like saying a toilet is a drinking fountain just because there is water there.
b) who uses ps/2 keyboards that is worth hacking anymore?
c) capacitors.

So the work for The Frogs is done. And i mean really done.  The Final Countdown  took all of friday night,  all day saturday and nearly all day sunday.   That afternoon soundhive discovered that the frog costumes alone would not even fit into two of our cars. Luckily, the CityCarShare pod at the BART station next to us just turned up a Honda Element. Somehow she managed to fit the entire collection of props and puppets into the van, and by 3:30 we were off.  We just managed to make it to the theater site by 5pm.  Down at the theater stage we met the rest of the crew, which had been working their tails off to get the stage built and painted... we barely got volunteers to help us haul down the props, everybody was so exhausted!

In all we made: Five 8ft ionic columns, five paper-mache ionic capitals, four doric column chairs, one column-table, three pairs of fury gloves, a staff for dionysus, a staff for hades, a gigantic underworld balancing scale, seven giant frog costumes, a cerberus puppet costume, eight bamboo noisemakers. Oh and some plaster masks. The last thing that needed creating was some cardboard spats for the bottom of the columns, and soundhive made those yesterday in between hanging out with polyomino. She also swept the garage clean, clearing out the massive piles of redwood bark i had hoarded this month.  It was a huge amount of work, and i certainly learned a lot of things that we want to avoid for bman: late nights, crazy pushes, and frantic constructing. But overall it was a ton of fun, and i really love making projekts with that theatre crew, and making things with my glue-gun-wielding and bamboo-crafting  partner.

Before loading everything on, L took reference pics of each prop and costume. We'll certainly be posting the works soon, but we'd also love for you to see it in person!

Sunday and monday nights were wonderful, hanging out with a visiting polyomino and getting back some sleep. We'll be attending the Fire Arts Festival this thursday,  but otherwise sleeping, and getting ready to jump onto the next lily pad....

horg.

We were looking at houses. This one seemed just about right - good size, nice yard, nearby shopping - and we were starting to talk price when C looked out the window. "Is that... a zombie?" She pointed: a shambling form had emerged onto the street from a yard on the other side, draped in torn clothes, twitching and grunting in an all-too-familiar way.

The realtor made a horrified face. "Oh... no! Certainly not. This is a nice neighborhood. There's no..." but just then, one of the neighbors came down the street in their car, striking the lurching form in the side and scattering it into pieces all over the place. The realtor put her face in her hands. "The city will have that cleaned up in no time, I promise," she tried hopefully. C shook her head and I nodded in agreement. "We're going to keep looking."

Call us livists if you want to, but you know it's true: once a neighborhood starts getting one or two of the Dead, it's just a matter of time before the whole place is overrun. Humanity - living humanity, I mean - had been forced into a perpetual, irritated nomadic existence, always having to sell at a loss and buying somewhere else every time the Dead ruined another nice place.

The last place we'd lived, it had gotten so that you couldn't even go out to your car to leave for work without mussing up your clothes and stumbling down your own driveway, groaning and spitting, pretending to be one of them so that they wouldn't rise from where they were all lying around - on your porch, in your flowerbed, draped over the hood of the car, in the gutter - and make a sudden lunge for your throat.

Sure, you could shoot them in the head. But their putrescent remains were like a beacon for more of their kind. And there were sometimes unfortunate social side-effects of that solution. Once, at a Mardi Gras street party, two hideous, reeking figures had shambled out of the dark at me. "Are you alive?" I asked, repeatedly, but all they could do was mumble and shake. When one reached for me, I drew and put a pair of .45s into each of their heads. All the fresh red blood had been a tremendous shock and the crowd began to scream. They weren't Dead, they were just too drunk to make any sense. Manslaughter. That had been a pretty bad time, but at least there was a valuable lesson demonstrated: don't get so incapacitated in public that people can't distinguish you from a walking corpse.

Anyway, as C and I got back in our car, I looked around and saw, yeah, the Dead were already here: in the dark shade of that tree, underneath that SUV, tucked in among those bushes. They were craftier, here, hiding themselves more effectively. You might not see them until you were right next to them and then they'd be right on top of you. Were we losing this war? Were they going to keep getting better and better at blending in until we could no longer spot them? I tried not to think about. We'd keep looking. We'd keep looking until we'd found a place where the Dead could never go. That's all we wanted.

