Jeff - Blog/Main

"I like my rut! That's why I dug it!" - Dr. John Becker

9/19/07 - Last new MLTS strip up, at least for a while. Enjoy the archive, thanks for reading, and hit me up at burning_portable_toilets@hotmail.com or at my Deviant Art site. Also on my dA site, look for postings of any progress I make on the new project I'm working on. Breif synopsis up tonight, more to come whenever and breaking news whenever it feels like breaking.

9/8/07 - Second-to-last new strip up. MLTS will most likely be going on an "indefinite hiatus" after next week's strip, as I've got no more strips in the queue and no one seems to care very much anyway. May ressurrect it at some point in the future, who knows. Also, who cares. As a last-ditch attempt, I may post all of the strips over at my dA page and, if I get some sort of response, it may motivate me to do more. In closing, I love Hard-fi's song "Suburban Knights" and I love Virgin Radio Xtreme for playing it at least once an hour.

9/4/07 - New strip up, get 'em while they last. Very late putting it up this week, and that's after inadvertently skipping last weekend entirely. Spent very long weekend in Rehoboth Beach, DE. A bit burned, physically and mentally. At least I'm back in my lovely rut in the Greatest City in the World, with Virgin Radio Xtreme blasting loud enough they can probably hear it back in London.

8/20/07 - New strip, big deal. Got the strip up a bit late this week. Had some surprise company over for most of the weekend. Jon "Sven" Hoffman, whose website is here, suddenly moved back to the East Coast from Utah! Oh happy day. If he and Jesse can get it sorted, he should be joining Fake Radish Studios at some point in the future and, if I have any say in the matter, he'll be joining us at Katsucon '08. As for what I've been up to lately, nothing at all artwise, but I've been continuing to develop concepts for the sci-fi story I want to do. Been meaning to write some stuff down and refine it a bit more but haven't had time, so it's still all up in the ol' brain. Any refined writings and planning stuff that I manage to hash out shall be posted here for ur lulz. Nom nom nom.

8/12/07 - Got a new strip up for youse. Listening to: Matthew Good, "Hospital Music"; Tegan and Sara, "The Con"; The Lashes, "Get It"; Mark Ronson, "Version". Watching: "Becker" on WGN; "Feasting on Asphalt, season 2" on Food Network. Currently lulzing over: I has many corms.

8/06/07 - New MLTS strip up. Back from a four day vacation in lovely Buffalo, New York. Yes, that's right, I live in Baltimore, Maryland, and I vacation in Buffalo, New York. And I draw comics that no one cares about. You can't imagine how exciting my life is. In all seriousness, Buffalo looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland from the interstate driving by, but if you actually know someone who lives there that can take you around to the quality places it's a brilliant city. Very much like Baltimore, actually. I also am a big fan of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. 100% serious, if you spend some time there and get into the vibe of the city, it's really cool. Fine, don't believe me. Have fun going to Mexico on vacation and getting your throat slit. I <3 troubled North American post-industrial small cities. Here's a picture: Buffalo beach party '07!

7/28/07 - New super Sunday strip (the third one, imagine that) up! Also, I put a new strip up last update on Monday, forgot to mention it at the time. I've been taking a delightful break from art of any kind following Otakon. At this point I'm figuring out what I'm going to be doing artwise in the forseeable future. Right now I have no desire to do anymore MLTS strips, so there may be an interuption of service after I run through my backlog. The thing that would perhaps motivate me to get off my ass and do some more is if Fakeradish is in fact going to be attending Katsucon in February, which was floated after last week's con. That remains to be seen, but, friends, if I may share a secret, I've been feeling inspired in that sci-fi anime sort of way in the aftermath of Otakon, and I've come up with some really cool groudwork for something along those lines up in the old harddrive between the ears. Nothing on paper yet, that would make it official that I'm "working on it", but I'm considering taking that leap. You see, friends, I was rather disappointed in the utter lack of interest in my books at Otakon, and I was looking at them objectively, in that sort of, "well, if I saw this sitting on a table for sale, would I want to buy it?" way. And I don't think I would. I thought about the anime that I enjoyed that weekend at the con, and contrasted that with the stuff currently in my portfolio, and there's quite a wide gulf, in terms of genre and subject matter. I've always wanted to do straight sci-fi, outerspace sort of shit, but never thought I could pull it off, so I usually fell back on humor. But perhaps it's time to just go for it. Ooh, "Pace is the Trick" by Interpol just came on. Mughi is feeling inspired! Mughi is feeling very inspired! *runs off*

