Before you read the latest Living in the Geekdom, be aware of a few things. First, I've decided to take the comic into a much broader territory. No longer is it necessarily about RPGing. Also, I'm trying out each panel as an individual image. Should be easier to read. Finally, please vote in the poll.
Alright, so as I've said, please vote in the poll. I know most of my friends don't care one way or another, but that's really not the point at all. So you're not a geek, just humor me. If you have a real funny zinger, go ahead and let me have it. If not -- if you have the same old tired groan-inducing snide comment geekery -- go ahead and save it this time. Maybe charge up your wit factory and really say something good next time.
This marks the beginning of a comic story thread. Trust me on this one. It'll get pretty good.
Anyways, this one was a fun one to do. Notice the addition of a new character. If you're wondering how long it takes me to do these, just take a guess and then add 10 hours to that. This one's been in the works for a week and a half or so -- off and on.
Once again, July 14th was a smashing success. The slip n' slide had a sort of car wash building with a flappy door on it. Here's Scott Hanna taking the dive right at the beginning of the night before he had to go to work.
Added this year was the freedom water drinking competition as well as the little red wagon float competition.
Brandon Smith handily won the freedom water competition by drinking, I think, nine cups of tonic water/Perrier. That was a full five cups ahead of the next person. I probably should have told him that he only needed to beat the next guy by one cup, and that he probably drank five cups of the stuff in vain. He also tied for first place in the milk drinking competition.
It was Scott's idea to do the wagon float competition which probably explains his win by default. Here's the manatee/barbie/zombie float he brought to the table.
I forgot to get a count this year. My guess is about 35 over the course of the evening. If you attended, please comment. Let's get an accurate count here.
Oh look, here are the people who threw up last year. No such luck this time around. I think since we extended the drinking contests through the whole night, people were a little more conservative.
After winning the red wagon float competition, Scott wowed us with his freestyle slip n' slide skills.
The wagon, slip 'n sliding and also the bringing of the July 14th photo opportunity cut-out solidified Scott Steele's position as reigning July 14th monarch.
The question came up last weekend: east coast or west coast? Despite often not having a left-turn lane, I would definitely say east coast. I don't like the sun and I don't like volleyball. I certainly don't like the vastness of concrete that is Los Angeles.
Surprising then that I enjoyed myself so much this past weekend. In a nutshell, Joe and I needed to make a presence at our first film festival -- The All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival. We decided to have Jen, Margie and Zo drive us there.
I'm not going to elaborate on a ton of photos like I did with my last California trip. I stuck everything you need to see on Facebook, right here (I hope that link works). Nevertheless, here's something you won't find on Facebook (yet). It's our iPod karaoke that we did as we thought Jen's car may be overheating.
Turns out the car wasn't overheating, it was simply breaking entirely. Or so we thought. The mechanic at Barstow said the repairs would be extensive and time-consuming. Joe then rented a car and we were off again.
Totally arrived in the climate-controlled environs of Los Angeles safely. Here is my meal from Pink's Hot Dogs:
Later that night we hit Santa Monica Pier. I should NOT have done headstands in the water fully clothed. Hmmm. Actually, I have no regrets.
One thing I've forgotten to mention is that we did this whole thing on Joe's birthday. As his birthday present he beat the tar out of this poor kid at Guitar Hero Arcade.
Here's a more beautiful picture of Santa Monica Pier than real life.
Take a look at this picture. When you're on the Santa Monica Pier of life are you the one yearning for what's in the distance, or are you the one taking a bite out of what's in front of you?
Saturday was the day of the festival. Here's my meal at Pann's Diner. Pann's was the restaurant prominently featured in Pulp Fiction.
Here we are in front of the press runway for the film festival. Notice the awesome uniforms Joe had made for us.
It's weird. I thought I was going to be really uncomfortable at the festival scene and hate everybody. I was only half right. The people there were really stellar. Everyone we talked to was super friendly to us and there was a wonderful spirit of camaraderie. I tensed up quite a bit when our movie was shown, but it seemed to roll quite well.
