Luis’ Illustrated Blog

THE SIMPSONS NEWS

I feel like I’m not getting enough work done.  I’m working like crazy but it feels like I’m not getting anything done.  I don’t know why that is.  Maybe it’s because the scenes I’m doing are complicated or maybe it’s because half the stuff I’m doing is on the computer and the other half is on paper.  There is also the fact that some of the scenes I’m working on need to be printed out on paper so that I can work on them; only it’s a big pain to do so and I end up spending a lot of time printing the stuff out and trying to get the size of the artwork to work the way I want.

Been staying late the last few days to make up the hours I didn’t work last Friday.  More on that below.

FAMILY

Last Thursday, Alesha stayed home with Munchkin because she came down with some sort of stomach flu.  Munchkin spent the whole day laying down, taking in liquids, watching cartoons,  and going to the poddy.  She seemed to be doing better by the end of the day so Friday morning we woke her and Dante up to go to daycare.  I gave her morning sippy cup of Pediasure (doctor prescribed) and we left the house.  Five minutes letter, we heard a gooshy splat sound coming from the back seat.  Alesha said, “Oh no.”  We both turned around only to see that Munchkin had vomited her Pediasure all over herself.  As we stared, she then proceeded to projectile vomit the rest of it all over the back seat of the car. Needless to say, we turned the car around and I told Alesha I was going to stay home with Munchkin this time.

After rushing to clean up the back of the car, Alesha was on her way.  Meanwhile I got Munchkin comfortable, and put the blankets and coats she had puked on (that where in the back seat and protected the car from the puke) in the washing machine. Munchkin, once again, spent the day laying down, taking in liquids and watching cartoons, although she DID sleep for a veeerrry long time at midday.

By Saturday, she was definitely better. The day before, she could hardly get up.  Saturday, she was walking around happily.  Alesha and I had a lot to do during the weekend so we asked my mom if she would mind taking care of the kids for the day.  She told us she would love to.  Alesha went over to Munchkin and asked:

So off we went.  I ran errands all day while the kids had a blast with my mom. It was a very eventful couple of days.

CATHOLICISM

One of the errands I need to do this Saturday was to go to Confession.  It had been about four months and I really needed it. The church I went to had some fairly long lines.  I hate that.  I’m always afraid that I won’t get a turn.  On the other hand, long lines are a good thing.  It means people care enough, and know enough to go and take advantage of the Sacrament of Confession; which I always see as a reflection of the spiritual health of the parish. Still, I don’t like the long lines.

The most interesting part about Confession this time around was my penance.  The priest told me to take out my Bible, open it up to Psalm 51, read it to myself at first, then read it out loud and pray it to God.  He told me, praying the Psalms out loud was a very Jewish way of praying them. I don’t know if that’s true but I did as I was asked, and I must say, it’s a very moving way to pray a Psalm.  Not only that, but Psalm 51 is an amazingly appropriate Psalm to pray as penace.  Though I didn’t know it before I read it, I didn’t realize I was already familiar with it (or at least parts of it).  The Psalm is one of the Psalms, always read in the Liturgy of the Hours.  It was one of those, “Ah ha! So that’s where it’s from” moments for me. I might read that Psalm from now on after Confession, even if I’m not asked to.

SOME THOUGHTS

Been sending e-mails back and forth with my friend Raul (see the bottom of last weeks post). He’s been sending me copies of the pitchbibles of the shows he’s been pitching around the animation studios. I must say, I’m very impressed with them.  Not only with the fun ideas he has, but the amount of work he puts into them.  Everyone of his pitchbibles has the outline of a complete episode plus a few quick hooks for other episodes.  They also have drawings of the main characters and a history of each.

This has got me thinking, what have I done that is anywhere near as complete as those? NOTHING! I have a ton of ideas of my own.  I keep a book near my bed where both Alesha and I have written out germs of ideas or even written out slightly more fleshed out concepts.  For some ideas, I have small doodles, for some I have tried designing the characters;  others, I have even gone so far as to try to write the outline, but none of those ideas have been done to completion. Even the ones I have done the outlines for I have had to re-edit some story flaws, only to find myself get stuck somehow on how to fix them and they end up being left incomplete.  I mean, wasn’t I suppose to be working on a webcomic.  Well, where the heck is it?

Seeing Raul’s out put is very inspiring.  It’s made me want to come up with even more ideas of my own. Not necessarily to sell as kids cartoons like he’s doing, but just fun ideas for stories that I think would be cool to write.  In fact, on the way home on Tuesday, I came up with four that I haven’t seen anyone do before (I googled them and they don’t exist).  I immediately wrote them down in my “idea book” when I got home, but will they go anywhere?

