18 October 2008 Tales of Inertia #2 After only about a 6 month delay, I finally finished Tales of Inertia #2. It contains Incident at Red Bone Peak, a 24 hour comic I did in April 2008, and also Moonshine, the sequel to Seaside Retreat, from issue 1.

The Portland Zine Symposium is coming up again this year, on the weekend of August 23 and 24. I'll once again have a table of my various stuff. Hopefully I'll stop being lazy about drawing and actually complete another book before then!!

Some recent stuff on my flickr page...

Here are some goofy food photos that I've made recently..

And here are a bunch of photos from the Pdxstrobist meetup at the Department of Skateboarding on June 25, 2008. What I learned: I cannot fire my flashes in my D300's 5 or 6fps continuous shooting mode with skyports and definitely not with Nikon AWL! Action shots have rapidly changing focus areas which my D300 still has trouble keeping up with, especially when using off camera flash, making me miss shots!

Salmon Street Fountain I've been really lazy about putting content right on this site, instead going the easy route and posting on Flickr, but anyway, here's the famed Salmon Street Fountain during the Portland Rose Festival. The fountain has jets like this for a while then changes to a different water pattern coming from different jets. A source of great revelry on hot days in Portland. You can see the Hawthorne Bridge, and also in the distance to the left is Mt. Hood. Click for quicktime, and if that doesn't work for you, you can view immersively with fieldofview.com shockwave. Also, you can visit this image on flickr, or see an alternate projection of this image here.

Fame and Glory I can hardly believe it, but the image of mine below has been viewed over 160,000 times in 3 days!!!

and so on...

24 Hour Comics Drawpocalypse Yes, it's time again for a 24 hour comics masochism marathon!! The task is to create a (finished) 24 page comic in 24 hours. I did one in 2005, and it's time to see if I can still stay up 24 hours straight, and live to tell the tale. See a promo staring 24 hour superstar David Chelsea here. This will be at the Cosmic Monkey this Saturday, April 5, 10am to 10am Sunday. Be there or be asleep!!

At Lick Observatory Nestled atop Mt. Hamilton just east of San Jose, Lick Observatory, which has nothing to do with tongues, is home to several telescopes, including this gigantic refractor. This is one of the neatest interiors I've seen in a while. Visited last Decemeber, but hadn't been there since I was a kid, and it's still neat! There's a very windy road leading up to it, and I have childhood memories of trying to spot the wrecked cars that had driven off to their doom whenever we drove up. This photo is of the first telescope built on the site, which was constructed between 1876 and 1887. The body of James Lick lays entombed beneath. Beat that for ambiance!! The entire floor that you see raises and lowers so that the eyepiece of the telescope can be at eye level for the astronomers. You can see the counterweights along the walls. The telescope itself is balanced so that a single person can just grab hold of it and drag it around to point it at the right place. All in all, a neat place to visit. If this quicktime doesn't work for you, you can view interactively with shockwave. Also, you can visit this image on flickr, or see an alternate projection of this image here.

So I finally got a feature accepted in the mainline Gimp that allows you to temporarily see through sections of an image as you try to rotate, scale, shear or otherwise transform. This has long been one of my main irritations whenever I use an unmodified Gimp to edit images. You too can use this if you use the subversion development version of the Gimp, or you can use my patch for Gimp 2.4.5. Many thanks to the Gimp developers for accepting this feature.

24 Hour Comics Jam Panorama This was one of many such events hosted at illustrator and graphic novelist David Chelsea's place, in July of 2006, in the spirit of of 24 Hour Comics day, where cartoonists have 24 consecutive hours to create a finished 24 page comic. I've managed to get one done on time, not this time around, but the previous year. At this jam, I opted to chicken out and just take photos. Surprisingly enough, some of these comics even turn out pretty good! Photographed with 30 photos from this thing. Click image to view interactively with quicktime, or you can try to view with a shockwave viewer.

Your Chance to Harass Tom at the Stumptown Comics Fest I will once again have a table full of stuff at this year's Stumptown Comics Fest. It's happening many months earlier this year all of a sudden, and I hope to have at least one new book, as well as funky new photo balls. I might be able to pull that off, if I get properly "busy"!

Get Your Walnuts Here This is another of my older panoramas from 2006 made with 30 photos taken with this thing. The tree is a huge black walnut tree near Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon. This kind of tree is great to have near curbs, because the huge walnuts that drop off the branches will often make a memorable resonant thump on unsuspecting cars and passers by. Click image to view with quicktime or view with shockwave.

Added some more really old cartoons to really old cartoon gallery Lately, I've been screwing around with my new camera and fisheye lens instead of drawing cartoons, so I thought I'd post some more of my oldest cartoons to my old cartoon gallery.