I have recently had two very annoying experiences with the online fronts of two different businesses.  First up is Budget truck rentals.  On Tuesday of this week I reserved a moving truck from Budget, using their website.  I picked the closest center to our house as the pickup/dropoff location, and they reserved a truck that I could pick up at 8:30 this morning.

So Stephanie and I headed over there this morning, getting there about 8:00.  We walked up to the office, because we saw a guy getting there and unlocking the gate.  “Are you guys here to pick up a truck?” “Yeah, for Robinson.”  “They were supposed to call you, this location is no longer open.”  “Come again?”  “This location is closed, last Saturday was our last day... what was the name?”  “Robinson.”  He went inside and looked at the four names he had, and said Robinson wasn’t even one of the names he had on his list.  After some discussion, I mention that I made the reservation on Tuesday, after this location had been closed.  He said they were supposed to have blocked that location from the website.  The guy was nice at least, and called around to other Budget locations nearby to see if anyone had a truck that wasn’t reserved, and after about fifteen minutes he found one not too very far away, so we rushed over there to get it.  So it turned out okay, but it was incredibly scary for a minute, because we had to get moved into the house today, and some people from our church were showing up at 9:30 to help with moving and we needed to be there with a truck.  Plus I’m probably going to have to deal with a $50 no-show fee, which will require some kind of hour long phone call to try to explain what happened.

The second situation is with Time Warner.  I called them about two weeks ago to arrange for our cable to be cut off at the apartment and turned on at the house, and they set up an appointment for 1-5 on Friday (yesterday) to turn on the cable at the house (they didn’t have to come out to disconnect at the apartment).  Yesterday morning I wanted to see if the technician could give us a call-ahead before showing up, since 1-5 is a pretty big time window.  I went to the website to find a number, and decided I would go to the “chat with a customer service representative” option.  I wouldn’t have to be on hold forever, and chatting would be easier to do while I was working.  The lady on the chat window told me that a technician didn’t even need to come out, since the last people had never canceled their service, so they would just change the account over to our name.  I was a little miffed at this, because had I not called, someone would have been at the house from 1-5 with no technician showing up.

So this morning, when we were moving into the house, we saw that we had a message.  It was Time Warner, saying that the technician had showed up at 1:50 and no one was home.  When we got a TV unpacked we discovered that the cable had been disconnected and the internet didn’t work.  I called Time Warner and they sent someone out, and when the guy got here and connected everything he said “I’m sorry we have idiots working for us.”

Both of these situations were really annoying, because the people at the website aren’t communicating with the actual people on the ground.  This whole world wide web thing is not new, and its primary purpose is, after all, to be a communication tool.  Both of the situations shouldn’t have happened.

Spoiler warning: If you haven’t seen any of Lost’s third season yet, this post will contain spoilers.  If you are caught up but prefer to not know anything about season 4, even if it comes from the writers and is vague, you might consider this post to contain spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

I think I am now a new level of nerd.  I am blogging about something that happened at Comic-Con.

Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse held a panel discussion at Comic-Con, and you can download the audio of the event, if you are interested.  There is probably video of it out there on your tubes, if you prefer.  In any case, I’ll outline some of the things I found intriguing.

• The show doesn’t start till February, but runs for sixteen straight episodes without reruns.  This isn’t new information, though.

• The filming for season 4 starts in a few weeks, giving them a lot more time to work on each episode.  This also means most of the season will be written, and a good deal of it filmed, before the first episode airs.

• Harold Perrineau (Michael) will be returning to the show in season 4, as an actual cast member (i.e. you won’t just see him in flashbacks).  Michael was never one of my favorite characters, but I am hoping this means Walt will be back in some form.  This leaves one to wonder if Michael actually got off the island and is now returning (with help?), or if Ben lied and Michael will, like Desmond, somehow crash back into the island.

• There will be more flashforwards in the final three seasons.  Starting around 22:30 in the audio, they say:

  At the end of season 1 we sat down and said ... this flashback device is not going to work forever.  The minute that we stop showing the audience revelatory moments from these people’s lives, and the minute that it starts feeling like we’re making it up as we go along, ... we knew that we were going to have to switch gears, and the way that we would be switching gears would be with flashforwards.