The wonderful news of the evening, but not quite news to Joe and me was that we actually received a reward. Our film was the only film that made it into the festival's "Micro Documentary" category. Who knows how many entered that didn't get in (I supposed there's a POSSIBILITY that nobody else entered)?
Due to camera issues, we didn't get our entire acceptance speech, but here's what we got:
Here's our gang at the awards ceremony:
Here's a meal (not mine) from Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles:
Stunning view of L.A. from Mulholland Drive. Note the power lines. Man! Los Angeles is sure missing a sort of organic appeal.
Here's a drink from that taco place near Manhattan Beach we went to. Does the guy on this cup look like me? Is he a guy from Eagles of Death Metal?
Anyhoo. Film festival: success! Los Angeles: success! Lots went wrong, but it seemed mostly right, which was more than I thought it would be.
In the meantime, it behooves me to say that I'm strangely heading to the Los Angeles area for the second time in a month. I'd rather hit Diego or Francisco, but duty calls. I'll be in Hollywood schmoozing with production types at The All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival with Joe. Our dunkball movie will be highlit.
Please let me know if you need anything in California. I'm already shuttling some fruit into Cali for a couple of shady friends. You'll have to give me a call.
While you're waiting for me to get back, here's a delightful Jon Demand from a couple of months ago. Yeah, goofing off. Glorious.
If you're wondering why we're blindfolded, it's so that we'll keep singing despite the spectator laughter.
Okay, so a few days ago I had an intense yearning to start doing these again. It's actually been a year if you can possibly believe it. This one's been in my head for some time. If nobody minds, I'm going to take the comic in a new direction after this. Well, maybe not so much a new direction, but a big expansion. If I keep the comic going it won't JUST be about gaming.
You may need to click on it to see it properly. Here it is:
Note Joey on the computer screen. When we used to play we used to Skype Joey in.
While playing these games sometimes you have to roll the dice to see if your character notices subtle events. I always kind of thought that was weird because if you don't roll well enough, you're kind of just supposed to pretend that nothing's up, but the fact that you have to roll in the first place obviously means something is up, but your character doesn't know that, but YOU are your character, blah blah, etc. It's sort of like if you heard a car running through the living room of your house, but you don't actually SEE the car, so you assume it was nothing. Actually the point of this comic is that oftentimes geeks are unaware of the life around them. At least that's the way I am. ALL THE TIME.
Do you ever get sick of checking my blog for interesting information? Is Google Reader not "automatic" enough for you? You may be in luck, because I've just finished partnering with the robots who are about to enslave us.
Meet Robot Rex!
Robot Rex is a well-behaved automaton who is in the process of recording my blog posts to audio form! It's actually quite fun, zen and hypnotic!
If you subscribe to the Robot Rex Podcast, my blog posts will download directly to your computer and your iPod or iPhone will sync them up as soon as the chance is there! Then you listen to Robot Rex in his lovable monotone and practical voice say my words! You will never have to READ my words ever again!
But Robot Rex is more than just a means toward illiteracy. Robot Rex will undoubtedly help us connect to all those cute little A.I.s struggling toward self-awareness. Just listen! Robot Rex is like the Joshua computer from Wargames with an iron lung! Listen to my dry humor as it comes amplified through a cold, heartless computerized sound amplifier! So very zen indeed. Zen indeed.
Click here to listen to this post as read by Robot Rex!
Here is a picture of me holding up several Youngblood comic books.
This information is incredibly boring unless I tell the slightly less-boring story of how I got them.
