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Geoff Sebesta's LiveJournal:
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| Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | | 1:15 am |
The Poetry of Sarah Palin
reposted from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jwaneeta"On Reporters" It's funny that A comment like that Was kinda made to, I don't know, You know ... Reporters. "Haiku" These corporations. Today it was AIG, Important call, there. "On the Bailout" Ultimately, What the bailout does Is help those who are concerned About the health care reform That is needed To help shore up our economy, Helping the— It's got to be all about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy And putting it back on the right track. So health care reform And reducing taxes And reining in spending Has got to accompany tax reductions And tax relief for Americans. And trade. We've got to see trade As opportunity Not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs Being created in the trade sector today, We've got to look at that As more opportunity. All those things. --- Okay, and here's what I think; That woman is up to something. But I don't think this was part of her plan. And that was the weirdest press conference I ever saw. What was up with the barnyard noises? | | Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | | 1:25 pm |
The Curious Case of the Prolapsed Kitten
Got bit yesterday, HARD, by a prolapsed kitten. Hope I don't get that ol' cat scratch fever.* The kitten had been bitten by a dog and squeezed so hard that his colon popped out. It looked like a red onion attached to his butt. Doc had to push it back in, using his little finger and a gentle swirling motion. Kate and I helped to hold the kitten down, and he was at such extremes of distress and terror that he sank his teeth clean into the meat between my thumb and finger. Ouch. My glove filled up with blood but I was cool with it, just grabbed the kitten by the throat and asked him politely not to do it again. Doc says the kitten will probably live. I hope so. Apparently a prolapse is quite survivable and we will be feeding him a nutritive tea for the next few days instead of solid food. I have to say that watching the look in the cat's eyes as Doc squished his intestines back into place was a strange, sick sort of funny. At first his pupils were completely dilated, all the way back to the sclera, as he was touched in a way that he has certainly never been touched before. But after the doc managed to get the colon in back past the rectum, and he bit me, he calmed down substantially. On the whole, the kitten was very well behaved through a very unusual and traumatic experience. Here are some pictures of CALM this year:     That hut in the first two pictures is the CALM wikiup.** It's clean, dry, and seats nine comfortably -- we use it to store non-essential supplies, store food, and as a sort of lounge. It was a lot of fun to build and I'm pretty proud of it. This has been the best year for CALM construction since I've been doing it. We've had a paucity of materials but made it work just fine -- the entire wikiup took two tarps, about twenty garbage bags, three coils of rope, and a quarter-roll of duct tape. That's pretty darn good for an entire house. So now we have a CALM wiki. Kelly wanted to set one up for a while, so here it is. It's a open-source pile of sticks that anyone can edit. CALM has been very nice in the last week. We've got a lot of people in and things seem to be taking care of themselves. For once in our organization's history we have more storage space, food, and construction help than we can use. Sorta strange, but I like it. I've been hanging out with a woman named Mackenzie and eating a lot and trying to stay out of the way. My focus this year has been to enjoy the Gathering, and I've done a pretty good job, but all the same enough is enough. There's a ride to San Diego that leaves the 6th, I believe, and I can't wait to go. I need some ocean. *no, there really is such a thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-scratch_disease**It was meant to be a wigwam but it turned into a wikiup. Apparently a wigwam is more of a teepee and less of a hut. | | Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | | 4:07 pm |
| | Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | | 3:51 pm |
Cloudhopper #1 is almost done
ANY COMMENTS OR SUGGESTIONS YOU HAVE ABOUT THE ART the more specific the better ARE ASTOUNDINGLY WELCOME IN THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS  That file is much, much bigger than it looks. It's a panoramic picture of the background of the last fifteen pages. The idea was to do all the background at once, to give a real sense of place (which has been lacking sometimes) and a sort of payoff to a location joke. I'll give you a hint -- there's one direction the comic won't look until the end. No, it's not up. That just occurred to me this second. Dan never actually looks up once. And that would be such an easy page to do... You know I'm going to do it. I'm going to do a page where Dan just looks up and there will be an entire page of plain old blue. I'm that sort of fiend. But it's just gonna have to wait for the director's cut, because I didn't think of it until too late. Because, you see, I am finishing