• The season 3 DVDs come out in December.

• At some point we’ll find out why Ben was heading across the island when he got trapped in Rousseau’s net (which was indeed an accident, not a plot to invade the survivors’ camp).

• They hope to get to Libby’s story in season 4 at some point (they’ll tell it in flashbacks).

• They haven’t told us about Rousseau’s story yet, because they’ll have to reveal other things that they haven’t gotten to.  We should learn about her in season 4 or 5.

After the discussion, they showed a new Dharma Initiative orientation film, for a new station, “The Orchid.”  This can now be seen on the official website.  You can find some discussion of the video, including screen caps of the frame jumps, by navigating your web browser to the destination of this hyperlink.

This has been a crazy week for me.  It started last Saturday with the move and the craziness we encountered from both Budget and Time Warner.

Then on Sunday afternoon, thirteen days after buying our house and one day after we moved in, our air conditioner broke.  I called some of the people in the yellow pages that advertised 24-hour service, to see what it would cost to send someone out at 10:00 pm.  That ranged from $129 to $199, just to send someone out (not counting any work they would have to do).  We opted to wait until the morning.

Side note: I had two phone calls that went something like this:

“Our air conditioner is broken and I was wondering how much it would cost to send someone out tonight and how soon they could get here”
“You want someone to come out now?”
“Well... I mean, your ad says 24-hour service...”

That was a miserable night, it was at least 85 degrees, and very humid, inside our house, preventing anything that resembled sleep.  First thing in the morning we called someone out to fix it.  It turned out to be a problem with the tube that drains condensation being clogged, causing the unit to shut off (so that water does not overflow).  We may have a warranty that will cover the cost of the repairs, but we have to find that paper among the five hundred or so pieces of papers we signed.

So then Tuesday afternoon, on my way home from work, I got into a car accident.  Fortunately it was not serious, and I was hit from behind so it is not my fault, but we’re down to one car for a few days at least.  I’ll describe the accident with the aid of this diagram from the police report (what you see is this intersection):

So I’m car 2, and the guy who hit me is car 1.  Not shown is that there was a car in the eastbound lane of Poplar Tent Rd, waiting for an opportunity to turn left onto I-85.  I saw that this car would have to wait a while to make a left turn, so I started to make my turn.  But then another car heading east drove around the car turning left, in the shoulder, so I had to stop.  But the guy behind me thought I had gone and was looking left to see when he would get an opportunity to go as he moved forward, unaware that I had stopped.  He at least was cooperative, and didn’t raise a fuss when I said I wanted to get a police report (a police officer I know said to always do that, no matter how minor the incident, so that the other guy can’t change his story later).  We did have to wait about thirty minutes for the police officer to show up, and it was very hot while we waited.

You may not know this if you’re reading this from another part of the country, but we have had extremely hot and humid weather this week.  In fact, as I type this, it is 100°F, making this the third day in a row to hit 100.  And that’s not a heat index; that’s the actual temperature.  Yesterday it was 103, and it may get that hot again later this afternoon.

Something else I learned: lawyers and chiropractors are very quick to send you things in the mail after you get in an accident.  Our police report was made available at 9:00 AM on Wednesday, and we got things in the mail from two lawyers and one Chiropractor on Thursday, wanting to make sure they can cash in on our misfortune.  I anticipate many more such letters.

Lastly, if you’re feeling adventurous, view the Concord Police Department’s web page with Firefox.  Fantastic!  I’m guessing this is the result of a developmestuction environment.

All in all, quite a crazy week.

It’s nearly midnight and I am tired but having trouble sleeping, so I decided to get up and do something other than try to sleep.  When I opened the fridge to get something to drink, I thought about the fact that whenever my eyes are adjusted to the dark and I suddenly expose them to light (turning on a computer screen, opening a refrigerator door, turning on a light), I always completely shut my right eye, and squint my left eye.  I’m not sure why this happens—is it related to one eye being the dominant?  It could be that my right eye is the dominant eye and I am instinctively protecting it from the damage of bright light.  Or it could be that my left eye is dominant, and I am instinctively using the better eye.  I’m not sure because I don’t know how to tell which eye is dominant.   (incidentally, my vision in my left eye is much better than the vision in my right eye, but I don’t think that is related to dominance).

