“Striking Sparks” — Page Forty-Five
Man. Take out a few murderous criminals and suddenly you’re typecast? Life, I swear.
So the seemingly unrelated storylines are starting to come together now! Hang tight! This is where we start having some real fun. Especially me, since I get to set more things on fire. Fortunately, I’d just done some burning tire tracks, and Max’s sweet art on this page gave me the perfect opportunity to use them.
Oh! and reminder! October’s Vote Incentive is up! The popular “Sith Marissa” image, now pristine without word balloons or distracting foreground elements!
And speaking of sweet art, the September incentive: “Marissa: Blowing Kisses” has been upgraded to super-high-resolution and print-optimized versions and the whole shebang is available for immediate download on Max-the-Artist’s donation page! Any and all boostage appreciated!
More below!
Bobservations
Part of the Job Description
I’m sure we’ve all experienced this at some point or another — the discovery that; just because you’ve gotten a reputation for being good at something, people assume that’s all you know how to do. There’s any number of people who assume that just because I’ve occasionally blown some stuff up that I can’t possibly be the same guy who writes cartoons. Or that if I write cartoons, I can’t possibly write novels. Or live-action scripts. It’s like you get pigeonholed.
But it’s okay. I actually like bouncing around. And the neat thing about the Internet and computers these days is that if you can’t get anyone to actually hire you to do something new — well, it’s not outside the realm of possibility for you to just go ahead and do it anyway. Indy filmmakers, indy authors, and of course — webcomics. Sometimes the best way to learn is by doing.
So right at the moment, I’m trying — with my wife’s help — to learn how to write for pre-school children. Yes. Me. It’s a style I’ve never explored, and since almost my entire IMDB database is 90’s brutal action shows, it’s not something I can really expect anyone to just hire me for, right off the bat. But actually, it’s an interesting shift in the mental gearage. I used to say that if they ever needed the Care Bears to blow stuff up and kill people, I’d be right there (and I still secretly think that would be a cool series) but for now, I’m actually learning to “think cute.”
My wife currently works on a Disney Junior show called Jake and the Neverland Pirates, which gives her all sorts of insights on the genre. Such as “Don’t be scary,” and “There’s no real evil, just little conflicts like envy or competition,” and “it’s important to have small teaching moments.” And while my natural instincts are to write something like: “Okay, kids! Remember, Mr. M203 Grenade Launcher is your friend! Just make sure he’s loaded properly and pointed in a safe direction! Now let’s see who can be first to fire a forty mike-mike HEPD into the practice bunker!” she says that’s not really what the executives are looking for. Then she references a “teaching moment” like showing how worms help enrich the soil, and doesn’t mention anything about decomposing bodies.
It’s like we’re talking two different languages, I swear.
Still, I’m picking it up. It’s a growth experience. And like Max in the page above, I rather resent the implication that no one seems to think I’d even be interested. I am, I swear!
(Share Bear: I know! We can share it! Just let me make enough pieces for everyone — with my chainsaw! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! BRRRRRRRM!)
— Bob out
————————————–Owl books! Yes!———————————->
Gonna need something to blow the windows!
Hard to say if anyone would know about the windows outside the fire dept/gov. City hall types tend to sit on data like that when it comes to the press…until it bites them somewhere sensitive.
On the bright side, Max gets to blow his secret identity soon!
You are correct and this is not knowledge our hero currently has. Reveals coming up!
Oy, tell me about it. You help a few people with their phones, program a few microwave clocks, fix a few cameras, and all of a sudden, everyone thinks you’re some kind of IT genius, raised and educated for the sole purpose of explaining how this thing or that works, or whether or not something is a good buy, or how the hell cellphone contracts in canada work. Nevermind that I’m only mediocre in these tasks compared to an actual expert, or that I’ve spent most of my life working on a compleatly different skillset, I can show you how to end tasks and clear the RAM on your android phone! I must be some kind of techno god sent back from the singularity to help all humanity and battle the evil forces of the technology manufacturers hellbent on keeping the masses huddled in fear and ignorance.
*deep breath.
I’m ok now.
……..
So, how goes the blowing up stuff and childrens literature?
Hahaha! I confess I have been the other person, usually with Max, whom I treat as the family Tech Support and I can tell he is really tired of it. But tough. It’s his own fault for usually knowing the answer.