Surely you sometimes delve into the incredibly humorous My Religious Blog. Well -- Matsby, the guy who does it, hosted a cold cereal party this last Saturday. If you check the link in the previous sentence you'll see that one of the prizes at this party was this Youngblood collection that I'm now holding in the above picture. I only knew about the little get-together because I follow the guy on Twitter. Doing nothing else, I dragged Joe and his new iPhone (which told us how to get there (see the previous post for the harsh reality of this fact)) over there and won some free Rob Liefeld comics (even though Matsby said that Liefeld is an atrocious artist).
The point is, I got free stuff by going to a party thrown by a guy I don't really know at all and it was only slightly weird since the other people there were pretty much his married friends.
After that, I got onto Twitter, and whined about how I lost it. Lo and behold, the company that I won the hat from actually heard my whines and messaged me that they wanted to send me ANOTHER podgineer hat. How nuts is that? They must have done a Twitter search for their own handle names and came across me complaining.
Anyway, the moral is: get on Twitter and follow me!
I've always said that one day robots will rule the earth, and it's not JUST because my whole life I've engorged myself on movies with that same premise. Recently I Googled myself and came across this:
My name popped up on this site BEFORE it popped up for this blog that you're reading right now. This particular site seems to be a place where people send mp3s to their phones as ringtones. Strangely, VERY STRANGELY, "beeMP3" is offering the DVD commentary of Pretty in Pink that Maria, Monica and I did a couple of years ago. Yeah, that's right. IF YOU WANT, your ringtone could be the three of us talking about Pretty in Freaking Pink for 45 minutes.
I guarantee that no human being bothered to find this mp3 online somewhere, converted it into a ringtone and then made an accessible web link to it. Wanna know who did? Robots.
Yeah, not robots that look like The Terminator or R2-D2 or anything, but robots without bodies -- spritual robots in a sense. In a less dramatic sense, programs. They're gonna rule the earth just like in all those sci-fi movies. And they're not even waiting to strike. It's not a matter of when they achieve consciousness. They're not going to take us over. We're simply going to give everything to them.
A couple of days ago I was talking to Stephanie about what she did that day. She said that she was feeling lazy, so she watched tv and Return to Me was on. This made her happy because if it wasn't on tv, she wouldn't have watched it. She enjoyed it, but actually said to me that she wouldn't go out and rent it.
Have you noticed this phenomenon? Here's an even more extreme one and it's all about me. Every time the movie X-Men is on FX, I always start watching it. It's not like I wouldn't go rent it... because I OWN it and NEVER watch the version I own -- the version that's clearer, that I can fast-forward and has no commercials.
I have two explanations for this phenomenon.
1) I enjoy watching broadcasts rather than personal viewings because there's a thrill in knowing that many other people are having the same experience at the same time. It's community pride and cultural consciousness. This also explains why I prefer to listen to the radio in my car instead of cds (and because my cd player's been broken for the past six years).
2) Human beings have been conditioned to enjoy being told what to do.
I believed in explanation 1 for a very long time, but it didn't quite seem so believable. Now I'm thinking the sad truth is actually number 2. Steph couldn't get enjoyment out of choosing Return to Me from the thousands of movies she could have watched. Tv had to tell her to watch it. And me... I'm far far worse.
Actually, "worse" is a pretty negative word. I never actually said this was a bad thing. In fact, The Robocalypse will be totally sweet. I can't wait. Seriously, this is totally my thing.
Jon Madsen Jon Madsen Jon Madsen Jon Madsen Jon Madsen Jon Madsen Jon Madsen is awesome. I only said all that because I'm still mad that the Google robots aren't finding this blog when someone searches for "Jon Madsen." Maybe it'll help slightly.
This was three years in the making. Actually, we played basketball one afternoon with some video cameras, waited three years and then put it together into a movie where we make constant fun of ourselves.
If you've got nothing to blog about today, we wouldn't be offended if you embedded it on your blog. Joe would love it especially. It's his birthday, after all.
This past weekend and most of the week was the semiannual (biannual? Which is the one that's every two years?) Madsen Family Whatever. This year we decided on Disneyland and had my normal brother Andy organize it. Actually he's pretty normal except that he's unnaturally obsessed with Disneyland.