I’ve read descriptions of how to test yourself to identify your dominant eye, but they never seem to work for me.  As I recall, they all say something about looking at something far away and then covering up one eye, and if you still see that object you are looking with your dominant eye.  That may not be exactly right, but the problem I always had with the test was that I got the same result for either eye, so either I didn’t understand the test, or I have ambidextrous eyes.

I think I’ve read that dominance in eyes and feet are in the same ratios as hand dominance; about 10% left and 90% right.  I think there’s also no correlation between them (i.e. being left-handed doesn’t make you any more likely to be left-footed).  But this is all coming from memory and may be completely incorrect.

Or maybe the test doesn’t work because my refocusing abilities are just good; I am one of those people that can look at a Magic Eye image and see it almost immediately, without having to hold the book to my nose or anything.  It’s a skill I remember realizing when I was around seven or eight, and I would look up at the the bottom of the top bunk which was supported by cross bars and by something resembling stretched out steel wool, in a very regular pattern.  I found that by adjusting how far I thought the top bunk was from me, I could adjust how far it looked like it was.  By crossing my eyes a little I could make it get closer to me, and stick out my hand until it was “touching” the bunk, even though I wasn’t touching anything.  The bed would be in focus, and my hand would be blurry.  Then I could push my hand even further, “through” the bed.  It also worked in the other way, if I loosened my eyes as if to look through the mattress, it would get farther away, and I could stick my hand out to it but my hand would bang into the “real” mattress before it got to the place where I could “see” it.  Not that I think this is some elusive skill for which I should be praised... I mean it’s only slightly more useful than being able to roll your tongue.

Well, if any of this has made sense to you... I am surprised.  This is the kind of random crap that goes through my mind when I can’t sleep:  when I’m tired, but I just can’t shut my brain off.  And what you’ve just read is kind of a stream-of-consciousness exercise.  Well I left out the thoughts that are just ruminations of everything that I have done or said to anyone in the last week or two and whether or not there was something else I could have reasonably said or done that would have led to more desirable outcome for any or all parties involved.  But no one wants to read those thoughts anyway.  I’m going to try to get some more sleep now.

same old decent lazy eye fixed to rest on you (aim free and so untrue)

What you are reading right now is the official announcement that the shrimp-shaped person pictured below is looking forward to meeting all of you, sometime around March 19th.

That is all.

Update: Additional information can be found on my follow-up post.

I meant to say more in my last post but I got distracted because I couldn’t upload the picture (I have an admin page I use to upload pictures to go along with blog posts, so that I can do it on a machine with no FTP client, or where port 20 is blocked, but it wasn’t working yesterday).  By the time I walked Stephanie through doing it on the phone, I didn’t feel like writing much post to go along with it.

Some additional thoughts/comments:

• They can’t determine the baby’s gender yet; it will be about two months before we know that.

• The baby is about 2 cm long right now.  That’s less than an inch!

• We could see the heart beating on the screen, at around 170 beats per minute.  That sounds like the baby’s about to have a heart attack, but they said that is a normal rate at this stage.

• It may have been hard to tell from the picture, but the baby’s head is on the bottom-left, and is almost the same size as the rest of the baby.

• Although we didn’t want to tell everyone at the time, this was the main reason Stephanie quit her job working as a pharmaceutical tester.  Not exactly the safest environment to be pregnant in.

• “Morning sickness” is a misnomer, it can occur at any time of the day; Stephanie gets it mostly at night, and it seems like every time we mention this to someone they say that they had worse morning sickness at night too.

I guess that’s all the additional information I have to share.  So, umm... peace out y’all.