Cloudhopper now. I am not leaving Santa Fe until it's done. I've put in six hours this morning and made a substantial dent, but it's not finished yet. ACTUALLY I WILL USE THE 'UP' PAGE FOR THE COVER~! It is so perfectly elemental, something that could have happened at any point in the series, it's perfect for the cover. See, here's the thing, I don't want the cover to give away that he's on a cloud. I love the surprise entirely too much. ANYWAY. HERE IS THE DEAL. Cloudhopper will be done in the very, very near future. ANY COMMENTS OR SUGGESTIONS YOU HAVE ABOUT THE ART the more specific the better ARE ASTOUNDINGLY WELCOME IN THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS andI know from watching Zach sell Miner at Stumptown & Staple and gauging reactions (and preorders!) that I can certainly sell at least fifteen copies of Cloudhopper #1 during SDCC. Probably thirty, maybe more. I could also sell at least fifteen copies of mTX #1* and ten President of Ice Cream in those same four days. Again, quite likely more. In order to print all these books I will have to pay lulu.com $600. I can reasonably expect to make that back, and a fair amount more. If you would like to invest in this venture, I can promise a reasonable profit. SDCC is the last week of July, and I would pay you before the first of August. So contact me if this sounds interesting to you. *I fixed up mTX #1 a lot too, because you know I do stuff like that. If people are gonna keep buying it I might as well make it pretty. | | Friday, June 12th, 2009 | | 11:14 am |
Gathering 2009
We are in the Jemez forest above Cuba, New Mexico. It has been exactly like last year except fun. Got to see the progress of some wounds we treated last year...wow. It worked! We fixed Billy's leg and that one guy's gums actually grew back. New Mexico is amazing. A lot of people very happy to see each other, it was nice. There are so many people here early this year! As one person said, it's sort of amazing to see so many recognizable faces on the 11th. You would have thought that I might have taken a picture of the site, but I didn't. Just look at a picture of the Colorado or Utah site and you'll get the general idea. Spring Council was the best ever. There were no arguments or wingnuttery, the conversation passed quickly and lightly, and there were a lot of people there just to listen. Honestly, we mostly had the council because we enjoyed sitting in councils. We consensed that we are not the ruling body of the Gathering, as the Gathering has no rulers or leaders, and as such we cannot choose a site for anyone else. That said, we have looked at a lot of places where we might want to go camping this summer, exercise our religious freedoms with anybody else who'd like to show up. A lot of people seem to prefer Parque Venado, up on J70. If you were to go there, you'd be more than welcome. Go to Albuquerque. Take I-25 North and take 550 to Cuba. In the middle of Cuba (by their out-of-business visitor's center) turn onto 126, follow that to 103, take a left on 69, and you're there. It's near a part of the Jemez National Forest called "Read Your Bible." HERE IS THE TURN: IT IS AVAILABLE ON GOOGLE STREET VIEWS! My god the future is AMAZING. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=cuba,+nm&sll=32.726859,-117.124386&sspn=0.012889,0.008326&ie=UTF8&t=h&layer=c&cbll=35.986257,-106.788377&panoid=gK6xV0256STj_JyXT6WfVA&cbp=11,36.09,,0,-0.27&ll=35.986258,-106.789395&spn=0.001393,0.00412&z=18&iwloc=Ago up that road to here: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=cuba,+nm&sll=32.726859,-117.124386&sspn=0.012889,0.008326&ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=36.025466,-106.755352&spn=0.024782,0.032959&z=15&iwloc=AI believe it's around there. That's where all the cool kids are hanging out and you of course are invited. Life has taken a sudden turn for the interesting. So I went and did minor CALM duties for a few days, hung out with Rand. Oh, this is why I'm at the Gathering: because, after a meeting of Austin Sketchgroup, in Austin, Texas, Zach and I were up drawing all night, working on our various projects Bearquest: http://www.gnourg.com/bear-quest-001/and Cloudhopper: http://geoffsebesta.insanejournal.com/and when morning rolled around we went for a swim at Barton Springs. At 7am the phone rings and Rand says, well, you ready to go to the Gathering today? And I said no and then I said yes, and now here we are. The story is much longer and I forgot the part about going to Jessi and Madison's place and watching Conan with Arnold Schwartzenegger's director's commentary, which is seriously one of the funniest things I've ever heard and deserving of a post of its own. Imagine if Arnold Schwartzenegger was really as stupid as you've always suspected. Imagine him watching Conan, and not only forgetting that it was a director's commentary, but that the movie wasn't real. Anyway, we drove there, we got here, it was Spring Council, now it looks like it's the site, everything is going well, I snuck down to town for a few days to FINISH CLOUDHOPPER because I CANNOT SLEEP UNTIL I FINISH CLOUDHOPPER and I have to FINISH CLOUDHOPPER and I am going insane. It's a good insane. Apparently I get to crash in a local friend-of-the-family's teepee for a couple days and sit in a coffee shop or library and FINISH CLOUDHOPPER. I