Don't Wanna Know How It Ends {Week 34}

Someone here had a productive week (that's me!). Work, some art projects, an IKEA shelf that I did not enjoy putting together at all! Still, feels a little bit better now that the heatwave may officially be behind us. 

But guess what? Next year my ass is gonna be posting about how excited I am for summer at the end of May 2027 despite the absolute torture that was this summer. Never having learnt my lesson... one must imagine Sisyphus air-conditioned.

Week 34.

On Monday I had some time for personal projects and also tried to play my usual hour or two of Titanfall 2. However, some shithead has been DDOSing all or most of the servers. And this asshole is also obviously aimbotting and cheating. I could download Northstar but I'm not feeling it yet. I may by next week.

Tuesday I finally got some good progress on the zine Alice and I are working on. Still a bit to go but I think it's all really coming together.

Wednesday we had some work, fertilizing the kiwi plants. They look a bit dried out and after the past month, that's no surprise. The corn's having a good time though. We got there before the sun and wrapped it up by lunch. I got to have fun on the tractor some more! 

Whimsical tractor ride.

Corn?

Corn!

In the evening there was some live music and BBQ in the town center. We met up there with some family friends. I put on a whole look and everything. The burgers we got were so bad, which is surprising because it was the same vendors from the brocante in May. The couple that were arguing in front of like 30 people but made a fantastic burger. What a shame... was it the lack of passion? Everything was quite tasteless. We met Sham there and after dinner dropped by our house for a bit to watch my sister and her friend play Far Cry 3 and bother the cats. 

Crepe!

More work on Thursday. I'm getting really sick of not having a scheduled job. I'd love to just... know what I'm doing next month and not be called in randomly. The poplar trees are tall as hell by now and the way they've been planted makes them look extremely liminal. 

Spooky!

Friday I was busy cleaning up my room. It's a total mess and getting out of hand. I've re-organized my closet and I'm trying out this app as my closet database so I'll report back if it's actually worth anything. So far it's pretty good. 

An IKEA shelf also came in and as resident IKEA builder it was within my jurisdiction to put it together. The delivery guys broke one glass and two MDF shelves though so that was very annoying.  

On Saturday me and Tom finally started Saints Row The Third. I played it A LOT as a kid. We played some with my brother about two years ago as well but with the way my memory is, it's like I've barely ever played it. Tom's never played the third game, or any of the classic games, so this was his first rodeo. Obviously the character maker is the coolest part of the game. What I loved doing the most back in the day is making a hot girl voiced by Laura Bailey, in the most ridiculous outfits, listen to GenX 89, and doing every Deckers Gang Operation until I was sad that there were no more... I was obsessed with the Deckers specialist. In general, my obsession with the Deckers and their campy cyberpunk bullshit was kind of embarrassing but justified.

I still love you...

More of the same on Sunday. We're playing the remaster, by the way. And I've got to be honest... it sucks! It looks so weirdly realistic and totally destroys the style of the OG game. And runs even worse somehow. We got new and fresh bugs! Otherwise, we also finished the first season of Parts Unknown and watched the Jerusalem episode too. It's a great episode.

End.

Not a bad week, all in all. I'm just waiting for September to start. It looks like we'll be below 30 at last. Finally!

This Week I'm Excited For...

Probably making my own fun next week. I was going to start some of the comic sketches but I've been feeling that the script needs a re-fresh because a lot of the thumbs don't look good to me anymore. Would like to do that so...

Song Of The Week... 

Since I enjoyed La Dispute at Alice's recommendation so much, I've been going back and listening to their earlier albums too. This time it was Wildlife and honestly, there's not a single bad song. Each one is a story, be it more literal or abstract, a narrator and their life in every song. Melodically, it reminds me a bit of At The Drive-In but maybe that makes no sense, I have no idea and am musically unqualified as hell to be honest. King's Park may seem like an obvious pick but I also can't not pick it for this week. Guttural, brutal, and painful song. Naturalistic speech or dialogue doesn't always work for music but it makes everything hurt much, much more here: "Can I still get into Heaven if I kill myself? Can I ever be forgiven 'cause I killed that kid? It was an accident, I swear it wasn't meant for him. And if I turn it on me, if I even it out, can I still get in, or will they send me to Hell?" I don't think anything good ever happens at motels.