Balthazar, the thing that aggravates me the most is when people run to me for help with things they could easily figure out themselves if they only stopped to look and think for a moment.
When I was very young and VCRs were a new thing, I remember one of my older sisters mentioning how a professor at her college couldn’t figure out to run a VCR. When I first saw one, knowing nothing about it, I stopped and looked at it. Hmmm. Play, stop, fast forward, rewind, eject… Aside from this “tracking” knob and a few programming buttons that I didn’t understand at the time, it was just like a tape recorder! And on the back, I already knew about audio in and out from tape recorders, and this had a video in and out too, along with TV inputs, which made perfect sense. I was in early grade school and was able to figure out this thing that the college professor couldn’t figure out, not because I was brilliant, but because I actually stopped and looked at what was there rather than just throwing my hands up.
Things like that have led me to one of my great insights. Smart people really aren’t all that smart. They’re just less stupid than everyone else.
How about… (air-quote) smart people tend to stay within more well-defined pursuits and are even less capable outside those parameters than (air-quotes) dumb people.
How about, “smart people can figure things out and while smartness in general doesn’t necessarily correlate with how much a person has memorized, having a larger store of information and experiences to draw upon and make new connections tends to make a person better at being able to figure out how people/things are connected and how things/people work”? Part of the MENSA test is (or used to be, anyway) general random trivia. The idea was that if you were really smart, you’d pick up on all that random stuff floating around that most people just gloss over and ignore.
It’s kind of like the false “big men are slow” notion. Fat tends to negatively correlate with muscle, but the presence of fat doesn’t necessarily mean that a person doesn’t have muscle. Consider sumo wrestlers. The top guys can all dunk on an NBA hoop — they’re huge ginormous guys, but they have a ton of muscle along with all their fat. “But my favorite boxer/MMA person looks super muscled just before a big fight.” They’ve probably starved and dehydrated themselves to make a particular weight class and so are probably pretty weak right at that moment. Look at the superheavyweights, they’re big, somewhat fatty (extra padding to help absorb the blows), and they move like lightning.
This is an impressive discussion. I’m going to add that, as a writer, one of the things I’ve always relied on is that “smart” can be faked pretty well by “Time + Research.” I can have a character whip out a snappy comment with deep knowledge behind it and look smart as hell to the audience… but they don’t know it took me two days plus extensive Googling to come up with that line. Heh.
Speaking of Sith, lol
http://acidsquirrel.com/post/58773
Is it just me or is Max looking a little different here? I mean more than just the expression, his facial structure seems a little off the norm, as it were.
Hmm, well, i don’t have a set model i base Max off of, so he’ll fluctuate a bit here and there. Any specific feature you were thinking of? I guess maybe his chin is a bit big in frame 4, but its within my tolerance… maybe it’s just you 🙂
So, you’ve probably already thought about this, but just in case you haven’t, I want to throw out a suggestion. Max is constantly being injured on missions because he doesn’t have a weapon. Your reasoning behind this is that metal can’t go through the teleporter, but what about a ceramic or composite plastic gun? Or even a composite plastic knife? Or perhaps a small fiberglass crossbow? Even a baton would be better than nothing. Anyhoo, I just wanted to throw that out there.
Welcome, Andrew! Yes, they’ve all been discussed in previous comments. Plastic guns tend to explode and still have metal parts (don’t get your information from Die Hard II) and standard ceramic knives are too brittle for combat. I suppose we could give him a wooden bow and flint-tipped arrows and – for that matter – an obsidian knife; but remember that Max’s main requirements are close-quarter combat. It’s better and easier for him (as a skilled professional soldier) to have both hands free and fast movement because he can take a real gun away from most thugs and thus have a reliable weapon almost immediately. That said, however, we do have plans for upgrades, wait and see!
Oh, and if you want a hero who really gets damaged during an adventure, check out the Owl books. Abusing my main characters seems to have become my forte. (Along with shameless plugs)
Okay, sure: The red lightning and tracks of fire do make for nicely dramatic effects.
However… This is not Back to the Future. And if your electric car arcs lightning all the time, I’m pretty sure something is wrong with it. Also, the batteries would go dead in no time flat. Just saying…
Scarlet Dynamo effect. There’s a less spectacular (Valet) mode for normal use.