his_spiffynesss

Remember my post last year about KFC's advertising comic from DC featuring the Flash and Green Lantern and the Colonel fighting his evil universe doppelganger Colonel Sunder?



( Crisis of Infinite Colonels! )

  Today at work they announced a new policy they were enacting. Since I'm one of the Target employees whose shift begins outside of regular store hours, I get a shift differential bonus for coming into work at dark thirty in the morning. That bonus applied to all of the hours I worked, but starting in a few weeks that won't be case.

At the end of the month, the shift differential will only apply to hours before the store opens. But since this will adversely affect my take home pay, they adjusted my base pay, giving me a twenty seven cent raise to make up the difference. Plus this was just a few days after I got the annual review, so in the end I will be getting sixty three cents more an hour. I will still be getting the shift differential for the early morning hours, this just makes up the difference for the hours after store opening I'll lose that bonus. Of course during the holiday period when we work overnights it will make for some very nice paychecks.

So why the hell are they doing  this? Mostly this is a cost saving measure for new hires who won't be getting these perks for being here so long. And this is the second time I've seen them adjust the shift differential for the flow team. Though last time they just cut it back by fifty cents, but gave everyone a 50 cent increase to make up the difference.

 I got my second page for THEY SAVED AYN RAND'S BRAIN!!! inked and scanned today, I also got excessively anal retentive about this page. I ended up setting up  a slew of guides in Photoshop and realigned all of the borders straight and square.

When I'm drawing I can't ever get the lines really straight, just sort of close. Each time I pull out those little blue lines out of the ruler edges they mock me for my imperfections. So I systematically removed the lines and used the guides and the selector tool to make nice straight lines and solid right angles. 

Mostly I'm just wanting to make certain I can crop the images down square. In the past I've left the border intact on the images, but now I've decided to cut it out to save on file size.

Since about One 'o'clock we've had this huge storm front passing through town. It's spawned four or five tornadoes, including some powerful ones that ripped through Arlington. Thankfully the worst of it passed over where I am. Spent most of the afternoon watching news reports on the storms progress.

We end up by default watching the ABC affiliate's coverage, but I'm finding their meteorologist and overall editorial approach a bit of a pain. The had their chopper in the air following the storm and  watching the path of destruction, it just struck me as kind of lurid. I switched over to the NBC affiliate, and their guy was sticking to the weather map or switching to the news desk for follow ups. A little more traditional,  less focused on the devastation, and their weatherman came across as much more calm, focused, and reassuring.

 

 Think Geek, of course has it's annual collection of weird products The Admiral Akbar Singing Bass  seems to be the most absurd, bet likely to end up real item.  

George Takei has an interesting announcement on Facebook

Comicfury announced it's joining with Fur Affinity 

Devinat Art features Mandatory Cat Education 

From NPR: Tweets will shrink to 133 Characters

Reddit's new Timeline feature covers the beginning of time till the heat death of the universe

That's all I've run across so far

A few days ago I was flipping through the channel when I found MeTV. It's an all rerun station, but their selection is pretty good. The weekdays are filled with all of the classic sitcoms and 70's detective shows. Best of all, Saturday nights they show the Adam West Batman series and a bunch of other sci-fi series. Plus they have a horror host show called Svengoolie who does some lightweight riffing of the movies he's showing.

Overall, this is the perfect replica of a UHF station from the pre-digital era of TV. Some of the Dallas viewers posted on their Facebook page comparing this station to the old Channel 39 of bygone days (back before it became a Univison affiliate)

In general I find I love this station, and I think Weird Al summed it up best...

Let's review a bit of history...

It's 1990, Kuwait was occupied by the Iraqis, there is an increasing drumbeat for war and a young girl named Nayirah who says she is a nurse and comes before Congressional Human Rights Caucus and tells the horrible tale of how Iraqi soldiers entered their her hospital stealing incubators and leaving babies to die on the floor.

What wasn't told to the Commission or the public at the time was that the girl who was giving this testimony was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador, and was concocted by a PR firm to justify American intervention. Numerous Senators and the President used the story to illustrate the need for action. Considering the vote for war was passed by only five votes, this lie may have been what started Operation Desert Storm.

Now some twenty years later, we have Kony 2012; a slickly produced film about the atrocities happening in Uganda by the Lord's Resistance Army and it's leader Joseph Kony. Of course, the fact that Kony is not that active in Uganda anymore is pretty much glossed over in the movie.

This current situation reminds me heavily of the Nayirah testimony. Somebody is trying to sell war Uganda. Why? I'm sure the oil has something to do with it, but considering the people that are funding Invisible Children It's real easy to see this as some kind of religious crusade, and the founder of Invisible Children even suggests that.

