A Few Tid Bits

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So my Kickstarter orders are more or less all out.  I still need to get the paperwork done & get the artists paid for the work they’ve done on the comics.   But I feel a lot less stressed out having finished that.

So I got some news that the tour I’m doing with The Independents has been greatly abbreviated.  I’m fine with it because it will give me more time to work on my own stuff, though I do miss the idea of getting to go up to Canada & just forcing myself to be out of the house is probably a good idea as well.  But I’ll try to make some cool stuff happen in the mean time.  Get a couple comics done & maybe an album or two instead.

Here’s another video of new stuff from mwvm.

Last Night’s Dream:
I look out the window of the kitchen on the second floor & near eye level is a fox sleeping on a branch of a pine tree.  I didn’t even know foxes could climb trees, much less that they choose to sleep in them.  I wish there was someone to show him to.

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Comics, mwvm, Peter Aldrich, Small Life Form, Dagon

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I thought last week that I had printed up enough comics to fill the orders for the Kickstarter.  & maybe I had, but with the couple additional box sets I sold & all the comics I unloaded at SPACE I’m a couple hundred comics short.  So today I needed to print some more up, but I needed to take the printer apart & clean it to get the print quality I wanted & now I have to assemble them all & try to finish things up with getting the packages assembled & shipped out.

In other comic news I realized I need to increase the prices of the comics when people order them online.  Paypal takes a fee & then there’s shipping of course & I was only going a nickel over expenses (given my time is of no value).  So soon I’ll be increasing the prices to $1.50.

Lately mwvm has been putting up songs as they’re recorded rather than waiting for an album.  I’m still undecided about the no album format so many musicians are adopting, but more good music is more good music.

So a few weeks ago at the Blondena release party I performed a trio improv collaboration with my Small Life Form rig & Peter Aldrich performed in a separate trio.  Here’s the audio artifacts of the event.

I watched this movie Dagon today while assembling my comics.  I hadn’t watched it because though I’m a fan of the Lovecraft mythology, I saw a bunch of the movies based on his work that came out in the 1990s & they were all pretty awful.  But this one lives up to the hype of a decent little Lovecraftian horror movie.

Posted in comics, daily news, movies & television, music | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

3 Responses to Comics, mwvm, Peter Aldrich, Small Life Form, Dagon

  1. michael says:
    May 3, 2012 at 3:29 pm

    i still believe in the album concept brian, i’ve always uploaded WIP stuff since the very early days.

  2. michael says:
    May 4, 2012 at 11:55 am

    i like the sarcasm :)

Birthdays & Comics

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So today was my birthday.  I celebrated by assembling comics & going to the post office to ship a bunch out.  Anyway, I did somehow get 103 people to post “happy birthday” on my wall on Facebook & that felt pretty weird.  I don’t know.  You see, my birthday is the same as my mom’s & it being her birthday has more or less trumped mine since I was ten or so & then when I was 25 my nephew was born on my birthday which also kinda knocks my birthday down a peg, so I don’t really have this big deal thing like most other folks seem to have.  I guess I don’t even know what I’m missing.

I am about halfway done with getting the comics packaged up & shipped out for the Kickstarter.  After I finish that I’ll get to work on making another fan funding project.

I have some reviews I need to type up for N=D & FCIO.  Also I have a couple of entries I want to do for the blog to generate some fairly random traffic (just articles on life in general that I don’t know where else to post).  We’ll see what happens.

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One Response to Birthdays & Comics

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    May 1, 2012 at 8:09 am

    yet 103 people aren’t willing to post a hey great album or whatnot…. FBook rules!

Back & Dreams

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Back from the comic convention.  It was fun.  Made enough to cover my table (though not enough to cover gas), so in general a success.  Now I’m back home & trying to get more promo follow-up done for the Northern Valentine & to finish making up all the comics for the Kickstarter thing before I go out with the Independents for a month in two weeks.   It’s a race to get it done.  Which is keeping me from properly blogging these fine bits of entertainment for you.

Recent Dream:
I wake up & I’m unable to get control enough over my body to move in the bed or call for help.  All I can do is blink my eyes.  I guess this is how it ends.

Posted in comics, daily news, dreams | Tagged | 2 Comments

2 Responses to Back & Dreams

  1. Jarod says:
    April 30, 2012 at 1:01 am

    Hey, I just finished reading “Just a Man” 1-4. I really enjoyed it! I hope you’ll continue the series. I really like your sparse prose. Reminiscent of some of my favorite pulps.

    • Brian John Mitchell says:
      April 30, 2012 at 10:23 pm

      Thank you sir. I need to get back to work on that series. I got to a point where I couldn’t figure out which of two things was going to happen next. I suppose I should just write them both down & go with whichever seems stronger.

More Cyborgs & Cats

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

I posted up reviews of Cyborg 2 & Cyborg 3 on Finally Checking It Out as I watched them while making the comics.

Still spending more or less all my time assembling the comics.  I’m leaving town tomorrow for the comic convention & I suppose I should spend thirty minutes playing guitar & it’ll take an hour to pack.  I’m going to stop in Greensboro to visit Will Dodson on the way up & stop in Lansing, NC to visit Nic Slaton on the way back.  Then finish up the packages to mail the comics out & then get back to work on music stuff.

I also stumbled across this pretty great kitty cat short today.

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5 Responses to More Cyborgs & Cats

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    April 20, 2012 at 11:28 am

    just thinking you should do a comic called “More cyborgs than cats”

    about a slave class (cyborg) in future america. maybe from the cat perspective.

  2. DistortedHorizon says:
    April 20, 2012 at 12:32 pm

    Battlestar Galactica with cats in charge?

