While authorizing a third party to conduct a criminal background check (for my application to grad school), I noticed this:

I clicked the “FAQ” link, expecting “why do you only need to know the ethnicity of Michiganis?” to be the most frequently asked question.  But it was nowhere to be found.

Maybe it’s like how they ask you if you have had gay sex with a man from the Congo since 1976 before you can give blood.  If you answer “yes”, they just assume you have AIDS and throw your blood away without testing it.  Similarly, if you are from Michigan and select the wrong race1, you must be a sociopath.

A few weeks ago I started seeing an ice cream truck driving through our neighborhood.  This kind of surprised me.  I thought ice cream trucks were a relic of the past, much like newspaper boys and telephone operators.  You know, things that are only remembered in modern society due to their presence in 1950’s sitcoms.  I certainly don’t remember an ice cream truck ever coming through my neighborhood when I was a child (unless you count the Schwan’s man).  In fact, I now have the same reaction to ice cream trucks that I have to male gym teachers and men dressed as Santa Claus:  every time I see one I think “that has to be a pedophile.”  I mean, why else would a person drive an ice cream truck?

For some reason this morning, I decided to see how well I could draw the continental United States from memory.

I started with California and worked my way generally to the east and then north.  Michigan and New England are particularly atrocious.  I forgot that Maine comes off the side of NH/VT.  Which themselves come off the side of New York.  I guess those states are just so small that I felt bad for them, and drew them bigger.  Then Minnesota totally got embiggened.  But all in all I think it’s still a perfectly cromulent map.

Recently Penny Arcade made a very funny comic about gifts they receive from PR firms, a topic which Joel Spolsky discussed about a year ago.  This seems like a good time to publicly state my gifts policy here at vacant-nebula.  I’ll now shift to the editorial “we” so that I we sound more important.

We, at vacant-nebula.com, like stuff.  Especially free stuff.  We will accept any gift, be it money or merchandise.  We particularly like high technical devices, such as anything that could be found in Best Buy.

Unlike many other blogs, we do not consider ourselves journalists, and as such we are not bound by any code of journalistic ethics.  In particular, this means that we do feel an obligation to disclose the source of any gifts, or even the fact that a gift was given.  We are even willing to praise products that we don’t really like, as long as this means we might get free stuff we do like in the future.

In short, we are preemptively selling out, even though no one is buying yet.  So send us stuff we want and we’ll tell people it’s great.  We won’t write any holier-than-thou blog posts about how we’re too good to accept free stuff.  If you would like to send us gifts, but you are unsure what products we would like, just drop us an e-mail and we’ll be glad to work something out.

PS- if anyone knows a Microsoft PR rep who has an Xbox 360 they are just dying to bribe a blogger with, send them here.

A few days ago I was talking to Stephanie and somehow the subject of ear-piercing came up.  Stephanie said she was seven when she first got her ears pierced, which seemed young to me.  I thought most parents didn’t let their girls get their ears pierced till they were thirteen or so.  She said no—for most parents who make their girls wait till they are a certain age, that age is nine or ten.

Afterwards I was thinking about it, wondering why I had an age of thirteen in mind.  I never had sisters, so it’s not like it was a rule I learned from my parents.  All of my friends were boys, and although some had sisters, I never really saw the parenting process per se.  The closest would have been some of my cousins, but even then I don’t recall ear-piercing being discussed.

Then I remembered that episode of Full House where Stephanie wants to get her ears pierced but her dad says she needs to wait until she is in Jr. High (i.e. about 13 years old), because that’s when D.J. got her ears pierced.  All of a sudden it occurred to me: everything I think I know about how to raise a girl I learned from watching Full House.

That’s a little scary.

Over the weekend (Saturday in fact!) yours truly completed his twenty-sixth lap around the sun.  The only thing I know of that changes on your twenty-sixth birthday is that you can no longer be drafted.  Of course, they aren’t drafting anyone nowadays, but if they started doing it again I’d be safe.  Unless of course Congress changed the rules, which I believe they are perfectly capable of doing.  In any case, I’m continuing to get older.  Somehow on this year’s birthday I actually felt more than a day older.  It seems absolutely impossible that a full year has passed since I passed the quarter-century mark.  And it’s not that I haven’t done anything all year.  I guess it’s that I have done a lot of “grown-up” stuff in the last year.  I bought a house, for example.  I went on a business trip.  I started making mortgage payments.  I filed my own taxes.  And the big one, of course, is that I’m going to be a father in four months.  A dad.  This guy is going to be responsible for the life of another human being.  I mean, we are talking about a person who not only created a drawing of a guy in a giant toilet riding a turd, but he posted said turd cowboy onto the various internets.  That’s just craziness.

Maybe, just maybe—with the help of her seemingly sane mother—my daughter will turn out to be more than a demented sociopath.

Yee-Ha!

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!

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, 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.

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.