I haven’t been to the website of John Van Fleet for awhile and I’d forgotten that he did this cool new update. John has done artwork for several Batman comics as well as various Star Wars and Vampire: The Masquerade projects. You may or may not like his work but the site is just too cool. Turn on your sound and wait briefly until the radio on the intro page stops making noise and then click to go on into a very fun looking site.
This could get ridiculous, but I just stumbled across this on another blog and since it was an amalgam of my last 2 posts I thought, what the heck.
I’ve spent many years embracing my inner nerd and learning to become proud of the geek that I am. And now my nerd factor has come into question! I was perusing SciFi Chick’s new site and came across the How Nerdy Are You? questionairre (Congrats on getting your own domain name, Angela! 🙂 ). I only scored an 18%! That ranks me in the Not Nerdy category! What gives! I read comics! I’ve been to several comic book and Star Trek conventions! I have several autographed pictures from said conventions! I have a bat-erang signed by Adam West! I own a replica of Han Solo’s blaster and Aragorn’s sword Anduril! I have Robot pics on my wall in my office and a statue of Phoenix from the X-Men on my desk! I have a Wonder Woman tattoo on my butt…..well, that part isn’t true…but I am a NERD! A GEEK! James calls me a FREAK all the time! How is it that I scored so low? Admittedly I could have been less than honest on some of the questions. A few of the questions were concerning the computer I was doing the quiz on and if I had answered using my home PC as an example my nerd score would’ve jumped up quite a bit. I thought for sure I’d be more nerdy than at least 50% of the quiz takers! SciFi Chick scored a 75%! She kicked my nerd butt! I’m pretty depressed about this whole thing. I think I’m going to go home and put on my Spiderman pj’s and watch reruns of the Super Friends…..
Here’s the link to the quiz if you want to take it. Let me know your scores so I can be more depressed. Thanks again SciFi Chick, this was fun! Check out her site and give her feedback as well, she’s the one that made this nerd-fest possible!
In all the rush of Valentine’s Day, work, and then illness I completely forgot about the fact that February 12th marked the 5 year anniversary of the passing of Charles M. Schulz, beloved creator of Peanuts. I won’t go into alot of detail on his life. This book does a far better job than I ever could imagine and was lovingly written with the help and permission of Mrs. Schulz after his death.
I grew up as a Peanuts fanatic. I loved to draw when I was young and I was always drawing pictures of Snoopy and Woodstock. My local library had several collections of Peanuts books and I frequently checked them out. For some reason I always got Peanuts, I understood why it was funny and I frequently laughed out loud at some of the strips…I still do actually. I will acknowledge that the later years of Peanuts was pretty dry, but the earlier stuff is so brilliant. Schulz seemed to have the ability to capture the essence of the fears and anxieties of children, and adults for that matter. By making these “funny” he succeeded in showing us that we are not alone with these issues. As I stated before, the earliest of these strips were the best. Fantagraphics Books started an ambitious project last year to put together every Peanuts strip in book format in chronological order. There will be 25 books in all covering 50 years of Peanuts strips. They are releasing 2 books per year. Much of the early stuff has never been collected in book format before. I’ve got the first 2 of these and they are wonderful. Charlie Brown is much more mischievious and sarcastic in these early strips and its so much fun to read the strips where specific characters were introduced for the first time and to think that they had been written years before I was born.
There are very few creators/entertainers who are real class acts and Charles M. Schulz was definitley one of them. Two days before he died I was watching a 60 minutes special about him with my parents and I mentioned that it wouldn’t surprise me if he passed away now that he was giving up something that was his life’s passion. I was very saddened by how prophetic those words were. I feel privileged to have grown up in one of the many generations who got to see Mr. Schulz’s work on a daily basis and I’m happy that Peanuts’ popularity is such that many future generations will be able to grow up with the Peanuts gang.
While looking at different sites today I stumbled across this game link on a site that is no longer in operation. Its called Spaced Penguin and its another one of those addictively fun, mindless, work-interrupting games that are all over the internet. Have fun!