Really, I think, that's all anyone wants anymore.

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For consideration: sub-conscious metaphors for the economy

Last night I put together a Martha-Stewart-for-Kmart console table (on clearance!) that works perfectly as a mini-desk for Owen's tiny room. It's only 15" deep, just enough for a flat-screen monitor, keyboard, mousepad, and not much else. Bonus - no room for clutter!
We also moved his bed to another wall, took out the play kitchen and other things he doesn't play with, and pretty soon he'll have a brand new 'big kid' room. The bedrooms here are so teeny. It's like a dormitory.

I have so many projects lined up; it's crazy. I have to finish painting the hallways a pearl grey (the downstairs hall is almost finished). I have to paint O's room a soft light blue. I have to paint the upstairs bath a sort of cafe au lait, and clean white trim throughout the house. Gotta paint that metallic vertical stripe in the living room. Gotta hang mirrors and bracketless shelves.

The problem with waiting until you can thrift accent pieces and artwork and frames and furniture is that you're never done. Still, I don't think I've bought anything for this house that didn't come dirt cheap from a garage sale or was on deep-discount clearance. Holla.

Happy Bastille Day, gang!

Celebrate by swinging by the store and purchasing your very own sluttypants lineup of revolutionaries!

Or you could organize a mob and storm a prison containing only a half dozen rather well-treated white collar criminals and a couple of psychotics and aristocratic perverts.  Hey, if you do anything as productive as writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man afterwards, we’ll call it a win.

One of my favorite forgotten underlying causes of the French Revolution; financial stress caused by the military expense of saving our punk little revolutionary butts over here in America.  Yes, without the support of poor King Louis XVI, we Yanks would be spelling ‘honor’ with a u and paying for things with currency depicting the Queen’s corgis instead of mystical freedom pyramids.

So, my fellow Americans, any time some bellicose fellow says something rash about the French in your presence, gently remind him that France took it in the teeth for us back in 1776, which in turn sparked off the upheaval of the revolution, which eventually gave rise to European nationalism, from whence came those pesky World Wars. Then prepare to run, very quickly.

In the meantime, raise a glass, tear open a baguette, and buy a print, mordi!

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I’ve had a Monday. It has been a Monday wherein many things got done, none of them writing. I spent the morning on day-job work (as per usual), then went to Petco for fish supplies, went to (stores redacted) to do some birthday shopping for a couple of relatives, hit up Trader Joe’s for some desperately needed groceries, went to the postal store and bought shipping materials, packed up and shipped off a couple of birthday packages, took out a couple loads of trash, changed the fish tank while doing 2 loads of laundry, then folded/sorted/put away the laundry*.

I’m tired. I don’t want to stand up anymore.
But I still need to clean the litterbox.
*sigh*
I’m thinking maybe that one’ll wait ’till tomorrow.

However, I do want to point you at something new and groovy: The first installation of Boneshaker, live for your reading pleasure.

In my oh-so-copious downtime today [:: eye roll ::] I spent some time fleshing out Clockwork Century — cleaning up my own grammar, adding a graphic or two, and plumping up the “Stories” and “World” sections with more in-depth info on those two topics, respectively.

As I said, I’ll be tweaking, adding, futzing, and poking at the site for some time yet. I might even put up another chapter or two, one of these days. You never know. It’s like the wild wild west. Anything could happen.

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* As a point of fact, it’s worth noting that the laundry room is in the basement of our building, which means four flights of stairs up and down in a joint with 11 foot ceilings. It’s more than housework; it’s manual labor.

[Crossposted to/from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]

If running keeps going as well as it's gone the past few days, it might become my new fitness drug. Good thing, too, because I sorely need one. I did 2.5 miles yesterday and 3 miles today, and I have to admit I'm proud. There were some hills on today's route, and I beat the hell out of them. :D Running outside is so awesome compared to the stupid treadmill. I need to quit being a wussy about weather and just run outside.

I've been working my butt off by day, coughing and not sleeping at night, and generally feeling as though my life is not my own. I had two weddings to shoot this past weekend, one of them running almost 9 hours (!), and I couldn't even go to my wushu classes, because they conflicted with the weddings.

Combine that with *really* not wanting to deal with large groups of people--traveling in a group of 18 people for two weeks does that to you, I guess--and I damn near thought I was going to lose my mind.