Eclipse Unseen {Week 33}

I'm a changed man. The heatstroke has finally done irreparable damage. Blogging on a Sunday! Posting on that same Sunday night? Like something else that happened this week, this may be a one-in-a-decade phenomena. Alright, this may not last but it makes me feel pretty good to blog on a schedule. It's been an a-okay week. Some things happened on time even! That's a good prognosis.

Week 33.

Terrible Monday. Got gut punched by my period, pleasantly, in the middle of the night. The compounding heatwave left me on the brink. I spent most of the time in the shower or on the couch downstairs, in our only room with an AC. Gathered everyone to watch Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown. Yeah, Tony's not screening anywhere near me in the foreseeable future. Fuck A24! Or fuck UGC or CGR! I don't know fuck who but fuck someone!

So I've had knowledge of Anthony Bourdain kind of second-hand most of my life. When we lived in China one of our friend's had a satellite that let you watch all sorts of US and European TV stations. We mainly perused Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon. Adult Swim on the rare, private occasion. This is when Star Wars wasn't engulfed by The Mouse yet and Clone Wars aired on Cartoon Network (which no offense to the babies who stuck to Disney and the brats who loved Nickelodeon, but CN was the shit).

Anyway, eventually the hour would come when the adults wanted their shit back and we either stuck around or went off to play on our PSPs or something. Well, we led more exciting lives back then, so we may have gone and broken into some empty houses or filmed a found-footage movie about teleporting ancient artifacts (this is because we thought that pressing 'stop recording', moving to a new spot and hitting 'record' again was a genius editing technique that totally looked like teleportation!). The grown-ups loved a travel show or a cooking show, usually Master Chef or Hell's Kitchen or something else high stakes and dramatic. Anthony Bourdain shows seemed very down to earth, political, and confusing next to the expletives, flames, and seemingly endless competition. But it was the best of its kind in hind-sight.

We used to watch a lot of travel shows, even a few years back, before we came to France. I think the forced move really soured the taste of that. But I guess it's back because we had a good time. If you've seen Parts Unknown, did Anthony Bourdain visit your country? How close did he come to your hometown?

Big, big day on Tuesday! My tablet, my beautiful, perfect Huion Kamvas Pro 16 V2 arrived! I instantly unpacked it and plugged everything in. Listen, I'm a firm believer that the hardware is not nearly as important as the skill of an artists, you can make total masterpieces on a piece of shit Bamboo. However... a good tablet does make it easier. I tried it out for about an hour but sadly the cramps got to me. I let my brother mess around on it and apparently he saw God. I believe it.

She's beautiful!

Two screens!

Wednesday was the day of the eclipse. Very exciting stuff. Except we are so unorganized we didn't get any glasses. I watched my mum do... something to a piece of cardboard and foil for an hour. Like, just give up. It's not happening for us. 

Me and Mo went out onto our roof to, and I know this is against all recommendations, peek at the eclipse. Don't do it! I know I did, but I'm an idiot! I threw only a few glances and mostly kept my eyes not just pointed away, but covered. See, the thing is, the eclipse covers the perceived brightness, but the sun's rays will still penetrate your now dilated eyeballs (because they think it's dark) and ruin your retinas. So, I was cowering away for most of it unlike my brother, who climbed the highest peak of the roof and looked outwards. 

He thinks he's the king of the junjle.

I'm telling him, stop looking directly at the sun, it will seriously damage your retinas! He merely smiled back at me before turning his stupid, smug face back to the huge ball of fire in the sky, careless to the future he carves for himself.

Children know!

Luckily the situation was not that bad and no temporary or permanent blindness was suffered. Also the eclipse kind of sucked! It wasn't even partial for us, the moon barely grazed the bottom of the sun and it got just a little darker for like a minute. Disappointing! Apparently, there will be one visible in Spain next year, so maybe we can make a trip out of it. Thursday, same shit. Well... minus the eclipse! That would be insane!

