Do you like Axe Cop? FUCK NO YOU DON’T!!!! YOU LOVE AXE COP!!!!!
Appropriately, I bet you’re pretty psyched that Dark Horse is bringing out Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth as a series of comics printed on genuine dead trees! Well do you want to get a preview of the new series?! OF COURSE YOU DO!
HERE!!!!!!
A Planet Gets Axe Envy in ‘Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth’ #1 [Exclusive Preview]
It’s so AWESOME!
Last week I posted about a breakthrough I made about the writing process. A few days ago, I somehow found myself on Judy Blume’s website. I followed a tweet of hers that someone retweeted but I don’t remember who did it. It doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that I spent a little bit of time on her site reading through what she had to say about writing and found advice that echoed what I have discovered the other day.
Before I begin to write I fill a notebook, jotting down everything that pops into my head about my characters and story—bits of dialogue, ideas for scenes, background information,descriptions of people and places, details and more details. But even with my notebook, I still don’t know everything. For me, finding out is the best part of writing.
It’s pretty cool to have such an established author reiterate a conclusion you came to on your own. It makes me feel as if I am on the right path creatively and that is awesome.
After the unmitigated disaster that was my Theme for 2010, it’s time to reevaluate the way I intend to approach 2011. But first, let’s explore what I set out to do for 2010 and where I think everything went wrong because, without exaggeration, everything went wrong.
The thing you’ll notice first when looking over at the tally for the year in the right hand column is that I accomplished basically nothing of what I intended at this time last year. My grand plans to write something substantial every single month AND make three music videos fell right through the floor. Whose fault is that? Mine, of course. But, the other question is am I upset about it? Nope. Not at all.
Where was all the work? It was there, but not in the places I intended. 2010 was a very busy year for me professionally and with other personal projects. As it turned out, I engaged in a ton of projects through the year.
What the hell did I spend all year doing? Well, I cut a film, 6 other videos, a bunch of commercials, I took the whole summer off, I moved out of my old apartment and adjusted to life as a single man, I traveled around the country, I reconnected with old friends, I made new friends, I made music, I partied way too much, and who knows what else. The bottom line is that I was busy busy busy and I enjoyed (almost) every moment of it.
So, I didn’t get the things done I wanted to get done this year, but in the face of a major shift in my life, I was able to accomplish a number of other things. I feel good about how 2010 turned out overall and have no complaints. Sure, in retrospect I could have slowed my roll a little bit and gotten more done, but I needed to get it out of my system too. I also think that the important part about the theme is not that I make something specific, but that I make something no matter what it is. The idea is to be creatively active, engaged, making things.
The theme for 2011 will be…
What does this entail? Simple. For each month of the year I will do something creative that requires more than one sitting. It’s not going to be one-per-month to allow for me to do 2 at once or skip a month if needed, but as there are 12 months in the year, so will I walk into 2012 with 12 projects finished. What the scope or nature of these projects will be I cannot say. The only requirement is that they are creative. It could be anything. Right off the bat, I am thinking of redesigning The Black Laser, getting josephdillingham.com up and running, a short story set in OUTER SPACE!!!!, some music, a music video for my friend Mandy, and whatever the hell else my brain comes up with. Make make make.
The other half of the theme is to slow my roll. If you don’t understand what I mean, it can be boiled down to two words: party less. I’ve gone a little nuts this year and it’s taking its toll on me. It’s been the default mode for me this year. When I don’t have anything to do, I go out. Bad news. I need to figure out ways to entertain myself that don’t end with an empty wallet and a scarred liver. Common sense, I think. Besides, I have some trips planned for later this year and it would be nice to be able to afford them.
There it is. Look out for posts tagged “The Year of 12 Projects”. When the first one is done, I will make a new box on the right. Or I won’t. Wouldn’t you like to know?!?!
You’ll remember a few days ago that my friends Charles and Matt came out with their Better Names for Baby book. Well they’ve been getting some decent press across the old interwebs and I thought it worth sharing with you.
The first, and best, was when they were featured at Boing Boing.
Appropriately, the readership of Boing Boing got the joke and overall people were pretty positive about the book. And why shouldn’t they be? It’s hilarious. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for other sites.
From Church Crunch:
It looks like the author of the post didn’t even bother to read the book at all, but one of the commenters did.
AAAANnnnddd clearly he didn’t get it at all. Oops!
They got a similar reaction to this post about the book from The Bump:
Though the author of the post gets it, some of the commenters seem a little lost.
It was also posted about on the CH Runners forum. The initial post is right on, but some of the comments are damn strange.
…and then they get weird.
Well maybe it’s just that one dude. Overall, the rest of the commenters got it. And then Charles chimed in.
A couple months ago at a screening of The Frontiersman’s Wife, a film I edited, I shocked myself by heckling my own film It was then I realized I am an inveterate heckler to the point that even my own work is not safe from my snarky commentary. Charles is the internet version of that trolling a thread about his work. Hilarious.