The weddings did turn out beautifully, though, and in spite of being so tired while shooting them, I *am* looking forward to picking out shots for the blog. :) The one on Saturday was held in this amaaazing church--the courtyard wasn't anywhere near as attractive as I was led to believe, but the interior of the sanctuary was just amazing. I think the church director was close to flipping out, because everything was running late and all the guests-with-cameras were breaking the church's photography restrictions, but all things said, it could've been worse.

Running, though, has been better for my psyche than anything, since I got back. I almost feel in control again.

And I TOTALLY slept until noon yesterday, and caught up on TV. So, I feel tons better just because of that. :D

Not sure if this came out cropped well. Hope so. The innuendo is just awesome.

My bi-weekly meeting with my boss was less than two minutes long and ended with a "whoo-hoo!"

Boss: Do you have anything?
Me: Not really - one formatting question - do you want this formatted book-style or just blorted out for text only?
Boss: Blarrrrrrrr!
Me: Okay!
Boss: I'm glad you understood that.
Me: Good Meeting!
Boss: *pumps fists in air*
Boss & Me: WHOO HOO!

This shit is HILARIOUS.

This is some fellow on a genealogy forum for my surname and its spelling variants, who is ... just a little weird, to say the least:



I had forgotten in my childhood that my grandfather had [snip] an old steamer like trunk covered in a canvas-like shroud keeping out moisture. The trunk was pitched all over with tar or such substance to keep the trunk and interior waterproof.

That trunk hold the family, and the Kympton-Kempton-Kimpton genealogical archives for what could truly be said to be nearly 2,000 - 4000 years old. Inside are cuneiform tablets, papyri, parchments (which are as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls .... and the State of Israel knows about them! they are that biblically important), and ancient papers, genealogical lists, et al across a variety of ancient nations and languages of Gaul, France, Britain, Germany, Brittany, .... [snip] Little did I know as a little child that this archive was passed down nearly 2000 years IF NOT MORE!

[snip]

... the direct-male Kympton-Kempton-Kimpton lineage. We descend directly from King David. That does not mean that we are Jews or Jew-ish, but that our ancestors had an ancient faith called Yehidah, which is a parallel definition to the Tribe of Judah. We are Judaic and the religion is Yehidah. We follow the true ancient faith that our Master Jesus taught.

From the times of Jesus ... down to 1066, ... our ancestors were very highly placed in whatever nation they held. We were the Kings of the "Jews (Yehidahs)." We were known and respected as such, irrespective of being national kings, princes, dukes, earls, or even Emperors in the Mideast down through history.

We were second cousins to King William the Conqueror of Normandy,[snip] We, and the Percys of Northumberland were the most powerful Earls in the land. [snip] The Kemptons are the descendants of Thomas FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel.





SOME of the stuff on this page as it pertains to the family lineage is known to be true, or close enough that it doesn't matter. But largely ... he's a crackhead! But it's a fun read.

I spent most of my working time this weekend putting together the Family Man website move/redesign.  With the assistance of Mr. Tyler Martin it will hopefully come out looking very classy and atmospheric!  And all in one place, so you’re not obliged to scoot around addresses to read the blessed thing.

BUT all work and no play makes Dylan a cranky girl, so I finally let myself color what I called the Revolutionary Hotties print.

Here’s the current draft of the near-finished project (click it for full-size):

Yes.  I went there.  It’ll be on sale starting sometime this week in the store, to commemorate Bastille Day and the brave, idealistic, occasionally evil, but always charismatic men who gave their heads for the Revolution. I salute them!  And their cute little butts.

I know you want some 18th century man-meat on your wall.  You so do. ADMIT IT.

I haven’t quite settled on the dimensions – 8 x 16?  Meredith has warned me that I will rue the day I try to ship anything longer than 12 inches on a side, but dammit I never claimed to be smart, and I kind of adore poster tubes.  What say you, internet.

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New Bunnies, and another problem solved with grace!

It's kind of funny, you know. This is the first time that Honey and her original "adoptive mom" have actually interacted with each other onscreen in almost five years, but they're both so caught up with solving their own current little problems that the significance of the moment is completely lost on both of them.

And if that don't speak to a Bunny's nature, I don't know what do. :-)