Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Geoff Sebesta's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
10:59 pm	The Pawnee of Post-Rock Country Ellsworth is in the part of Kansas known as Post-Rock Country. That's because when people moved out here weren't no trees. So they scraped back the topsoil, cut eight-foot posts out of limestone, and used those to make the boundary fences. Hard core. Do Make Say Think and Tin Hat Trio are two of my favorite bands, and they play what some people call post-rock. See? See? Get it? Plus the Pawnee live around here. And Pawnee looks like PWND. There has to be a hilarious gif in this somewhere. Which no one in Post-Rock Country would ever see, because they don't believe in gifs. Here are some great names for bands: OJ and the Real Killers MC Ctrl-Z The Shirtless Kirks Waiters of Mass Destruction The Affordable Health Cares* Van Candy Google McMyspace Baby Shark Jesus Centimeter the Empty MC** Shanks vs. Shivs Dipthöng Dredlox El Kablammo The Devious Elite*** Brillo Glacial**** The Ditko Dots Sugar Shock The Harsh Realities Pro-Life Bang-List***** Googlability The Monster Island Marching Band Weird Pointy Industries Proud Member****** Cadmium Cocktail +1 to Music Perfect Bacon******* *This one is a really, really long story. **Must be prog-rock or post-rock. ***Stole that one from Shane. ****Stole that one from a bottle of Pantine hair conditioner. It's French for "Icy Shine." *****Jake assures me that's a good idea but I'm not so sure. Probably should be an ironic punk band. ******Also yoinked from Jake. *******gyanked from Charles. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 25th, 2011
7:11 pm	y hello thar lj Don't mind me, just a test post for my own purposes. Read on if you want to see a very rough draft of Cloudhopper 3. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Monday, October 17th, 2011
2:19 am	Abortion I don't give a damn at what point babies are babies, I say if you got something in you, you got the right to take it out. If it lives, put it in an orphanage. If it dies, well then. The corollary to this -- and the point where abortion anti-advocates prove themselves assholes -- is that if it cannot survive outside the body, it still looks like a baby, and it's a pure kindness to end its suffering without making the mother suffer even more. I have a chart that demonstrates this if you're confused. The salient point is that nobody can make you an incubator if you don't want to be. Laws stop at the skin (or at least they should). What I reeeeealy want to do is give the technology another couple years to get here, until we get to the point where a baby can be implanted and survive in the GI tract for at least a little while, regardless of whether the GI tract is male or female. Apparently it's quite possible and they just haven't made it practical yet. And then I want to find a fat asshole senator from a state where they made abortion illegal in cases of rape, and give him a roofie and inject that shit in his fat gut, and tell him, it doesn't matter that somebody implanted this thing in you in the most horrific and disrespectful manner possible, it's a baby and you have to carry it. The law will be clear. I will be charged with rape or something, and since this is a southern state that's only a year or two with time off for good behavior. I'll probably get out before that shitbird brings the baby to term. And I'll spend that whole time laughing. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 10th, 2011
1:11 pm	Busta/Lovecraft: The thriiiilillililing conclusion! Okay that was not the thrilling conclusion to Busta/Lovecraft. This is! I wanted to space it out another week because I just can't get my blog on my website to work, but if I dedicate myself I can finish it this week. I am these days tryin' hard to push traffic to my actual website so if you haven't read it all yet go to unnecessaryg.com and read it there. I should talk about the creation of this odd little opus. This story arose out of conversations on the internet about the Mountain Goats song "Lovecraft in Brooklyn," and my amusement when I discovered that it was all true. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqq0lMhPTb4 Lovecraft really did live in Brooklyn for a year, and it was the year he went really crazy and really racist. The work he produced in Brooklyn is demented, the work of a collapsing mind, and after this he returned home to write nearly all his best stories. The strange thing is that nothing really "happened" to him in Brooklyn, he just couldn't handle the city. So I read the wikipedia page: and found it full of delights. Not only is Red Hook so weird a part of NYC that I've never been there -- you can't even take a subway there -- and not only is it where they filmed Real World: NYC, but Busta Rhymes grew up there. Instantly I realized that the screaming, chanting, hoodoo-making cult-priest in every HPL story was, in fact, Busta Rhymes. HPL