It’s been pretty busy around here. I’m moving to a new apartment in Savannah, and following that, driving home for the summer.

Haiku for a few more more people who donated are coming. The donation link and an explanation of what I’m talking about is in the previous entry.

Relating to that, this site may be down later today or tomorrow. Not sure. I’ve used up nearly all of my bandwidth this month and I may or may not just squeeze by. If I don’t, then the site will be down until midnight June 1st. Sorry for the inconvenience. Donations are going to pay for what I have already spent keeping the site up this long.

The new stencil T-shirts are done and look good. I’ll take a picture and ask if anyone’s interested in purchasing one in a day or two. After that I’ll get to work on the CafePress store. Any suggestions for something you’d want on a cafe press item?

OK. I’ve got to pack up the computer now and drive 634 miles in (probably) the rain. I’m sure this will end well.

If you liked the cartoon and you can afford it, please kick me a buck. I’m not trying to get rich here, I’m just trying to make back the money I spent upgrading this site’s bandwidth. I’ll write you a haiku about how cool you are if you want.

Ha! As soon as I posted the haiku thing, someone donated. Here.

William is King Shit
of Shit Mountain above Poopsville
in the Ass Lands

Doesn’t follow the 5-7-5 rule, but it has 17 syllables

My buddy Jeff Roth made this cartoon. His animation is based off of a stupid game I made up while driving around Savannah one day. Adam and I both did voice work as Arnold.

I’ve got all the pieces I need, so tomorrow I’m going to make my prototype good t-shirts. I’m using stencils, but the paint and stencil quality will be much better than the one I made 2 weeks ago. I’ll post info on buying them once I see how it turns out.

I’m making a CafePress store for this stuff soon. I haven’t had time to do the guy up in vector form. I’d guess by next week you’ll be able to purchase mousepads and CafePress non-stencil t-shirts. Good times.

Finally, from concept development for a new cartoon featuring Jesus, a Fear and Loathing parody. This is the first attempt at drawing with a Wacom. Still working some kinks out.

The Netherlands (now the second coolest country ever) is beating the shit out of my monthly bandwidth. I had to upgrade my service to double my monthly limit. Thank you guys for checking out my stuff, but this is starting to cost me some money.

Can anyone spare a dollar?

In other news, I bought plastic to make better stencils today. T-shirts and other merchandise will be announced soon.

Last night some random dude (deadlock32) off the web IM’d me about my cartoon. One thing led to your moms, he converted it to Flash, and I posted it on Newgrounds. Newgrounds is a big flash posting thing. I’m sure that’s exactly how their press release reads.

Here’s the link to the flash cartoon. Chances are you’ve already seen it, but here you can see a quick loading screen I drew AND vote me a million HERE.

Anyway, I won second best cartoon of the day for yesterday. Wooo. As of right now, 6,225 people on there have viewed it.

OK… lets see…

traditional student film distribution model
As of today, 50 people have seen it tops.

LOL Internets
As of today, 16,000 OMGROFL at the lowest.
This doesn’t count downloads from mirrors and people saving it and showing it to their friends. I had about a dozen mirrors at one point. Also note that 6,000+ viewers are from the past 24 hours. I’m on the front page today, so that number may go up.

Now if someone would just pay me or give me some sort of lame piece of paper saying I’m a winner so I can add a line to my resume.

The Animation department’s end of semester show is tomorrow. Unless someone in charge is a jerk about adorable penis monsters, I should be in it.

I had to get some emergency bandwidth this month. I moved almost every video onto my school’s server, but I was still about a GB away from my limit with a week to go. I’ve been killing about 400MB to a GB a day since last wednesday.

I didn’t want to tack this stuff on to the other update.

This has been an eventful weekend.

I did not get an interview with Turner Broadcasting (cartoon network). I guess that’s technically not an event.

My oldest dog, Boo Boo, died. Boo Boo’s nickname was Worthless.

We’ve had her since she was about a year or two old. The owner before us was cruel to her, and for quite awhile she would cringe if you raised your hand anywhere near her. Probably because of this she never quite settled into being a happy, friendly dog like our resident goofy retard Macgyver. Boo Boo wasn’t mean or bad, she was just disinterested with everyone except my mother. If you tried to pet her, she would let you, but she’d walk just out of arm’s reach.

Adding to her character was her advanced age (something like a million billion years old). She was 70% blind, almost totally deaf, and these days she couldn’t help but poop and pee on everything.

