Mr. Gazpacho

Spoiler-free review:

The Watchmen movie was abysmal. They told the same story the book told and made it something entirely different; something flashy and (at the very least) boring.

It accomplished something spectacular: it was both too long and too short. Because there was so much source material to adapt, the movie was a kind of highlight reel of the comic that didn't give you the time to actually care about any of the characters, making the 2 and a half hour running time unbearable.

Oh, and the music sequences were completely forced and awkward.

Turns out Watchmen may have been unfilmable all along.

Okay. I totally want a Guitar Hero scarf. How cool is that thing?

Tattoo for TJ, whom we knew as House.

So Christmas left me with a wireless receiver for my 360, which I just now named Torrence, and 13 months of Live.

I'm about to go play some Left 4 Dead and I will potentially continue to do so from time to time.

My username is LosFatHead, what's yours?

I wish every single one of you a happy holiday season. May each of you find at least one hour where you're content not consumed by hassle, exhaustion, or bitterness. We should all be so lucky.

I say Happy Holidays not because I'm afraid of saying Merry Christmas and not because I simply don't want to. I say it because my job makes me and I don't care about something so petty.

I understand why it's a big deal to some people, but cut the rest of the world a break. Leave it to the self-righteous to take someone wishing them well as an attack.

This isn't a time of year that revolves around Jesus. I'm not being a jerk, but you know it, and I know it. Christmas, itself, and how it's celebrated has nothing to with Jesus, in fact. The traditions are largely pagan and a the church fabricated a December 25 birth date for their savior with the intent of squashing the holiday festivities all together. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. That one's on the books.

Flash forward a little over 1500 years. The line between the Nativity and the North Pole has become blurrier and blurrier with every new wave of people born. In a few generations, it will likely be swallowed by the materialism entirely. "Christmas" was stolen by the church, and after a dozen centuries, it was stolen back.

--

I suppose that I said all that to say this: this is a time that damn near all of us observe. The believers, the unbelievers, the undecided, and the unconvinced. If you spend your Christmas honoring your savior, I love you for it, but don't harbor disdain for those whom do anything less.

I won't pretend that this season isn't fueled by the all-mighty dollar first and foremost, but even all that near-fatal shopping is all done in preparation for that one day when we're meant to come together and for one, stupid day, not be jerks to one another. That may not be the most poetic way of putting it, but you have to admit it's a nice thought. It doesn't matter what the hell you call it.

Much love,
FatHead (Jason)

Buy a drawing, save a cat: http://super-donkey.livejournal.com/197466.html

I know I haven't posted here since right after TJ passed, but I'm okay folks. It's been the hardest month of my life, but life has returned to (more or less) normal speed.

The silence is due to just not feeling like saying anything and to being preoccupied with comics. Because, you see, I am taking over the artwork duties on the webcomic, Sketchies. Starting Monday! Isn't that lovely? Hm?

The petals of a red rose will wilt and fall softly to the ground
A soldiers soul will drift away without making a sound
A ring of smoke from a burned out man will melt away into the night
The crescent moon will disappear with the morning light
But my love for you will survive on through and never ever fade away

Buildings will crumble leaving ashes and dust mingling with the fall breeze
Trees will tumble and disappear without leaving a trace of its leaves
And no matter how bright a star shines someday it will meet its end
And a day will arise when our time runs out and theres no more left to spend
But my love for you will survive on through and never ever fade away

Mountains will fall, rivers will dry, forever will be no more
But my love for you will survive on through and never ever fade away

-TJ Williams, 1984-2008

TJ passed away last night. He had bleeding in his stomach that they patched up. He started bleeding again, and before they could find out from where, he bled out. He was asleep the entire time.

I'll always, always miss him, but I'm still living and he would be ashamed of me if I stopped. This was the man who told me at least a dozen times he wanted to have an open bar at his funeral so people could party instead of cry.

He was and is my brother. I'm both optimistic and inconsolable. However long my life goes on, there won't be a day I don't think of him. Time marches on.

Hooray. Hooray for today. Hooray for the next four years. Hooray, hooray, hooray.

I have to work until midnight-ish tonight, so I'll have to discover the election results via cellphone internet.



Please believe.

Christ. One more week.

This is how it goes. Last year, I felt the same way. For a month straight I was all stoked to be rooting for a team and saying "GO KERRY!" in idle thought.

Then with a month or less left to go, these fuckers start running out of things to say, things get boring, then they get cheap, and then they become nigh unbearable.

It's the same year. "Go Obama." I guess. I certainly don't want the McCain/Palin ticket to claim office, but my ability to maintain any kind of personal enthusiasm went out the door maybe 3 weeks ago.

This election is officially at the point where it's just a benefit when you fill up your tank and a pain in the ass when you go to buy weed on payday.

Let me get through this homestretch with my mind intact, oh non-god.