would have hated Busta Rhymes. He would have found him terrifying. And considering HPL's priggish manner and outspoken racism (and Red Hook was where he reached his absolute peak of xenophobia), I doubt Busta would like him either. But I love them both! I don't know if there's many other people in the world with as much honest affection for Busta Rhymes and H. P. Lovecraft as me. I knew that I had to tell this story. If not me, who? I didn't know that instantly, it only became clear to me over a series of FB conversations. I've started this new technique I call "stealing ideas from the internet," where I discuss story ideas on FB and other forums and people tell me what they think, and then I usually decide what to do based on that. It's been an extremely effective technique, may I say. Anyway, the internet thought the idea of Busta Rhymes vs. H. P. Lovecraft needed to be told, so I told it. This was back in February. I worked out most of the story in conversation with Gewel, then laid out some of the pages while she was in Vermont. When we moved in together in April the pages went up on the wall, and got worked on a little bit at a time. We skipped the Gathering this year to stay in Austin and have our own personal gathering, worked on pages and paintings, it got done a little bit by a little bit. I did the layouts and rough pencils and then Gewel and I went back and forth on the pencils and inks. It was a game. The first page that we really did together, the "Stars are Right" pages (which were originally 1/2 again longer), took a month to draw all those crazy little stars. It was fun, and there was no rush. As long as it was done by November I was fine with it. It was about two thirds done when I got the phone call on July 1st that I had somehow jumped to the top of the SDCC waiting list and could now have a table. It was just too bad, thought I, that Busta/Lovecraft wasn't going to be done in time. Let's finish it, said Gewel. So we did. And that's pretty much all we did for the first three weeks of July -- worked on Busta/Lovecraft. We actually finished it eight hours before we drove to San Diego, did the cover and the logo sitting on a patio in San Diego and had printed copies less than an hour after being done. Since we had no time we didn't go no fancy, we just got the biggest pinkest paper we could for the cover and folded 11x17 paper in half for the inside pages. Less than twenty-four hours after that we were selling it at SDCC. It sold out by Friday. We printed more and they sold out too -- I think we left there with 5 copies. We also left with some of the most valuable experience a creator can have -- at least a thousand pairs of eyes passed over our story, and some of them were attached to extremely perceptive brains. We got some truly excellent criticism, and it came at a time when we could take it to heart. So we took the story apart, and put it back together again. We split one page into two (because people enjoyed the art of the "Stars are right" pages but didn't get the story of it, added another page to Busta's party (mostly as an excuse to draw three-point distorted perspective again, because I wanted to do a better job than on page one), gave the table-tossing and the rap each their own pages (because before they were smooshed onto one) and made the rap much, much, much better, and added another page to the Streetfighter battle, because that's the best part and anyway as Mr. Notley pointed out, HPL never really got to give his own back in the original version. He's just a guy who was eating dinner thinkin' stupid shit and this guy just shows up and whales the tar out of him for stuff that weren't even illegal when he thunk it. It's important that HPL get at least one good punch in. So be it! Chain Attack! Plus the fight feels more like a fight now, and I like that. Also, we totally redrew these two pages from the ground up: We follow the principle, it's not essential to understand what's going on but it's always essential that what's going on be epic. And then we redrew every page. Just poured hours into it. Because it's fun. We established an aesthetic and stuck to it, asked questions and answered them and left some more unanswered, and did it in a way that a large number of people have found entertaining. We know it works, in other words, so we really stretched out and made some pages better. Especially the lettering and some of the costuming issues. Because the characters all change costume every scene we lost some readers in there, and sometimes they just assumed that whoever was closest to the front was Busta. It didn't seem to harm their enjoyment of the story any but it wasn't *awesome* so we fixed it. And that's it! And now you can read it! And we will print out some hardcover copies tomorrow, which I'm really looking forward to -- I've never had a hardcover book before. Thanks for reading, both the story and the story of the story, and if you'd like to see the whole thing go to: http://unnecessaryg.com there are both softcover and harcover versions of this story for sale in the store, or you can just click here: In conclusion, here is the best Busta Rhymes video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la4vPnrGUms (Comment on this)
