Stark Contrasts.

The first week of Anime MegaMix at Comic Book Masters went exceedingly well, I thought. The students were all really interested in the topic at hand and everyone seemed to have a good time. It looks like teaching this class is going to be a lot of fun.

Over the weekend I purchased 2 items. One was a box set of the 80's version of AstroBoy, the legendary anime made for children of all ages. The other was an Evil Dead and Evil Dead II "Book of the Dead" gift set, the classic low-budget horror movies popular amongst freaks such as myself. After the fact, I came to realize the stark contrast between these two items and how strange that is. This is either a sign of how wide the gamut of my various interests lies, or simply a sign of how weird I am.

Sayonara.

Anime Stuff.

So, as discussed previously, tomorrow I am teaching a class for Comic Book Masters called Anime MegaMix. This was kind of sprung on me before the end of the last session as something that all current and former students could take regardless of what level they had finished at the time, but was kind of necessary due to the way the numbers were shaping up. But that's fine, I was interested in coming up with a new program and doing some new stuff anyway. The lessons will mainly center around using colour in anime artwork. I'm excited about teaching it, and the time in between sessions seems like it's been far too long. Hopefully some old faces will show up for this class, because it's open to any and all of my previous students. But I don't need to sell it anymore because it's definitely running.

Unfortunately, there were not enough people interested in taking Anime Round 1, so that won't be running this time. What happened here? Has the well been tapped dry? Have I already seen everyone in the area who is interested in drawing anime? As unlikely as it sounds, it's possible. Perhaps alternative methods will need to be employed in order to reach new people.

In other news, the amazing anime film Princess Mononoke, directed by the acclaimed Hayao Miyazaki, is airing on YTV in Canada tomorrow night. It's likely to be dubbed, edited, in pan & scan, and with commercial interruptions, but watch it anyway. If you've already seen it, watch it anyway. If you already own the DVD like I do, watch it anyway. And tell everyone you know, especially anyone with a ratings box, to watch it too. Help support high quality programing running in Canada so that we can get more animation of this caliber in the future. And if you care nothing for anime, well, watch it anyway. This film will win you over. It's fantastic.

Sayonara.

Ok, I'm back now.

Yeah, so, I disappeared for a few weeks. No special reason, I just felt like leaving for awhile. I doubt anyone really missed me very much though, since hardly anyone talks to me nowadays anyway. And I bet anyone that would be interested in reading anything I have to say here on my weblog isn't reading it anymore after this much inactivity. Oh well. Anyway, just in case anyone does care, I'll be writing here, posting on message boards, and doing the online messaging thing slightly more often now.

Here's an update of what's been going on.

Christmas was nice. I held a baby.

New Years was nonexistent. Nothing happened. I did not care, and still continue to not care, that the numerical value representing this seemingly arbitrary measure of time has increased by one.

An attempt at making peanut butter cookies recently resulted in more smoke than I had ever seen. It was a disaster. Not my fault though. Something went wrong in the oven. It is still broken today.

I got a Nintendo DS with Mario Kart. The game itself is fantastic, but I'm not really good enough to play online. The whole "snaking" phenomenon is just something that I do not take part in, so I pretty much don't stand a chance against anyone who can drive that way. Contact me or post on the message board if you want to exchange friend codes though.

I finished watching fansubs of Transformers Galaxy Force. The ending was the single most awesome ending in the history of Transformers. There has never been anything like it before.

I finally got fed up with all the poker-related spam I was getting. I originally posted about this here. Over the course of 5 months I received almost 4000 spam messages from what seemed to be one single source that all arrived through my website. I even got some during the holidays. Yeah, I know it was just automated programs sending this garbage, but you'd like to think that whoever's responsible for this plague would show some basic human respect and turn off the bloody spam machine on Christmas day, but no. In fact, the amount of spam I was getting had escalated to the point where I couldn't deal with it any more. I asked some developers for help and was met with silence. Thus, I had to take a few days of my own time to figure out how to stop them by myself using a programing language that I do not even fully understand. But, needless to say, I did it. I made it stop. I kicked those spammers' asses and now they can't touch me. I am happy to claim this victory, but the fact remains that it shouldn't have happened in the first place because this annoying poker spam should not even exist. Bastards.

I guess that's it. Doesn't seem like very much but it hasn't actually been that long since my last post, so I don't know if I could say that a lot has happened or not.

I start teaching again this weekend. Included is a brand new class, Anime MegaMix, so if you're a former student and you want to come back, this one is for you. More on this later, but for now you can see all the details at Comic Book Masters.

Sayonara.