JAYSUS!

Man, has this been one productive week/weekend. I blame it fully on the fact that we haven't had regular internet service since around Tuesday. Damn you, person in the building with unlocked WiFi! Get a stronger signal!
Anyway, now that I've totally incriminated myself...
Finished a piece for Paracinema Magazine's (www.paracinema.net) next issue, that's going to be on the cover, apparently. I feel so very accomplished! Can't say a whole Hell of a lot about it, but it's cool (in my totally unbiased opinion), and you should all buy multiple copies when it comes out.
What I CAN talk about is this really awesome idea I've had based off a school assignment given this week (wow, how often does THAT happen?) I've been wanting to do some kinda gimmicky giveaway to send to people or sell, something cool and unique that hopefully people would be into. For my class assignment, I chose to do a graphic novella...thing...that's related to one of my larger stories. Kind of like a mini chapter:

That's not a poorly formatted JPEG. That's actual size. The assignment was to fit our work into a standard-sized matchbox.
So, I'm thinking of developing a series of "Minikomik" (gotta love that faux-Soviet spelling!), complete works around 5-10 pages long, all lovingly shoved in their own matchboxes and reasonably priced.
Oh, and I cheated. The original size of the pages is 3.75x6 inches. I might be insane, and I might love to do miniatures, bu there's no way in Hell I am inking a multipanel page that's only 2 inches high.

Good Old-Fashioned Nightmare Fuel

Just woke up from a harrowing nightmare in which I was kidnapped from a Turner exhibit at the Guggenheim (I fully admit I barely know who Turner even IS, and from what I've seen I don't know why I would have gone to that show, but anyway...), by a gang of military/rogue mercenaries dispatched from a cooking school in Belarus. After pleading with them that, among other things, I had to use the bathroom, the elevator stopped at the 44th floor (at the Guggenheim) and deposited us into a British grocery store in Belarus (...again, at the Guggenheim). It was there where I was cruelly told I must separate lettuce by color to ascertain just how far along I WAS in cooking.
This was when I literally woke up crying. Belorussian cooking schools don't fuck around.
Finally starting on my drawings for Thesis– would have done it yesterday except for recovering from Germanfest, which I will talk about. I figure there's no way in Hell I'm going to be able to do that many linocuts, so I'll do faux-linos. I figured out a quick n' dirty way of doing it (well, actually less dirty than doing real linos, but you get the point). Listening to a bunch of Lotte Lenya/Kurt Weill to get "in the mood" (yeah, it's a really cheery, upbeat piece of art), which unfortunately has me now wanting to do real prints about the Threepenny Opera. No! No! Resist the temptation! Until next weekend, anyway!
So, Germanfest: Imagine every loud-but-jolly drunk you've ever met, slap 'em in lederhosen and one of those Munich hats with the brush on the side (one of which I have proudly owned since high school), and ply them with beer and brats, and encourage them to yodel. Then, throw in an inexplicably huge amount of Asians, also drunk, in funny hats, and yodeling. Did I mention it's 2 in the afternoon?
I've determined, as a part-German myself, that although we might be efficient, we're essentially one damn goofy culture. So between that, the Lotte Lenya marathon, and the pursuit of Frans Masereel prints for reference, it's been a VERY German weekend.
Guess that's better than Belorussian, anyway.
Where the Hell even IS Belarus?