Monday, October 3rd, 2011
4:24 am	Cowboy-Free, my 24-hour comic for 2011 I did a 24-hour comic this weekend, so the last installment of Busta/Lovecraft will be delayed a bit. ( Read more... ) Thanks to Zach Taylor for putting it all together, and to Conjunctured for giving him a place to put it all together. This was the most fun 24hrCD for years and years, and yielded major insights and hilarity. I had a really, really good time. Also, I'm getting really into making my web site work, so this blog will...well, this blog will still be here, but its main home will be at: unnecessaryg.com/blog just as soon as I get the last couple kinks ironed out of wordpress. I'd really prefer that y'all follow me over there instead of here, but I'll keep reposting here anyway. I'm also a huge fan of Project Wonderful: https://www.projectwonderful.com/?tag=66144 For reasons that I will explain when I'm less tired, oh and also I now have a FB "artist" page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Geoff-Sebesta/223541824372461 Which you can now "follow" but I actually signed up for it accidentally and have no particular plans to develop it at this time; I'm finding my website and Project Wonderful a lot more interesting. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 26th, 2011
2:32 am	Busta/Lovecraft 26 Name me one other work of art where H. P. Lovecraft gets hit by a truck. I don't think there is one. This week I've ensconsed myself in the comforting insignificance of "Trying to Get My Web-Site Traffic Up." It's been fun. I've managed to about quadruple it, and turn that into money. Sort of money. Like, three digits, but only if you count pennies as digits. But I went through and really exhaustively spruced up my web site, to the point where there are only a few parts that still bother me. I put ads on a couple pages too, which has been great fun. projectwonderful.com , tell 'em I sent you. It's an advertising cooperative where people bid pennies, literally pennies, to advertise on your site, and you do the same for them. It's actually sorta worked a little bit. I don't think I've made a single sale off the five big dollars that I sunk into this, but if I do I will recycle those funds right back into the ads, because it's mad fun. I get to spend miniscule amounts of money and feel like I'm actually accomplishing things for art and career -- it's mad fun. It definitely fulfills my need for the internet to tell me more things! faster! Many thanks to Jeanne Thornton, roommate extraordinaire and author of this encomium of astoundment: http://fictioncircus.com/mwhf/comic.php?date=20110812 (Comment on this)
Monday, September 19th, 2011
12:10 am	Busta/Lovecraft 24 and 25 EPIC. Hey, do me a favor and go to my web site: http://unnecessaryg.com and that's it. Just go to the web site for a second so it looks like I have more traffic for a second, because I'm trying to impress a computer program. That's all; just click the button. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 12th, 2011
1:47 am	Busta/Lovecraft 20 and 21 (or 22 or 23) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
12:49 pm	A Citizen's Guide to Watching Texas Burn Down So it has come to my attention that some of you do not live in Austin; in fact, some of you might not be Texan at all! In that case, I bet you're a bit curious about whether or not my state is burning down. Here is a FAQ: 1. Is Texas burning down? No. Texas is a really big place. We have space for a lot of wildfires. 2. Is Austin burning down? Now that's a much better question. All I can tell you is that I live very close to Central Austin and I can't see any smoke or really smell any smoke. I can tell there's something in the air because people have been having crazy allergy attacks for the last three days, coughing and sneezing everywhere you go. And I hear if you get up about ten stories you can see this wall of smoke to the East that is supposed to be quite disturbing and depressing. But from my house, no, you can't see a thing. So downtown could theoretically be safe. 3. Is Bastrop burning down? Bastrop is unfortunately apparently gone. Everything to the south and east of here is apparently not there right now. 4. So is Austin next? We're going to have to get into geology here. Texas is basically one very, very big hill. The hill's called The Hill Country. We (like Waco, San Marcos, San Antonio, and basically every major city in Texas) are at the very edge of the foothills of the Hill Country, we're right where it stops and turns into endless prarie. The prairie is on fire, not the Hill Country. This is an extremely good thing. The wind is coming from the north, (and will be coming from the north, with no