Flyer fight 8:15 AM

Here's the final printed version of the flyers that'll be posted at AnimeFEST tomorrow. I thought hard about putting the credit line with all our names on it and figured why the heck not? Maybe I'll get everyone to sign a flyer or two to raffle off. Which reminds me that I need to make the raffle tickets for the show. Still to do: Burn discs for Saturday's show and get new glasses. And get that big bag of Tootsie Rolls!

Time and place 11:29 AM

Joe Riley's IMDB page 

Lolita no. 18 

No sleep... 11:14 AM

Didn't sleep well last night. Lots of tossing and turning. I'm probably stressing over what needs to get done this week before the con. Not to mention that I don't even know if I'm doing the OtakuHELL show at AnimeFEST and if I am I don't know which night it'll happen. And I need to tell Josh and Michael which night, soon.

I'm seriously thinking I should take Friday off just to make sure I get everything done. Like I did for AKon this year. And I've got more things that I need to do this week. Like get my glasses fixed.

Oni-Con is the weekend before Halloween this year. I've talked to Josh and Michael and they want to do the show at Oni-Con as long as it doesn't conflict with anything they've got planned for October. Which is understandable. With any luck I'll get them to talk with the folks running Oni-Con at AnimeFEST and we'll see what we can do.

Meanwhile, buttons continue to be made and discs continue to be burned for O'Hell. The PGzine needs to be tweaked and published, too. But that's a lower priority right now.

ninjaconsultant: Show #28 Win a Date with Daryl Surat! 3:19 AM

ninjaconsultant: Show #28 Win a Date with Daryl Surat!: "Our first Contest: Win a Date with Daryl Surat!

Conditions for Winning:

1. Are you female?
2. Do you live in Florida? Preferably near Orlando? Or better still, 90 minutes south of Orlando?
3. Are you single? (i.e. not involved in a long or serious relationship - NOT married. Divorced is OK!)
4. Are you 18 or over? Age of Consent in Florida is 18
5. Preferably, but not necessarily, you ought to be heterosexual. I guess it's different for post-op transsexuals. You could still win based on the above conditions.

Chances are that so few people meet these conditions that basically if you enter, you win. There is the potential for multiple winners."

The last week of August... 10:17 AM

p1
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Heading into the long weekend and O'Hell and A'Fest.

Shopping list:
1 bag of Tootsie Rolls, Large

To do list:
Burn discs for O'Hell show
plus other stuff...

I just finished transfering the otakuhell domain to godaddy for the next two years. Which brings all my domains up to date, at least until next year. I'm not sure when cheapdisposable runs out, but we'll deal with that when it happens.

One thing I need to do this week, before the show, is get new glasses. I've been putting this off far too long. I need to get it done now.

Funkblogging 10:34 PM

Iowahawk

Mister Spurlock goes to Washington 9:48 AM

Netflix sent me the 30 Days Season One discs last night and I popped them into the Nexxtech and killed most of the evening enjoying Morgan Spurlock's warped little tv show. Later I watched MISTER SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON for the 6th or 7th time.

Which made for a juxtaposed dream of Morgan Spurlock standing in for Jimmy Stewart and fighting graft in the Boy Rangers. Weird freaking stuff...

When the levy broke... 9:09 AM

Remember when I used to update my blog everyday? Remember when I had my shit together? Ok, maybe I still don't have my shit together. That's something that'll be hard to come by.

This time next week I'll be seeing Bob and Emily and Doug and who knows who else. Time to ramp up and get ready for AnimeFEST and OtakuHELL. Plus there'll be buttons to make and zines to print. Video CDs to make for the show. Gotta get myself in gear...

PGzine Beta 9:48 PM

shogunAd
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

I posted a pdf of the PGzine Beta. It's only a start. It should shape up in the next two days. That's how it works.

It took me a bit, but I figured out how to merge all the pages into one pdf file. It seems to open fine for me. I guess I'll find out if It doesn't work for anybody else....

Triple digit heat 11:41 AM

page14
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

So very hot these days. Makes it difficult to do anything.

I haven't worked on comix in a week. And I really need to finish up The Sid Davis Story and Heino Comics and Stories. Soon.

And AnimeFEST is coming up soon. And with it OtakuHELL. So there's prep that needs to be done for that, too.

And there's the PGZine beta that I need to get ready and print...and assemble.

Never bored...