7/23/07 - Well, we survived another Otakon. Could have gone better, could have gone worse. The bad, from my point of view: our art tables were facing a wall (as seen on map further down page), no one seems interested in buying comic books anymore (I think I sold 2 MLTS collections and gave one away at the raffle), and they still haven't figured out how to project stuff high enough in the video theatres so that more than the front row can read the subtitles, as opposed to just staring at a row of heads at the bottom of the screen. The good: Unseasonably cool weather means much improved con-smell from previous years and the plush radishes sold insanely well (I was an investor in that project, so at least I made a profit for the weekend there, as I certainly didn't selling art). There was a tie this year for my favorite uncomfortable/horrible/odd thing to have witnessed. First was man with no arms and one leg smoking a cigarette with his only foot. Now that's determination. Second was an Otaku who must have been having a really bad day chucking a water bottle at a cab that honked at him when he was crossing charles Street at the intersection with Pratt against the light, and then almost getting into a fistfight with the cabbie, egged on by the other fine Baltimore motorists stopped at the light. Fun! Now then, on to the pictures. Shari at the radish stand. She had a total of 21, selling for $25 apiece, and she sold 5 of them before artists' alley was open to the public on Friday. Jesse in his element at the Friday night raffle, whipping the crowd into a consumerist frenzy. Shari poses with the Prime Minister of Canada, brandishing her Canadian passport. Hailing all the way from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Prime Minister Tim Horton appears here in the official royal robes of the Canadian Prime Minister, originally given to the first Canadian Prime Minister, Leslie Neilsen, by the Queen of England. Hanging from his scepter are the Canadian crown jewels: a cheap plush beaver wearing a mountie hat and a Tim Horton's coffee cup, from the coffee and donut chain that happens to be owned by the Prime Minister because, well... there really aren't that many people in Canada. For more pictures, check Jesse's page, he should be putting his up soon. Until next year... I'm going to f'ing bed.

7/18/07 - Hi. After a flurry of updates to fakeradish, I took about a week and a half off, as I hadn't been planning on posting a new MLTS strip this past weekend anyway. Oh, but that doesn't mean your boy Mughi hasn't been busy. No no, in fact, he's recently joined Deviant Art!!! It's my new Deviant Art page!!! Lolz!!!!!11!!!1 Just in time for Otakon, too. I must admit, DA is fairly easy to use, even for my retarded ass, and I've seen a lot of artwork I actually like whilst browsing around, which I didn't think would happen. I assumed it was all a bunch of flippin' nerds with illegal copies of Photoshop, OpenCanvas and Painter. Imagine that. So check it out, as I've got some stuff up there that hasn't made it into my fakeradish gallery yet. And if you're here from my DA page, check out my fakeradish gallery , as it has all my old stuff in it. Oh, and speaking of linking to things, Big O and Dukes , a couple of my radio friends, are back in the Baltimore/Washington area, on Superstation WJFK, no less! Thrilling. Finally, I love this picture: It makes me happier than Clinton Kelly at a dude convention. SEE YOU AT OTAKON '07!!! MUGHI OUT!!!

7/8/07 - Hello again, friends. I sure am posting a lot of stuff here as of late. Hope someone's reading, or else I'm just amusing myself. Ah well, if not now, after Otakon there should be at least moderate readership of the 'ol blog. Here's hoping. Ah yes! Another surprise. Was putting together prints for the con and was going through my book 'o prints and trying to think of stuff from my archives that isn't in there but perhaps should be. As far as stand-alone images go, there were 5 or 6 color Copic drawings done shortly after I got back from Japan in 1999, but I remembered I had intentionally left those out of my fakeradish gallery way back when a few months ago when I was compiling it, due to them not being that great / me being tired of looking at them. Then I remembered a comic book project I'd been working on the summer after my first year in college that I knew I'd completed 3 pages of but didn't think I'd ever bothered to scan. I knew I'd seen the original pages recently when organizing my art junk and the screentones had yellowed horribly (par for the course, I suppose... we're talking about 10 year old pages here) but I knew I'd seen small, print-size photocopies of them somewhere. Well, I put on my hat with the light on the front and climbed into the little mining car on a railroad track and descended deep into my archives (my actual, physical archives, a much darker and scarier place than my digital archives). Among other oddities, I came across all of the production materials for my old Fun in Dystopia / Antisocial Comics strips (titles and lettering that I used to print out from a computer, cut out, and actually paste onto the fullsize original bristol board, before I gave up and just started doing everything digitally), and a bunch of extra prints of fanarts I'd done and sent into my favorite manga titles of the day (the most famous of which, which was not only published in an issue of Oh! My Goddess but won a prize as well, is here, but I'd forgotten I'd also had two published in issues of Gunsmith Cats... find the issues and I'll sign 'em for you at the con, ehehehe). Eventually, thousands of feet below the earth's surface, beneath a pile of dinosaur bones covered in bat shit, I found it! And now, making its worldwide exclusive debut after ten long years, the first three pages of the never-to-be-completed comic Freelancers: Dialated Time! I threw them all in one file and kept them big enough so you can still see the detail in the screentone. Hope you have a big monitor. Technical notes? Well, all pages done The Original Way, fullsize on 14"x17" bristol board, inked with Rapidograph technical pens, screentoned with real, honest-to-God screentone purchased from Towson Artist Supply (now unfortunately Pla-Za artist supply, they no longer sell screentone... but you really can't blame them, considering its complete obsolesence). I also unearthed the layouts, scripts and other writings done for the story. I looked over some of the writings breifly. I don't really remember where exactly the story was going, and I'd only written the script up to page 4, but it hardly matters, as the most notable thing about these pages is the backgrounds (it's certainly not my character drawing ability or the quality of my inked line, both of which were in their mere adolescence). I remember putting what seemed at the time an unbelievable amount of work into just that first panel of the Baltimore skyline. Keep in mind this was all done by hand in ink and I didn't own a light table, so I have no recollection how I got it to come out so well. I can't believe I just eyeballed it, but perhaps I did. As I recall, Freelancers was a very early attempt at trying to do a sort of action-adventure, girls with guns, buddy cop type of story, descended from my favorite manga: Adam Warren's Dirty Pair and Kenichi Sonoda's Gunsmith Cats. That ended up culminating, in a way, with Pizza Girls (minus the guns, of course), and I did another script and layouts (though no completed pages), of a variation of Freelancers using basically the same characters that I'd come up with while in Japan. Julie, seen in the completed Freelancers pages, and Ellis, the other half of the pair, if you will, did end up making an appearance in my comprehensive fakeradish gallery, and most of the pictures I did around that time of a chick with dark, shortish hair are more or less Ellis. Beth and Cassie of Pizza Girls are, respectively, descended at least visually from Julie and Ellis, and Ellis' ultimate evolutionary fate is rather odd, looking back: she became Rachel's little sister in Most Likely to Succeed. At the time I first started to put together the cast of MLTS when I was about to graduate college, I had not yet done Pizza Girls and still liked the Ellis character and hadn't yet done anything with her that had come to fruition, and Rachel needed a little sister. So, Ellis minus about ten years, minus some of the pathos, roughly equals Rebecca "Becky" May Morrow, the main resemblance being in the name and the haircut. Ah, what a lovely, only slightly embarrassing trip down memory lane that was. Right then, ever forward.