rain, for the forseeable future) which means that effectively any fire that's coming here has to spread (slightly) uphill, and into (relatively) damper areas. The Hill Country also traps and funnels all the water in most of the state, and it drains through Austin. This means that we still have water, long after most of the water is gone from the state. In fact, as long as this area doesn't turn to a desert Austin will always have water. Howeever, due to Texas climactic factors, Austin has a much larger surface area of city parks than most city. Basically every creek in Texas is its own little tree-lined canyon. They're too steep to build in, so they're just parks, and they're everywhere. This normally does a great job of protecting and sheltering the water and preventing fires, but when you're in a drought as severe as this one (and neither I nor anyone alive has ever seen a drought like this) that doesn't matter any more. The creeks are not completely dead but they've been dying. This means there's basically a hundred lines of tinder and kindling leading straight into downtown Austin. This means when it happens, it's gonna happen. 5. So how exactly could it all go wrong for Austin? The Hill Country is not on fire. Right now. However, the Hill Country is a much wetter area than the prairie. It's a lot more sheltered. That means that it's covered in trees. It's not a forest like you Yankees think of a forest, because the trees are shorter and much wider, and there's a big space between the trunks. It's still a forest. Which means it's made of wood. And there has been a terrible tree disease called "oak wilt" that has been killing most every tree in the Hill Country for years now. There are hills and hills and hills filled with dead trees. That was before the drought. It is extremely easy to imagine a wildfire of truly horrific proportions sweeping down the hill country to Austin. At that point we are well and truly screwed. It won't be a brush fire so it won't just come and go. It will burn, and burn, and burn. I can't imagine how they'd put it out, especially in a high wind so that the fire jumps the ridgetops. 6. Wouldn't rain help? It's not gonna rain. An interesting side-effect to all these East Coast hurricanes is that when they turn north and go up the coast they push a column of air over the top of the pole and back down. It goes right down the middle of the plains states, and the wind has no moisture in it whatsoever. As long as this continues, no rain. Hurricane for you = no rain for us. If it did rain substantially, lots of deaths from flash flooding, because the ground is much too hard to absorb much water. 7. What next? If the fires back around to the west of Austin, it's my opinion that it's time to think about leaving. It's also my opinion that by that point it will be too late to leave, that there won't be anywhere to go anyway, and that no matter what I don't plan to leave. This is actually the best place to be for hundreds of miles in any direction, because your choice is drought-struck plains, plains that have just burnt down, or a terrifying hilly tinderbox. This doesn't change for 300 miles in any direction. The places that burned, in two years they'll be prairie again. The people who lost their houses, I dunno, I don't have a clue. If you're thinking it's a bad idea to put this much carbon into the atmosphere right now, you're right. Maybe some of it will fall onto the Gulf, stick to the oil, and bring it to the bottom. That's your silver lining. I love Austin more than anything, but if it doesn't rain this winter I'm leaving. I'm not exactly worried about my town burning down, because what's happening now is actually sort of a controlled burn and even if new ones start after this we'll be able to escape through the part that already burned. It's not that. It's that I can't stand to watch all these trees die. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 5th, 2011
7:41 am	Busta/Lovecraft 19 (or 21 I guess) (Comment on this)
Monday, August 29th, 2011
12:03 am	Busta/Lovecraft 17 and 18 (or 19 and 20 as they prefer to be known) I was helping Dylan Edwards out at ArmadilloCon this weekend, and also worked as a caricaturist at a charity carnival, so long story short I had about twenty hours on the bus in three days. I finished one book, read two more, and got deep into a fourth. Pretty cool. I haven't had the time for serious reading in a week or two and it was good to get some deep research done. Between that and the life drawing class I got some learnings in the last week. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 27th, 2011
