Posts Tagged ‘conversation’
5 items.
For the record, I really don’t feel like there’s nothing to talk about in movie-land at the moment. For example, there about a hundred and one cheap shots I could take at that johnny-come-lately end of the world flick The Core coming out on Friday. But why spend all your joke money in one place? I thought it would be kind of fun to do a short strip on the Oscar let down.
Does anyone else notice how the entire ceremony just vanishes from your memory like a fart in the wind after just a few scant days?
Secondly, I don’t want anyone to think that today’s strip is some how a reflection on my relationship with Jared. Things are fine. We talk to each other quite often. This isn’t Movie Comics, y’know! 🙂
Truth be told, things couldn’t be much better. If you read Penny Arcade at all, you’ll know Jerry and Mike will be making an appearance in Kansas City this weekend at the Planet Comicon convention. Guess who is going to see them? That’s right! US!
Kansas City is about 3 hours away from Des Moines, so we thought it would be a fun way to kill an afternoon to go to the show. We’re leaving early so we can be there when it opens at 10am. The day wraps up at 5, so it would be no trick to go home in the same day and be back before Saturday Night Live.
I’m going to take my camera and hopefully we can get a picture with the two of them. If it turns out their 300 pound bodyguards keep us at bay, I’ll try and snag a photo with Lou Ferrigno instead. If I get any good shots, I’ll be sure to post them on the site.
I’m really pumped about going and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t entertaining the thought that Jerry and Mike might be familiar with what goes on over in our little corner of the Internet. I would introduce myself, tell them I’m a fan and ask them if they’ve ever heard of Theater Hopper.
The conversation could go one of a few ways, I suppose. They could say they’ve seen it and liked, the could say they’ve seen it and thought is sucked, or they could say they’ve never heard of it. If the latter proves true, maybe I could turn them on to our littler operation. Jerry would link to me from his blog and hordes of fans would crash the server just before flooding my inbox with hate mail!
It’s the stuff dreams are made of.
Either way, I’m buying a poster and asking them to sign it. Gotta cash in on eBay after they hit the big time! 🙂
You may have noticed that I took the poll off of the site. I know that it was kind of popular among my regular visitors, but I got tired of trying to come up with new questions. Plus, it never worked completely right and I think it kind of looked ugly, so I pitched it.
I’m thinking about starting up the forums again, but this time going with phpBB instead of IkonBoard. I know there is a poll feature in there, so I’ll probably make a special folder for it. I don’t know if that’s happening any time soon, but it’s part of the evolution of the site.
An item of interest: I watched Ghostbusters tonight on DVD. I put off buying it for the longest time. But when you sit down and watch it, you realize just how great a gift it is to American cinematic comedies.
It’s like, you’ve seen it on TV a million times. It’s been part of the background noise of your life for decades now. But it really is freakin’ hilarious. Every time Bill Murray quips, I pass out in laughter. If I had half his easy-going confidence, his total command of that playful B.S. swagger, that would be the coolest.
The best part of watching the movie for us is that we could see the hotel we stayed at while we were in New York a few weeks ago.
There’s a scene where Murray comes up to Sigourney Weaver at Lincoln Center. They do a wide shot, and our hotel – The Empire Hotel – was in the background. Now when we show people pictures from our trip, we can slide Ghostbusters in the DVD player, skip to that scene and say “See that building in the background? That’s where we stayed.” A lot of the action in the movie takes place around Central Park West which was pretty much the nexus of our visit. It’s cool to see that stuff on celluloid.
If you haven’t watched it in a while, I strongly suggest picking it up. Besides, we all know movies are much better when the swear words aren’t replaced by nonsense words like “bulldip” or “crud”.
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It’s been one heck of a week, kids.
As you may have noticed, Theater Hopper was down earlier in the week. This was somewhat related to our recent move to a new server. The story is on that’s pretty complicated and one I’ve been wading in up to my eyeballs, so I don’t know how keen I am on retelling it. But we haven’t talked in a while, so I’ll give it a shot.
