Dear France

why do your supermarkets close at Noon on a Sunday? Why even open at 8:30 if you're going to be closed at 12?

Cut that shit out man.


Tell German malls to cut that shit out too. They'll know what I'm talking about.

Must be all the handball or something.

HANDBALL!

It's like soccer (futbal) but with your HANDS. America doesn't even have a team because we don't need one. People would literally die if we played that game. We're too busy trying to get "The Running Man" to be an actual thing to play handball.

Take THAT cultural tolerance.

Day before.

Ok, so I'm going to Europe tomorrow (er..by the time I post this). Hopefully this should be pretty awesome. It'll be cool to hang out with Bob and my Brother the whole time. 

We're going to land in England, meet up with Brother and stay there for the night. The next day we fly to Berlin and get our train passes. We'll do whatever people do in Berlin for a day or two before going to France and doing what the French do. 

I should make a surrendering joke now, but that seems the obvious path to take. I should do some more research on the french and come up with something better. 

After France is Italy, which I'm pretty excited about. I want to see Rome mostly, maybe some of the vatican. I'm especially excited about the countryside and the food. Jeez, real italian food? I may never leave. 

After that we go to Spain, assuming we have time, and I guess wonder if the spanish are taking english jobs? I don't know. I think that may have been the most racist joke I've ever told just out of the sheer ignorance of it all. I can only hope. 

While I'm there and riding the trains and stuff I need to be sure to write and draw a lot. I want to flesh out some of my story a bit more and maybe draw some comics or something. I really want to get that going. I can post the stuff here, and add commentary below them. It'll be the ol' ONE-TWO punch! 

I also need to look into some of the publishing internships that I saw on the Texas State Career services website. 

Well, not while over there of course. I guess this is just more of a personal note. 

I think publishing would be an ok profession for me to go into. I mean I enjoy books and what the get published myself, right? It only makes sense. Plus there are some companies in Austin, so I wouldn't even have to really re-locate if I got an internship, and later a real job with them. I could stay where I am, April could go to UT and I'd never have to drive all weekend again! I'd sell my car just because I could! 

Then I'd probably have to buy another car which wouldn't be as good because I wouldn't have any real credit to get a loan for one etc. etc. but still, It'd be liberating. 

Besides I could just get a scooter or something. Truly then I'd be a king among men. 

things I should remember

I told a really funny joke the other day. I don't remember what it was though. I'll ask april, 'cause she said I should write it down but I didn't have my note pad with me.

I'll try to think more tomorrow

we didn't start the fire!

And apparently no one else did either.

Ok, so the fire alarm went off at approx. 5 am today. My first thought was that this was the "oh shit you're in hell now" alarm. I had never heard this particular alarm go off before, thus it was extra jarring when it woke me up.

After climing out of bed, throwing some clothes on (no sandals though, massive hobo feet [or is it hobit feet? I guess it depends on how PC or nerdy you are]) I start to walk walk outside with the rest of the people in my hallway. I get outside with a few other people, but not nearly as much as actually live in the complex. This freaks me the hell out because I watch too much twilight zone of course, and I immediately think:

"Oh great, I didn't make it and neither did any of these other people. We're all going to stand around for a long time before we realize we're really dead and probably have to haunt the building forever"

of course the real answer to the mystery of the missing people was just that its summer in a college town so everyone is in their city of origin. Damn you Rod Sterling, damn you to hell.

Because we only live like 2 blocks from the fire department, they were here by the time I got to the sidewalk, so kudos on that I guess. People started to come out with their dogs and I was worried that this particular puppy who didn't have a leash on was going to get hit by either the fire truck or the multitude of people leaving in their cars, so I pick the little guy up after he crawls under the gate separating our parking garage from the rest of the world. I try to hand him to his owner, still in my sleepy haze mind you, without saying a word. She just says "Its ok for him to be on the grass" and I put him down thusly because trying to explain myself is still out of the question at this point.

Its not until about an hour later until I realize how silly I must have looked to her. Here's some guy just randomly picking up her puppy and handing it to her without saying anything. Ah well, I'm sure she's not the first person to assume I have a mental problem.

So I walk around the building a little, just kinda passing by everyone else who's sitting on the curb and the few determined souls trying to get some sleep on the benches. It occurs to me that I want a soda so I can maybe wake up a little while I wait out the alarm. I go back inside (I'm like 90% sure there isn't a fire at this point, so its not like I'm actually just risking my life for a Dr. Pepper) fallowing some people who i guess decided that they like the noise better then they like the mild humidity of outside, and make my way to the soda machine. During my journey to the 3rd floor where the good machine is, the alarm goes off and on several times, raising my hope and dashing it just a little more each time.