will do the background for the last twelve pages in one giant panorama and then select from it, so as to give a stronger feeling of place and space. I have six or seven strips to put word balloons on, coloring left to do on eight. I have to add two props to thirty-odd panels, fix the cloudbeast from 072 to 074, and do hair and final shading on twelve. Oh, and I need to improve six drawings of cloudfrogs and two drawings of a gaba plant, which I have decided is a kind of plant that grows on lampposts. Because it was just too boring by itself. I think an air moss would be appropriate, don't you? Or perhaps a lichen... Anyway I will not go back to the Gathering until I finish this comic. If anybody's gonna die, they're just gonna have to do it without me until Monday or so. There was already one helicopter evacuation that had nothing to do with me and I like it that way. I'm figuring out what it is I do at CALM and it doesn't really have much to do with helicopter evacuations. I'm always pleased to help if one's around, don't get me wrong. But it's not anything I look forward to. I prefer foot wounds, thank you very much. Anyway, FINISH CLOUDHOPPER. | | Saturday, June 6th, 2009 | | 3:10 pm |
Air France 447
"The plane was awaiting replacement of a speed sensor that investigators identified as a likely contributor to the accident...The sensor, made by Thales SA, gave inconsistent readings on the speed of June 1. Airbus SAS had advised airlines more than a year ago to replace the sensors on A330 jets with models that are less vulnerable to ice. France’s chief crash investigator today told journalists at a briefing near Paris that the failure of the air sensor to convey reliable speed data may have kicked off the chain of events that led to the deaths of all 228 people aboard. Sensors Not Replaced “The sensors had not been replaced” with the improved units, said Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of France’s air-accident investigation agency, at a briefing outside Paris. “But that doesn’t mean that without them the plane was dangerous.” The inconsistent speed measurements may have played a role in the crash, though it’s “too early to draw conclusions,” he added. " Okay, based on my limited experience in the airplane field, I'm calling shenanigans. The pitot tube is not nearly as important as the static ports. However, everything we're hearing about this is consistent with static port failure, and they are part of the same system. I'm guessing right now that there was a problem deeper in the system that was showing up with the pitot tube. The widely differing airspeed warnings, and perhaps even the autopilot and loss of cabin pressure warnings, could be caused by pitot/static port failure. But remember, a static port can function without a pitot tube, but pitot tubes can't function without static ports*. If this is true, it is not major malfeasance on Air France's fault at all. It was a very minor issue that turned out to be major, a "for want of a nail**" situation. *This is of course assuming the engineers and other people at the San Diego Airport told me correct information, and that I understood it when they told it to me. You know how it goes. **If you are not familiar with this phrase, google it; you may like it. | | Thursday, June 4th, 2009 | | 6:47 pm |
| | 5:59 pm |
Centrepit
 Oh, this is the big time right here. My first editorial cartoon! Unfortunately unaccompanied by my first editorial cartoon paycheck, but that's the way things are right now I guess. Anyway, if they're not gonna pay me the least they can do is let me post the page in context so that you can see yes, indeed, this is a reputable publication right here. It's printed on paper and all sorts of stuff. I am sorry to everyone who is more thrilled about this than I am, especially my brother who got mad at me for not accepting his felicitations with the proper grace. I find this to be aggressively meaningless because newspapers can't pay cartoonists any more, so they'll publish most anything you send them for free. But I have been told to stop denigrating my own work, or at least to pretend like I care about it, so. I'll do comics for free because I love them. I did this because it was an excuse to practice with distorted perspective. EDIT: Now that I think of it, from the point of view that I didn't used to be able to draw at all, and now I take things like this utterly for granted and actually get annoyed about them, this is a very good development. I'm now good enough to be a jerk about it. The next task is to not be a jerk. | | Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | | 2:12 am |
well then