Boo Boo also kept grudges. If you wronged Boo Boo, she’d chew up or shit on something you cared about. It was because of this and the petting thing that my brother and I dubbed her Worthless and swore we’d flush her like a goldfish when she died.

Boo Boo was an ok dog.

Goodbye Worthless.

Mark passed away two days ago. For those of you who didn’t know him, he was a friend of mine from my undergrad and the boyfriend of one of my best friends. I’m fairly certain that he would think posting this sort of thing on the web is retarded, but I think someone should write something.

I stole these pictures from his photojournal. All of my pictures of him were photoshop jokes.

microwave door self portrait

I met Mark about 7 years ago. I remember he was wearing a Skinny Puppy shirt, and for several weeks I mistook him for a goth chick. I never told him that, but Joe and I were pretty open about making fun of everyone of any significance at the station back then. If he heard it, I guess I’m sorry. I’m sure he had something to say about me. A big fat guy in a loud Hawaiian shirt is a pretty easy target.

I liked Mark. We were friends, but it’d be a lie to say we were close friends. He was quiet, and he had a bone dry sense of humor with a healthy dose of sarcasm. I could never tell, even when I talked to him on line in the last few months, if he was just making a simple observation or calling me stupid. When I first started talking to him in classes, we’d make fun of the other artwanks around us. The whole time I had this feeling he was making fun of me, but Mark seemed like he’d sooner keep quiet than strike up a conversation with someone he didn’t like.

I remember meetings at the radio station where Mark or Ray had some snide remark for every other thing Avi (the station manager) would try to say. I was lazy when it came to pestering Avi. I’d read my comics, talk with Ann, and eat my milk and cookies. I’d occasionally chime in or sing “I believe I can fly”, but Mark was relentless. I enjoyed those meetings a lot.

Reading that last bit, it sounds like we were assholes. Some people at the station certainly thought we were. I know I was. I enjoyed just being a jerk for the fun of it. Mark was dedicated to making a radio station with a strong musical philosophy; college radio for artists who weren’t already all over the big corporate stations. That isn’t to say he didn’t enjoy making jokes about Avi being dumb or fat.

I remember Mark’s sarcastic laugh. heh-eHHHHAA. You sort of make the sound without opening your mouth. It reminded me of a half-hearted rim shot. “Hey, that joke was almost funny.”

mirror self portrait

He was a far better bullshitter in art classes then I was. I couldn’t start pretending I read the material until the topic had been bounced around class for nearly twenty minutes. Somehow Mark, without ever reading the material, could jump right into a discussion and sound like he knew what he was talking about. He could speak with intelligence about his art in a way I still can’t after 2 years of graduate school. He may have been bullshitting, but that hardly counts against you when it comes to art.

We shared a love of fucking with people we thought were offensively stupid. That’s how I describe it, anyway. Avi was a dumb ass, but in what I feel was a lovable sort of way. Krieg was something else. After following his antics for months like grotesque fans, Mark and I made a website of photoshopped pictures of Krieg, the worst art student ever. We each supplied about half of the nearly 200 altered images that made up the site over the course of a semester. I wanted to post some of his examples, but I’m ashamed that I didn’t save any of Mark’s images from that site. I think he archived nearly everything (his CD and movie collections and every e-mail he has ever received and written). I’d bet money that his computer has every single page of that website.

It should go without saying that we both cared a lot for Ann. Mark was better to her than I ever was, and it was obvious how much they loved each other. Ann meant the world to him, and Mark meant just as much to her. When Mark got sick, I would worry about him, but mostly I was scared for Ann. I think Mark felt the same way.

Mark and Ann

I’m shocked that he’s gone. I’m upset that I didn’t save all of this stuff to remember him with when I had the chance. I never expected it to happen so suddenly. The last thing I ever talked to him about was that mp3 going around of Trent Reznor vocals over the Ghostbusters theme song. It is so frustrating to be 600 miles away from one of my best friends while she’s hurting so much.

If you knew Mark, I am sure his family could use your support. Information is coming on the service next weekend and possible donations to a cystic fibrosis charity.

If you know Ann, please give her your support. Even if she won’t ask for it, she needs your help right now. A comment on her journal is nice, but the Internet is so detached from reality. A visit or a phone call mean so much more. She needs to know people care about her.

Mark’s website is HERE.

If anyone knows a simple way to archive a livejournal without having authorship access to the account, please give me or Ann a head’s up.