Temple of the Seven Golden Camels 

ScoreBaby Annex 

Goodwill Ghoul by Joe Riley 12:37 PM

Goodwill Ghoul by Joe Riley
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Aurgh, you can't take it with you when you go...

Anime Hell at Blogspot 

Joe Riley's men-oo-she-a 

Davey and Goliath on DVD 

Firdamatic 

Blogger Templates 

BlogSkins 

Forbbiden Video Experiments 1:37 PM

I dicided to make some more VCDs to give away at OtakuHELL at AnimeFEST this year. After attempts with Nero, VCDEasy and WinAVI I've decided to use Ulead. Mostly because Ulead has an option that includes an autoplay video player on the VCD. So you can play it on some DVD players and all PC's. The only problem with the test disc was some bad artifacting on the B&W clips. I'll work on that. But it's pretty much ready for multi image burning.

FLAG Episode One Review 9:54 AM

FLAG BandaiChannel 


FLAG Official Site 

Congregatio de propaganda fide

Giant robots. Mecha. What kinds of images do these words propagate in your mind? What kinds of ideas do these words initiate? Complex concepts or programmed precepts? Have you ever considered why these images and ideas fill your thoughts?

FLAG is about a picture. A photograph of a flag. The image is powerful, iconic. The photo is seen on magazine covers, newspapers, billboards, behind the talking heads of the cable news channels and projected behind politicians and military peacekeepers who stand behind podiums. The photo of the flag becomes propaganda.

All the visuals in FLAG are presented to us as a kind of media collage. We see this story through the viewfinders of digital cameras, video cameras, and webcams. Sometimes we watch video clips on laptops, other times we watch as photos are brought up from the memory cards of the digital camera interface. We never actually see anything in FLAG directly, only filtered and recorded media. Where there are gaps in the media document we are guided by narraration, a voice over a dark, empty frame.

We are introduced to the photographer who took the photo of the flag. The flag in the photo has been stolen from a temple. The photo has turned the flag into a near religious relic in a middle eastern country torn by civil war. The United Nations decides to recover the flag and sends the photographer to document the special forces unit on their mission. But you have to ask yourself why are they sending the photographer?

FLAG challenges you, the story and the storytelling is dense and non-traditional. There is no simple story arch, but lots of lots of little fragments that don't fit together seamlessly. Images change their meanings and we can not use them as simple visual shorthand out of context. Photos of the people in the middle eastern country torn by civil war that we see at the beginning of the episode are juxtaposed with a demo video of a UN giant robot that looks like an SUV commercial as it speeds through the desert with dynamic camera angles. Video of the giant robot shooting a big gun at a jeep are intercut with those photos of women crying for the dead and refuges and a soldier carrying away a body. Yeah, it's obvious. It's also propagandistic. This isn't gonna be a giant robot anime, it's aiming much higher.

Peace, Mommy, Peace! 9:51 AM

Peace, Mommy, Peace!
Originally uploaded by IAAFOTS.

WTF?

OtakuHELL x AnimeFEST 11:56 AM

DVD Addiction 10:50 AM

Picked up something like 15 NO ART DVDs at Video Warehouse, essentially Blockbuster DVDs taken out of circulation. Only $1.50 a piece. I couldn't pass that up.

I found all three discs of Penn & Teller's Bullshit Season Two, and I picked up Willard which I'd probably only rented at regular price. Hiding in the extras on Willard is a music video directed by Crispin Glover of Crispin Glover covering Michael Jackson's BEN. Gold I tells ya, GOLD!

I've decided that I'm going to try and set up a server at the Edstead. If only because I don't want to have to deal with AnimeHELL bandwidth problems. I've got the Leechbox sitting in the corner and It'd be perfect to run a server from. Now I just need to figure out how to do it.

DON 2:48 PM

026b
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

"Who am I?"

"Can you guess?"

A search for DON online revealed BOLLYWOOD.TV a movie download site dedicated to Bollywood flicks. Kinda neat. Streaming video sucks, but still a neat idea.

