I Vomit Rainbows

I’m back from San Diego with 1200 photos and tons of great stories, but Defcon is this weekend so I’m super busy preparing for that. Dave just spent 2hrs dying all my blonde streaks bright bright pink, and I’m picking out photos to send to CBLDF and Archaia Comics.

Today was the first day of ComiCon for me. I started it out by waking up to Erin (@readiness) calling me– I’d overslept by two hours and she was waiting outside for quite a while. She bleached my hair as I delt with last minute ComiCon emergencies, and an electrician who was gonna make my apartment more usable. We tore the place apart while packing — i felt bad about leaving it looking wrecked, but I had to get to LAX to pick up an old friend.

I met Rich Johnston when I was 17yrs old. He’s a comic book creator from London, and for many years was the gossip columnist at CBR behind Lying in the Gutters. Now he runs a site through Avatar called Bleedingcool.com and was coming to SDCC on their behalf. I was picking him up from the airport cuz he bribed me with a suitcase full of candy to do it.

The first order of business was food, and the best ramen place in Southern California happened to be by LAX. So we went there and even got to sit at a low table on a tatami mat. Then, we bought EVEN MORE CANDY. Cuz Japanese candy is awesome. Then we sat in traffic til we got to the condo.

So we got to the condo and there was ANOTHER random british dude there! Apparently (and this took quite a while to sort out) the property manager thought he was staying in our room, and his room was at some place about 10mins away. It was super random. After that was sorted out, I dropped off Rich and headed to Mira Mesa to hang out with Todd and Christy Pluciennik, a couple of artists in my publishing group, Penguin Palace.

I had a blast hanging out, playing uno, and we got taquitos from Santanas. I’m going to spend this week determining if Sombreros or Santanas has better taquitos.

I need to convey how awesome FancyCondo is. It’s across the street from Balboa Park in a beautiful building, stunning harbor views as well as a skyline view. I’ve never stayed in a place this nice at ComiCon. The bathtub has armrests. There is a color printer. There is a full kitchen that makes me really wish I had time to bake or something. It’s REALLY AWESOME.

Tomorrow the madness begins. Wish me luck.

I just got back from Cirque Berzerk with Dave, Craig, Jessica, Chris, and Erin. Ran into Jonah Weiland and his friends there too. It was amazing. Not only is it Cirque de Soile level performance, but it’s put on by a group of Los Angeles burners from the Do Lab. And my friend Art was on stage doing insanely choreographed dance moves with the Wandering Marionettes!

Cirque Berzerk has aerialists, fire dancers, contortionists, musicians, ballerinas, and a midget, all with a gothic flair. There’s a giant circus bar outside with a ton of vintage pinball machines. One of the more popular acts had four acrobats doing synchronized trampoline stunts. If you live in Southern California and haven’t seen this show yet, I highly recommend it!!

Dave and I have been back for about a week. We just went to ToorCamp, which was a hacker convention out 3-4hrs east of Seattle. Seattle goes from beautiful waterfront to tree-lined mountains to harsh desert wasteland very quickly. Can you guess what climate we ended up in?

The last time Mount St. Helens erupted, it dumped ash out over the United States, but the part it dropped the most on ended up being where we were camping. Anytime you walked somewhere, it felt like you were on the moon (maybe a moon covered in sagebrush), because the ash and dust was so fine it would billow out in puffs of smoke off your shoeprint.

The camping at the event was Burning Man style, except that Toorcon provided showers (made of gardening sprinklers), portapotties, and generators for power. The major drawback was that the portapotties were not cleaned nearly often enough (they were seriously the grossest ones I’ve EVER seen) and water and ice weren’t brought in often enough.

It was worth enduring by the second day, when we got a short tour of the missile silo. The silo was built towards the end of the cold war and was the biggest one ever. The plans were leaked to the Russians, and they couldn’t afford to make one, so the war ended shortly after. The silo housed three Titan-one missiles.

Tprophet wrote a glow opera, using costumes lined in el-wire. Me and Jules got to be voice actors in the play, which was nerve-wracking but awesome and fun. It was probably the first hacker play ever. There were giant raves every night and a violin concert, too. Keith spun for 8hrs on Friday and 4hrs on Saturday, which was super awesome. There was also an oldschool happycore DJ for a while.

By day three, we could go out to the silo whenever we wanted, and got extensive tours out to the area where the missile was housed.. and got to peer down a 200 ft hole. It was amazing. The entire place was covered in graffiti, mainly pertaining to ducks. I did a bunch of sketches and taped them to the wall, and put a bunch of cardboard penguins up all over.

Our camp was called Camp Craigslist, because we got a bunch of stuff off Craigslist when we landed up Seattle and rented a Uhaul to cart it all over with. We ended up with three couches, a broken lightbrite, ottoman, skateboard, beanbag bed, vintage telephone, and some lamps. Keith showed up a day later with his giant speakers and we had our own Silo pretty much (our camp was next to it). His friend Jeph was with him and built some crazy tarp shade structures for us. We also had hit Costco and the Japanese market, so we had sushi almost every day (Albacore sashimi!) and I invented a roll.. grilled bacon-wrapped asparagus with cream cheese =) SO yummy. Also made bacon fried rice, yakisoba, and octodogs. Tip: don’t try to fry stuff on a gas grill. It’s messy, takes forever, and works horribly.

When we got back to Seattle, we had a giant group dinner at Quinn’s, ate at the oldest sushi resteraunt in Seattle, and got to meet an amazing street artist, starheadboy I got to hang out with tons of friends and explored a ton more of the city. The trip was absolutely amazing.

I didn’t really take pictures, but dave has lots here

Hooray! I’ve been blogging sporadically on my deviantART and livejournal pages, but I think this is gonna be my primary art/food/travel blog from now on.