I get my soda, and walk around the place a little, seeing if the sprinklers are actually on in any section of the complex. Of course, none of the sprinklers are on, and now the alarm is only going off in each individual room so the hallway is somewhat quiet, except for the almost distant, yet ever constat, EEEEeeeEEEEeeeEEEEEeeeeEEEeee. It really reminded me of a zombie survival game, which mixed with the odd light out in the hallway and no one else around kinda freaked me out.

I decide to go to the parking garage roof and watch the rest of the city, which was nice until I realized that I would be doing this in a few hours. It occurred to me that I would probably blog this event, then maybe write something in my facebook, and tell the people in the online game I play. Then it dawned on me that telling everyone else about this event would take much less time then it would here. My, what a bleak and terrible future we live in.

After I've had enough of the scenic beauty, I go back down and kinda dick around in the street a little bit, while contemplating if I should just walk over to the donut place a block away. I'm kinda of regretting not going now because I could really go for a kolache. Damn, I still might go if I decide to just stay awake. I can hardly resist the siren's call of a sausage link in dough.

Its at this point I realize I could go to the pool, which I do and it was really nice to just let my feet soak in the pool as I lay down and look at the now blue sky. That is to say, it was nice until I found out I was covered in small caterpillars and rolly pollys. After picking the bugs off me, I decide to just lay in a lawn chair and maybe try to get some some sleep, which of course means that 5 minutes later the alarm went off for good and I was able to come back in.

Right now my biggest fear is that as soon as I finish this post, its going to go off again and I'll have wasted time that I could have used taking a shower or doing something productive. I'm afraid to do my laundry because what if it goes off again while my stuff is drying? Bah. I'm hungry and tiered.

Ants

So there are a bunch of ants on my desk. I don't know if they have some kind of colony actually on the desk or if they're always crawling up from the floor and wall. I certainly hope its not all the way from the floor, mainly because of the one brave soul who keeps making the journey all the way to my computer screen. I don't know what this little scout is looking for or why they keep coming. I mean I don't kill them so its not like its a search party or anything so I don't know why they just report that there's nothing up here and stop the searching.

I've been threatening the rest of them with a lighter. I'm hoping that if I can convince them that I'm some kind of angry fire god they might leave. I think just tapping the surface with the lighter is doing more though. Do ants even know that fire is bad for them?

dear spanish

I hate you.

XOXOXO

---phil

action web-comics

So I've been thinking about action based web-comics. Most of the ones I read aren't really that good admittedly. The problem is just that they go so incredibly slow for my taste. You see, each page really only covers one action or so, say walking down an hall and entering a room. In a normal comic book, this wouldn't be so bad because the next page is right there waiting for you. A normal comic book goes on for 20-30 pages and you get a good cliffhanger on the last page to make you want to keep going. In a webcomic you get a page, then wait a week and get another page. In a year you'll get 52 pages, assuming it all is on time, of a story while print comics deliver at least 240.

Now, I get that a web-cartoonist 98% of the time is only doing this for fun and makes little to no money off of their work thus we just can't expect to get as much product as from print. This often leads to a slow moving story that makes me lose my interest pretty quickly. There are a bunch of examples, so I'll go with who does it wrong first.

Zap in space spent well over a year on a single fight. The problem they had with it, was they simply spent too much time doing absolutely nothing. I'm not sure if I covered it in this blog or not, but I've said it before somewhere. They have spent, more then once, several pages doing actions that can easily be done in one. I can understand wanting to show all the details of a fight scene, because that has suspense and action and blood and explosions and all that good stuff. Once that part is done, and all your character is going to do is meet up with someone and leave the area, do that in as few pages as possible. Other comics have this problem too, such as Lastblood which gives a lot of pointless action in between pointless "character development" about people who I just don't really care about.

Some people who do things well, at least for the most part is Goblins. Goblins keeps things fresh by running multiple story lines at the same time. Once one group starts to do some dull, but necessary plot moving he jumps over to the other group who we last saw in the pit of danger. This keeps me enthralled in whats happening because its always something interesting, even if its not the main plot. Recently though, I get the feeling that Goblins isn't actually going anywhere. Its always moving, but its not really moving foreword at least with the main plot. I think though, that this is simply a sign that we're about to spend a lot of time with the other cast of characters and see what they're doing.

anyway, thats all for now. check out goblins if you haven't already. its right over there --->