Warrior Dash 2013, Our Second Year In A Row And It Sure Wont Be Our Last.

Sketches of pages 1 & 2 by Thad Stalmack. Part of Nomad Anthology series

Spent the weekend at our friends Joel & Erica's farm "Emancipation Acres". It was so much fun getting away from the city and spending some time in the wide open fields playing with their three dogs while eating great food and drinking great beer.

Plus we left with two pounds of their homegrown ground pork, a pack of bacon, two dozen freshly laid eggs (we collected them ourselves), some purple cabbage, as well as a jar of honey from their bees and twelve bars of Erica's homemade bars of soap.

I wish there way a way to steal time from one day, and give it to another.

Doing a tile painting of The Great Wave Over Kanagawa. It's taking a long time to do but is going to look bitching when it's done.

Into the Fall

Last weekend Allison and I took a trip with friends up to Wisconsin for our last fall adventure before it got too damn cold. As usual it was so magically perfect that I had trouble coming back to the city.

Dreaming of Parks and Rec

It’s Anne Perkins wedding and we’re at a grocery store to pick out something for her fiancés bachelor party when we find out that he cheated on her. This is the same moment when I realize that I’m still in love with her. Leslie is super excited for the wedding because she doesn’t know anything and starts dragging me towards the bathroom but I tell her she has to let me go since I can’t go in the girls bathroom. I go over and all the guys are showing Anne that we picked out fish for the party and I’m super depressed so it just comes out as “yeah, fish”. I leave them and go to the men’s room where every stall is taken by guys standing up on the top of the walls and peeing down into the toilet. Ron gets down from doing that and I start to take his stall but he tells me he has to poop too. I start to pee at a urinal and a guy on top on a stall says “geez can’t anyone stand anymore?” And I reply with “geez can’t anyone sit anymore?”. So I’m having trouble peeing and then all of the sudden several of the guys at the urinals and I get peed on. We all start freaking out and I go over to the sink and start splashing myself with water and saying fuck as I try to dry off with a towel. Then all the emotions start coming out and I shout fuck and throw the towel right as this dad and baby walk past. The dad gives me a dirty look and I start apologizing. I pick up the towel and lean against the hand dryers. Just then Mark Brandanawitz steps out from behind a ring of sinks with Anne. She’s also soaked and holding back tears. I know she knows about her fiancé and I start to have trouble holding back the tears because I love her so much but she thinks it’s because I feel bad about her fiancé. Then she walks forward and we hug really tightly and both burst out crying.

That was a dream I had few months ago that was so vivid and emotional I woke up just short of being in tears. I wrote down everything I could remember and even now I can remember just how I felt waking up that night.

Dream

Been spending a lot of time thinking about death lately. The anniversary of a few family members deaths have come and gone in the last few weeks and it's definitely brought the mood of the house down.

Last night I had a dream that something had happened and my Dad had gotten hurt. I stood there with a group of people I didn't recognize but seemed to know, looking at the woods where he must have been. It was being decided who would go into the dark of the trees and find my father. Everyone was crying and scared, myself included, but I volunteered. I walked into the woods away from everyone I knew and the next thing I knew I was at his funeral. The world had turned to black and white, my suit blending in with everything around me. We were there mourning my father's death but I realized that no one besides me seemed to remember him, his face had disappeared from all the photographs that hang on the walls. It was as if he had never existed at all.

My Grandpa, what a badass.

Beorn the skin changer

I have long been a fan of the LOTR books with the Hobbit being my favorite. I think it's because I read it at a young age and t was able to make a nice impact on my imagination. Anyways I was excited when I heard about the Hobbit movies and couldn't wait to see one of my favorite minor characters, Beorn, on the big screen.

Needless to say I was disappointed.

Not only did they skip over the chance to lead nicely into the film with some down time at Beorn's house which would have allowed them to reestablish the plot prepare everyone for the events that would later happen in the movie, but they also cut down the content from the book drastically. Why go into the appendices and pull out extra information to help extend film time and then cut short scenes that are actually in the book  itself.

I don't want to be totally negative about the movie, it did have some great parts and as always the people at Weta did a fantastic job with the set, props and design work. However, I recently got a chance to look through the "Desolation of Smaug" design book that is out on the market (available on amazon below).

http://amzn.com/0062265695

All I can say after looking at all the designs made for the Beorn character is that they picked the wrong one. There were some truely fantastic concept ideas that were much more closely related to the book's description. Understandably you want the dwarves to look distinctly different so that you can tell the 13 of them apart, but there is no way anyone could mistake the giant Beorn for a tiny dwarf, so why try to make him look like one? Luckily the got all 30 seconds of screen time for his bear form right at least.