aalgar.com

So, I’m back. The website is where it belongs (special thanks to Bob, as always, for making stuff like this happen for me), and all the archives are where they need to be (thanks to Amanda for assistance). The entirety of my twelve years on the web (minus those Sarcastic Voyage installments that got pulled to be published in The Sarcastic Verses) are now here, in one convenient location. They are categorized, searchable and not moving again for the rest of my damn life. Unless I have interns to take care of it for me.

So, if you do the RSS thing, go ahead and subscribe. As of this moment, the plan is to post one of these entries here every week, to check in with assorted minutae I may have to share, and to update you on the status of various projects. An installment of the new webcomic, God Damn It, Matt! will be posted each Monday. And other things, to be announced shortly, should follow.

A few important things happened to me this week:

• I found Mexican Coke, which is actually quite a big deal for me. Coca Cola started using high fructose corn syrup rather than simple sugar years ago, and things were never quite the same for my taste buds. Their various competitors followed suit over the years, including very recently, the great love of my life, Jolt cola. I’d noticed the stuff had taken on a sickeningly syrupy sweetness about a year ago, but I never quite understood why. Now I know. And (I never thought I’d hear myself say this) I may be done with the stuff if they have no plans to switch back.

It was actually Jones soda (the quirky hippie stuff that’s bottled somewhat locally in relation to me) that turned me into a sweetener snob. But their cola is hard to find, and appears to be some kind of special seasonal thing anyway. (Which makes no sense at all to me. Those turkey and gravy sodas — also made by Jones — should be limited. Not goddamn cola.) Some research I had done online finally clicked with those strange glass bottles I’d seen at the grocery store in my neighborhood (which is predominantly hispanic). So now, long story short, Mexican Coke. Yay.

• I made a late holiday purchase on Amazon, and ran into this little problem:

Mildly disturbing, to say the least.

Happy New Year, everyone. It’s good to be back.

• I know, it’s been a stupidly long time since I’ve updated this thing. Believe it or not, events have been happening. To me!

• Creatively, big things are on the horizon. I know I always say this, but I really mean it this time! Intermen will be wrapping up at the end of the year, and I think Matt and I will be working on a new webcomic after that. There are also plans for a new adventure game (which I’ve been hinting at for awhile, I realize), the last part of the Tales of the Odd saga and… well, other stuff that’s even more tentative that I’m scared to announce just yet. Trust me though, there’s some cool stuff on the way. Also: more music, if you actually care about that sort of thing.

• I spoke with the Former Mrs. Sarcasm recently, and she mentioned that her current boyfriend was considering taking a picture of the cat I lost custody of in the divorce. He wants to turn it into one of those LOLcats things with the caption “WATCHIN NEW GUY BONIN UR EX.”

I love that we still have such a healthy relationship.

• A friend of mine has taken it upon herself to write my eulogy. I’m feeling pretty great at the moment, but perhaps she’s more insightful than I give her credit for.

While this is a sad day for some of us, it’s a happy one fo some other, those being all his ex-wives. AAl us to say that he was big internet flirt and that that was the best way to get to know a person. I like to think it delayed the inevitability of finding out what a dick he could be. I see his fifth wife is her in the front row. I’d ask her to say a few words on his behalf, but she just learned to say,”da da,” and I don’t want her to overextend herself.

I remember the day he asked me to make his funeral like a roast. I wasn’t to keen on the idea of saying mean things about him at a time like that. He then corrected my spelling and grammer like the grammer nazi he was. He even corrected my use of the term grammer nazi, he said he preferred the term “grammer facist.” After that I didn’t find it so hard to say what a asshole he could be.

AAl, I his 2nd and 3rd wives and probably many of you, met on the Bendis Board. I use to love going there, because it was one of the few places where i could go and talk comics and not feel out of place. It was there that I first heard the term “attention whore.” I learned quickly that if there was anyone that embodied that term it was AAl. I remember he took a hiatus from the board, he wanted to focus on his writing or something like that. I think he did it for two reasons: one, so he could come with new was to insult us, remember he was a prick; and two being the attention whore he was, he probably wanted to make a grand re-entrance.