Last week I posted a late-night rant on ocular dominance, and since then I’ve read some Wikipedia pages that were kind of interesting.  It seems I was right that there is almost no correlation between dominant hand and dominant foot; however, there is a weak correlation between dominant eye and dominant hand.  I also determined that I am right-eyed.  This makes me like about 60% of the population, in that I’m right-handed, right-eyed, and right-footed.

The ocular dominance test I took before was some variant of the “Dolman” method, which doesn’t work for me because I am too conscious of what is being tested.  But the following test worked for me:  Look at something far away with both eyes open, and then point at it with your index finger extended at full length.  Obviously, you’ll see two index fingers, but you’ll naturally use one of them for pointing.  Once you’ve done this, if you close your eyes one at a time, the one that sees the finger lined up with the object you are pointing at is the dominant eye.  For another variation, if you find that you are pointing at the object with the index finger on the left, you are right-eye dominant, and vice-versa.  When I first did this, I thought that I was favoring my right eye just because I was pointing with my right hand, meaning that lining up my right eye won’t leave the other image of my hand blocking my view.  But when I tried the same test using my left hand, it was still more natural to line up with my right eye.

There were several interesting theories as to why left-handedness would develop in right-handed populations.  Most of them focus on the advantage the left-handed person would have in combat, since the right-handed opponent would be less practiced against left-handed combatants (and for that same reason left-handedness is more common in boxers and baseball players than in the general population).  But there isn’t a good theory as to why we aren’t all ambidextrous, or why there aren’t any isolated left-handed populations.

So back to my original hypothesis: when you go quickly from dark to light, you instinctively close the dominant eye and squint the weak eye.  Yesterday Stephanie and I were leaving a restaurant with some friends in the middle of a sunny day, and as we walked outside I noticed everyone except Stephanie was closing their right eye, but Stephanie was closing her left eye.  I later had her do the test to determine dominant eye (without saying why exactly) and it was indeed her left eye, which is consistent with my theory.

Now for more hypothesizing, Stephanie and I both have weaker vision in our dominant eye.  Is that a coincidence, or is it because the dominant eye is stressed more?

Last week Garrison tipped me off to this story about a thirteen-year-old kid who got suspended from school for drawing something that resembles a giant gun.  Seriously, is that all it takes to get suspended?  If I were that age today, I would probably be expelled.  In fact, they might send me to Gitmo and throw away the key.

I’ve decided that I’m going to devote this week to sharing some of the things that I drew at around the same age.  Beginning around the second semester of sixth grade (which is to say, early 1994, when I was 12 years old), I drew pictures of stick man wars.  This is something I continued for approximately three years, culminating at the start of the second semester of my freshman year of high school (early 1997, at 15 years of age).  During this time I completed five “books” of these drawings.

For today, I’ll leave you two pages from The Book, my first and longest book (fifty pages!).  Stay tuned as I plan to make a post each morning this week before leaving for work.

If that kid got suspended for drawing a gun, then you can imagine what they’d do if they found a drawing like this.  This was basically a catalog of all the weapons I had used or might someday use in my stick wars.  I need to give some context to the “nazi star” you see on the page, before you leave dozens of comments accusing me of being a racist:  there were many different armies in my drawings, one of which was the Nazi army.  The “nazi star” is a swastika-shaped throwing star, which the Nazi stick men would use sometime.  For the same reason you see a calculator attack (one of the armies was Nerds) and a cape smother (one of the armies was “caped crusaders”).  In tomorrow’s post I’ll elaborate on the different armies.

In my books I included advertisements, and here is an advertisement for “Bombs ‘R’ Us.”  I believe the tone of the ad was a parody of some commercial on TV at the time, that said something like “big cars, little cars, black cars, white cars.”  It may not have been cars per se, but I think there was some commercial like that.  I just changed the subject to bombs.  Check out those 10 inconvenient truths locations.  I guess I picked locations that were either (a) hard to reach; (b) devastated by war; or (c) Madagascar.  You’ll also see a reference to Sega’s pre-ESRB video games rating system.

Check back tomorrow morning for some stick wars from The Book.

