It's strange...

Arsenal just lost at home to Liverpool for the first time in over a decade, my team is probably the most vulnerable it's been in 15 years. It's been a long, long week, and yet I feel pretty darn pleased with myself right now. G'night everyone :)

Light, Sweet Crude

For about a year and a half now I've been working with Shof and a mutual friend named Chris Feliciano Arnold on a new comic adaptation, a political thriller called Light, Sweet Crude. Last week we were able to get the first 8 pages together and show the comic off at Comic Con (by we, I mean Shof and Chris, I stayed put in Manila).

If you'd like to have a closer look and flip through the first 8 pages, you can do so here. Chris wrote the story and script, adapted from a short story he wrote and got published in Playboy in 2009. Shof did all the art, and I'm doing consultation on the project.

I discovered today...

... that you get to a certain age, and wearing a baseball cap backwards just looks wrong.

I do it anyway.

That time of year again...

... now I get to start watching Star Trek: TNG over from season 1. It's been about a year since I've gone through the show in sequence and I'm so excited!

I wonder whether...

I was looking around my apartment today at my action figures (Superman, The Thing, Asterix, Obelix, Conan), and I had to wonder whether a girl walking in and seeing them littered about experienced the female equivalent of what I do when I walk into a girls room and see Cabbage Patch Dolls and My Little Pony's adorning the landscape.

Still, they don't make My Little Pony's as awesome as this, do they!? Someone HOLD ME!

Journey is painfully pretty

ThatGameCompany make special games, Journey looks to be their crowing achievement, it's just hauntingly beautiful. And that music!

Some screenshots:

I'm so happy I could cry

There's a new Star Trek game in production,this news makes me so very happy. Now pleaaaaaaaaase be a good game. We deserve it.

How to build your own gaming PC, by Eurogamer

For anyone who builds (or has ever tried) to build their own gaming PC, I present this amazing piece of work from Eurogamer on the subject.

Highlights:

Look, your consoles play games just fine. Some of them do other things as well, like streaming movies or facilitating identity theft. You don't need a gaming PC.

1. Should you do this?
Probably not. It's sort of complicated. Take this questionnaire.

Do you know how a computer works?
A. Yes. The hard drive is for long-term storage, RAM is for short-term data, and they both connect to a motherboard, which... [You continue to recite an accurate outline of a computer's workings even though I have obviously stopped listening.]
B. Yes. I type the thing into the Google, and my internet goes to the thing.
C. Yes. I push the lever down, and a few minutes later, my potato waffles are done.
For those who answered anything other than "A," put down the hammer and nails - you are not going to be building a PC today. The fact that you thought you'd be using a hammer and nails should have been a red flag. 

Read the rest here, seriously, it'll put a smile on your face.

Much ablog about nothing.

For the past few weeks I've been feeling increasingly frustrated. I want to blog, but I can't figure out what to blog about. Everything seems so downright trivial! Well, not to me, to me it's actually important, but if I were not me and I was reading about the things the real me isn't blogging about, I'm pretty sure they'd be trivial. 

There's that, and there's the fact that I whenever I think about something truly blogworthy, I'd much rather be lying down. 

Enough! Let's get to the good stuff. Some time back I promised that I'd write about the process of creating a web comic I've been working on, the page below has actually been done for a few months but I'm only now getting around to posting it. I've got a new computer set up here in the Philippines and will at last be getting back to the project. This is actually a page from a third of the way into the book - I decided to start on page 11 you see. There's no text yet (apart from a font style test in the first panel), I hope to post more over the coming weekend.

Ice Cream and Marshmallows

You know those task lists you create in MS Word, or Zimbra, or Outlook that track what it is you're currently working on in the office? Well mine just blew right past comically long. I need to get a handle on things.

At present work is moving a mile a minute. Sure, I complain, but I'm not sure I'd have it any other way at the moment. Besides, I'm still trying to prove to myself I can actually do this, actually wrap my head around properly managing and organizing what needs to be er, managed and organized. It'll pay off personally and professionally. Maybe

I was thinking last week that I need to start writing a journal, mainly because I hardly ever blog about anything deeply personal here. And lets be honest, in a hundred years when I long gone people are gonna want, nay, need to know how I spent my valuable lying around time.

I discovered ice cream with marshmallows in it last week. I've had 3 and a half TUBS of the stuff this week. That can't be good.

I've also been meaning to start writing a series of posts about roMANce Movies for Guys (non-working title), but for one reason or another I haven't got around it to it. My list so far reads thus:

• Karate Kid II (stop snickering in the back)
• Solaris (the 2002 Soderbergh flick)
• The Fountain
• I'm tempted to ad Superman: The Movie.

Oh hey! I had a haircut this weekend (in hopeful anticipation of the resurrection of my estranged dating life). This news is in and of itself not really significant except that it was a "proper" haircut performed by a professional, and not one that was self inflicted. All told I think it went well... except that my barber, a friendly man by the name of Mr Ed (I kid you not!) took to cleaning up the fringes of my haircut with a straight edge, and my poor delicate skin just does not take kindly to the touch of the blade.

Finally, I recently started watching the TV show Frasier, frankly, it's brilliant. I'd caught an episode here and there in the past, but never really kept track of things.

The Tale of Tagaytay

Come, gather 'round people wherever you, roam for a tale of Tagaytay I have to tell.

It's not often I'm caught entirely by surprise, as such it's a rare treat I tend to relish. So far it's happened twice already in 2011, once when my dear brother bestowed upon me the magic of PlayStation, and then again last weekend when a dear friend sprung heinous trap.

Saturday, March 19th. Mabie had talked me into coming with her to play the bongos this weekend (don't ask), it sounded like fun, so I agreed. First Mistake.

Second Mistake? Not bailing as soon as I sensed something was up. We met at a little coffee shop in the mall at around 3pm and were there till 5pm. A little late I thought, but maybe the bongo festivities start at night?

Third Mistake? Getting into the car with Will and Bryan, Mabie's co-conspirators. As soon as we hit the highway, Will said "so wants to break the news?" Cue ominous laughter. If you've ever seen the scene in The Lost Boys where Keifer Sutherland takes Jason Patric's character out for a night time ride on the train tracks, you probably have a good idea how I felt.

In the end? We made our way to the mountaintop town of Tagaytay, where one of Mabie's friends was having a birthday bash for friends and one gate crashing Nigerian. Fresh air, lots of food, lots of booze, and some good conversation capped off a truly fun night, as you can see from the pics below. Also, I got a bushel of fresh lettuce to take home :) Did I mention the party took place at a lettuce farm?

So.. thanks Mabie. Watch your back.

A major "life transition"

Recently I've had to start coping with one of the most difficult "life transitions" I've ever known. It came unexpectedly and I wasn't at all prepared for it, but so far I'm coping fairly well. I am of course referring to the fact that the "confirm" command on my new Asian PlayStation 3 is mapped to the circle button instead of the Western standard "X", which in turn is mapped to cancel out... jarring stuff.

For some this means nothing, but to me it's been a major change, one that's difficult to adjust to after more than a decade and a half of doing things the other way round. Commands I once performed using muscle memory alone have become labored exercises forcing me to stop-think-execute. It would be great to be able to carry this philosophy into my day to day. As Obadiah Stane put it, "no more of this ready, fire, aim nonsense".

I'm stealing time out from my lunch hour to post, I must confess I really feel like firing up my PS3 (brand new, courtesy of the bro) to play some Mass Effect 2, but I think I'll settle for preparing a ham sandwich and some music.

PS. Is the background of my blog a tiled image of a frog for anyone else?