7/7/07 - New strip up! Last new one before the con. There will be one the week of the con, though, and back weekly after that, so fear not. Got the MLTS collections printed this week, they look great, stop by and pick one up on con weekend, won't you? Guess what? In addition to the super cool photo of yours truly that now adorns the top of this very blog, and the Otakon '06 photos I extremely belatedly posted earlier in the week, I've got a couple more visual surprises in store for you this week. First off, finished yet another color picture. Oh, and I believe you've already seen the pencil version of this, why, right here in this very blog. Exciting! I'm happy with it, colored with my trusty Copic markers, background done using various Adobe products... I actually spent way to much time mucking about with the background... I have a much more complicated one also that, when I got done with it, I compared it to the simple one I had done quickly when I first got the Copic drawing scanned and it looked like ass by comparison, so I went with the simple one. Yet again proves my working philosophy, "first idea, best idea". I don't know why it usually works that way. Could it be because I'm... a genius? Moving on... Hey look, it's a big retarded map! Yes friends, that is indeed the location, the epicenter, the nexus, if you will, of all Fakeradish related activities to be occurring at this year's Otakon. FR has three tables this year, conveiniently located... facing a wall. Buck up, though, we're in section C, the section right after the (arguably) "famous" people seated in the "prestigious" sections A and B. Now you have no excuse. You know exactly where to find us. Don't make us find you. Ta.

7/02/07 - As both the anniversary of the birth of our great nation (coming up in two days, which 2/3 of Fakeradish shall be celebrating by getting plowed and going DOWNY INNER HOURBER, HON, and seeing the Psychedelic Furs play... ain't that America?) and Otakon '07 draw nigh upon us, I present to you pics from Otakon '06 recently unearthed from the Mughi Furtado vaults! Enjoy: caption: Fakeradish Studios, live and in person. And who's that dapper gentleman in the middle? Why, just the straw that stirs the drink, that's all. caption: Jesse and... hey, wait a minute, that's not Jira! Huh?! caption: Aaah! Random polar bear! Oh, wait, that's a very fat cat from Hampden.

