Back Home For A Few Days

Well, I’m back in the laundry room/studio for a few days before heading back to Staten Island to retrieve the Widget. I asked Gran if the kid could stay for a few days so I could get some work done, since school has been closed for weeks now due to the ice storm that ripped New Hampshire a new one.

While visiting my mother for a few days I was once again exposed to her guilty pleasure -HGTV.  It could certainly be much worse. My mother could be trolling the singles bars of New York, or base lining heroine in her spare time, and in light of these and other options available to her, a few hours of bad cable television each night is probably not a bad thing. And it’s not like my viewing habits are any better when I’m given access to a television.  Dorinda and I sat through a marathon of VH1’s “I Love The 70’s” without getting up to eat or use the bathroom on Saturday.

The difference though, between those “I Love The . . .” programs, and 95% of the shows on HGTV is that HGTV leaves me hating the human race.

If I’m completely honest with myself, part of my dislike of HGTV is rooted in jealousy. This is a network dedicated to buying houses, or making very expensive modifications to houses. In other words, it is a network whose entire programming lineup is about people with a lot more money than me.

That’s not saying much really. I grew up in a working-class family, and took a nose dive into working-poor when I struck out on my own. My wife and I both went to college, she has a masters degree, and I have a bunch of worthless flight certificates that cost as much as a masters. Yet we both work jobs that barely require a high school diploma and earn the sort of income that you would expect from such jobs -unfortunately we still have the monthly payments you would expect from attending several small, and very expensive, colleges.

The idea of us ever buying a home is such a laughable pipe dream that I don’t even fantasize about it anymore. Instead when I win the lottery I plan on paying off all those student loans and credit cards just so we can rent a tiny apartment in a city somewhere, and end this long exile in the godforsaken frozen wastelands of New England.

I suppose that alone would be enough to make someone in a similar situation steer clear of programs like Property Virgins, House Hunters, and HGTV Dream Homes. But that’s not quite it. For me it came after the sixth bitchy suburban housewife turned up her nose at a beautiful house, that was twice as large as the couple needed, because she wanted each of her children to have their own separate bathrooms. All five of them. I mean . . .seriously? Who the fuck is going to clean that shit? Before that is was the fucking idiot who didn’t like a house because the living room had blue walls. It was as if she’d never heard of a can of paint. How the fuck are blue walls a deal breaker on a house hunt? Then there was the couple who wanted two completely different things. The husband wanted new construction and no backyard what so ever. He said repeatedly that he hated mowing the lawn, and do-it-yourself home improvement horrified him. His wife wanted an old fixer-upper with a huge yard. I predict a divorce within the next three years.

HGTV is all about selfish douche bags and conspicuous consumption. As a guy who lies awake at night worrying about the planet, that sort of rubs me wrong. Do you know what creates 60% of greenhouse gasses and consumes 40% of all out energy? Buildings. Where does most of our garbage come from? Construction projects. Homes, businesses, and factories are the biggest environmental threat to the Earth. And I’m watching these jerks out in suburbia getting hairs across their asses because their poorly built McMansions only have three bathrooms and not four. Design: E2 is where it’s at people. Get with it.

I would never have thought it, but city dwellers are the most efficient human on Earth. When you look at a place like New York your first impression is one of dirty streets and heaps of trash. Yet per capita, New Yorkers create less waste, use less energy, and have the smallest environmental footprint of anyone in America.

Speaking of things that really frustrate and frighten me, have you noticed that things are slowing changing on the new website? Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results each time. I don’t think this can be applied to web design. Because doing the same thing sixteen times on a CSS sheet will consistently produce sixteen unique and unrelated results.

Do you see WheelieBot up there at the top of the page? He was intended as a bit of cute, but temporary, art. A place-holder if you will. That took approximately ten hours of fiddling to make happen. I suspect you’ll be staring at his sketchy ass for quite some time.

The art galleries are still not working. I have no idea why. Neither did the three other people I had look at it. When I go to the FTP site I can see the folders where I want the art to be kept. Yet when I try to transfer art off my computer into those folders I am told they don’t exist. Even though I am looking right at them. The image viewer plug-in is likewise being a total jerk.

Sigh. Well, it’s coming together. Slowly. At least I can say that. The only thing that I am excited about is the totally bitchin’ Atomic Robo & Killer of Demons links up there in the page tabs. It shouldn’t be possible to do what we did to that. But we did. Har-har, fuck you WordPress!

Comics Should Be Good! R Robo Gud?

Robo wrap-up review on Comixtreme.

NYCC update from ComicArtHouse.

Nice little review on Extra Sequentials.

And a great little nod from Newsarama’s Best Shots: “Atomic Robo: Dogs of War 5 of 5 (from Red5 Comics; review by Brendan}: A year ago, this was my favorite new comic series. Today, it still is. It still looks the way I want it to, tells the kind of jokes I like, and kicks the same level of ass. There are too few funny comics, but this is one of those few. When a Nazi says, right before being blown up, “I don’t even like Hitler,” that is FUNNY. I don’t need this book to change, I don’t need it to develop into a long-form story, or reveal any huge, story-altering secrets. I just want it to continue to tell awesome stories where a wise-cracking robot, and his insane but heroic friends battle the evils of the 20th century, sometimes without the aid of legs.”

RANDOM SPLENDOR

-Yahtzee on Force Unleashed.  I played FU on the xbox recently and yeah, it pretty much sucked -just like every other Lucasarts game I’ve ever played.

-The “Critics” may be saying one thing. But fan know that “The Spirit” is a steamy pile of crap.