I rode down with Mom and the stepdad to Vegas where the family set up Winter Quarters for one night. My sister lives in Vegas in a brand new beautiful house that she and her husband just finished moving into at 4:00 that same morning. Here's a shot off the loft balcony where I slept. Yeah, long time exposure. Turned out pretty cool.
My mom and dad's theoretical 50th anniversary would have happened this past weekend so we got Mom a big cake. She actually ate that whole thing.
Here is a picture of some of my family on the walk to Disneyland from our hotel (seen in the background; resembles a riverboat). It sorta looks like we're crossing the plains.
We went over to the park at like 7:30 am in order to have that tiny window of time to ride the rides at our leisure before half of the country's population (and many Japanese people) show up. Our first choice? Splash Mountain.
There were so few people there that early that we had the opportunity to ride it again immediately. I and some of my nieces and nephews took that opportunity. In order for some of my smallish nephews to ride, they made me take the "fatty" seat in the back. Then the ride operator was totally like, hang on to your hat! I was like, I just rode this and my hat did fine. Whatev. Turns out the back seat makes your hat fly off, because that's what happened to me. My cool "podgineer" hat? Gone. Hey! I thought it was cool anyway.
Here's a picture that I took of the picture I was too cheap to buy of my nieces, nephews and I just before my hat fell off.
Here is a Kodak "picture spot." Kodak was awfully nice to point out what signs I ought to be taking pictures of.
We rode Big Thunder Mountain several times, because it was only shut down half the time. Most of the rest of my family rode it at night, which I hear is a wonderful experience. Unfortunately, I only rode it twice; both times in the middle of the day.
I'm always on the lookout for places of business with names that look like they'd be in a Simpsons episode.
Speaking of Simpsons, whenever someone says "Matterhorn," I automatically think "Murderhorn."
Here is another picture opportunity sponsored by Kodak. My camera actually is a Kodak. I wonder if camera owners of different brands are as welcome at these "picture spots." I was hoping to find more, but I really only saw two picture spots the whole time.
Here's probably the most hilarious video you'll see all day. It's of Space Mountain (which was seriously closed 75% of the time for some dumb reason and I only got to ride it the once). If you've ever been on it, you might be able to see the appeal in the video. If you never have, you'll wonder why it's the most popular ride at Disneyland. Its appeal is that it actually strips away the sense of sight. That's why it's got the longest wait. Could the same sensation be achieved on Big Thunder Mountain or Matterhorn if the eyes were closed? I dunno. I wouldn't willingly do it. I need to be compelled to have that kind of fun. Perhaps the music helps.
So on the second day, we met for dinner outside the park, but 15 minutes before that happened I ran to Space Mountain (through the Disney Parade!) real quick to get a fastpass there. I barely made it in time to discover they had already booked Space Mountain for the rest of the day! Sheesh. Just close your eyes on some other ride, people.
I ended both days in the magic kingdom by riding Haunted Mansion (while most of the rest of the fam were on Big Thunder Mountain). The second time I was totally alone. Love that ride. It got me so pumped for Halloween.
I didn't take my camera to California Adventure because by that time I was almost out of battery. California Screamin' would have been awesome to take video of, though. Soarin' is plenty fun, but it doesn't hold a candle to The Tower of Terror, which was probably my favorite new thing that I did on the whole trip. Word of advice though: when you go to California Adventure, do the Toy Story ride first. You get to shoot stuff at targets and it's 3-D and you get to keep score with the person next to you and everyone else if you want. The ride doesn't offer fastpasses, so if you go late, it's like an hour wait. Oh! Also the rapids ride is wicked fun with a surprisingly short wait. Maybe because it was a frigid 70 degrees out while we were there. Seriously. Vegas and L.A. were wicked cool over the past week.