6/23/07 - Hello friends. You may or may not have noticed that I didn't post anything last weekend. Reason for that is I'm working on stuff for the upcoming Otakon at a pretty good clip, including MLTS, and I've decided to space them out a bit before the con where, presumably, I'll have the chance to actually get some people to come here afterwards and read the strip (imagine that). So I'm going to put one up every other week until the weekend of July 21st so as not to run through my backlog of strips so quickly. I figure I'll have two months worth of weekly strips still left to post after Otakon, and we'll see where we go from there. Oh yes, almost forgot, new strip up. In other news, oh look, here's a picture right here in my blog! Colored up the second of the two Amy pictures I posted below, all on the computer! I think it looks good, but it reminded me why I don't like coloring entirely on the computer: it takes to bloody long and, because of the magic of "undo", I start obsessing over details and messing with things endlessly. Whereas if I were to have colored it in Copic, it would have taken 45 minutes or so and that would be it, because once the color's on the paper you can't do anything else with it. Sort of limiting in a good way, I think. Working in "real" mediums squashes my tendancy to overdo and obsess. Anyway, went with a classic cel-shaded look on this one, using the fake Photoshop "cel-shading" method originally taught to me by Fakeradish's own Jesse "Mr. Jesse" Davis. The red colt pistol in the background is all me though. I love clipart, especially monochromatic clipart. Speaking of Fakeradish studio members, just went downstairs to get a water and Fakeradish's own Shari Fedak is sewing up a storm (and listening to Sufjan Stevens... urgh). Expect to see, in addition to my fabulous posters, prints, old comic books, and new MLTS collection (containing the strips as they were meant to be seen, in glorious non-webfriendly screentone... they really look a lot better, if you're going to be there, buy it, shameless plug, thanks) a whole mountain of super plush RADISHES! Complete with fully posable RADISH LEAVES on top... and faces. Awesome as balls, kids! Eff the dealer's room, stop by the Fakeradish Studios booth at artists' alley (easy to find, Jesse will probably be standing on the table with a bullhorn or setting off fireworks or hosting a jousting competition or doing some other sort of noisy promotion, as always) for awesome full color posters, bad ass (and much cheaper, for the Otaku on a budget) prints by the pound, rad "Amerimanga", done for love and not money, obviously (the Fakeradish motto: we break even, usually), and, now PLUSHIES! Plushies are going to take Fakeradish to an H.N.L. AND THAT'S A HOLE... NOTHA... LEVEL! I'm sorry, that isn't funny when Keegan Micheal Key does it on MadTV, but I got a bit excited. Gomen nasai to all my peeps in the Kansai. I'm wearing my Kansai Gaidai University gym shirt today. Wow, I've been at this computer for almost six hours now, with only a bathroom break and two trips to the kitchen to break it up. And for 4 and a half hours of that I was listening to Virgin Radio Xtreme. No wonder I'm going squirrley. Uh... Mughi OUT.

6/10/07 - Nothing much, just got that other pencil piece up that I'd been working on. I'm liking this posting of pencils in advance of finished pictures appearing. I'm also liking Blur's Parklife album. I'm such a bad Britpop fan, I hadn't heard this album until just recently. Bad Anglophile, bad! Its amazing for a Blur album, its actually about 90% consistently good, and they restrain themselves until the 7th track before seemingly intentionally trying to alienate the listener by ditching tuneful, catchy songcraft in exchange for weirdness for weirdnesses' sake. London loves the misery of a speeding heart. Ah, yes, the picture, right then, here it is:

6/9/07 - New comic up, as usual, but I got some extras for ya as well this weekend. Been working on salable artworks for the upcoming Otakon '07 for a couple weeks here, as I've mentioned before, and I put one up in the gallery, so go have a look. I've got a few more, but I think I'm going to wait to put them up until after the con, just so as to not hurt potential sales. I don't really think it would matter much, but I just like pretending what I do has some potential value occasionally. Just being silly. One more thing, I was getting all ramped up doing art and did a few pages of a new character in the ol' sketchbook. Why, here's one now! I almost never post pencil stuff, and I thought this looked passably nice in its pre-inked stage. Since I got the time, I think this one and possibly one more will get inked and colored so I'll have a plethora of new color stuff for the con. I'd rather have 8 color pieces and have to cut the weakest 3 from being printed poster size (we're generally limited to 5 copies of 5 color posters per con, the reason for that being a deep dark fakeradish secret... shh!) than have exactly 5 and maybe have 2 that I know are turds, but have them all printed big. I'd forgotten how maddeningly difficult, yet somehow rewarding, it is to draw someone holding a gun, especially at any type of angle, and have it look cool and mechanical like a gun, as opposed to looking like a bunch of shitty boxes a 2-year-old drew. Its actually easier to draw cars, as they're more organic and curvy and you can fake a lot of stuff and it'll still look "right". Also why it's easier to draw girls than guys. Right then, art theory lesson over. Oh, and one last thing, was listening to Virgin Radio "Xtreme" today for a good 3-4 hours and they played very listenable stuff, only some repetition (they're crazy for those Arctic Monkeys there boy, lemme tell you) and NO f'ing Fall Out Boy. Cheers, give 'em a listen.

6/1/07 - New comic up, hoo-freakin'-ray. Virgin Radio Xtreme really needs to stop playing American bands. Or at least just the bad ones. The Killers' second album had exactly one good song on it, and they just keep milking that dry, sour cow for singles. Whatever. In good British music news, everyone should be required by law to go out and buy the new Art Brut album, appearing on store shelves here in the U.S. of A. in 18 short days, on June 19th. I'd like to reiterate, anyone at all who reads my comic or this blog or even looks at the site, please email me at burning_portable_toilets@hotmail.com and offer me whatever feedback you may have. It will be honestly considered, as I've gotten virtually no feedback on the comic so far, from this site, from posting on message boards, and in real life, or, IRL, as you may know it. Oh yeah, I'm currently working on, in addition to new MLTS strips, color pieces for Otakon, coming up in July. May have some of those for you to preview later this weekend depending on how it goes. Look forward to it. Or don't. I don't honestly care. It's too bloody hot here in Baltimore.