As I stated yesterday, my first and longest book of stick art was entitled The Book.  In The Book I started out with eight different armies, and partway through I added eight more armies.  The armies included Americans, Feminists, Chinese, Nerds, Nazis, Ninjas, Drug Dealers, Aliens (the kind from outer space, not the kind from Mexico), and Scuba Divers (yes, there was an army of self-contained underwater breathing apparatus enthusiasts).  I apparently stayed away from any armies based on race, at least as I understood race at the time (I thought Arabian was a subset of “white”), and I also tried to balance the number of members of each race that are dying.  I guess this is another thing that could get me sent to Gitmo, as the Americans weren’t doing all the killing (that’s high treason!).

What you see here is the very first page of my first book (not counting the title page, table of contents, or advertisements).  One of the features included is a bad attempt to represent the way the Chinese language sounds to a twelve-year-old who doesn’t speak it.  In retrospect, that is probably pretty offensive.  You’ll also see that there is a “danger room” at the bottom of the cliff.  Personally I would have opted for a hot chicks room, but to each his own.  There’s not much blood in the early drawings, at least not compared to my later drawings (you’ll see this more clearly as the week progresses).  The people with three pony tails, four arms, and two mouths are aliens.  In case you were wondering.

Now I present you with another picture that could have gotten me arrested.  Maybe it could still get me arrested?  This battle took place in Washington, DC and was subtitled “The Clintons Croak.”  I don’t think this was an attack specifically on the Clintons; they just happened to be the people living in the White House at the time.  You’ll see that Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and Sox Clinton all get assassinated.  Well technically, Sox is only thrown from the second floor, which I now know most cats could survive just fine.  There is also a baby being beaten against the side of the building, which was a reference to something that happened in some book we had to read that year.  I don’t remember the specifics.

Next up is a pretty typical battle, taking place in an underground base in Antarctica.  Here I introduced the element of torture, as some dude is holding a gun to a feminist, who is begging him not to shoot her.  We don’t know what happened next, but I think everyone can agree that it was pretty sexy.  I also must have liked the idea of a stairway leading to Hell, as both this drawing and my first drawing featured one at the bottom.  I’m not sure why a secret underground base in one of the most remote locations on earth would have a giant “To Base” sign advertising its presence, but I guess it’s not likely to be seen by anyone who wasn’t already on his way there anyway.

For today’s last image, I’ll leave you with a battle in an underwater base.  I think this was supposed to be the Scuba Divers’ army’s headquarters.  You’ll see a Nazi about to get harpooned (the Nazi soldiers have swastikas for faces... because I couldn’t think of any other way to draw them I guess).  I didn’t realize it until I started typing this, but I totally have a thing for harpooning Nazis.  But that’s okay; if video games have taught me one thing, it is that it is always, always honorable and virtuous to kill zombies, Nazis, zombie Nazis, aliens, and fast zombies.  Speaking of harpoons, Willy (of Free Willy fame) (mispeled as “Wiley”) is getting harpooned.  There’s also a sewage pipe that just pumps the sewage out in the water above the base.  Why would they build that pipe?  If they weren’t going to dispose of it properly couldn’t they just have pumped it directly into the water?  I guess if they did it that way some guy couldn’t be eating the sewage.  And eating sewage is always hilarious.  For more bathroom humor, check out the “john” where someone has really stunk up the place, so much so that two dudes have passed out from the smell (see, you can tell because they are laying on the ground and saying “sniff, sniff... Shoo!!!”).  There’s also a drug deal going down at the bottom of the ocean (hey, that’s where I buy all my drugs).  Hey check out the cracking glass: that’s actually almost decent art!

That’s all for today.  Tomorrow I’ll have some scans from The Book II.

If you’re just joining us, this is part 3 of a 5-part series.  You may want to go back and read part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.

Following the success of The Book, it became evident that a sequel was needed.  At the start of seventh grade, I began work on The Book II.  In this book you can definitely see an improvement in my artistic skill, although a lot of my ideas were getting stale by that point.  I also reduced the number of armies, but I don’t recall the extent of that reduction.

