Just coming down from the high of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival where we not only found an excited audience for our new graphic novel (we sold 90 copies in two days!) but I got to sit beside my favourite comic maker at the convention, Carla Speed McNeil — who, incidentally, I first heard about through the first TCAF when we were on a self-publishing panel together. I did a quick 20 minute interview with her and we talked about why she creates anachronistic science fiction societies, how she gets around the fact that her work is complex and hard to promote, and the development of her sin-eating aboriginal bad-boy. Click play to hear it.

 
 Carla Speed McNeil interviewed at TCAF 2007 [20:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Keep reading to hear about the other amazing cons I went to this summer, as well as some tips for enjoying them! Read the rest of this post »

One of the funnest moments for me on the Infest Wisely movie was getting to see a song I wrote the lyrics for get performed on stage. It was nothing like I imagined it — it was so much better. At the time I was writing the script I had a half-assed idea my pal Maggie and The Republic of Safety might do it. Maggie was on tour, however, but Chris and Anthony stepped up to the challenge: they put together a band from scratch, got them to practise the music Chris’d composed, got them glam-punk wardrobe and tattoos, and then booked the Cameron back room for us to rock out in!

It’s hard to communicate how surreal and fucking awesome it was to see this stranger belting out the words I’d written just two months before:

Get out of our bodies/ you sneaky parasite / if you think we’re your new home/ you’re in for a fight!
Our leaders and rulers our rights have traded/ but I’m fuckin human and I won’t be upgraded!

 
 NoNano [1:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Click play and sing along! (Though if you haven’t watched it yet, it’s better to see it in context in episode four of Infest Wisely, “Spawning Rebellion“.)

On March 28th 1957, parliament passed the Canada Council act, making today the Canada Council for the Arts’ 50th anniversary. As granting bodies are something I have a continuing interest in I met with the Senior Communications Manager Donna Balkan when she was in town for the Governor General’s Awards. The forty minute interview will be of most interest to folks with some kind of engagement with institutionalized cultural funding bodies — I found out how graphic novels became eligible for grants, what phone calls stress their staff the most, and that technological changes may banish the ghost of vanity press and make self-publishers eligible for funding.

 
 Interview with Donna Balkan from Canada Council for the Arts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Susan’s birthday is today, and last night she finished off the last academic assignment for her doctorate. That’s only one of the many things she’s pulled off this year — being her husband I might be biased, but I think her 33rd year was pretty amazing.

As a biochem grad student, Susan has pretty much a full-time job at a lab where she’s been publishing papers, training students and doing real science type stuff with gels and microscopes and a labcoat of her own. Last year she started a group on campus and a zine (LadyScientist) to talk about the issue of women in science. (Interesting fact that we just discovered this week: University of Toronto has the widest wage discrepancy between male and female professors in Canada.) This year she’s been dealing with the same issues, just in a fantastic variety of ways… Read the rest of this post »

I’ve finished a first draft for our lo-fi sci-fi movie script Infest Wisely. It’s got a Voltron-inspired story structure, with seven segments that stand alone but come together to form a feature length piece. Since we’re planning to shoot it next month, I’d rather just release it than talk a bunch about it, but if you’re curious you can peek behind-the-scenes — it’s our unofficial “whiteboard” website where we’ve been amassing ideas/considerations.

Talking about unusual shorts, McSweeney’s has put out a “DVD magazine of unseen films”, Wholphin, and were nice enough to trade it for my DVDzine Novel Amusements. I did a phone interview with the editor Brent Hoff where we discuss subtitling foreign sitcoms, trailblazing with distributors, cepholopods, films about beards, not wasting people’s time, and the world’s most illegal game of volleyball — press play to hear it.

 
 Brent Hoff interview: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

For the shameful headstanding scene in my machinima piece Yoga Deathmatch I used something called Gary’s Mod. It allows you to spawn and arrange Half-Life 2 objects really easily, a surreal 3D sketchpad. Immediately it started me thinking how neat it would be to introduce more visually creative people to it, and thanks to Digifest I was able to arrange a “jam session” with a half dozen artists.

We took clips of the jam in progress and it’s going to be screened this Saturday, as part of dorkArmy’s monthly event at the Gladstone Hotel (Sept. 9, 8pm, $5). They’re bringing their Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero gear (out of the basements and into the bars!) and I always enjoy myself. If you’re not in Toronto, however, you can check out one clip from each of the artists by clicking through. Read the rest of this post »

Ryan North does a daily webcomic which features the same six panels with three talkative dinosaurs and a tiny woman about to be crushed. 70,000 people a day check out Dinosaur Comics, for good reason — it’s hilarious and inventive and occasionally thought-provoking, which is a lot to wring out of T-Rex clipart and MS Paint.

I was on a panel with him at Ad Astra and discovered he lived in Toronto, too, and so we got together last month to chat about being an adult who still wears pajamas, funding free comics with t-shirt sales, the positive sum game of webcomic linking, his programming side-projects, and his beautifully designed new book Your Whole Family is Made Out of Meat.

 
 Ryan North interview [17:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve been annoyed by how prevelant using “bitch” as an insult has become, so I’ve proposed a couple of alternatives in this audio piece. Features a verse from my rapping debut, Spamma Please.

Sorry to all my dandy pals, but you fancified fuckers had it coming.

 
 The Hardest Word Of All [2:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve been wanting to interview people on whether they felt like they cheated at yoga for a long time, but what finally made this audio piece coalesce was the mind-blowing brilliance that is This American Life. If you don’t know about this radio show out of Chicago, read on for more info.

This piece I’ve made is so derivative and so much weaker than anything they do that it kind of feels like This American Life fan fiction, but I’m fine with that. That’s just how good TAL is.

 
 Yoga Cheater [7:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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I got hooked on radio drama when I was young mostly by accident — it followed the comedy hour on CHUM-FM. I listened to Orson Welles on the The Third Man serial long before I saw any of his movies. Thanks to various sites, I’ve been enjoying the old time radio drama on my MP3 player.

Almost a year ago I was struck with the idea that it would be interesting to make a kind of audio drama that took advantage of the MP3 player, to turn it into a kind of primitive interactive story. I grew up on computer text games like Zork and books of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ilk so it was a natural fit. And here’s the result: the first 20 minute episode of “The Letter” that you can listen to on an MP3 player or the computer. At the end of each track, you decide what should happen next…

Try this Flash player below or click through for other playing options:

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