So after all that, on the way home I hiked Angel's Landing in Zion's with my other brother. We're sort of the odd couple. We shared the hotel room the whole time. I'm sloppy and lazy while he's meticulous. I think he's more extreme. I mean, the guy makes his hotel bed for cryin' out loud.
Here's the warning sign in front of Angel's Landing.
People who've hiked Angel's Landing know the thrill. The thrill is you could die. They've got chains staked into the rock to hold onto as you ascend. It gets pretty steep and there's like a 500 foot drop on both sides of the trail. We talked to the Zion's shuttle driver and asked how many people die on the thing. He said a couple a year, but it's always because they went off the trail and not the hazards of the trail itself.
Here I am showing how bald I can be sometimes and also how far up we are. That's the Mississippi river up at the top of the photo.
Here's a picture of my brother in his usual pose of, "Here, take a picture of me!"
Here is my brother approaching summit.
Here is a picture of my brother taking a beautiful picture.
Here's an awesome picture. Also, my brother's in it.
Here's a squirrel I met. Our Zion's shuttle driver told us not to feed the squirrels because it brings out aggression in them. I named this squirrel "Tub Gluttonous."
Here I am. I hadn't been in too many pictures so far, really so... here I am. Since I'd lost my hat, my brother lent me one of his Eurotrash dew rags, which I'm sporting.
Here's me again, but showing my Klingon Che Guevara t-shirt. My beard, glasses, hair and rag make me look similar. Like some kind of leftist revolutionary.
We didn't notice how cool these switchbacks looked until on the way down. On the way up, they just sucked.
Yep, so that was the big Madsen trip! Honestly, it was funner than I thought it would be. I actually really enjoyed Disneyland. Possibly even more than Magic Mountain.
I'm just about to leave on my family trip to Disneylalnd. Figured I'd better write something just in case my Matterhorn bobsled flies off the track or I go completely nuts while dealing with so much family at once. Btw, suggestions for a fun Disneyland experience? Please text me. I hear that Captain EO doesn't play there anymore. I'm not sure what else to even do there.
Speaking optimistically, I've hit it pretty lucky over the past week (with the exception of failing to successfully call-out a would-be employer about not paying me). For one thing, I actually managed a tax return. This was awfully nice of the U.S. government considering that back in April I actually came to the conclusion that I actually owed. I found it particularly weird (and enraging!) at the time since I didn't really earn anything last year. So not only did I get a check, but in a separate letter I got a statement saying there was a mistake in my tax return and the result was a refund (with the option to complain). I made fun of all those people who thought everything would automatically change for the better once Obama got into office. I guess the joke's on me!
In a related luck story I lost my wallet yesterday. On the bright side I figured it would solve all my financial problems. On the negative side -- well, the exact opposite. Fortunately I found it in the last place I looked which was on the passenger side of my car in the space between the seat and door. Why it was on that side, and why it didn't fall out when my passengers from Wednesday got out of the car, I'll never know. That reminds me, I could use a new wallet. The plastic picture holders in there are really wearing out.
Also I lucked out the other day while walking home from the mall with Cousin Jen. We went a little too northy in our initial approach, so the obvious solution was to cut through West High. Fun, but scary. I immediately went back to my high school self -- constantly worried about getting in trouble. I don't know what they'd even do to us. I suppose they could call the cops on us for trespassing, but like they'd bother, right? They'd probably just put us in high school jail for an hour or so. I was so hoping they'd ask what class we were supposed to be in. That'd be so sweet and would make me feel oh so good.
I've tried mentioning on Facebook, but I'll mention it here: I need blue nail polish. It's related to this year's 14th of July celebration -- which should be stupendous this year! We need a few more celebrations for that evening. Since the 14th of July is primarily dictated by the people, I'm open to suggestions. Since the day falls on Bastille Day we may have a Perrier drinking contest (but obviously we'll change the labels to read "Freedom Water").
I don't drink blood to survive, but my sleeping habits are now almost totally vampiric. It's gonna be a long summer.
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