9:51 pm	analogues for Napoleon So I was trying to figure out what Napoleon looked like to the people of his day. And then I noticed he was exactly two hundred years ago -- the march on Moscow was two hundred years ago last year. So this is easy! All I had to do was find a large, influential country that had undergone a revolution around 1989 and then had a powerful and dictatorial personality come to the fore. Putin, obviously. So the way you feel about Putin today -- or more accurately, the position that Putin holds in history -- could be more or less the way your great^7-grandparents might have felt about Napoleon. A guy who took over a country that used to be really repressive and is now just sort of weird and confusing and occasionally aggressive. Don't get me wrong, it's not a perfect analogy -- Napoleon was a lot, lot, lot, lot more warlike. If I've learned nothing else from studying the disastrous campaign of 1812, it's that it's possible to walk from the French border to Moscow, and back, between May and December of the same year. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011
4:09 pm	Busta/Lovecraft 15 and 16 (though after the Revolution they will be known as 17 and 18) If you're curious the reason the numbering system changed is because Gewel and I implemented some of the changes suggested by readers, which usually means more pages. If you're curious about why I'm a day late posting it's because I was at St. Edward's all day yesterday, and swimming in random apartment complex swimming pools, and I forgot. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
8:17 pm	Cahoika Mounds From a cold November visit to Cahoika Mounds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia This was once the largest city in North America. Now it's a hill. ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 15th, 2011
12:21 pm	Busta/Lovecraft 14 and 15 (though the future will know them as 16 and 17 ) (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 7th, 2011
10:21 pm	Busta/Lovecraft page 12 and 13 (actually 14 and 15 but right now it's 12 and 13). Gewel and I went to a convention in Dallas on Saturday. We met James O'Barr, and he gave each of us a Crow lunchbox. I actually finally actually worked on my website. Parts of it are getting quite good. I don't know anything about web design at all, other than spending a substantial portion of my life on the web. But I know how to make simple animations, and that's really enough. If you go to unnecessaryg.com/ and then click comics and then click the Invention of Soccer you can read it in either French or English, and you can click "like" on FB and comment in a little comment box and there's little buttons that take you to the home page and to the store. The store isn't finished yet. But the rest of that thing works. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 31st, 2011
8:15 pm	Busta/Lovecraft page 11 (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
7:15 am	Busta/Lovecraft 07 San Diego! Gewel and I made it. The last twenty-four hours have been some of the most enjoyable of my life, especially since I was asleep for about fifteen of them. Oh, blessed sleep, thou art delicious. As always, since I moved most of my blogging to Twitter and other nonsense platforms, there is far too much to tell. Two-and-a-half weeks ago I got a call from San Diego Comic Con saying, we were just kidding, you can have a small press table, you have exactly twenty days to give us lots of money and come out here with everything you're going to sell. And I fucking rose to the occasion, my friends. It's Tuesday so there's still time for things to go wrong but I got it together and got out here with two whole days to spare. And Gewel and I threw down and finished Busta/Lovecraft! That's right, it's done, and I'm on my way to the printer just as soon as I finish the logo. These things happen fast in yonder modern era. So after much wailing and gnashing of teeth we were all ready, lined up a rideshare, rented a car, and were on the way. NEVER RENT A CAR AT AN AIRPORT. Because they gave me a hybrid instead of an economy and knocked $50 off the price and I couldn't figure out why they were being so nice until I saw the bill. Austin tacks about $100 of taxes onto rentals from the airport. The hybrid saves most of that money in gas, but still. Goddamn. I'm trying to make a profit here and did not need that. Whoops, the house is waking up so I have to cut this short. Basically we drove here, it was amazing, then we got here. Arriving in San Diego we did this in this order: 1. Went to the printer. 2. Dropped off the craigslist ride. 3. Went home and dropped off stuff. 4. Got some food. 5. Went to SDCC to take care of some table registration stuff. 6. Got home and slept like the dead. And now here we are! And away we go! And since you've been so good here are pages 08 and 09: San Diego Comic Con 2011, Small Press booth Q-11. Gewel, Rocky, and I will be there all weekend, come on by! This comic will be for sale there. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 10th, 2011
11:49 pm	Busta/Lovecraft 06 ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Monday, July 4th, 2011
11:03 am	Busta/Lovecraft page 05 It's my birthday! BTW I will be at SDCC. Table Q-11 in Small Press. I'm as surprised as you are. (Comment on this)