Wow, I… I just don’t know what to say.

Early on in the day we have the sad news that Farrah Fawcett, the star of Charlie’s Angels,  had died, which is a shame in it’s own right.

And then that news gets upstaged dramatically, and quite appropriately given the man who did the job.

It’s only been about an hour since the news was broken that Michael Jackson had died from a heart attack, and it still seems quite surreal. Although, given what he accomplished in his life, that’s probably how a lot of people feel right now.

RIP to the both of them, and my thoughts to both of their families. Peace out.

So, if youve been following my twitter recently you’ll know that I’ve been harping on about doing work on Alienated Youth. I’ve finally gotten to a point that I actually like the direction of the art style. In fact, I’ve gotten so comfortable that I’m getting more and more fluent when drawing the characters.

So, Alienated Youth is getting nearer then. In fact, it’s about a month and a bit away. Like Monday August 3rd.

At the moment, I have 4 linearts, one half drawn and one fully finished comic. The banner’s been inked and I’m on the verge of colouring that soon. I have the basic skeleton of the site ready, and to go live at a moments notice. And as I’m waiting to August until everything goes live, I should have a rather big buffer to make a start on. That’s mostly due to the art style making it so easy for me to get a comic ready so quickly, which means that I am starting the comic with 2 updates a week. Maybe increasing to 3 updates depending on how it goes at first.

This will be my first regular comic for nearly 2 years, and believe me wanting to work this right, straight from the start.

You know, I really shouldn’t be posting just now. But just to let you know…

I’m currently out in the garden with the laptop (amazingly, the wifi does reach far enough out), it’s blazing hot and I’m about to do the garden (i.e. cut the grass).

If you are British, for the love of all that’s holy, get out and enjoy the weather while it lasts. God knows, it won’t last forever. Especially if you are up in Scotland, like I am.

…honest answer, not much.

Well, somethings I guess. For one, I’ve been working on the new Alienated Youth site. I’ve got a preview of the site up @ alienatedyouth.net. but not much else there at the moment. The rest is running on a personal web server on my laptop.

I have, however, been working on what’s going up on Alienated Youth though. And you can find a couple of the results here and here. This has been running around my head for some time now, and I think it’s nearly ready to start really going forward. Hence the working on the site.

I’ll post more when I’ve got more to show. But as an FYI, you should look at those concepts then look at the other pictures I have up on DeviantArt. Seriously, some of my old stuff is embarressing…

I went with Christine to see Star Trek tonight. Now, I could go through everything I liked, loved and hated about the film, but then I’d basically be spewing out a repeat of what’s elsewhere on the World Wide Web about it. What I will say is this:

I loved it. I’m not a Trekkie, but did watch the shows and films that came before. And I loved this film.

Also, I think that the way the JJ Abrams handled the reboot by creating an alternative timeline/universe to play with was brilliant. It was probably the only way that it could have been done without severely pissing off the fans by basically pissing on 40-odd years of well loved history. Hence, with the exception of Lost (which I will get to at a later date), is another reason to make me think that Abrams is a genius.

Seriously, go and see Star Trek, even if you weren’t/aren’t a fan of the franchise up until this point. Even from a non-fan’s perspective it was freaking awesome.

(Note - if you want a good dissertation on the film, then head over to Websnark. Eric Burns at his best, really)

It’s been one of those funny old days you know. Christine is still not really herself, especially given how she has found herself addicted to Guitar Hero and, of all things, Monopoly on the Wii (I’ve taken to calling it MonopolWii). I’ve, on the other hand, been doing as would always and seen myself tinkering on the internet.

Well, specifically, I’ve been having to code a website for my soon-to-be father-in-law. But rather than half-ass it and fire about with some tables, as I would have in the past, I decided to actually push myself and figure out how to work with DIV tags and CSS. My limited knowledge up until today consisted of modifying font colours and tinkering with it in the Comicpress theme, as well as various other WordPress themes. But I’ve managed to work out (vaguely) how it all works, and I managed to come up with a rather good template for his website. But it all gave me a good idea…

A new theme for this very website.