    • GoddakkAttack says:
      April 25, 2012 at 8:45 am

      i’ve only seen the original :/ and can only think of the cats as that goofy dog thing Muffit

      • DistortedHorizon says:
        April 25, 2012 at 2:27 pm

        Just saw Muffit for the first time in my life thanks to Google. It reminds me of ALF… I really have to watch the original series :D

  3. Brian John Mitchell says:
    April 24, 2012 at 9:37 pm

    That does sound like a good idea. Would a cat’s quality of life improve by being owned by a robot instead of a human? Of course as a super serious drama social commentary instead of as a comedy…..

Gear Grinding

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Assembled a couple hundred comics.  Reworked my comic display to hold the new books.  Everything takes longer than I anticipate.  Also spent a couple of hours on an interview about the comics (I’ll put up the link when I get it).  New shirts & buttons came in.  Restrung my guitar (strings too dead even for me!).  Possibly booked a show for the way back from Columbus.  Completed more paperwork for the Kickstarter orders.  I need interns….

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Top Choons, Comics, Etc.

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Northern Valentine, mwvm, & Electric Bird Noise are all on Top Choons trying to get voted into the top of the charts if you have a few seconds to vote for one of them.

I got the digital comics done & uploaded.  It took a while as one of the zips is 350 megs.  Sent an email out to the first tier of supporters about it.  I still need to send stuff out to the other backers about them being available while they wait for the physicals to come.  Speaking of which, I got about 100 assembled today.  I’m letting myself get embarrassingly far behind on my goals for getting all the comics ready.  I got my first credit card bill with some of the supplies for the comics on it.  It’s funny how money coming in doesn’t seem like as much when you see all the money going out.  I’m probably making $2 an hour or something on this project in the end, but that’s okay.  It’s better than nothing.

I checked out my Google Adsense account (for the ads on QRD & such) & I finally passed their payment threshold.  Pretty stoked about that.  I think it only took five years!

Planning on doing another musician dad interview series on QRD if any of you have any people you think I should make sure to contact for it.

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Work for Me, Videos for You

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I finished the first batch of boxes for the comic sets finally.  I put lemon oil on them & everything.  I also finished making digital versions of the last few comics I hadn’t done that with yet & I did some slight alterations to the text portions of the first three Lost Kisses to make them easier to read than they originally were.  So tomorrow I plan on bundling up digital versions of the files for the people that had that as one of their perks on Kickstarter & letting them know that they are available.

Been working for 16 hours straight on the comics today, so not a lot of other things to talk about, but when I checked my email a few people sent me links to videos, so I have some content for you.

From Peter Aldrich came a link to this video from The Turtles explaining the legal problems & debts of their band:

From Silber friend/fan Will Dodson comes a trailer for a zombie short starring toddlers that he’s involved with:

From mwvm comes a little video of him fooling around with his newest looping pedal, a Boomerang III:

Last Night’s Dream:
Sharing a hotel room with my grandmother, niece, & nephew.  We’re all sitting on the beds eating Twinkies.  My grandmother is warning the kids to be careful not to get the cream filling on their hands & wipe it on the bed meanwhile I have a Twinkie that looks like someone sat on it & is a burst mess even before I open the plastic so I get the cream all over my hands.  I try to wash it off, but my hands are still sticky no matter what I do.

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Weird Headache, Fun Times, Dream

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So yesterday morning I got an email about an old article not being up on QRD.  Somehow the file was indeed missing.  Along with 100 or so other random files throughout the Silber site.  Some image files, some MP3s, some HTML files.  I basically had to re-upload the entire site to check what was missing.  I have no idea what happened or when.  My webhost did have a crash a couple of weeks ago, so I guess that may be the culprit?  Kind of an annoying & negative way to start a day though, that’s for sure.

The show went all right.  I tried to broadcast it on Ustream.  I still need to go through it looking to see if there’s anything worth trying to present to you folks.  The internet in the venue was wonky at best.  Anyway it was a night where people did trios with people they hadn’t played with before, so forced improvisation.  I was rocking the Small Life Form set-up with Bryce Eiman (Weather Machine) & Scott Berrier (Powercloud).  Fun times.  Oh & it was the release party for a Small Life Form disc.  I’ll let you know when it goes up for sale.

I think I’m going to be putting on the final coat of varnish on the comic boxes today.  I guess I’ll look at them tomorrow to figure it out.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m driving with my niece & nephew in the car & we’re going by the school I attended for kindergarten & first grade.  There’s a guy walking on the sidewalk dressed as Mr. Freeze circa the Super Friends.  He has his hood down & sweat is pouring off his head so fast that his winter coat is wet.

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Productive Walls

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

I felt like I had a pretty productive day.  Worked on the finish of the boxes for the box sets.  Did some of the paperwork for filling the Kickstarter orders.  Assembled some comics.  Mailed an order out to a distributor.  Got in an order from another distributor.  So I thought to myself, “I’ll top it off by mastering up a sample track on this project to knock that out in the morning.”  Ehhhh, that didn’t work out.  The problem with mastering quiet minimalist music is when you start to boost things to a level to seem audible next to the average record you run into a really loud noise floor & weird distortions of the volume peaks.  But I guess the question is, “should a quiet record be close to as loud as a rock record?”  I’m never sure because there’s also the question, “Should a quiet record be loud enough you can hear it while driving on the highway in a crappy car with a crappy radio?”  So right now I’m at a point where the song is mastered just below 1990 specs in volume which I feel might be the right spot.  Sent it to the musician to see the situation on this track before moving on with the rest of the album.

Playing a weird improv show thing tomorrow.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

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2 Responses to Productive Walls

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    April 13, 2012 at 7:50 am

    maybe you should compare it to classical music cd’s instead of rock ones.