Also, I’ve been thinking of maybe doing some freelance drawings for some role playing game magazines as well.  Just to do something different. But in order to do that, I would need to draw something in the style of what they’re looking for as a portfolio piece. I’ve been meaning to get to that, but I haven’t done it.  Why?  Why is it, that when I get home, the last thing I want to do is draw?  I just want to relax.  I don’t want to keep working.  Not only that but I when I have any free time where I can actually do something creative, I don’t.  It seems like, I like the idea of drawing and writing all these creative things, but I don’t actually like doing them.  Yet I get all excited about them when I think about them and I can’t wait to get started on them. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I have to somehow find a way to discipline myself into completing SOMETHING or I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I had.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Finishing off the storyboards this week. My director liked my shots which made me feel good. Now all I have to do is put the board together and I’m done. Then it’s back to doing character layout.

Had a nice little discussion about Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and The Lord of the Rings this week with my director and an assistant director friend of mine. My director had Fellowship of the Rings playing in his room and it got us talking. Things like this always happen at work. Often times these discussions praise or “fix” (because we are guys and know how to fix everything) every movie ever created that we like or dislike.

SOME THOUGHTS (Cyberpunk)

So I got Darknet in the mail this week and started reading it. I’ve only read the first two chapters so far and I’m very interested in reading more. The thing is that as I was reading it, a thought struck me. I’ve read a few William Gibson books (he invented the Cyberpunk genre although he didn’t coin the phrase). Many people have written in the genre for years and have also riped off many of his ideas and made great careers from it (The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell), even the term microsoft comes from a William Gibson novel. Thing is, so much about what Gibson wrote has become such a reality, that now, I’m reading a book that starts out exactly like a Cyberpunk novel, with a guys who plays in a game in cyberspace (a.k.a MMORPG), is a celebrity in that world and yet, it’s not science fiction. Since I haven’t read the rest of the story, I can’t say that it won’t become science fiction later, but the fact that this guy is walking around with a laptop, jacking into the internet (the Matrix as Gibson called it sometimes. He also called it the Net) and playing games in it in a cyberworld is something that was Cyberpunk fiction in the 80s. It’s just really weird. All we need now is big corporations to be our government and we’re living in a Cyberpunkworld.

MOVIES

I did not like The Hulk movie that came out a few years back. I thought it was slow, boring, and I didn’t care about the characters at all. I also thought that the idea of using different shots from different angle on the same screen to simulate comic book panels, was poorly done.

The point of having all those “panels” should have been to show the totality of what was going on at a given moment rather than just showing you the same exact thing from different perspectives. For example: the shot near the beginning of the movie with the helicopter landing was mostly shots of the helicopter landing. It was like, five shots of the exact same helicopter from different cameras. Why? What new information are you giving me that I can’t get from seeing it in one shot? That’s so dumb. It would have been better if it was one shot of the helicopter and maybe one of the pilot and some close up shots or long shots of the spectators and main characters as they watched the helicopter land. That way, we get a more complete picture of the moment. They did it a little bit, but nowhere near the amount that would have called for it. The way they used it, was more gimmicky than necessary and it added nothing to the movie.

I also found that the only time in the movie that I was interested in what was happening was when the Hulk was on screen, and then only, if he was smashing things.

Needless to say, I wasn’t very excited about the fact that a new Hulk movie is coming out. Until I watched the trailer. The trailer makes the new movie look pretty darn good. It even looks like the parts without the Hulk in it will actually be as interesting as the parts with him in it (the key to making a good superhero movie). Now I’m getting excited.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Mostly drawing crowds this week. We have a lot of them in this show. It’s dull work.

I’ve pretty much run out of Podcasts again. I’m going to have to find me some new ones. The ones I subscribe to aren’t enough anymore.

Got into work late once this week. That was annoying.

Once again the studio has passed out a memo asking artists to pitch new animated show ideas. Every time they do this, nothing ever comes of it. It seems everyone is jaded over the whole idea. I’ve tried it the last time they did this and the whole thing fell apart on them before anything could happen. I don’t know what to think.

SOME THOUGHTS

I’ve realized, after looking at my blog that I’ve just been writing a lot about board games. In fact, it looks like I write about them more than just about any other subject. Even more than what I write about the Simpsons. Why? Well, besides the obvious answer, “I like them a lot”, there are a few other reasons why. I‘ve found, after taking a good look at myself and seeing how I am, that I tend to go through these obsessive phases in my life. What do I mean my obsessive phases? That’s when I get into something so much that I’m thinking and almost always surrounding myself with it twenty four hours a day, every day. I’ve also found that I tend to use these obsessions as a way to relax when I get too stressed out. It also doesn’t help that I live in my head most of the time, in a type of anti social dream world where my mind is racing around thinking deeply about something meaningful or ridiculously shallow. This tends to feed into my introverted side which is very antisocial and tends to almost always make me feel uncomfortable and bored around large social gatherings.

