If you don't like us, you might have to fight us...

New moji y'all.

I think I'm going to do a series of goofball superheroes like my friend Aquataclops here.

Meanwhile, back in the Awesome Throne room...

So I've been wicked busy lately with a fairly large educational project and I haven't had much time to post. I can't actually post anything from said project, because it won't be published for quite some time. I did however manage to eek out this little guy while taking a short break from the paying work. His name is Sneaky Pete and he is my most recent Moji that I added to Mojizu. He was a neat little guy that I just cranked out real fast. Creating characters is one of my favorite things to do, which is what makes Mojizu so much fun.

Oh yeah, Fireworks and Karate Supplies regular "Tha Professor" is one of my Mojis and he's engaged in a Moji War. He did well the first round, but he's getting trounced in round two. If you're like me, you probably want to see Tha Professor move on to round three, so take a moment to vote for him and we'll see if we can make that a reality. We are the change Tha Professor has been waiting for.

Unsupervised, I Hit My Head

So tonight, I finished putting the kids to bed and went down to the art cave to do some serious drawing. I'm working on a book dummy for a personal project and I really wanted to get a lot done on it before the next few weeks because my schedule seems to be filling up rather quickly with some big projects (more on that in the future!). I get to my desk, start getting all set up and I move my sweet adjustable clip-on desk lamp into position and it just falls down, shattering the bulb into a million pieces, all over the floor, my chair, my desk. Everywhere. So I spend the next howevermany minutes cleaning the whole mess up and determine that this is just a minor setback. I'll just get a new bulb and be back in business. But then I discover that the lamp is all messed up at the base and it won't hold the weight of the lamp any more. Back out of business.

See, the lighting down here sucks. We haven't redone the basement yet, so it's wicked dark and the nautical-themed lanterns the previous homeowners placed on the other side of the room give off crappy light. The dark wood panelling on the walls doesn't help much either. (Yes, we have a lot to do down here.) All in all, without the desk lamp, its not a conducive drawing environment.

So after a little moping, I decided to forego the drawing tonight and mess around with this old image in photoshop just because. Heck, I have to go to bed early tonight anyway because I have to get up early for an appointment. How much drawing was I gonna do anyway, right?

Looks like I'm buying a new lamp.

Explosions in the Sky

I'm out of the musical loop. I've made an almost conscious decision to be there too. I stopped reading music magazines a long time ago. I haven't been by Pitchfork in quite some time because I was beginning to choke on the snarky, too cool for school-ness of the whole enterprise. And honestly I just stopped caring. I came to the point where I just liked less and less of the new music I heard various reviewers touting as divinely inspired (for that week anyway, beware the sophomore album!) and found it really hard to get excited about anything I was hearing. I call this point "getting old."

"Getting old" is great because it never matters what's cool anymore, you just listen to what you like. (Heck yeah I've got the Carpenters on my iPod, without the slightest whiff of irony) As all that angsty indie snobbery falls away you can even start to enjoy older music that wasn't deemed kosher by the keepers of musical purity and integrity. Seriously, nobody ever told me that ELO was awesome, I had to figure it out for myself.

All that being said, I have a new favorite band, as of about 2 hours ago. Explosions In The Sky.

I honestly don't know almost anything about them. I vaguely remember catching about a minute of their performance on Austin City Limits back in twenty aught seven. I thought they sounded cool, but did no further investigation. Today, I was reading the internet and for some totally unknown reason, remembered this band. I looked them up and holy schmoley, they're awesome. Now I don't know if these guys have been popular with the indie reviewer set, and I don't care. I may be the last person in the world to find out about this band, and that's fine. I just dug them so much that I felt compelled to post. I've been really listening to instrumental music lately (another post for another time) and these dudes will now be in heavy rotation. You can download one song from each album and the whole EP "The Rescue" from their website. I think you should, if you like things that are cool. But remember, not cool because I or anyone else said so, just plain cool.

The above video was created by a fan for a "make us a video" contest the band held a while back. I hope you love it!