Friday was awesome. Free shit Friday! My mum's been doing an apprenticeship with a very old dude in town who's a master at furniture renovation. He's been meaning to get rid of a lot of stuff, the dude's a hoarder, and luckily some of it made it our way. I'll post about it on the fashion blog later but there were some really great things, especially some coats and pants for autumn and winter. My sister also got this old Sony handycam but sadly it's busted. I fiddled with it but it's doing a weird thing in the viewfinder I wasn't able to find a solution to. Here's a video of how cool the cassette slot is and the weird viewfinder thing, set to Braid's Killing A Camera (too on the nose?) so you don't have to listen to my siblings scream at the Xbox in the background. 

The cats also traumatized themselves by breaking a shelf in our little entry nook. Yoshi didn't come downstairs all day and in his rush to escape broke a nail. Luckily there was no blood and it was just the outside part.

Saturday was the day of all days. The busiest of days. The craziest! It started with a very early trip to the flea market/brocante. It was a sizeable one, a bit low on tech but lots of other good stuff, especially clothes and house stuff.

Kylie fucking who?!

Magical trash alley.

I had the nicest moment with these two girls at their booth. I stopped by and one of them gave me a paper, she just said it's for me and it was a small sketch of me! Riffling through stuff like a rat! It was such a sweet gift, I thanked her profusely. 

It's-a me!

When we got home, we took a little time off then walked to the other park outside of town for the car show. It was awesome, and since my brother recognized most of the European and American models I just had him tour-guide me all over the place. Only sometimes I could be like 'Ah! Mazda!' and that's about it. 

There he is: the most wanted!

Me with the vans.

Van!

Due to miscommunication however, we had to cut the trip short as we locked our mum out of the house and had to go back. Plus, we had a movie seance at Tom's at 2PM.

Naomi also showed up for our re-watch of Frozen and Frozen II. I think they are alright movies. I was never really into the Frozen story. I think Disney stopped hitting sometime after WALL-E. I'm old and lame. Tom hasn't seen Treasure Planet or Sinbad though, which is actually a crime of some sort. That will be our next double-feature!

I kept the box from the tablet because Simona likes it.

Nap in the socks.

Melting some more on Sunday. I've been a bit busy finishing up scans of my old notebooks and sketchbooks this week. The fires made me realize that I'd just lose everything easy if something were to happen so it'd be nice to have some digital backups of my oldest memories. 

The end...

And so this crazy week was over. Celestial phenomena. Trinkets and memorabilia. Fast cars. And then some!

This Week I'm Excited For...

I'm making next week 'managing a bunch of stuff' week. I have so many random tasks that need doing, so hopefully I'll knock all of it out next week. Then I may have some time for my comic beyond next week.

Song Of The Week... 

So I've been really, really enjoying Failure this week. Greatest band name ever? Perhaps. Fantastic Planet is a perfect album, top to bottom. I'm picking Saturday Savior as my song of the week this time, it's just got such a heavy and gravelly chorus. It's unreal!

I'm A Junkyard Full Of False Starts {Week 32}

More birthdays this week, Tom's this time. He's got the same birth year as Mo, so two morons turned 24 this August. I, as king moron, turned 27 earlier in the year. Weird that now that they're approaching their mid-twenties I've phased into my late ones. Pushing thirty, is what they say. I don't mind it, most people don't turn cool until their 40s and that's a fact. Everyone spends decades flailing around, I find. If it's not in fact true, don't tell me, these delusions held up by paper glue and thread are all I have.

Week 32.

Been sleeping like shit for most of July and now the first week of August too. Waking up late, often because I keep waking up during the middle of the night, covered in sweat and hot air, like I'm scarlet fever-ridden Victorian child or something. It's a real additive to the rest of the stress present. So Monday was like that too, I checked out some local stores trying to find a gift for Tom, super last minute and on a very low budget.

Tuesday was not dissimilar, I dropped by the post office, bought Tom a steam gift card, and worked on a sketch for the fourth page of the comic. It's the first page with panels so I wanted to try out how that would look. 

