Okay, here’s something fun and weird for your Saturday morning pleasure… (or confusion) a very strange public service announcement I stumbled over the other day.
Fun in a weird sort of way… but what’s the deal? Is this low level sadism on the zombies part? Do they need the heart to be beating in order for the zombie virus to infect her? Or…
I think at best this is what one would call a mixed message.
For this week’s sketch we have more sketches from the free showing line at the top floor of Pacific Place
Well yesterday afternoon was time for errands specifically the distribution of flyers for the annual Graphic Novel Panel that my chapter of the Graphic Artists Guild has been putting on for the past three years. With my targets being UDub’s art department as well as a student Graphic Novel club I go to occasionally. On the way I also stopped at the Ravenna Third Place Books as well.
At that point It was Seattle damp. I guess I shouldn’t have mocked it as a “hard mist” when I was talking to someone about biking in the rain because it started pouring soon after. When I got to the University I quickly got kind of lost. Not lost lost…. I know my way around the campus fairly well. It’s just all of the buildings in the Liberal Arts square all look alike to the point I end up going around in circles for about fifteen minutes until I identify the one that’s the Art Department. This time it was about fifteen minutes too many since the Department’s office closed a lot earlier that I thought it did so I wasn’t able to drop them there. I ended up making due with the Library as my drop.
After that I had about an hour before I had to go to the Graphic Novel Panel which involved heading over to my favorite hangout, the Dreaming, and then head back. Regrettably when I headed out again I found the key to my bike lock had bent in the lock so the lock was pretty much broken (so my bike was stuck to a railing) after a few minutes of panic I finally got the aid of the owner of a nearby bike shop who lent me some cutters (a charity I had mixed feelings about as for all practical purposes I’d asked him to help me steal a bicycle.) But anyway that was the end of the hectic insanity for the day, though I definitely needed my evening IPA more than usual.
Also it was kind of depressing how easy it was to cut the lock.
For this week’s Rhapsody we return to Liszt with his Eighth Hungarian Rhapsody performed by Claudio Arrau. It’s a lot “quieter” and whimsical than a lot of Liszt’s music but he cranks out the power in the end.
I’ve been a fan of Wu Cheng’en‘s Journey to the West since I had a picture book about Monkey’s early adventures as a kid. From there it was only a matter of time before I read the synopses to the whole story to reading the abridged version Monkey by Arthur Wale and then finally the whole thing. (These days I’m partial to the Anthony Yu translation.)
So I’m always interested in media versions of it from anime shows that are loosely based on it like Dragon Ball and Starzingers to the more straighter versions that go from good like the CCTV version, to insulting like the Lost Empire, to everything in between.
So all I can say is this new one with Donny Yen looks… promising.
Well, it was an interesting week for all things involving technical maintenance.
The first thing came as a surprise on Saturday morning when on the way to the U-district I discovered my front wheel was literally bent out of shape. My best guess of how it happened was when I tripped picking it up the night before. It was one of those stumbles where you know you are going to fall no matter what going to fall down so the best thing to do is (again literally) roll with it. It seems weird that after being a bit of a klutz this December with a handful of tumbles I was genuinely surprised I was able to walk away from, the only one that actually damages my bike was a comic pratfall in my front yard.
The biggest pain about it was rescheduling my afternoon around going to the bike shop which involved going to the bank for petty cash, breaking the twenty at a Dick’s Drive-in, and of course waiting for the damn bus. When I got to the shop it turned out I had to get the wheel replaced, which only took another fifteen minutes.
Compared to that, the problems I’ve had with my laptop this week was merely tedious. Over the past year it had been having problems with the back light going out to the point I’d stopped using it for a couple of months. One of my Christmas presents to myself was taking it to the Apple Store Genius bar. It turned out to be an easy fix and I was very glad to have my portable office back. I quickly decided to take the next step and finally get a travel tablet so I could do more than just letter strips It turned out that none of the drivers that Wacom provides run on anything older than OS X 10.6 and my laptop still runs on the OS X 10.5 it came with. To a certain extent this is just as well. I’d been putting off upgrading the operating software on both my computers. The only real stumbling block was in order to upgrade to the current operating system on my laptop I first had to upgrade to 10.6 and guess what software Apple still keeps in disk form and still sends to you by snail mail? (In hindsight I should have checked to see if the Apple Store had a copy but so it goes)
I finally got my copy on Saturday but just to be on the safe side I’m backing up everything before I do anything and since I’m using an old portable hard drive I’ve had way too long and it’s taking forever. (By forever I mean about 1 gig every 15 minutes and that’s not counting the number of times the computer went to sleep and the time I accidentally unplugged the laptop when I moved it to the office!)
All fun but still the sooner I get this over with the better.