So it's been a while; again.

One of my best friends is in the hospital, and everything is up in the air. The whole thing is so surreal that I go from being absolutely grief-stricken to being unable to react at all.

He's always had some health problems, but it's as if someone, somewhere is trying to disprove the theory that good things happen to good people once and for all. When he was 10, his left retina started to detach, and surgery proved unsuccessful, leaving him blind in that eye. Something like 6 weeks ago (13 years later), his other retina started to detach. He had the surgery, and it went well. He was going to remain anywhere from blind to incredibly impaired visually for 4-6 weeks regardless while he healed, and the first few of those weeks, he had to spend the entire day with his head down at all times. After all that is when he would FIND OUT whether or not he'd be able to see the rest of his life.

Friends of his family organized a big benefit dinner to help shoulder the massive medical costs they were encountering. Everyone came out to support him, and things went off without a hitch. The very next day, he was hanging out with another friend and myself, all the while complaining about stomach problems. I didn't think much about it, but he wasn't feeling well. He took off at about 5pm, and this is where everything I know thus far becomes second-hand.

From 6pm to 6am, he was vomiting. He was taken to the emergency room, where they found out that it was directly related to his heart. He's had a history with heart disease since he was much younger, but that's a longer story. It turned his aorta was expanding. He was helicoptered to Cleveland Clinic, put in the ICU, and wasn't going to get to go into surgery for 8 days or so.

Well, 4 days later, he flat-lined. It took the doctors 20 minutes to get him back. The surgery was done in emergency. Post-op (having been down for so long), his kidneys have shut down and he doesn't have feeling down his right side. The loss of sensation was at first erroneously attributed to a stroke. Last I heard, they still aren't sure of the actual reasoning behind it. It's our deepest hope that it isn't permanent.

As of last night, I was told that whenever they take him off of his sedation, that he wakes up flailing; throwing his arms and his head every which way. His mom doesn't think it's even him in there. They have him restrained, and they're trying to medicate him to get him to relax while trying to ween him off of the sedation (if that makes sense). I asked if he was speaking, and they said they didn't know because there's a feeding tube in his mouth. The doctors are doing what they can, but there's no definitive answers.

I'm not a person of faith. I don't really believe everything happens for a reason, and so I'm left with hope that he's okay. I really, really hope he's going to be okay.

Come on, House. Do it, House.

How, how, HOW did Ben Folds slip in quality so much to produce this steaming pile he's titled Way to Normal? The singles were good. If nothing else, they showed promise. This CD is sloppy, absent-minded, and forgettable. An absurdly peculiar dip from a performer that was my second favorite musical act at one time.

Okay!

We're still a good 2 months or more from an official launch (sorry it's taking so long), but I've just registered the new domain, so I feel comfortable announcing the title.

For those not in the know, we lost the niego.org domain, and rather than register niego2 or newniego or whatever godaddy suggested, our rational response was just to completely rename the comic. As we're expanding the kind of comic we're doing, it sort of makes sense anyway. We tried to come up with most bad ass title in the history of life, and I think we've done just that.

On that note, the name of the Niego sequel is...

DOLPHIN THUNDERSTORM

I haven't bought my hosting package yet, but it'll be at www.dolphin-thunderstorm.com when things are all finally in place.

The new comic will be every bit as ridiculous as Niego ever was, feature the same main cast, and an expanded supporting cast, be much more story-oriented, and hopefully be pretty funny.

For the time being, we need your help picking out the new logo for the upcoming website. Which of these do you like best? Leave a comment, and tell me like it is.



Whichever ends up being chosen will incorporate a symbol which I'm still working on. The symbol will be basically what you'd expect.

And by that, I mean a big ol' drawing of a dick.

Look for the site sometime early/mid October.

So after years of "some day", I finally bought a wacom tablet today. It's lowest of the low-end art tablets they offer, but it suits my purposes just fine thank-you-very-much.

Anyway. There's a pretty big learning curve with the thing, but I'm catching on faster than I thought I would. Hopefully I can get completely comfortable with the thing quickly, and use it for it's purpose: to create comics for the Niego sequel (awesome name: still technically unannounced).

Anyway, here's the sketch I did getting used to the thing. It's not the most clever thing I've come up with, but that wasn't the point. The point was to make a drawing using no real ink or paper. I think I've accomplished that much.

I love this picture because of how appropriately unenthusiastic the members of Staind are to be members of Staind.

Seriously, the guy on the far right is in the middle of a photo shoot and he's obviously considering what his favorite kind of cheese is.

"...provolone?"

At one point in the months just passed, Seth asks me "What are you gonna do if it sucks?" It's an important question, or it would be in most cases. Long since before Ledger turned up dead and people started revering his performance as some kind of godsend before the film was even released, I'd not been worried about how good the Dark Knight was gonna be.