Here's a shitpost for the week. Apparently there was a broadcasting error in Iceland in 2012 where the network aired the Teletubbies with the Sopranos subtitles. I've been thinking about this unholy union for a while.

Absolute kino.

On Wednesday we went to work at Noel's in the morning. Mostly just a bunch of cleaning tasks, we cleaned out his van which was totally trashed since the flood. Mud-caked, splattered, totally gruesome. Wolfie hurt herself again somehow, nearly sliced her toe off on something, the dumb dog. Now she's running around in a cone.

Got home and while Mo took a nap, since we worked very early, I went to the store to pick up some more snack-based gifts for Tom. Got paid at last too! You know what that means... fiscally irresponsible decisions are back!

    Idiot.

Anyway, we came to Tom's in the evening and Lolu was there too which was awesome because I haven't seen her since last May. We played a round of Monopoly, at which I sucked. But also, it wasn't my fault. I kept getting bad rolls and isn't that just the core of capitalism? Tom and Lolu made a yogurt cake that we all sampled, it was surprisingly good considering Tom was a part of it's making.

On Thursday, now that I had some money, both recently received and saved, I checked on the Huion Kamvas Pro 16 V2 again. It was on an even bigger sale than before! I was gonna buy it ages ago, had the money saved and everything, but the stupid gas company didn't let us split money owed from winter time because of their own technical error of some kind so I had to cough up 300 euros on the spot. This was a terrible winter for us. Anyway, it seemed like the right time so I picked up the Huion for around 300, when it's usually like 400. I don't think there would have been a better sale and my brother told me to get it (I suspect he doesn't want to share his tablet anymore...). Nice to get paid but I still want a full-time, or consistent part-time job, I'm really tired of jumping between jobs and never knowing when I'll be called in next. The gig economy is literally evil. Uneventful Friday.

On Saturday we went to do some janitorial duties and Andrei was also installing the new window in my sister's future room. My mum has also been doing the plaster so soon enough Marta will be in her own spot on the third floor. Exciting! My room is nowhere near done but honestly I'll move in there even with the shitty windows come autumn. 

In the evening we watched the new Avatar movie (Aang, not blue people). It was a disappointment... I felt like one of, if not the, most fleshed-out and moving characters in animation were watered down to gags and goofs. Sure, there were some good bits but everyone felt so uncharacteristically hollow... not to mention the tired plot. However, the art was pretty great! Except the faces, which looked terrible and so generically anime. 

On Sunday I got Burnout Revenge and Alien Colonial Marines on the 360 and Tome came over. Burnout has some of the best tracks, some real emo stuff, I love it. Tom also tried out Future Soldier's wave mode with Mo and somehow I was roped into playing it with him once Mo left to call a friend. Anyway, we made it past wave 20, through teamwork, through bitter toxicity and blaming each other (mostly Tom ragging on me, because I'm a very casual gamer except Titanfall 2 and do not care about being 'good' at games), we made it eventually. It was actually a lot of fun and a reminded of what Ubisoft once was. Now they are literal trash! 

Ash tray chic.

We finished the evening with Drop Dead Gorgeous, which Tom hadn't seen. What an amazing movie, so satirical, so beautiful. Literally flawless acting on everyone's behalf. Especially Brittany Murphy, my beloved. 

Week 32.

Everything is still hot as hell, I want this heatwave nightmare to end already. Where are we gonna be next year? Or in 5 years? Or 10? Probably dead!

This Week I'm Excited For...

Allegedly the Huion will arrive next week. I'm so excited! I've never had a tablet with a screen before even though I've been doing digital art since like 2012. Wack!

Song Of The Week... 

Not sure how but Elliott Smith's Coming Up Roses played somewhere this week and it made me want to go back to the self-titled album. Maybe not my fave of his albums but it's basically perfect. Few bad songs on his catalogue, if any. I actually did not realize that 'coming up roses' means something happened successfully, but it makes total sense. Nearly all proverbs and sayings that reference roses mean something exceptionally good, or contrast something good with something awful. It all hurts more: "So you got in a kind of trouble that nobody knows, it's coming up roses everywhere you go." My fave songs of his is also rose-focused, Rose Parade off of Either/Or.