We had to endure his huge ego for years, at least he was kind enough to be cremated. Now the pall bearers don’t ahve t o strain themselves from the weight of his head alone.

Thanks, Angel. I guess.

• That’s pretty much it for the moment. Hopefully I’ll be getting back to updating this thing weekly. Intermen will still be going up every Monday, and hopefully there’ll be a much improved website going up in the somewhat near future.

That’s all for now.

It was a decent enough week – it still doesn’t feel like late spring here in Seattle, but that may have something to do with the fact that I still hardly ever see the sun.

• I checked out the first couple of discs of the new Doctor Who series. Somehow, despite being a sci-fi geek for over three decades, I’ve never encountered so much as an out-of-context sound byte from any of the incarnations of this series. I was pretty impressed by what I saw – it wasn’t incredibly profound or compelling, just good, fun sci-fi. It was light-hearted and at times a bit goofy, but all around funny and interesting and very definitely British. I’m in no great hurry to see the rest of them, but I’ll get around to it eventually.

• I’ve finally started watching King of the Hill in its entirety recently. I’ve always kind of taken this show for granted – I never doubted its entertainment value, but I hardly ever watched it. Giving it a proper concentrated DVD marathon has really been quite a treat – the viewing equivalent of finding $20 in your pocket. It almost reminds me of Arrested Development with its mixture of subtle and blatant humor, and its emphasis on character-based comedy. I’m only through season three, and I’m very much looking forward to the several I still have ahead of me.

• I find it strange that, with the massive proliferation of “chicks with dicks” porn, there isn’t any “men with vaginas” stuff out there. One assumes there must be post-op trannies going in the other direction – are they just modest? Or is it that there’s no catchy rhyming name like “chicks with dicks” to market them under? The best I could come up with was “duders with pooters.”

• One of these days, I’m going to write a story about a young, idealistic writer who comes to Hollywood, does not compromise his principles and has his screenplay competently adapted into a movie that adequately reflects his original vision.

• I just don’t think Americans would elect a President named “Mitt.”

Excelsior, true believers!

I created this graphic for the b–g on my own website. It amused me, and I thought perhaps it might amuse you as well. (Click to see full-sized.)

Notable things from this week:

• The Beastie Boys’ new album The Mix Up is out in early July. I have probably mentioned this before: few things in life can lift my spirits the way these guys do. You know in sci-fi movies or TV shows, when the hero makes some arrogant speech about the things that make us human, and he says something about the intangible way music touches our souls? And you’re thinking man, I like music and all, but that sounds a little fruity to me. I’m with you — except that the Beasties really do kinda have that effect on me. Their music almost always improves whatever mood I’m in. And a new album — even an album of instrumental “post-punk” stuff (like the stuff on Check Your Head that a lot of people called “filler material”) — makes me all giddy inside. They released this fantastic little promo video in seven parts last week, which effectively gave us an entire song from the album, as well as illuminating the oft-misunderstood shadow world of the donut spy. Man, I love those guys.

• I also quite love the Super Giants, whose new album The Else came out on the iTunes this week. I’ve definitely only been listening to it for the week that it has legally been released, and not at all for an additional week. I’m a law abiding citizen, I am. Review will probably follow a bit later — my first impressions of music are hardly ever worth very much — but I am quite enjoying it so far.

• Ditto the new MC Frontalot release, Secrets from the Future. If you are unfamiliar with this nerdcore sensation (who, by his own admission, did not travel through time to fight cannibal leprauchans using only his common sense and $8 worth of twine), you are ignorant and lame. The good news is, you can fix the situation. Go listen. Now. A review of this will also be forthcoming.

• On my way home from Canada last night (dropping the girlfriend off after an extended visit), I stopped at a gas station/convenience store for car fuel and people fuel. On the snack shelves, I discovered a mysterious unlabeled bag of Doritos.