5/25/07 - No better way to start off a nice long Memorial Day weekend than with a brand spanky new installment of God's favorite webcomic Most Likely to Succeed. Going to the beach, you say? Cooking out, you say? To that I say FEH! Pales in comparison to the four glowing black and white panels that will soon be shining bright from your monitor. Yes, I know that this one is an excessively wordy installment in an admittedly wordy comic, but this is the last real bad one for wordiness (I think). I've actually been working on getting the amount of text down. Brevity is, uh... let me see... I think it's something like... perhaps maybe... ah, yes... wit, after all. But I'd like to see you try to incorporate early American history into a four panel joke and and see how breif you can keep it. Ass.

5/20/07 (10:00pm EST)- BREAKING NEWS WHENEVER IT FEELS LIKE BREAKING!!! Yes indeed, the very first ever full colo(u)r MLTS strip is FINALLY UP! Clicky on the linky to see the strip directly, or hit up the MLTS webcomic thingie and scroll back to it. Behind the music DVD extra commentary is that the esteemed Colourist's esthetic when colouring the strip was to make it "not look like 'Get Fuzzy'". Well done! Also, the problem of the Sunday strips not centering in the webcomic thingie is being worked on as I type, so by the time you read this the strip is probably not only in full glorious colour, but centered on your lil' monitor as well. Special! And only two and a half hours, three maki rolls from Asian Taste, two glasses of wine and one old episode of Law and Order:CI later! Didn't even get around to those Heroes episodes on DVR because it was so quick, WOW! TURNAROUND, BABY!!! THIS JUST IN, the webcomic has, in fact been fixed! Don't know if that means the little lines around the strips are fixed, but I assume at least it means the centering is fixed! Let's go over and look together, shall we? Wheeeeeeeee!

5/20/07 (7:30pm EST)- Hello, MLTS fans! You may have noticed that it's Sunday evening and nary an update to the strip. Well I'm waiting in rapt anticipation as I'm sure you are. You see, my esteemed colleage from the Great White North actually colo(u)red the first Sunday strip today, and that was going to be my special MLTS treat to you this weekend. Unfortunately, in true Fakeradish style, the job wasn't quite up to par the first time and needed to go back for revisions, and I just got the revisions back and now they need (very slight, admittedly) second revisions! Imagine that. Anyways, I shall check back with all zero of you later with, hopefully, super duper special colo(u)r for your collective proverbial easter basket! Until then, do what I'll be doing: order out for sushi, watch Heroes on DVR, and listen to Modest Mouse. Are Issac Brock's lyrics why my mood is so negative? Honey, I invented negative. Imagine that.

5/12/07 - Has it been eight weeks already? Got Sunday strip #2 up for youse. As to the question of whether the Sunday strips will ever be colored, I'd venture to say based on the history so far of my attempts to get them colored that the answer would be a resounding "no". Sad, as they look very (in my opinion) unfinished in their uncolored state, as I left out black areas and backgrounds and stuff with the idea that they'd be filled in by the colorist, but you can still read them, so I guess that's something. God damn, Virgin Radio X-treme is playing some shitty music tonight. I had to turn it off. I thought the Brits hated emo. Whatever happened to that? I distinctly remember seeing a picture in Rolling Stone or somewhere of that fag Gerard Way from "MCR", as they insist on calling it, flipping off an audience somewhere in England because they were chanting "Emo sucks" and throwing things at the band on stage. Then I turn on ol' buddy Virgin Radio X-treme and they're playing f'ing Fall Out Boy and some other shite that sounds like Fall Out Boy with English accents. And can we please dispense with the stupid screaming in rock songs? I mean, I know I grew up listening to hip-hop, so I may have missed something cultural about it as a relatively late in life convert to rock, but what the hell is the point? Is it supposed to be funny? That's the only redeeming quality I find that it has. I seriously start cracking up when I hear it, not as much in "metal" or whatever sub-genre it is where it just sounds like jackhammers and powertools and some dumbass screaming and trying to sound evil for the entirety of the song, but more where it sounds like some homo whiny emo song and then the queer starts doing the devil voice and screaming for the chorus. Am I supposed to be afraid of you? You just spent the entire verse whining and crying like Morrissey being buttraped by Disintegration-era Robert Smith and now what is this screaming supposed to elicit from me aside from peals of laughter? As long as I'm going on about stuff, people from Pennsylvania can't f'ing drive. I know that the state doesn't help Pennsylvanians to learn to merge with those shitty short interstate onramp merge lanes, but why can't they take it upon themselves to learn the art of merging before they cross the Mason-Dixon line? Just as a general rule, if you're in Baltimore and you see that dreaded blue, white and yellow license plate you know you're about to witness some shitty driving. I swear that, perhaps because their state sucks so much and Harrisburg and York are toilets and they all just love voting Republican and carrying around their concealed firearms, they make a point every weekend of driving, en masse, down 83 and aimlessly driving around Baltimore displaying a combination of utter confusion and indifference to all other drivers. If I had to make a choice between building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and building a wall between Maryland and Pennsylvania, I'd choose the latter. At least Mexicans tend to be very careful drivers because they don't want to call undue attention to themselves and get deported. Aside from the Pittsburgh and Philly and their immediate suburbs, Pennsylvania should change it's state motto to "A little bit of the deep South up North". Let's see what's on Virgin Radio X-treme again... I swear to God I just turned it back on and they're playing Fall Out Boy. I need to write them and request that they play no American artists aside from Interpol and VHS or Beta. And the Rogers Sisters, whom they don't play but it would be nice if they started. God damnit. Now they're playing their other favorite American band, the Killers. Good thing I just got a drink or I'd be rioting in the streets and burning the queen in effigy right now. And, yes, it's my first drink of the evening I just grabbed. I had not already had a few while typing the rest of this novella. I was a bit tired/loopy from doing yardwork and before that driving around all day in the heat. Oh, and I'd like to end by apologizing for using various slurs against homosexuals while discussing emo. It's insulting to gay people to compare emo people to them. I was simply using the terms as general insults. If emo people actually were gay they'd probably make much better music. Shout out to Neil and Chris of the Pet Shop Boys. Shout out!