Basically what happened was that the server move was successful, but we carried over some unwanted guests into our new environment. Dreamhost – Theater Hopper’s new host – caught them and shut us down. What kind of unwanted guests, you might ask? Hackers. They somehow compromised our old server and were using it as a proxy of some sort. Probably for warez sites. We’re not sure. What we *do* know is that some jackass thought it would be fun to leach our bandwidth, slow our server down and cause a whole lot of problems for people who only want to entertain.
At the time Dreamhost shut us down, they fingered us as guilty before even discussing it with us. That left me a little cheesed off. We’re as much a victim as anyone else here. If they had communicated what they had found, we could have partnered with them to resolve the situation faster. But that’s not how things unfolded. Instead, we had to sit on our hands for two days waiting for them to get back to us. It was a bit of a let down for me because I had heard such great things about Dreamhost. This certainly put us off on the wrong foot.
But things are up and running again and we have a new comic for you today.
I should stop to give sincere thanks to Brian for helping to facilitate the switch and talking to Dreamhost in a language they understand. Left to my own devices, I’m pretty sure Dreamhost would have gotten me kicked off the internet altogether. Also thanks to Dave for reconnecting the database that manages the comics and the blogs after the server move. I’d be dead in the water without these guys.
I’ve gotten a few e-mails asking me if I’ve noticed the similarities between my talking DVD player and Penny Arcade’s DIV. My response is "Yes. I’ve noticed them." But I would like to point out the important difference that my character wears shoes and gloves while DIV is essentially walking around naked. Okay. So my talking DVD player isn’t wearing pants, either. But gloves and shoes are better than nothing!
I tried to make my talking appliance look different from the his more well-known counterpart. But there are only so many ways to anthropomorphize small, grey rectangles of technology.
At any rate, keep your eye on this arc as we’ll probably see a cameo from DIV in the upcoming strips. Maybe a couple other pieces of talking technology as well.
As long as we’re on the subject, you should check out the incentive sketch I drew of the talking DVD player. It was the very first drawing I put together of him, plus some notes for personality traits. The whole idea is that he came to life after being disgusted by Tom’s terrible tastes in movies. So it stood to reason that he should be very tweedy and intellectual. That’s why I’m questioning whether or not he should wear spats. Cuz, y’know… spats make you look REALLY smart!
Something else I wanted to draw your attention to are the FREE COMICS you can download through my page at Clickwheel. If you have a video iPod – or heck, even if you don’t! – check out my most recent updates. I’m adding all of my incentive sketches to the site as miniature anthologies separated by month. This is the first time I’ve made these sketches available outside of the site. If you’re interested, they’re out there!
I’m going to try and keep adding sketches until I’m all caught up. After that, I’ll add more comics.
Thanks to everyone for their patience this week. One thing is for sure, I never really knew how cut off I felt until I was forced into that situation. Not having access to the site for this period of time has made me really thankful for what I have. Thanks to you guys for making that possible!
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Clearly being annoyed by people talking in a movie theater is somewhat of a theme for me.
Apologies for the lack of comic on Friday. I just got slammed by holiday responsibilities. Cami and I hosted Thanksgiving on Thursday and that was a chore and a half. Always good to have family over, but good when the leave, too. I’m sure you empathize.
Our problems were somewhat compounded by the fact that Henry has been cutting teeth recently. He’s had about five teeth for the last few months. But I guess they all must be pushing further through the gums all at the same time because he was practically inconsolable this week. Constant screaming. Like, screaming yourself hoarse levels of screaming. You do everything you can to easy the pain, but teething rings don’t help and neither do cold rags. We give him children’s Tylenol and pretty much wait for him to crash from exhaustion.
So, yeah. Anyway – full week.
I know today’s comic isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s based on a true event, so I had to put it into comic form to purge it from my system.