( Cut for long and cut for spoilers )

Every once in a while, I'll get overtaken by the Opinion Fairy. This is cross posted from a note I made on Facebook, which I posted without provocation. I've decided not to lock the post since that's part of the point.

---


((Quick note: These notes are as much for myself as anyone else. A lot of times I write things like this just so that I'll have my thoughts down somewhere. I have a lot of abstract notions that I never really form into full-fledged ideas.

That said: I have two kinds of friends on facebook. Half of you already know what I'm about to type. I can respect people against marijuana, but I like to present the other side of the issue for people who've never really heard it with a slimmed-down amount of BS.))

I'm not an activist. Not even close. I mean, I have ideas about things. I think the idea of being fashionable is a completely idiotic and useless concept, for instance. I don't really act on these kinds of issues, though. Mostly because my mantra of "make your own kind of music" dictates that I simply don't care about what people think of me, my appearance, ideals, or words, or actions. That, and I choose not to judge people for their own beliefs as long as they don't harm or hinder others than themselves.

One topic that honestly gets my blood boiling a little, though, is the legalization of marijuana.

There's a couple of reasons why marijuana is still illegal, and in my opinion, not a whole lot of it has to do with the substance, itself. The first is because of damn stoners. My fellow pot-lovers sometimes speak when they should listen. Stoners just love to chime in with irrelevant arguments and conspiracy theory when the topic of legalization comes up. Decades of this has trained the non-pot smoking community to immediately close their minds as soon as a stoner opens their mouth.

The second, I think, is just simple misinformation. Whereas stoners will sometimes incorrectly praise cannabis as some kind of miracle cure-all, misunderstood wonder-herb, the unfamiliar assume the drug is only 2 steps away from being as dangerous as, say, cocaine.

Schools, churches, and anti-drug associations will talk about marijuana in the same breath as crystal meth, ecstasy, and even crack. In part, I'm actually not opposed to this. I don't like the idea of it being likened to substances that will actually kill you, but it's still a substance that can be abused, so children need to be warned of it. The same goes for alcohol, though.

Here's the bottom line about weed: It's not good for you; we should be able to agree on that. No matter what it is you put in a pipe, if you light it on fire and inhale its smoke, you're not doing your body any healthy favors.

The argument is that if beer, liquor, and nicotine are legal, then cannabis should be legal too. Weed is a drug like alcohol is a drug. To be fair, as far as the kinds of poisons and hurt you're bringing into your body, weed is much less of a concern than either of the other two. Probably high fructose corn syrup too.

Weed isn't chemically addictive (at least not remotely on the same level as alcohol and certainly not nicotine). Studies in regard to lung cancer are officially inconclusive, but there's no solid evidence of a connection. When was the last time you heard of a death related to marijuana? THC is the active ingredient in weed (i.e. what gets you high), and to over-dose on it your body would have to smoke more than a pound of really potent marijuana in one sitting, which is for all intents and purposes, humanly impossible.

Alcohol can make you angry, depressed, or violent. This is subjective, but I've never, ever heard of anyone being any of those things as a direct result of smoking weed. Weed enhances some sensation, makes you hungry, and more than anything just gives you a euphoric, mellow feeling.

Again, the issue isn't whether or not it's good; it's whether or not it really needs to be illegal.

More than anything, what hurts me is the stigma of pot smoking. Because it's illegal, people knowing that you smoke pot can cost you your livelihood. Because people are uninformed about it, anyone who does is thought of as a degenerate by the opposed.

Smoking isn't nearly as significant of a difference in lifestyle as being gay, and isn't even close to being as important of an issue as being a minority, so there shouldn't be an issue an issue of "coming out". People who smoke should be able to be open, honest, and vocal about it.

Some smokers are degenerates, some aren't. We're just people. People who like getting high, admittedly.

Oh, one last issue, before I forget. The "gateway drug" thing. This is in the eye of the beholder, in my opinion. A lot of people who snort coke or shoot heroin may have tried weed first before taking the plunge, but consider the scenario of marijuana not existing. If pot wasn't there as a jumping off point, would these people still have tried cocaine? Again this is opinion, but I say it's pretty likely.

There's those of us that are content with marijuana usage. I've never, ever tried cocaine, and I never will. It scares the hell out of me.

This turned out way longer and long-winded than I anticipated. I really doubt anyone read it all the way through, but if you did:

Thoughts? Arguments? I appreciate the dialogue either way.

P.S. - Wikipedia is not always 100% objective, but there are some well researched points made in this article: Health issues and effects of cannabis

Hi, LiveJournal! Long time, no smell!

Guess what I did today. That's right; I made a completely retarded video. Let's watch it, shall we?



This is either the dumbest or best thing I've ever made. I guess it's possible for both to be true.

Show it to your friends! Make it viral. I need some of that Chocolate Rain money.