My obsessive phases last between months to years. I don’t remember my first ones but I’m sure they began early. Maybe it was Garfield. I don’t know, the thing is they happen. Most of my obsessions never really go away, they’re always there but just not as dominant as they once where, while others go away completely. For example, when I was a teenager, I was obsessed with Batman, to the point where I was trying to get Encyclopedic knowledge of all things Batman, but now I could care less about him. On the other hand, at another time in my teenage life, I was obsessed with learning and “Game Mastering” Role Playing Games (RPGs). That really hasn’t gone away completely, I still buy and read new RPGs and I sit around wishing I had the time and energy I once used to have to play or run a game or two. It’s really weird. I was once really into vampires. I was obsessed with them for a year or so but that went away and I haven’t really gotten it back. Few years back, before the movies came out, I got crazy obsessed with The Lord of the Rings books and their history. That really didn’t truly leave me but I don’t have the urge to talk about them the way I once did. Perhaps the most useful obsession I’ve ever had was the three year obsession I had with Philosophy and Theology. That truly hasn’t gone away either but I’m not walking around with a Philosophy professor living in my head any more. My Catholicism obsession (which started at the same time) has also never left me. I used to study that stuff to relax. There was also the time I was obsessed with story telling and writing…I mean I’m always getting obsessed with something. Some people have one thing they get that way about, I get it with something different every three years or so. This time it happens to be board games. Although I have to admit, it was bound to happen. Every time I saw some sort of analog game using strange dice, or cards or chips or something, I would be very interested. Oooh that reminds me about the time I got crazy obsessed with chess and….never mind, time for my next point.

The more stressed out I get, the more obsessed I get. It’s been quite stressful around here lately. I need something to take my mind off things and I almost always turn to my obsession. When I was into video games, I would come home from work and just go to my room and stay there for hours playing on my Playstation. That was my sanctuary. That was my way of dealing with the stress. I was living with my parents at the time and they would very rarely see me because I was playing games for hours. Come to think of it though, I’m not too sure if video games were an obsession. It was more of an interest. I think the whole Board Game thing I’m going through right now is. It’s not mainstream enough and I have to go out of my way to know about this stuff. Kinda like the way my Anime obsession was…Nah! Who am I kidding? The video game thing was an obsession too.

I’m a bit weird…well, a lot weird. When I’m asleep I dream just like everyone else, but when I’m awake, I dream just as much. Most of the time I’m only half awake. Half of me is in “La la land” thinking about something while the other half is living out the day as it should be. I’ve found that about 80% of the time, “La la land” consists of whatever I’m obsessed with at the time. This makes it very difficult for me to really concentrate on anything that isn’t in some way associated with the things that happen to be going on in my head. One of the reasons I listen to podcasts is to try to control this problem. My job requires me to be focused and to get the job done, but if I was to sit down and try to do it, five to ten minutes into it, you’d find me blankly staring at my desk. I’d be in “La la land” playing with my pet thought of the moment. On the other hand, when I listen to podcastS, audio books, or audio lectures, that dreamy part of my mind stays focused on whatever I’m listening to while the part of me that needs to get things done, gets things done. It keeps my dreaming in check and allows me to do my job. The moment I take the headphones off though, POW, I’m back in “La la land” playing with my obsession.

This, as you may have gathered, causes no end of trouble to my social life. I go to a party and I haven’t got the slightest clue what to do with myself. I know you’re suppose to go make small talk with people and find out what’s going on in their lives and get caught up, but how do you do that when the part of you that can ask creative questions and really listen is in “La la land”? If I do it, it’s because a supreme superhuman effort on my part is taking place. This leaves me so exhausted that I don’t want to be around anyone for hours afterwards. What usually ends up happening, is that I end up sitting somewhere by myself or with my wife and just staring off into space, wishing I was somewhere where I could be satisfying the needs that my current obsession requires and generally feeling miserable. Thing is, if at that time you where to come up to me and bring up the subject I’m currently obsessing about, WATCH OUT, because you’ve woken the giant and I’d talk your ear off. After three or four hours listening to me talk about the same thing, most people are ready to jump off the nearest cliff. The thing is, you’d actually be talking to a fully awake me. The “La la land” me and the normal world me, have become one and I’m completely there. Currently, if you want me to be completely there, you’d have to play a board game with me. Lately when I’m desperate to feel fully awake and whole, I bring out a board game and ask to play. At other times in my life, when I wanted to be awake and whole, I’d try to get into a Theological discussion with you or ask you to watch a Japanese cartoon with me. It would all depend on my current obsession. Sometimes, I even revert back to an old obsession for a day or a couple of hours. You never know what the heck is going on my head.

So there you have it. The reason I’ve been writing so much about board games on this blog lately. I’m curious as to what my next one will be and how long it will last. But since I’m stuck with this one right now, I might as well have as much fun with it as possible.

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