First up is page 13 of the second book, which takes place aboard a pirate ship.  For this battle and this battle only, you got to see pirate sticks.  Unfortunately there were no ninjas in this book, so there is no ninja vs. pirate action.  In this drawing I broke the fourth wall... with a cannon ball.  Doesn’t that make your eyes hurt!  Do you still refer to the barrier between the image and the viewer a fourth wall when it’s a drawing and not a play/movie/tv show?  You can also see the censored profanity that I first started using in this book, coming from the guy who just killed Flipper.  And check out the guy getting delicately split in half by a machine gun.  That must have taken skill!

Next up is a drawing from the bad taste department.  This one took place at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing.  You can clearly see some censored worty dirds in there.  Notice the social commentary here: the press is blocking the road, preventing emergency workers from getting to the building.  That’s a powerful metaphor or something.  There’s also a reference to Beverly Hills 90210 and its overuse of sex.  At least, I think that was something the show was known for.  I’ve never actually watched it.  I have however watched Nickelodeon’s What Would You Do?, which is also referenced here.  Notice even more social commentary on the inefficiency of governmental organizations (in this case, the FBI, who only just now determined that this was caused by a bomb).  And apparently the local news stations are KILL and KKKI.  Which I assume was meant to be pronounced KKK-1.  Since that would be a really bad call sign for a television station.  Get it?

For today’s final image, I present the one that would have been most likely to get me expelled from school: a drawing of my middle school.  With the principal standing out front.  And she’s about to become the victim of a drive-by.  While she says “stop the violence.”  Yeah, I think they might have overreacted to that.  Can you tell by the not-one-but-two “a.k.a. Hell On Earth” banners that I wasn’t extremely fond of my time spent in middle school?  This drawing, like the Oklahoma City drawing, was one where I spent a lot of time drawing the background, but then never drew the stick men fighting.

I’ve also blurred out the name of someone I didn’t like.  Contrary to what you may interpret, this person never actually did anything to me, at least not physically.  Actually I never really got into fights.  I mean, I’m clearly not a violent person.  No, I’ve blurred out his name because I have no idea what he’s like now: I haven’t actually talked to him since probably around the time I drew this.  I’ll let go of the past because I realize now that he was probably a jerk back then because he had crappy parents that treated him just as badly, if not worse.  He’d already gotten more than he deserved for the things he did, before he even did them.  The sad thing is that odds are good he’s in a prison right now.  Or that he has a kid or three that he cares for about as much as his father cared for him.  But I hope not.  Wherever you are, blurred-out-name-guy, this post goes out to you.  Here’s hoping that you’ve done more with your life than the statisticians, politicians, sociologists, and economists would predict.  Maybe you even graduated high school in my class, in which case (if you’re not in prison) I might see you at a reunion sometime down the road.  No hard feelings, okay?

Join me tomorrow as I take a look at World ‸^Stick War III: The Book and Bookstix IV: The Next, Next, Next, Next Generation.

If you’re just joining us, this is the penultimate post in a five-part series.  You can read the first, second, and third posts to get caught up.

I was on a roll.  The Book and The Book II were lots of fun to make.  I had plenty of time in school to draw these violent stick wars, so I next embarked upon World ‸^Stick War III: The Book.  In this book I decided to utilize chapters, grouping similar battlegrounds together.  I also reduced the number of armies to the following six: French, Russian, American, Chinese, Japanese, and Teenagers (yes, teenagers).  So let’s look at a couple of drawings from this era.

What you see here is the first drawing from the “Towers” chapter of the book.  As you might guess, this chapter contained drawings of stick men fighting on top of tall structures.  In this case, they are on bungee jumping towers.  You can see where I originally drew an arch-shaped bungee tower, but then erased it and went with some less-realistic towers.  There’s not much more of interest in this picture, I was kind of running out of ways to kill people.  One thing to note is how much better my drawings of people on fire got.  By this point I was drawing a person on fire pretty much the same way I might draw it today.  Here is a comparison of someone on fire in the first book versus the third book:

You can almost taste the burning flesh and hair.  Good stuff.

