I died this morning. The weather was somewhere around 12° F and I had to get up early which I thought would make for an unpleasant death but I actually rather enjoyed it.

I’m not sure the movie has a title yet but Mike Partlow and Paul Disdier are working on a short WWII film and I was recruited to play the part of a dead American soldier.

I got to spend about an hour and a half covered in cold, sticky fake blood. It tasted pretty good but we had some problems with it freezing and I thought it might have been just a touch too red but that part will probably get fixed in post. Here’s a pre-photoshop version of the image above.

I forgot how much I like being covered in fake blood and I now wonder if everyone gets as much joy out of being covered in red corn syrup. I remember when Aaron and I filmed our “Concentration” short film and I had a drill go through my head. It was ten in the morning on a Tuesday and I walked past the coffee shop window. I couldn’t figure out why people were looking at me. Was I dripping on the carpet? How embarrassing.

I can’t wait to see what my gurgling and coughing look like on the big screen. I have great faith in Paul’s abilities after seeing his edits and color balancing on his “Freakin’ Fungus” trailer.

I’m very very pleased to see that Automattic has landed a massive chunk of change and will now be kicking ass with a much firmer foundation beneath them. If I had money, I’d invest in them too because Automattic is the group behind WordPress and BBPress, some of the best open source software available today.

We use WordPress for Orphan Army and several other blogs while BBPress is the awesome Bulliten Board we’ve adopted for our forums. I feel very good about those decisions now knowing that both programs are likely to have a very bright future ahead of them.

Keep up the good work over at Automattic! Here’s hoping the company never gets bought out by AOL or some other big dumb soul crushing giant! Huzzah!

I’m going to have to check Google tomorrow but I suspect today’s XKCD comic is going to send the blogger death count through the roof.

In other news I’ve been keeping fairly busy with the launch of our new television show and the ongoing effort to wind down my last straggling commercial projects.

New films are on the way and I finally got around to posting a comic on the Alaska Robotics site. Hopefully I’ll be able to show a little more dedication this year, I feel like I got sidetracked too much last year and let a lot of things get in the way of making comics and films. Clean slate. Time to kick ass. I love New Years.

Here’s a preview of my latest work, “Catching the Crosstown Night Whale.” It was inspired by Kazu Kibuishi’s illustrations for the Flight comics anthologies.

The crosstown night-whale is like a bus driver. He’s not necessarily grumpy but there’s a bit of monotony to his job. He’s glad the war is over but secretly wishes he were still serving on the flying whale brigade instead of spending his autumn years working for public transportation.

Long live the queen.

If you’re in Juneau this Friday, stop by the Ruby Room for Gallery Walk and say hello!

NPR’s “On the Media” has issued a writing challenge for National Novel Writing Month. Here’s what I wrote (I didn’t include the title in the word count).

Flight

The armored angel plunges through clouds, whistling playfully.
Her impact destroys us.

In an attempt to win 5000 bucks we created a short film about cookies for a contest a week and a half ago. There were almost no submissions at the time we entered and the quality of the existing videos was quite poor, so we thought our chances to be good. The film is a bit technical, and I think it’s also rather dull, but it got us to the final round (mostly based on the competition). The five finalists were all invited to D.C. to screen our films for industry experts who would then crown a winner.

I didn’t meet dubya in my time at the capital (though I think he may have flown over me), though I did have an opportunity (albeit slight) to influence public policy while I was there. The screening was part of a town hall on behavioral advertising on the web held the the Federal Trade Commision. They are starting to look into what kind of (if any) regulations need to be placed on web advertisers in regards to consumers’ privacy rights. The town hall was remarkably interesting and terrifically boring at the same time. The big names in the industry were there (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft) and basically opposed any sort of government control. They also promoted the idea that if consumers didn’t trust them, business would dry up and they would disappear overnight so that regulation by the government was unnecessary. Though it made me wonder, does anyone really trust Microsoft? Watchdog groups were also present, but they didn’t really seem to have any plan of their own to promote, or perhaps just had too many… Read the rest of this entry »

I like the idea behind this clever little art/code project called Mutating Pictures. The program generates random mutations of an image and based on user feedback decides which mutations survive and continue to evolve.

I’ve been using the Miro player to track YouTube RSS feeds and currently have a channel setup to capture any videos with “Juneau” in the keywords. Mostly I get crappy home video footage of people visiting the glacier or video performances by a band named Juneau. Today I finally hit the jackpot.

Weird Al came to Juneau in 1995 and put on a kick ass concert at Centennial Hall. It was pretty much the pinnacle of live music experiences during the first 20 years of my life. I remember waiting in a big line after the show so that I could meet him. The guy in front of me asked to touch Weird Al’s hair. It was.. weird.