Apparently they’re some kind of “test flavor,” which you’re supposed to eat and then share your feelings (and name suggestions) with Frito Lay. It had been my hope that this was some sort of “limited test market” thing, and that I’d only lucked out by stopping at this fairly off-the-beaten-path store in the wild untamed north of Washington state. I had visions of testing the X-13D like some sort of hotshot test pilot — as though the cosmic mysteries of this new flavor chose me, like Hal Jordan, to be their new master.

Then I came home and realized these things are all over the place. And apparently you can go to Frito Lay’s website and get clues to what the flavor actually is. (You earn them by playing some kind of shape-matching game. Either the Guardians of the Galaxy have really relaxed their entrance standards, or this is not the cosmically significant event I’d hoped it was.) So that was a bit of a disappointment. Also, they taste kind of ketchuppy.

• Fuck Jerry Fallwell. I’m glad he’s dead.

Share and enjoy.

This is probably very old news, but I just discovered it on Wiki today and it made me laugh. A lot.

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo

A follow up to the 1999 sleeper Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Rob Schneider reprises his role as the inept gigolo who travels to Amsterdam to see his friend, T.J. The critically reviled film just broke even on its $22 million budget at the U.S. box office before bombing overseas. The film became the subject of a heated debate between star Schneider and movie critic Patrick Goldstein, who wrote an article about studios producing terrible movies, citing this film as one of its examples. In January 2005, film critic Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times said in an article that Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo was overlooked for an Academy Award because “nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.”

Schneider responded two weeks later with full-page ads in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter where he said “Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind … Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers… Most of the world [has] no idea of your existence. I can honestly say that if I sat with your colleagues at a luncheon, afterwards they’d say, ‘You know, that Rob Schneider is a pretty intelligent guy’ … whereas, if you sat with my colleagues, after lunch, you would just be beaten beyond recognition.”

Film critic Roger Ebert responded to Schneider saying “Reading this, I was about to observe that Schneider can dish it out but he can’t take it. Then I found he’s not so good at dishing it out, either. I went online and found that Patrick Goldstein has won a National Headliner Award, a Los Angeles Press Club Award, a RockCritics.com award, and the Publicists’ Guild award for lifetime achievement.

Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.

But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” while passing on the opportunity to participate in “Million Dollar Baby,” “Ray,” “The Aviator,” “Sideways” and “Finding Neverland.” As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.”

This very much put me in mind of those pithy comments like Churchill’s “you’re ugly, and I’ll be sober in the morning.” I don’t even hate Rob Schneider as much as the world-at-large seems to, but I cannot deny the comedic value of a fantastic put-down. Well done, Mr. Ebert. Well done.

The Tales of the Odd website was up for renewal in a few weeks, which sort of forced me to finally address the whole TOTO problem. To wit:

• comics cost a lot of money to print
• drawing a comic, even with allegedly time-saving 3D rendering, takes for-goddamn-ever
• I can’t seem to find an artist willing to do the drawing for me
• I’m on a bit of a creative roll lately, and I’d rather use it writing words than drawing pictures
• did I mention the cost?

So I decided not to renew the site. As of… I guess the end of March… talesoftheodd.com will no longer exist. Neither will the “Oddblog” that I had set up over here.

As for the comic itself… I suppose it’s too early to say. I have the entire “saga,” such as it is, completely mapped out, and it’d be a damn shame to just let it all go. I may just write all the scripts and put them away someplace. Or maybe I’ll keep plugging away slowly at the art (this seems less likely). For now, at least on the web, it’s dead.

Anyone interested in purchasing the remaining copies I have is encouraged to contact me. Failing that, I could always buy a bird. Or maybe even just the cage.

I actually witnessed this today:

Man sets woman on fire in downtown Seattle

So now I’m on the Creepy Myspace. I still hate it, but since everybody in the goddamn world is on it, I figured maybe I could score an extra reader or two that way.

So if you care:

http://www.myspace.com/aalgar

I don’t really understand how half of it works (it took half the morning and two people to post a simple html entry), so don’t be offended if I don’t “friend” you immediately or whatever. I’m generally a pretty amicable person, and if you want to be my friend, I’ll respond in kind. So if I end up ignoring you, it’s technical ineptitude, not a slight at you.