Turns out when I'm having lots of fun I have less time for the internet. Hm. I leave for Austin in seven hours. I have twelve pages of Cloudhopper left to finish before I can go to the Gathering (plus the cover and solicitations and etc.) so I'm going to hole up in air-conditioned coffee shops in Austin and work as many hours and drink as much coffee as I must to get it done. After that I will somehow get to northeastern New Mexico, where I will have a hell of a good time all day and freeze my butt off all night. Apparently the Gathering is going to be colder than Utah. Altitude sickness & energy drink withdrawl here I come. Then California, then SDCC, then I don't know, then (hopefully) Austin again. Thus is the plan. I've been hanging out with my family in New Jersey and I really love them and we had a great time. Don't have much more to say about that except that I wish the Davidsons and my brother had been here. Also had a great time wth my friends, playing complicated card games with Veda and wandering the Met with Justin, and I reconnected with my friend Jennifer Ciarleglio and her supercool crew of rogue art historians. And I freaking love the Met and if you look careful you may see some old greek statues dressed up like Dan and slipped into the last fifth of Cloudhopper. Got a very nice compliment from Tony Shenton (the distributor fella) -- after he saw Cloudhopper he said, this is going to sell. If I had any money I'd put some down on this. High praise indeed from a fellow starving artist. Tony also told me something I had totally missed -- MoCCA is this weekend, and I could have gone very easily. But I didn't know and I bought the plane ticket and mailed all my convention stuff to San Diego already. Razzin' frazzin'... They published the Centrepit cartoon in the Herald Leader last Sunday. I'll repost it here sometime. I did a lot of landscaping for my grandmothers. It's been really nice outside here lately. I'm not going to post any more of Cloudhopper book one until after San Diego. If you really can't wait until August (and it doesn't seem like anyone's having any trouble waiting), you can just buy a copy in a week. I hope to have it done in a week. | | Saturday, May 16th, 2009 | | 3:13 pm |
| | 6:35 am |
Cloudhopper 074 and 075
  Having a lot of fun watching this: http://lfucg.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=4&clip_id=895It's the May 5th meeting of the Urban County Council of Lexington, Kentucky. If you like seeing an old redneck in a white suit get spanked by elected officals, this is it. Start at 0:50, the best part is at 1 hour 23 minutes in. But I can't guarantee how interesting this is to anybody but me. I'm a big fan of Diane Lawless, and the Centrepoint Project is such a beautiful boondoggle -- a sort of involuntary performance art piece in which negative architectural space has been utilized to communicate the hollowness of modern enterprise...it's really quite brilliant. I'd like to get around to writing about it sometime. Basically the nightlife of Lexington was concentrated in one block downtown. And they blew up that block to build a giant hotel that looked like a penis, and then they ran out of money because their secret mystery overseas investor conveniently died, and now there is a big pit of dirt in the exact center of downtown. It's wonderful. I love it.  | | Friday, May 15th, 2009 | | 12:18 am |
My god.
"" The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use. In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues. "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country." "" I can't believe it. I'm too stunned to even weep with joy. | | Thursday, May 14th, 2009 | | 3:51 pm |
| | Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 | | 12:17 pm |
torture
There's gonna be a lot more torture photographs released soon. This is going to be bad. It wasn't just Abu Ghraib. We've all known for years and soon there will be proof that we cannot deny. I've said it before and I'll say it again; George Bush is going to jail. Nobody believes me, but it's curious why -- because nobody believes they will bring him to trial, and if they do they think Obama will pardon him. Haven't met anybody yet who thinks he's innocent. Well, I think he's going to jail. He's not in trouble with America, folks. He's in trouble with the ICC. And the ICC is looking for the biggest fish they can possibly fry. He and his crew are in trouble because they violated the Geneva Convention, and that's a level of trouble that we couldn't help him out of, even if we wanted to. The Constitution is pretty clear -- the president does not have the right to abrogate treaties. This wouldn't matter if America wanted to defend Bush, then Obama would really do an end-run around the law and Bush would go free. But nobody wants to defend this guy. And in a week he'll have fewer friends then ever. It's not going to be a matter of American law. So that's one mistake the Republicans make here. Another is to believe that since the country voted Democratic, that we hold our leaders in such superstitious awe that we will bury this story to protect them. Not so. Two reasons: 1) We the people do not really owe that big a debt to the old-school Democrats; they're the spineless twits that let Bush run over them in the first place. I wouldn't exactly call Pelosi a hero. 2) Even if we did, we wouldn't care. Torture is a war crime and war criminals belong in prison. Period. Until we find a way to use modern psychology and fix their broken brains, prison. It's not even a question. If Pelosi authorized torture, she should have the next cell down from Cheney and Gonzales. It doesn't matter who. Nobody cares who. If Obama, Santa Claus, and the Virgin Mary signed off on torture policy, they should rot in the Hague for all time. | | 3:06 am |
| | Monday, May 11th, 2009 | | 11:23 pm |
| | 1:25 am |
| | 12:49 am |
| | Saturday, May 9th, 2009 | | 3:00 am |
| | Friday, May 8th, 2009 | | 2:27 am |
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