5/5/07 - Got a good one for ya this week. Uh, not that I don't have a good one for you every week... uh... yeah right. But really, this one (titled "oh, pishah" and, by my numbering, strip #13) is probably my favorite out of the first batch of 14 strips. I'm actually planning on having Rachel revisit the employment agency in the next batch of strips I'll be writing. So why do I particularly like this strip? First off, I didn't screw up the art at all, even in minor ways that most people wouldn't notice. I think everyone looks perfect in all four panels, my "line" is strong throughout, and the art serves the dialogue well. Secondly, I love the phrase "oh, pishah". I actually googled it when I was writing the strip to make sure I spelled it right. I think it's inheirently funny and I love where it happens to fall in the rhythm of this strip. Which brings me to the writing in this strip. Even after repeated readings I find it to be lean and mean, and not overly wordy, which tends to be my crutch when I'm writing a strip that I don't know if it's funny or not. And the strip ends with not only a funny punchline, but a funny visual, with the employment agency guy fending off the employment agency mutants with a broom. Any time you can incorporate a broom as a weapon = funny. In other words, this strip is pretty much everything I aspire to do in an MLTS strip. Some strips just work better than others, if I knew the secret formula to knock it out of the park every time, I don't know what to tell you. I'd be Bill Watterson, I guess. Anyways, this strip is extremely loosely based on my experience trying to get a job at the DLLR office in Waldorf, MD, when I was unemployed right after college. I actually wrote this one, the previous one and the next one way after the others you've seen so far because I'd been working on MLTS off and on for a few years, and when I decided to go "on" again, I realized I needed two dailies and a Sunday to finish off the first two weeks of "newspaper comic" format strips. Not bad for a patch job, I have to admit. Oh, and did anyone get that the title for the strip a few weeks ago, "a phonecall to Elyse", was a reference to the Cure song, "A Letter to Elise", based upon which I originally named Elyse? Oh, what? No one's reading the strip? Oh, okay, never mind, then. Pishah!

4/30/07 - I missed posting strips the past two weekends, but never fear, TWO new strips up! I didn't feel like thinking up something witty to title them, so I just named them after songs I like. The second big batch of strips is all inked and I've been working on scanning and formatting them today. Almost done, but the Sunday strips got f'ed up somehow when I was batch scanning stuff, I need to rescan them and prep them, which hopefully I'll have time to do between now (7:45pm) and the beginning of tonight's ALL NEW EPISODE OF "HEROES" WHERE IT IS ALL IN THE FUTURE AND NEW YORK CITY HAS BEEN EXPLODED AND NATHAN PETRELLI IS PRESIDENT AND HIRO SPEAKS ENGLISH MORE GOODER AND WHATNOT! YATTAAAAAAA! Oh, and it seems that strip #10 that I put up a few weeks ago was not working, don't know how long it had been like that, as it was fine when I originally uploaded it and, obviously, haven't had time to revisit the site since then. I reuploaded it and it seems to work now. Also, I am aware of the small, hair-width lines that sporadically appear around the borders of certain strips. I have no idea why that happens, I went back and made sure it was not in the jpeg files, then told Shari about it (who created and maintains my webcomic thing) and she probably hasn't done anything about it. That's that old fakeradish spirit of indifference that I just love. Oh well, at least Jesse has started contributing to the site again. I have many other things to complain about, some of which were alluded to in my last "blog", and some of which are new, which I am sure you'd love to hear about, but, as I've said, I've got scanning and formatting to do. So, another time, then.