After we got Henry down to sleep on Friday night, I went to the late show of No Country For Old Men. Cami wasn’t interested because she thought it looked scary. Javier Bardem’s reputation preceeds him! That said, I’m bummed she didn’t get to see this with me because it’s easily one of the year’s best. Believe the hype. The Coen Brothers are in rare form here and all the performances are note-perfect. The ending is still haunting me days later. It’s stuck with me in a good way and I feel like I’m still peeling back the layers of it’s complexity.
The only thing that subtracted from my experience was a 50-ish faux-intillectual couple sitting a few rows behind me. They would NOT. SHUT. UP. throughout the entire movie!
I knew they were going to be trouble from the first moments I laid eyes on them. I ran into the theater to buy my ticket because I was running a little bit late and they there were in front of me. They wanted to see a movie that had left already left the theater and now they were wringing their hands trying to figure out what to watch instead.
They lazily interrigated the box office girl. “What would you recommend? Which of your movies is selling the best? Do you have any written matierials about this one?”
Points to the box office girl for being so patient. Meanwhile, I’m standing behind this couple in tweed jackets and wooden jewelry bouncing up and down like I have to go to the bathroom.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“One for No Country For Old Men,” I say, hurriedly. I grab my ticket and I’m out of there.
I make it into the theater before the trailers start and I see not far behind me is the annoying couple. They’re looking for a place to sit. I’m kind of down in the front in the middle of one of the rows positively radiating “Don’t sit next to me” vibes. They take a seat a few rows back. The movie starts and I put them out of my mind.
That is until about five minutes in when apparently the woman returns to her seat from a bathroom break. Then, the man proceeds to whisper the first five minutes of the movie to this woman to get her up to speed. This was one in a series of SEVERAL transactions during the showing.
I don’t know if you’ve seen No Country For Old Men yet. But if you have, you know that silence is a motif. There are hardly any cues from the soundtrack to ratchet up the tension and the movie is very much about the wide open spaces of West Texas and the scary solitude it provides. Javier Bardem’s character Anton Chigurh is utterly terrifying not because some daring musical cue causes you to jump. It is because he is so still, so methodical. Even the sound of his boots stepping down and empty hallway is enough to send shivers down your spine. You never know when this guy is going to strike. But when he does, it’s sure to be violent.
Meanwhile, these two yabbering idiots will NOT. SHUT. UP. They’re narrating the film to each other. “Ooo! Don’t go do that. He’s in the other room! Oh, no! He’s turning out the lights!”
And I want to murder them.
At several points during the film I turn around and give them the hairy eyeball. At first they look at me like they can’t figure out why I’m not watching the movie. They stop for a while, and then go right back at it. After several over the shoulder glances, I look at them again and ask “Are you going to talk the whole movie?” and turn around incredulously. Again, they stop for a short while before picking up right where they left off. I sit through the rest of the movie with their nagging voices over my shoulder. When they aren’t talking, I start to anticipate when they’ll start flapping their gums again.
The movie ends. I walk out and the two of them look up at me as I exit. “Thanks for talking the entire time.” I say and I stride out.
This sounds petty and passive aggressive, I know. But I probably would have felt more lame to have gotten up and asked the theater manager to politely tell these people to shut the hell up. They were in their 50’s easy. They should have known better.
Besides, there’s this part of me that believes I shouldn’t have to be inconvenienced with the chore of getting out of my chair to force someone to learn common courtesy. That’s why it’s common. You should enter these social situations already knowing what to do.
But it’s water under the bridge and the movie was great. I can’t suggest it highly enough. Just… be careful who you sit around, okay?
I saw another movie this weekend – Enchanted with Amy Adams. Odds are good we’ll be talking about that movie tonight on The Triple Feature talkcast tonight at 9:00 PM CST over a TalkShoe. I hope you can join us. I know we’ll be talking about more than that. Probably The Mist and Hitman, too. Lots of good stuff in theaters over the holiday weekend and I’m sure there will be lots of opinions floating around.
See you then!