Next up is an image from the “Honey I Shrunk The Sticks” chapter.  I included this one to remind everyone just how funny a drawing like this was in seventh grade, in case you forgot.  I mean there is a guy riding a turd.  A turd cowboy, if you will.  (Note to self: if I ever decided to produce moviefilms of a scatological nature, I have a great title.)  You can see in this one that I again spent more time on the background than on the fighting itself.  What’s sad is that I recall sitting on the floor of the bathroom at home while sketching this out.  That’s dedication to your art.

I kind of got bored with the whole concept of W‸^SWIII:TB and ended it early.  As I recall, I didn’t do any work on it in the summer between seventh and eigth grade, and by the time eight grade started I decided I would start a new book instead.  This book would be Bookstix IV: The Next, Next, Next, Next Generation.  I’m not 100% sure, but I think the “Stick Books” to “Bookstix” title change was a reference to Southern Bell changing their name to BellSouth.  Starting with this book, I referred to the stick men in the book as “stix”, rather than “sticks.”  I don’t remember which armies there were in this book, but I know I introduced Arabian stix and a new type of alien stix (which now resembled four-armed versions of Alien).  This book actually had some sense of a story line, although I don’t think it would have won any awards.  So now let’s see summa them wars.

Here we have a battle at a satanic cult.  Which should really be viewed as having strong school spirit, seeing as how we were the Red Devils, encouraged to show “devil pride.”  You will see that Satan is wearing clothes, unlike most of my stix.  There is actually a reason for this:  Keith drew stick-wars also, and his stick men were unique in that they wore clothes.  So it was an in-joke that the devil himself was a clothes-wearing stick.  The clothes-wearing god pictured is also a reference to Keith’s stick men.  Check out the sexy orgy down at the bottom!  That’s pretty hot!  I’m thoroughly convinced that there’s nothing you can think of so perverse that a kid in middle school hasn’t already thought of it and drawn it on paper.

Tension had been brewing between my stix and Keith’s stick men, and this battle is the culmination of it all.  Believe it or not, Bookstix IV wasn’t all about Keith’s stick men, I just selected these two drawings because they were different from what you’ve seen the past three days.  It was nothing personal against Keith; I mean, I couldn’t claim he stole the idea of drawing stick wars from me, since I actually stole the idea from Kevin.  But getting back on track, I really like this image because it’s just so incredibly violent.  Like, Quentin Tarantino violent.  I mean, a guy gets shot, bifurcating his body.  Then, while the top half of the body is flipping over, more bullets take off the head.  So you’ve got a guy with a three-part body, spewing blood all over the place.  It’s dripping off the ceiling!  And in another place, a guy is grabbed by the feet and used like a baseball bat to kill another guy.  And there’s an Arabian guy down at the bottom pulling a double Sub-Zero fatality.  Awesome!  The page after this battle was titled “aftermath of the page 14” and just contained the word “censored” written diagonally across the page in large letters.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series so far.  Tomorrow morning I’ll wrap it up with discussion of Bookstix V, my greatest work of stick violence ever.

“bifurcating” is a cool word.

If you’re just joining us, where have you been??  This is the conclusion of a series on my demented mind.  If you’re lost, try reading all the other posts first.

Bookstix IV was pretty good, it actually had some semblance of a plot.  But for Bookstix V, I went all-out with the story.  There were pages of text between every so many drawings.  The basic gist of the story was that the aliens from Bookstix IV were actually “archaliens,” sent to scout out our planet.  They killed most of the inhabitants, and now the more powerful “nualiens” had arrived.  The only earthling armies left were the Americans and Arabians.  And believe it or not, they actually teamed up with each other, in order to have any kind of hope against their new alien overlords.  The surviving earthlings were known as “Rebyls.”  The entire book followed these star wars of the worlds for independence days.

Another improvement in Bookstix V came in the artistic media.  All blood was drawn with colored pencils: red for rebyls, and purple for aliens.  In addition I used a drafting pencil for a lot of the background work, which had much softer lead than your standard bubble-filling #2 pencil.  So without further ado, here are some pages from the book.

