Category: personal info

Functional Friday

I need another three or four hours of sleep, so this is going to be a pretty light day. I did want to be sure to once again publicly shame myself though, as it seems to be serving the useful purpose of keeping me on task.

  • Lukas & Nan is currently 11% done. I realized I’d started my first scene too far into the plot, so I’ve been doing a lot of structural work and not throwing a lot of words on top that I may need to change down the line.
  • My serial project has been further fleshed out. It’ll be a story in four parts, and it’s my intention to finish the first half before putting anything up. I feel like the format is solid and the story flows like water, so there’s really nothing to complain about here. I’ll get a word count together for next Friday, but there’s no real way to guesstimate how much is complete because of its more freewheeling nature.
  • Lovely Alex has been doing sketches for the gag comic, but it’s a tough haul as we’re swimming in babies over here. Still, things are moving along slowly – we’ll see how the Gods Of Slumber feel over the course of the weekend.

Dream Time

I go through odd cycles of dream repetition: years after I’d moved I used to regularly dream that the town I grew up in was being leveled by a nuclear explosion. It would always start at a distance and then roll towards me from the horizon, with a crushing sense of inevitability.

More recently many of my dreams have forced me into having to board a futuristic plane.

(Sometimes it’s just for inter-city travel, sometimes it’s a shuttle that does local-system planet hopping, but it’s always the same craft.)

The machine is full of cream coloured plastic – the interior is likely my brain mashing together the planes and trains I’ve been in. Orange cloth shades cover the windows, which seem to be made of exceedingly thick plastic. The seats are blue with coloured flecks randomly distributed.

The plane body is similar to NASA’s shuttles, but its made of a gray metal, like a DC-3, and the wings, although swept back like the shuttle, are twice the size.

The plane takes flight from a long chromed-steel platform, with regularly spaced ribs that shorten as the strip continues.

The launch faces onto a huge bay, and every time we take flight we’re slammed with acceleration Gs – just before the left wing rips off, at which point we inevitably corkscrew into the water at an immense speed.

Frightenstein

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsaFDZfz8Lc]

I’m just starting to realize how much Hilarious House of Frightenstein, and the work of Billy Van specifically, shaped my childhood.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA0UsMPjyWk]

Frightenstein.com lists Billy Van as Count Frightenstein, Bwana Clyde, Gorilla, Grizelda, Librarian, Maharishi, Oracle, Pet Vet, Singing Soldier, and the Wolfman – and yet he sells each one. The site also mentions that he was the child of a vaudeville family, which certainly comes through in the gags – the non sequitur jokes, the two man setups, the character work. Was Hilarious House of Frightenstein the last gasp of the classic vaudeville formula [for children, in a low budget broadcast, on an educational station]?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjpS878VatI]