More and More

It's Saturday and I'm being lazy. Again. I haven't slept well all week so I have this nagging too-tired headache and huge bags under my eyes. Aaaah! Zombie girl! Oh, wait, that's just me in the mirror.

Yeah, yeah. Whine. Oh poor me. Actually things are good. I wasn't completely lazy today. I did quick Photoshop work on some comic pages and uploaded them. So now Faerie or Bust is going to update daily until March 20. It seemed a little silly to only update weekly when it's several years old and was a 24-hour comic in the first place.

What else? Aeryn Daring updates tomorrow, assuming I get around to uploading the pages today. That's next on the list. I made a Facebook group for Aeryn Daring, but didn't invite anyone to join as a sort of experiment. It's here. Eventually I'll make one for Fey, too. Assuming this one goes well.

Umm . . . Posted the first three Fey covers on my DeviantArt page. Decided I need to teach myself how to make art using nothing but Photoshop after reading The Phoenix Requiem, a very lovely webcomic. Been reading a lot of webcomics in the last while. Trying to get ideas for promoting my own stuff. Also, there is some really, really fantastic storytelling out there for free. A lot of it I would happily pay for in print form.

Anyway, I think I am now just procrastinating and should get the next Aeryn Daring page ready to go before the boy gets home and distracts me. I'm not so hard to distract, after all. (Not that he does it intentionally. He's very good about leaving me alone when I'm busy.)

Oh yeah, we went to see Under the Sea in IMAX 3D. It was fantastic! (Even with Jim Carrey narrating--you hardly noticed it was him.) If you like ocean things, you must must must see this movie.

How Horrible and How Beautiful

I just read this on Neil Gaiman's blog, and thought it was too elegantly stated not to pass on:

"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."

The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.

"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.

"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."

The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."

This is why I think everyone needs to see Night and Fog, even though it is truly scarring.

Back to School

Yes, back to school week is here again. So, am I spending my Labour Day running around finding pens and pencils and paper and the appropriate art supplies? Of course not.

Today, I'm blogging. I did a couple of short news posts for work. I blogged a game review (Pirates: Legend of the Black Buccaneer, the game so obviously not a rip-off that they had to put a disclaimer on the box.) (But I liked it, actually.) for my Gamer Advisory Panel blog, which is so neglected that they don't send me demo disks anymore. Pout. And I am blogging here.

Later, I'll work on finishing a couple of small book projects. And I'll get in some video gaming. I'm working on the first Untold Legends for PSP right now. It's an RPG, and my character is an alchemist. Oh, and perhaps later I and the roommates will watch Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, since Doctor Who appears to have been booted off today's schedule in favour of a football game. (Really, a football game!) (Football!)

The other day I found a bookbinding blog done by someone in Nova Scotia: My Handbound Books. I should probably drop her a line. Anyway, on said blog I found some interesting projects. One was a simple little book using origami waterlilies as the book block (aka pages). So of course, I made one.



I had to add some text, though--old haikus about water written in pencil crayon on the inside of each lily.



Yes, it's pink. I wanted to use colours I don't like for the first try, in case something went wrong. I might make some more of these. They could be nice stocking stuffers, or even holiday tree decorations. Hmmm . . .

As for the rest of the week, I don't actually have class until Friday. Class officially starts Thursday, but that's my off day. I work 9-12 Tues, Weds and Fri (usually Mon, also, but today's a holiday). I'm hoping to switch this to 9:30 to 12:30, since I don't need a whole hour for lunch, and that extra half hour in the morning makes a big difference. Tuesday after work I'll take in my student loan papers (I meant to do that Friday, but I forgot to take a voided cheque) and get my U-pass (yay, we have U-pass this year; no need to buy bus passes every month).

So yeah. Work three days, a few errands, and then Intermediate Lithography on Friday. Bob will no doubt leap right into the lectures and demos. Printmaking classes seem to be much more intense than just about anything else I've taken.

In between classes and work, I'll be making books. I'm waiting for some paper to come in now for one of the big book projects I'm working on. Then it'll be ready to actually bind. At some point I'll need leather for the cover. The other big project still needs some intaglio printing done, but now that they have the paper in at the student store, I can do that any time. I plan on finishing it in the second week of class, before the printmaking studios get too busy. Then I can start binding that one. But I need to find some wood, and someone who can take one 1/2 inch board and make it into two 1/4 inch (approximately) boards. I'm hoping to find someone in one of my classes who took Wood and Metal and is thus allowed to use the wood shop, which I am not. I will bribe them with candy. Or a handbound blank journal.

Beowulf!

Seen the trailer for Neil Gaiman's version of Beowulf? No? See it now . . .