I’ve always liked using my own themes, or fairly heavily modified themes, on my websites. And my knowledge of CSS now being bolstered it seems like a good time to try and tinker around with a new theme. All I can say is that the template I’ve came up with for in here isn’t bad at all, and can already be easily modified in the CSS file that I have set up (I normally use a fair amount of transparent images on Coffee Of Doom, so changing the colours won’t really affect it too much). It’s not ready yet, not by a long shot anyways, but I’ve managed to get a fair chunk of the theme ready to go.

I wouldn’t expect to see any heavy changes on here until I’m certain that the new theme is ready to go live, but I don’t think that’ll be too long anyways. I think at the end of the day, I’ll be the one that’s more surprised when the new site design goes live.

I lost my iPhone recently.

No, sorry, scratch that. My iPhone was stolen recently. Couple of months ago in fact. Entire thing pissed me off no end, mostly as I had the damn thing set up just brilliantly at the time (that, and I had been addicted to the Time Crisis game that’s been released for the format. Oh, and all my contact numbers being on it of course). The iPhone is quite literally more than a phone, it’s the living definition of lifestyle management. And it’s all due to the App Store, and all the wonderful things that can be found to download for free, or at low, low prices.

Well, it was. Right up until Apple had a major lapse in quality control.

The video at that link, on the BBC News website, is of an app that Apple deemed OK to release to iPhone and iPod Touch users called Baby Shaker. The goal of the game, which had been retailing at 59p, was to shake a black and white picture of a crying baby until it shut up and had big red X’s across it’s eyes. Said game was rather quickly removed from the App Store on Wednesday, with good cause if you ask me.

I’m all for a laugh every now and then, occasionally at something that I really shouldn’t be laughing at, but I think it’s safe to say that the people that came up with that app are clinically defined as sick. As much of a laugh as it may have seemed at the time, shaking children to calm them down is just wrong on so many levels. And to come up with a game that glamorizes that behaviour, especially with the multitude of high profile child abuse cases doing the rounds (Baby P springs instantly to mind), or to even just authorise it for download over the App Store is just, let’s face it, reprehensible.

I hope that Apple throw the book at the guy who let this game to be sold, and that the guys who made it never have kids themselves. God knows what they’d do if their own child was screaming.

Um… hello there. Anyone there?

I know. It’s the month syndrome. The entire ‘I’ve not been on his bloody website for a month’ thing. But it’s been one of those crazy months. For one, I got the joy of going back to work after having two weeks off ill due to a viral infection. Add in Christine being ill this week and work being a mess of stress, strain and attempted murder (never mind) then we get to scrape the surface of how odd a month it’s been so far.

The scary thing is that even with all the stress kicking in with this, that and the next thing, I have wanted to be writing in this thing. Honest to freaking God, I’ve wanted to. But it’s the actual writing of stuff that’s been the stickler. Which always is the case in these situations. I get stressed. I have the ideas to put down. And I just. Freaking. Can’t.

Urgh. Anyways…

I do have one or two essays littering my head at the moment, and once I find the coherency to finish them I will and they’ll be uploaded duly. Also, I’ve also being doing work on Alienated Youth (although not the site itself).

Ah, right. Alienated Youth. Almost forgot about that. The ‘thing that’s going on that site’ is a new comic. Which I’ve been pottering away on for the past month or so properly. I’m now actually getting things done comic-wise and I’m looking to get the first ones up in the near future. Sooner than later anyways, especially as I’ve nearly got the very first one finished. A post will be going up here when I get that all started though.

I’ve also got a couple of ideas floating about for CODTV, but that can all wait for another time. Hopefully it won’t be another month anyways.

So, that’s the site nearly finished. All of the pages have something on them. All I have to do is upload the comic archives for both Coffee Of Doom and (…in)Sanity and we’re all done.

Just so you know.

For those of you who didn’t know, I spent four years of my life studying Computer Games Technology. An interesting subject to say the least, mostly as although I found it’s definitely not a field I can see myself in it does prove interesting how teams of people can program silicone chips to paint elaborate worlds onto our screens. And the man hours involved in getting workarounds to get what the designers see in their heads onto the screens too.

The BBC maintains a blog called BBC Press Red, which looks at their interactive TV services (oddly enough accessed by pressing red on the remote), the work that goes into the back end and things that they are looking to implement. It’s become my obsessive read lately, intriguing the inner geek in me to the point I check the site out every couple of days.

(continue reading…)