stories

As a bit more background, I work for a ticketing agency that is wholly owned by an arts venue.

For some reason, the management of this venue feel an urge to hold quarterly meetings of the whole organisation (mostly, they happen so the Marketing department can continue to justify their existence).

In 2002, myself and the 2 other members of the IT department had a mild obsession with the Upright Citizens Brigade (particularly the finale of season one) and an overwhelming desire to not attend these meetings.

Enter Tuvok.

With the Tuvok action figure, we could safely send 2 people to the meetings, yet semi-truthfully say 3 members of the IT team were there.

In the intervening time, the other 2 have left and others have come in, but Tuvok has maintained his record of perfect meeting attendance, something that nobody else in the IT department can boast.

Being an office drone, small distractions such as this are what make life tolerable.

I just don’t know what will happen when Tuvok finds his way home.

Hello everyone. I’d like to start by saying that I’m quite pleased to be invited to participate in this project and hope we’ll all be life-long internet best friends.

I’m Jess’ friend, Rachel. Jess and I lived together in AmeriCorps and we spent absurd amounts of time together in New York City.

Now I live in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I’m getting my M.A. in Children’s Lit (No, I don’t want to teach or write children’s books. I just needed something to do for two years) and I teach Writing Composition at Eastern Michigan University. Despite the fact that I teach writing and grade papers I still have no idea where to place a comma. Don’t tell my students.

I live in an apartment with paper thin walls. My neighbor recently got a new girlfriend and I can hear their wild, monkey-sex goings on at top volume. I’m impressed with his stamina.

None of that was terribly interesting, but I bet this is: My face is on a thong! So for just $9.99, you can have my head buried in your crotch any time of day or night. That’s a bargain, people. (Normally you’d have to buy me dinner first.)

Happy blogging!

Hey everyone! I’ve never had a blog before. I had something called a “Deadjournal” in 2002, when it was a fairly funny play on “Livejournal”, (and it was invite only! I felt so special!) but I think I made about 4 posts and couldn’t be bothered to do anything else on it.

But here I am today! I sometimes do things on the internet. Today LRR put up not only a video I wrote, but also my comic (which is not very good.)!
I even found time to do a doodle at work:

It kind of looks like an ugly doll in a devil suit.

And now for a good story:
I live in a very Chinese part of Vancouver, just about at the intersection of 41st Ave and Victoria Drive. I can tell it’s a very Chinese part of Vancouver because there is a bubble tea house on my block that has menus that are all in Chinese, but you can get ones that are bilingual. It also stays open until 2:00 am on weekends, and serves the kind of Chinese food that sounds like a good idea at 2:00 am, provided you have been drinking all night. Last time I went I had some of a friend’s fish ball soup, but we all debated ordering a side of crispy fried pig intestine.

There is also a Chinese market a block away, which is hells of cheap, but their food goes bad fast, and sometimes it’s bad before you’ve gotten a chance to eat it. Once I cut the end off a perfectly normal looking zucchini and a rancid brown goo poured out of it. It had somehow rotted from the inside, with no discernable outside symptoms, such as the a sloshing noise from it’s liquid interior.

Anyhow, 41st and Victoria are also very busy streets, and my apartment faces out onto the road, so I’m used to a constant stream of car and bus noise, well into the night. I was sitting in my living room at about 10:00pm, trying to finish my comic (which was mentioned earlier) when it seemed like all outside noise stopped. This sudden silence actually caught my attention far more than anything else I’d heard that night, so I looked up from my work, but I got distracted by trying to draw just the right look in panel three, and went back to work. Gradually the silence was filled by what sounded like a woman singing on the street. I was almost about to get up, and see what kind of woman could make all the cars and buses and people stand still long enough to listen quietly to her song, when I finally nailed the right nose-to-forehead-to-chin ratio. By the time I had finished what I was doing she had walked by, and the traffic had started up again.

Whether they endorse it, of course, is another matter entirely.

I’m writing this from a hospital computer at Crappy But Well-Paid Job, because it’s ten to eight in the bastard morning and I’ve got sod all else to do. Crappy But Well-Paid Job involves covering sick leave and holidays on the York Hospital switchboard; it’s crappy, but, well, yeah. It does yield the odd interesting anecdote, though, which I’ll relate here as they come.

I also do two other jobs; Awesome But Poorly-Paid Job (bartender, The Ackhorne, most excellent pub; I’m the “friendly barman” described in the first comment, I rule) and Super Awesome But Extremely Intermittent Job (freelance illustrator – What I Want To Do With My Life, but gigs are currently too infrequent and low-paid for me to make a living at it). Doing illustration stuff all day long would be ideal, of course, but at the moment I have to say I’m glad of the variation in my work life at the moment. When I got out of art school, I foolishly thought I could blaze straight into The Business, becoming a high-rollin’ illustration sensation with a reputation all men envy; of course, business-wise, I didn’t know my arse from a hole in the ground, and spent six months unemployed. Like everyone else, I’ve since realised that success, real success, in this game is far more dependent on who you know than how many e-mails you can stomach sending to art directors.

I’m going to be exhibiting at the UK Web & Minicomix Thing next weekend, so expect the next few days’ posting to be shrieking, panicked hollerings as I deperately try to get all my shit together in time. Either that, or I’ll return with a con report around the 20th.

My name is Luke and I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

Edit: hee hee hee the rota here says “HO’S ROTATE BETWEEN WARDS” on it! (HO = house officer in this case; UK equivilent of a resident, but still. Giggles are few and far between on the 7am-3pm shift.)

I guess as the 6th contributor, I need to begin by worrying about getting into 2 deadly games of cat and mouse in the sewers below Vienna.

Then again, maybe not.

By way of introduction, Wired seem to think I have a problem.

Admittedly, I did make the choice to begin using the Internet to get access to tv shows before they air in Australia, so I wasn’t left months behind discussions in various online forums.

The choice to never delete anything and fill up hard drive after hard drive with information I may never access (sometimes, multiple copies of the same movie/show/album) was all me, though.

But here’s the fun part: I don’t plan to stop. Just like I don’t plan to stop buying books I may or may not ever read and DVDs I may or may not ever watch.

My name is Stuart and I am a packrat.

This is what happens, I suppose, when five strangers stop being nice and start being real, although I (for one) intend to stay mostly nice and there’s no reason to think that any of this will be real.

Internet, ho!