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So I know that today’s comic isn’t fall-down funny, but it adds a nice little bit of progression to the plot and adds a dash of relationship conflict between Tom and Cami. I always jump at the opportunity to develop their relationship further, even if it’s only by a tiny increment.
So I guess now we’re in the thick of a “crossover” between Theater Hopper and Instant Classic. Although I don’t know if you can really call it a crossover, since we’re not sharing a storyline. I’m not sure what you would call it other than one artist gently making fun of the other in tandem with each other.
It’s funny, because I didn’t really intend for this to happen. I had only wanted to return fire from the comic Brian Carroll originally posted on his site on Sunday.
But then Brian posted a second comic and now a THIRD comic and I couldn’t let it slide.
Of course, it doesn’t help that you guys are egging me on from the sidelines. Your blood lust knows no bounds! Certainly, we are no better than the Romans…
I kid, I kid. This is all in good fun and a good way to beat back the January to February doldrums – when there are no new movies in theaters worth talking about. I mean, c’mon. Would you rather I do this, or do a comic about When In Rome? I know what I’d rather be doing…
Brian says that his next comic will be his last featuring his loutish parody version of Tom. I’m not sure if my version of Brian will extend beyond this Friday’s comic or not. I have a few ideas on how I can exaggerate my parody further, but we’ll have to wait and see. I wouldn’t want the gimmick to wear out its welcome. And besides, it looks a little mean when one guy is making fun of the other and the other guy is, like, “Yeah, I’m doing something else now?…”
That’s all for the blogging today. Thanks for swinging by the site. If you have any thoughts / reactions to our little feud, please post your comments below!
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Cardboard Thor! I bet you didn’t see THAT ONE coming, didja?
Well, maybe you did. You guys are a pretty perceptive lot.
Although I’m sure some of you are wondering why Jared didn’t got with Tom and Cami to see The Avengers at the same time. I actually thought up a reason for that. I was going to make a comic about it, but then I realized it wasn’t funny.
Basically, it involved confusion about what time they were supposed to me. Tom said 7:15 and Jared thought it was 8:15. Y’see? Not really funny? Besides, I got the whole “casual conversation inside a burning building joke” done with this comic. No need to drag it out.
I have to apologize for there not being a new comic from me last week. It’s inexcusable, but allow me to explain.
Cami and I went on a little vacation the week before last to Chicago. We got back last Tuesday. Then last Wednesday was July 4. Then I pretty much spent the rest of last week getting caught up on work and life. So, no comic.
I’m starting to wonder if I’m self-sabotaging a little bit. I’ve been producing Theater Hopper almost 10 years and for 98% of that time, I never missed deadlines. If I did, I always made it up with an extra comic or at least a better explanation than “We went on vacation! Hurrr!”
Now that the comic is supposed to be ending in a month, I’m blowing deadlines left and right. It’s not acceptable and it’s not the way I want to go out.
I’ve been trying to hit a Monday deadline each week and that hasn’t been working out so great. The comic ends in a month and I think I have WAY more than 4 comics left in me in order to bring this last story across the finish line.
So here’s the thing: I’m throwing the Monday “deadline” out the window and I’m going to try and update as often as I can leading up to August 6. If I make it to August 6 with the story completely told, that’s great. All’s well that ends well. But if I go a little long… well, there are worse things that can happen, right?
The point is, from today forward, be sure to check the site frequently. With any luck, updates are going to be coming a lot faster. And don’t forget the guest strips I’ll be tossing in from time to time!
By the way, if you still want to get in on that action, I’m still accepting guest strips. Feel free to e-mail me what you’ve got to theaterhopper@hotmail.com and help me send Theater Hopper out in style!
In the meantime, make sure you don’t miss an update by following me on Twitter or Facebook. I know that sounds a little counter-intuitive since I’m ending the comic soon, but I intend to keep updating those accounts.
The Twitter account is my “main” Twitter account anyway and I’m pretty likely to continue sharing movie news, thoughts and reactions on the Facebook page.
That’s it for now. Thanks for your patience and I hope you enjoyed the comic!
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