At best this is a lot of misguided fundamentalist colonialism, at worst it's an intentional public manipulation to justify more blood for oil. Either way, I just find the whole situation sickening.

I have sort of been involved with this one little online community of open source comic characters. But recently I've pretty much given up on that line of thinking.

Open sourcing of characters has become a bit of an internet fad. The idea really sprung up around Jenny Everywhere a character that came into existence out of a cartoonist forum in the early 2K's. The character was pretty generic, but had a distinctive look. She achieved quite a bit of popularity inside the internet comic creator world and lots of people have used her at various times. Which is cool and what the concept was all about.

There are also a bunch of open sourcing people over at the Public Domain Super Heroes Wiki and the Free Universe site. I was hanging around on the free universe forum for a while, and even contributed one character.

But the more I looked over the work there, it did seemed like a depository for all those people who say "hey! I got this great idea for a superhero!" and plop it down. It seemd like everybody was creating characters, but nobody was creating stories. And that's why i think a lot of open sourcing is a bit of a dead end. Sure, Jenny Everywhere is a recurrent meme, but she's clearly an exception.She was created to be a flexible character that could be placed just about anywhere, and there was a large community of cartoonists behind her to propagate it.

The public domain characters from the golden age of comics have the advantage of a large body of work to draw upon, plus the continuing interest of new creators. All of which means the PD super heroes find an audience, but the newer OS characters are going nowhere.

I caught Jaws on TV last night, it's been forever since I actually watched the movie. And one scene kind of stuck out at me. Roy Schrieder and Richard Dreyfuss' characters are talking to the Mayor after they had gone out and found the wrecked fisherman's boat. What I was noticing how frantic everyone was, and how they kept talking over each others lines, in much the way real people talk. 

Watching it made me realized that particular kind of performance is really uncommon nowadays. Admittedly it was more often associated with Robert Altman and his films. One good example being in M*A*S*H when the doctors first arrive and meet the rest of the staff in the mess tent. Hawkeye and Duke find themselves in the middle of conversations between Col. Blake, Radar and Father Mulcahy.

Just lately I can't think of any movie I have seen that tries to go with that kind of naturalistic dialogue. It's much more staid and focused with the usual back and forth pattern. I wonder if this is something the studios just don't like, since they assume the average film goer is an idiot who couldn't follow more that one track of dialogue at once, or if it's just something that has fallen out of favor with creators.

Furry Fiesta is one of the other two conventions that hold their event at the same hotel we use for Fencon. I was curious how they used the space and how the convention worked, so I went out there today and spent a few hours wandering about the con.

Registration was the first real difference. They had it set up in two bays of the Red Oak Ballroom (the areas we used for programming last year.) Normally we just have that set up in the hallway. They also did something I know we have been wanting to do for quite a while; they had three or four computers set up in the reg room to allow people to type in their information, thus bypassing the massive amount of data entry the convention has to do to maintain their membership list with paper forms.

They also had one thing in Registration that was downright awesome, they had those printable plastic badges instead of the paper badges we stuck in the sleeves.

The third bay of the Trinity was given over to their artist alley. The deal with their artist alley was first come/first serve every day. Which kind of surprised me, but considering how many artists there are in the fandom, I guess it would be sensible not to hog the tables all weekend.

Con Ops was located in the middle hospitality suite, the room we normally use for the con suite. Their con suite was oddly enough downstairs in the Whispering Oaks room, the old night club room we use for gaming.

Main programming and the dealer's room were more or less the same set up as our show, though in main programming the stage was oriented on the north wall.

Because of the Oak rooms being taken up the way they were, the secondary programming rooms were scattered all over the con, with one downstairs, and the other two on opposite sides of the second floor.

I got there about ten this morning, and stayed till about three. I noticed a lot of their programming features that Fencon runs in "prime time" were much earlier in the schedule. Their charity auction was around noon, but then they did have other events later in the evening that we don't, including a dance.

Of personal interest to me was their video room. I knew it would run heavy on the anime, but not that heavy. Except for screening the Mad Max films (one a day) everything else was anime. When I met FF's Head of Ops at the Fencon party he was kind of interested in how we acquired stuff for the video room. I might need to start some communication with them to offer a few other options for them.

Personally, I didn't get as much out of the con as I could have since I was on my own and my introverted tendencies kept me pretty distant from the group. I am thinking of going back next year, and making a weekend out of it. But only on the condition that the Great And Glorious Klingon Warrior Of Epic Legend Know Far And Wide As Skippy™ makes an appearance.