4/14/07 - 'Nother new strip up! Hey look, it's Elyse! Imagine that. Wow, I'm really running through my backlog of completed strips, putting one up a week and all that. I'm up to strip #10 already, out of 14. But fear not, strips 15-28 are making their way through the pipeline, and soon enough they will be pumped into the tanker ship, float across the ocean, arrive at port, be pumped into trucks and distributed to fueling stations around the country. Unless the tanker ship crashes, then they will leak out and destroy the ecosystem. But that is the risk I'm willing to take to deliver to you quality comic strips. I was originally going to go somewhere with all that, make some kind of analogy, but I just kept typing and nothing ever came of it. Imagine that. In other news, I'm listening to Virgin Radio "Xtreme" (it's the music we all love) and Maximo Park's "Missing Songs" B-sides album, in anticipation of their new album coming out on May 8th. And my car and monitor are both circling the bowl, and are probably going to need to be replaced soon. Bye bye, savings! I hate my car anyway and want to get a Ford Escape, if for no other reason than to rip the "ES" off of the "ESCAPE" badge on the back of the car and replace it with an "X", so I can make it cool like Virgin Radio "Xtreme". Oh, also, it's good that I kept rambling pointlessly for so long here, because it gave me time to remember that I recently discovered that my really really old geocities site is still up. It's all still there, except for the "recent art" gallery, which was hosted elsewhere, but that doesn't really matter, as it would be completely redundant and inferior to my new gallery anyway. So have a browse through my old photos and stuff, there's even selected Fun in Dystopia strips up there if you're interested. Enjoy my index-based website design asthetic, and realize why I let other people make my website stuff for me now.

4/8/07 - New strip up! My philosophy for timely weekly uploading of MLTS strips has evolved a bit. Originally, it was "put one up every friday night", then it changed to "put one up sometime during the day every Saturday", and now I think we're going with "put one up sometime during each weekend", so that's why this one's going up on Sunday. Oh look, it is from this very strip that the picture of Rachel used at the top of the webcomic browser thing was taken. Special! And finally this evening, the Sunday strips are now in the process of being colo(u)red, so I'll repost Sunday #1 when I get the colo(u)r version and hopefully from now on the Sundays will go up in full glorious colo(u)r. Speaking of the Sundays, I was just a little while ago listening to the Sundays "Blind" album whilst inking the hell out of some more MLTS strips. Fun! Peace.

3/31/07 - I know, I know, quit yer bitching. It's been three weeks since the last new MLTS strip, two weeks since my last uploading of anything. Forgive me, I had company in town and painting to do last weekend (and not the fun kind of painting, the kind of painting where you have to paint an entire room the same color). To make up for it, there are two, count 'em, two new MLTS strips in the webcomic thing and, not only that, one of them is the super-extra-jumbo sized first "Sunday" strip! Every seventh strip will be a "Sunday" sized strip, by the way... which should be obvious, considering the newspaper strip roots of MLTS. One more on the negative side, though, the Sunday strip has yet to be colored. When it gets colored I'll put up the new color version, but that at least explains why it looks sort of unfinished... I didn't screentone it like I did the "daily" ones, as it was drawn with the intention of it being colored in its finished form. If anyone out there reads this and can color stuff and wants to color my Sunday strips for no money now but eternal gratitude and credit and whatever money eventually comes from the strip (and you better start drawing up plans now for your giant vault on top of a hill that the Beagle Boys will be constantly trying to break into for when that tidal wave of cash starts rolling in, Scrooge McDuck!), kindly email me at burning_portable_toilets(at)hotmail.com for a bigger sized copy of the strip. Or AOL Instant Message me at Mughi Furtado, even if you don't want to color my strips. I only have one buddy on my buddy list, and he's a tool. F you, Ethan.

3/17/07 - Happy St. Patrick's Day, all you Black Irish bastards! To celebrate the day, I've been listening to Ted Leo and the Pharmacists all day! Not really, it just happens to be the most recent CD I bought! (Yes, I still buy CD's. Deal with it.) Though I will be getting drunker than an Irishman this evening, but that's not really because of St. Pat's Day either... I call that Saturday night! Enough with the exclaimation points. Okay, I've been updating MLTS weekly since the last blog/news entry, but this week, as the next one to run sequentially is a "Sunday strip" that has yet to be colo(u)red (although I have assurances that I will be colo(u)red by next week... cross those fingers and toes! Oh no, another exclaimation point!) I have chosen not to update the strip. Yes, I know, crushing to all zero of you who are reading this right now. But I do have for you an awesome consolation prize, a very cool b&w picture of Elyse from MLTS. I mucked around in Photoshop for hours putting together the background, and I think it looks damn impressive overall. I was actually thinking of it as I was working on it as more of a poster image, so the original is fairly large and has a ton of detail thats sort of lost in the gallery image, but I don't feel too bad, as you cheap get-everything-for-free-on-the-internet bastards need to come by my table at Otakon and shell out some okane for the big-ass print. (EDIT: I realized that I'd missed a spot screentoning the Elyse picture, and I wanted to put up a bigger version where more of the detail could be appreciated, so I fixed it and reuploaded it here. Still far from its full-size glory, but better than the "gallery size" version, which is still available in the gallery.) So enjoy St. Patrick's Day, and revel in the fact that, because they're white, the Irish are one of the few ethnic groups that the rest of us are allowed to publically stereotype and generalize about with no feeling of shame whatsoever. Slainte!