If you haven’t yet bought a copy, do. Better Names for Baby.
Preggers and having a hard time thinking of an original name for your forthcoming brood? Maybe you need to pick up a copy of Better Names For Baby, the new book written by my friends Matt and Charles. I vaguely remember contributing one or two to the list at a brunch some months ago, but I will rely on Matt and Charles to verify that claim. I am terrible with remembering things that happen when I’m still asleep and feeding my bad decision making engine with Sunday morning booze and eggs.
Get yourself a copy and check out a few sample pages here: Better Names for Baby
My personal favorite? Slint.
edit//// You can now read the entire book at the link, but I still think you should buy a copy.
Dear iPad users,
First watch this.
Now, let me admit that I am officially jealous. Why? Because you guys get to play with a bitchin’ version of Rebirth for only 15 bucks.
Oh, you say, what’s so great about Rebirth? Let’s rewind to 1997. I’m a sophomore in high school living in my parents house running a Macintosh Performa of some sort listening to Pantera all the time. The computer ran Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Leisure Suit Larry. It could dial into the internet. I had a version of Photoshop (3.0, the first one with layers) that my brother had pirated for me. It had an enormous 750mb hard drive that was filled with pictures and Word Perfect documents and games. No one knew what a hipster, an IED, P2P, the blogosphere, Google, or an iPhone were. Broadband was years off. The only instant messaging was IRC. I got all my demos from the demo CDs (yes, CDs) stuck to the cover of computing magazines. It had a 3.5″ disk drive. It was so awesome.
It was on one of those CDs attached to the cover of an issue of MacAddict or MacWorld or whatever that I got my first taste of computer music in the form of a demo of Rebirth from Propellerhead Software. Of course, computer music had been around for some time already in the form of the demo scene on the Amiga and old Commodore computers, but this was new to me. I had no idea what a TB-303, a TR-808, or a TR-909 were or that they were what Rebirth was emulating. I had no concept of how important the 808 was to hip-hop music. I had no idea that the 303 had effectively created Acid. There was no Wikipedia. How would you find shit like that out? I was just a teenager in my parent’s house in California avoiding my schoolwork and making luscious crunchy electro sounds on this marvelous and, at the time, prohibitively expensive (199.00) piece of software. I just used the demo over and over and over, unable to save, until it would time me out and I would have to start over. I spent a LOT of time trying to recreate the 303 line from New Order’s “Confusion (Pump Panel Reconstruction)”. You’ve heard it, but in case you haven’t listen below.
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/audio/confusion-pump-panel.mp3|titles=Confusion Pump Panel Reconstruction|artists=New Order]People often talk about books or albums of events that had huge impacts on their lives. I think that Rebirth is one of those for me. Couple that with the arrival of Johnny Violent’s “North Korea Goes Bang” on an Earache sampler CD again from the cover of a magazine, and my metal-centric world was split right open. Humorously, the Johnny Violent track was such a secret shameful pleasure of mine that I never really spoke about it to anyone but would still blast it in my bedroom. Listening to it now reveals it to be a little silly, but it was a gateway drug for me.
The combo of Rebirth, the awareness that the creation of such weirdness was accessible, and the Johnny Violent track, the awareness that electronic music wasn’t just bullshit glossy crap, opened up my musical world like nothing else had since my very first metal record years earlier. As the years went on and the stigma I felt for liking electronic music faded, I explored electronic music in depth. The late 90s were a wasteland for interesting heavy metal with nü-metal and rap-metal dominating the scene. Absolutely miserable. Instead, I turned to the sounds of Underworld, Front Line Assembly, Front 242, Future Sound of London, Fluke, Daft Punk, Orbital, Meat Beat Manifesto, and whoever else was exciting and fresh and new.
After the summer of 2002, I had a little bit of money in my pocket and I purchased the then-new Reason 2.5 and a USB MIDI controller. Reason was the successor to Rebirth by Propellerhead Software and it was (and still is) an amazing piece of software. But, with its added complexity and power, the simplicity of making silly little 303 and 808 lines in Rebirth was lost. Sure, you could sample and tweak synths until your eyes exploded and you weren’t limited to strictly linear composition of sequences, but a little something was lost. I’m not saying I would go back, but it was much like learning to edit on a linear taped-based system and the Steenbeck and then moving onto a fully fledged NLE like the Avid or Final Cut. The simplicity engendered by the more limiting systems prevented me from doing a lot of dicking around. Decisions were made and you lived with them. I’ve talked about this before.