First up is some of that text I was talking about.  This comes from the book’s introduction, and I think is probably the best writing in the whole book.  I still like it, although I have a problem with the way it posits the big bang theory and the theory of evolution as competing theories trying to explain the same thing, when that isn’t at all accurate.  I think most of all I like the way the drawings accent the text, and IMHO this is pretty well-written stuff here, except for the last paragraph maybe.

Moving on to battles, here we have the first one, which takes place on the Rebyl Warship.  Since it was in outer space and there was no gravity, I drew this with the speech bubbles going in all directions.  The explosions with the starfish-shaped light beams are from antimatter guns.  If you look closely you can see quite a clear difference in the darkness of the two types of pencils I used, especially with the text where I probably used 0.5 mm lead in a mechanical pencil.  I like the alien who is shooting the guy with two guns at the same time, splitting him into three parts.  Awesome!

Here is the second battle, which I think was meant to be happening in parallel with the first battle.  This is the aliens’ mother ship, being attacked by the rebyls.  Things to note: a painful alien examination of human reproductive organs (since they seem to like to do that during abductions), and a reference the lyrics to Closer by Nine Inch Nails.  I’m not sure why, I never really liked NIN all that much.  Also, some jokes from the two warship pictures: both of them have someone from the opposite group wondering what kind of spaceship this is, and in both cases someone is reprogramming the ship to have a destination of hell.  Because spaceships can travel there you know.

There was more of that story line that I won’t recount here.  Basically we find that the aliens are seeking Iron Trinicklide (FeNi₃), a substance that is plentiful in the earth’s core, but has been almost entirely depleted on the aliens’ home planet.  Throughout the book the aliens fight their way to a mine in South Africa, the deepest in the world, and start blasting a hole into the earth (to get to the core).  The book ends with a four page conclusion, which reveals that the aliens got the rock they wanted and left our planet in ruin.  That was four pages of single-spaced text, at a time when teachers struggled to get students to write a five paragraph essay.

I tried to start Bookstix VI: Vigilante Justice, whose title page is pictured here.  Unfortunately I lost interest after half-drawing a single battle.  The idea was that the earth was in chaos from the events of book 5, with no police, military, or government, and now the only way to survive was to become a vigilante.  I had intended to improve by using black ink (like, from a pen) for some of the detail work, and everything was to be drawn on plain white paper.  You can see this on the title page actually.  This was concluded at the beginning of my second semester of ninth grade, when I was fifteen.  I guess I just got bored with drawing these things.

Before we go, here are some random bits of information that I either forgot to mention earlier this week, or couldn’t work into the narrative.

• Most of my books were dedicated to “people in the future reading this after I die.”  Hopefully that won’t be until I have grandchildren that find these drawings and say “mom what was wrong with grandpa??”

• If you’re wondering, I pretyped about 90% of the material in these five posts in one sitting, last Sunday.  That’s just one of many ways I maintained a quality level consistent with the The Lord Of The Rings movies.

• I was originally only going to scan one drawing representative of the whole work, but I started looking through my drawings and realized there was way too much stuff worth sharing.

• To give more props, Kevin was doing stick drawings first, then Keith, Garrison, Peter, and I all borrowed the idea to varying degrees over the next three years.  It was definitely either Kevin or me who produced the most of these things though.

• While I was scanning these things, I scanned Garrison’s entry in my eight grade yearbook.  He made a post on his blog about it.  Go check it out if you haven’t already.

• Anyone found on the back page of a sheet of paper would be executed by a character from Mortal Kombat.  I really liked fatalities.

• A teacher did actually see these books once, when I let someone (I think Keith) borrow one of my books (I think the first one) to read it, and he was doing this during class and it got confiscated.  Either Mrs. Mims didn’t understand what it was or she didn’t look inside it, because we got it back later without getting into any trouble.

Well that concludes this week of Kip’s drawings from when he was 12-15 years old.  Let me know if you think this whole five-part series was cool or if it was way too much crap to read.  If you guys like it I may do something similar in the future, if I ever come up with a topic deserving several posts.  I hope you’ve enjoyed it.  And hopefully you’re not too much more scared of me now than you were a week ago.  Have a good Labor Day weekend!