3/3/07 - New MLTS strip up for view! Read it read it read it!!!

2/24/07 - Hey hey, look at me! Posting two days in a row! I RULE. Reason for that is that its the odd occasion where something actually happend SOONER than I thought it would, as opposed to where usually (especially here in fakeradishland) NOTHING happens, or it happens at a pace that makes a glacier look like a goddamned supersonic jet. Cue drumroll. It is my great pleasure to announce, to all zero of you in attendance here this evening, the long awaited debut of... Most Likely to Succeed! That's right, the long-awaited (by me) debut of my webcomic! Check it out, suckers! Also available, with a few extra mouseclicks, under my "webcomic" tab at the top of this very page. I'm launchin' 'er with the first four strips, as I already have a stack of strips ready to go and, until we get some traffic at the ol' fakeradish, there seems little point to putting just one up every week or whatever. The page ain't perfect yet, as you'll see, in that the strips for some odd reason don't want to center themselves on the page, and the strip ID numbers in the "archives" dropdown menu aren't accurate due to me test uploading a few times to get the strips to look right. But something's always wrong, as Toad the Wet Sprocket once sang. Jesus, Joe Strummer needs to rise up out of his grave, fly to Baltimore, and punch me right in the face for making a Toad the Wet Sprocket reference. But I digress. The spiffy header for MLTS was done by Shari, as was the whole setup of the webcomic, for which I am eternally grateful. Its almost entirely done in black and white, with no annoying colors except a little blue at the bottom. I hate colors. So read 'em, and, as always, check out the gallery, the top two pictures in it are new and MLTS-related, and drop me a line at burning_portable_toilets(at)hotmail.com. Yes, I know my fakeradish address is in my "contact" section, but it's not quite up and running yet, and the hotmail address is my old reliable. Thank you, and have a burgeriffic day.

2/23/07 - Greetings. After an exhaustive process of sorting through all my pitchurs, resaving and thumbnailing all my pitchurs, renaming all my pitchurs so they'd show up in the gallery in the right order, and uploading all my pitchurs, all my pitchurs are now present and accounted for in da gallery! I'd like to congratulate myself on this herculean feat. It involved a lot of listening to Don n' Mike and Ron n' Fez. I love linking to things. Much work has also been done on my behalf on the super special exciting webcomic, so that will be up this weekend hopefully. From what I understand, all thats left to do (aside from my making the comics "webfriendly", as it were) is to figure out how to make the webcomic show up when you click on "webcomic" in my delightful tab at the top of the page. But I'm sure that between Shari and Jesse it will be figured out. If anybody's reading this, drop me a mail-sent-electronically at burning_portable_toilets(at)hotmail.com and let me know what you think, won't you? 5000.

2/17/07 - Hi there. If anyone's checked this space in the past you may have noticed that my old few blog/mainpage entries put up a bit after Otakon '06 are gone like Donkey Kong. That's due to fakeradish.org going bye bye (because some damn Canadians said we hadn't paid them hundreds of dollars in hosting fees or summat... blah blah blah, stupid hosers). Anyhoo, it wasn't much of a loss, as I hadn't gotten around to putting up very much in the way of content anyway (though I was just about to get the webcomic going, I swear!), but now we're starting afresh. Put up a bunch of stuff in the Gallery todee, check it out. Its all the stuff that was up there before the end of fakeradish.org, plus two new random drawings from Most Likely To Succeed, my forthcoming webcomic. I'm also going to troll through the archives and put up some of my best stuff from the past, so that'll be coming soon. Also coming (hopefully) soon, the aforementioned webcomic, featuring many characters familiar to those of you familiar with Fun in Dystopia, my old comic strip of Towson University's Towerlight paper and self-publishing fame. I know nobody's probably reading this now, but the idea is to have a good bit of stuff up in six months when Otakon '07 rears it's ugly head. The strip will be kooool, I promise, its all I've been working on for the past six months artwise. Got a big stack of 'em ready to go whenever I can prod Shari to set my webcomic thingie up. I'll also be putting the old FiD strips up, the collections of which are for all intents and purposes sold out, so's youse can get caught up when the webcomic begins. Thats all for now my frisky little monkeys.