Even then Rebirth was lost to me since the Props didn’t invest the time or energy to port Rebirth to OS X. They chose, smartly, to focus their energy on making Reason awesome. Still, the legacy of Rebirth lives on in Reason as a device that will pull info directly from Rebirth into Reason. You can still download it for free from the Rebirth Museum, but it won’t work for me. Alas. Ideally, we’d see them shove Rebirth back into Reason for version 6. No need to make it fancy. Just have it support mods, be sequenceable, be routable and boom. Instant love. And my money.
To bring it all back, iPad users I am jealous that you now have access to one of my favorite, most important pieces of software for a paltry 15 bucks. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t make sense to buy an iPad at 500 bucks (at the cheapest) when I could instead get the much more useful Native Instruments Komplete 7 for the same price. If I bought the iPad with 3G, I could also afford the upgrade to Reason 5+Record 1.5. Pair Komplete and Reason with Logic Pro and I have a formidable synthesizer army capable of unleashing the wrath of the Space Pope on the universe. Nevermind that I’m not that good at making electronic music, it’s still damned fun and it’s money better spent than on trinkets or booze or nonsense.
Does anyone out there want to let me give them 15 bucks so I can put Rebirth on their iPad? Yes?
Sincerely,
The Black Laser.
Dearest Big Free,
I first encountered you at the East River Park waterfront show some weeks ago and you blew my mind. Never before had I seen so much ass being shaken on stage and, I thought, I never would again. Even though I was far away on the beer side of audience area (I’m sorry, it was very hot and I was very thirsty), your energy was commanding. As was the unbelievable amount of ass being shaken. The performance sent me ranting and raving to all my idiot friends who decided not to attend the show. Indeed, a did a fair amount of that ranting and raving right here on this very website. Just type in “Big Freedia” in the search box at the bottom and you’ll find yourself.
I don’t mean that in some metaphysical sort of way, just that you’ll be able to read the posts I’ve written about you.
Earlier this week, my friend Charles or Michael or both of them sent me a link to tickets for your CMJ show last night at Southpaw. Before they could ask me if I wanted to go, I’d purchased a ticket knowing full well that I would not be disappointed. Charles eventually backed out, but Michael went and we were able to rally Sue. She was very excited to get in on this Bounce action. And who wouldn’t be? I love to dance and I love intense shit and I love watching girls shake their asses. Though by upbringing a metalhead, it was brought to my attention this summer through the wise observation of two lovely lady friends of mine that everything I like is really intense. And that’s totally true. This Bounce shit is INTENSE, and, accordingly, perfect for me.
I’ve been preparing myself all week for the show listening to a variety of bounce, ghettotech, Detroit house, and dubstep. You might say I was warming up for the main event on Friday night.
And, boy, was I not disappointed. Dominique Young Unique brought it super hard. I was sort of nonplussed with her at the East River show, but I think her style just doesn’t carry across vast empty spaces. In a small club it was wildly different and much, much better. I enjoyed her set quite a lot. Javelin I could have done without. Big old meh from me on those guys. They’re not terrible, but they were doing nothing at all for me.
Then you came out into the crowd, even going so far as to let people know you were walking through the crowd, and the whole night exploded into ass and sweat and dancing and awesome. I’m actually having a hard time coming up with an accurate way to describe just how much fun the show was to our other readers without just saying, “HOLY FUCK IT WAS SO AWESOME OH MY GOD YOU SHOULD HAVE COME WHAT THE FUCK IT WAS AMAZING!” I think the video below accurately sums up my experience of the show last night.
Some highlights? When you filled the stage with people shaking their asses. Your performance of “Gin in My System”. Michael commenting that there were a lot of gay guys in the ticket line and me shooting him a solid “DUH” look. Giant plastic cups of whiskey at Southpaw. That the show was only 12 bucks. Dancing with Sue and Michael.
But it would have been boring if the night ended there, wouldn’t it? Of course it would have.
Sue, ever the producer extraordinaire, approached Rusty Lazer about where the after party would be. Sure enough, her bluff worked out and he told her that it would be at 285 Kent, a random doorway right next to Glasslands. Michael and his ladyfriend foolishly decided they were too tired to come to the next spot so we left them behind us. At about 1:45, 2 o’clock we arrived and entered the room to find a seething mass of sweaty people under purple light grinding. There was no fighting the sweat in there. For such a high ceilinged room, it was remarkably hot and stuffy, but what do you expect from a room full of dancing people?
After a 5 dollar Modelo Especial (ridiculous, right?), you came on and slew that place too. Sue and I danced ourselves delirious and dripping. We stayed for the entire second set. Happily too. I can’t remember seeing a show twice in the same night before, but yours was one I’d have gladly seen thrice. It’s just that good. I am impressed. We walked out of there at 3:30 in the morning satisfied.
So, thank you, Big Freedia, for bringing some joy to my life. I will gladly see you perform again and will recommend you whole heartedly to my friends, relatives, coworkers, compatriots, wellwishers, and various others. Also, I really love my t-shirt.
Sincerely,
The Black Laser.