PGzine Cover Rough 2:20 PM

DON 1:46 PM

From Kaiju Shakedown:

The next big Shah Rukh Khan movie will be DON, a remake of the funkalicious 1978 Amitabh Bachchan movie, DON. If you haven't seen the original DON please do yourself a favor and go out and buy a copy post haste. There's an easy-to-find all-region, English-subtitled DVD and while the middle hour gets a little baggy and saggy (too many tightrope walkers) the opening hour and the finale are all wall-to-wall shag carpets, liquid eyeliner deployed by the gallon, and a gangster so cruel he kills a man because he hates his shoes. And the credits sequence is, quite possibly, the biggest slab of waka-waka 70's joycore this side of DISCO DANCER. So who has the cooler poster? The Shah Rukh Khan DON? Or the Amitabh Bachchan DON?

(And go check out a million other poster designs for the 1978 DON over on the Hot Spot)

Follow up by Twitch:

A week or so back Grady at Kaiju Shakedown posted news about an upcoming Bollywood remake of Don, a 1978 brownsploitation gangster film by Amitabh Bachchan - a film apparently considered a classic by a good many people in the know. Now, the interesting note on this to me isn't so much that the film is being remade but that, according to IndiaFM, this is the first official remake in the histroy of the Bollywood film industry. Not that Bollywood producers haven't cranked out stacks of remakes in the past, but this is the very first time that they have ever actually acknowledged their source and paid proper rights fees to do it legally.

Ain't that a kick in the head...

PGzine 12:56 PM

Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PsychommuSlamFest/ for more info about how to contribute.

papercraft? 12:57 PM

qargalpapercraft
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

I should do more stuff like this...

AV Geeks Return To Texas! 10:54 AM

AV Geeks Return To Texas!

What Now, Skipper?
Continuing the constant challenge to bring you educational film
entertainment in the strangest of places (which have included a moving
schoolbus and a sausage factory!), AV Geeks and Alamo Drafthouse
challenge you to watch boat safety films on an actual boat! Films
include What Now, Skipper?, Suddenly In Command and more!

Join us for BBQ, swimming and above all - a hilarious lesson in boat
safety! The Ark for this screening is limited to 75 passengers, there
is a long swim platform and slide that is great fun! Plus - your ticket
includes beer! LOCATION: Beach Front Boat Rentals on Lake Travis at Highland Lakes Marina in Volente More info.

Admission $18 plus $5 parking

6:30pm-11pm, Friday, Aug 4th, hosted by the amazing Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX

---

The Modern Housewife
Films aimed towards solving the problems faced by today's (well,
really, yesterday's) modern housewife. A fascinating and insulting look
at the 1950s and 1960s housewife. Films include: Goodbye to Garbage, Home is What You Make it, Soft as a Cloud, Joy of Living with Fragrance and Freeze-In.
Admission $7


7pm, Sunday, Aug 6th, Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, Austin, TX

---

Dag, that's Cold!
Let's face it, Texas in August is brutally hot and the AV Geeks spend
most of their time holed up in a dark dank basement watching films. To
counteract the sticky humidity of Houston, we present a show of films
about living in cold weather. Films include Surviving The Cold, How to build an igloo, How to drive on snow and ice and more!

8:15pm, Tuesday, Aug 8th, Aurora Picture Show, 800 Aurora St, Houston TX

---

The Modern Housewife
Films aimed towards solving the problems faced by today's (well,
really, yesterday's) modern housewife. A fascinating and insulting look
at the 1950s and 1960s housewife. Films include: Goodbye to Garbage, Home is What You Make it, Soft as a Cloud, Joy of Living with Fragrance and Freeze-In.

8:30pm, Wednesday, Aug 9th, Angelika Film Center, 5321 E. Mockingbird Lane, Dallas, sponsored by Dallas Video Fest

Indie Touring 12:30 PM

Indie Touring: "Have your hometown launches lost their pungent melange of terror? Do you find that you show up for them without jittery nerves, several feet away from the precipice of emotional collapse? Do you find that afterwards you’re not drained to the point of not knowing who you are anymore? Then you might want to turn it up to eleven... and get in the van.

Spreading your cultural virus from the scene whence you sprang to elsewhere is holy work. Although I’ve only toured with my books, you can — and should — tour with anything: zine, flea circus, cartoon sculptures, medical equipment museum. What’s more essential than having a mass-produced commodity such as a CD or book is having realistic expectations of what the road has to offer.

In my experience, the fabled groupies and big sales are in short supply. The things that are in good supply are interesting folks, great conversations and neat places. If you expect as much from a tour as you do from a roadtrip, then you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised. If you expect a perpetual ego orgasm, then, well — you’ll get a well-deserved kick in the ass."

A or B? 3:02 PM