Pimping A Russian Mail Order Bride

Regulars know i tend to shy away from tagging specifics on people i talk about here, simply to be respectful to them since they've not given me explicit permission to discuss them with the general public. But, i'm going to break that rule today for a bit of promotion. (Maybe it's Stan's influence?)

I previously made mention of my younger son starring on stage in Las Vegas until the beginning of this year. The unmentioned show was Evil Dead: The Musical (The 4D Experience), winning official approval from Bruce Campbell with his portrayal of Ash, King of Groovy. (or something like that. Ask Jack)

A great role, but after a few years one wants to do other things - especially someone like Chris (AKA Strangling Jack Johnson of the Swinging Johnson Brothers) who acts, does comedy, writes, directs and produces. He needed to stretch again.

Hence, his latest project - a new series on Amazon Prime entitled 100 Nights With Strangling Jack Johnson.
The official description:
"Follow Strangling Jack on his quest to become a working stand up comic - from his first night bombing to his first headlining gig and beyond! The show shares tips and tricks from working comedians about what it takes to start a comedy career."

BTW - you can also find his indie comedy Driving Bill Crazy on Amazon. Here's the description, once again:

"Bill’s life has always been a bit crazy, from his swinger mother and his step father who is four years younger than him to his abusive completely unhelpful psychiatrist to the fact that he works in a mental institution. His boss doesn’t like him and has no problem telling him. The girl he likes just started dating his worst enemy. Just when he thinks his life couldn’t get any loonier, he steps into the twisted world of Cameron and Cary Nolan. A massive head wound causes the prohibition of “Lawn Darts” and simultaneously makes the Nolan brothers rich. They realize that working is for chumps. Scams and fraudulent lawsuits are where the real money’s at, and corporate America is quick to settle out of court…especially when there’s a penis splint involved. After several years of falling down hotel stairs, “finding” rats in their fried chicken, and train derailments, they’ve discovered a new scam far superior to all the others. Evidently there’s plenty of money to be made in the mental health industry especially when you don’t exactly play by the rules. Now there’s a race between the insanity of Bill’s everyday life, and the twisted false reality of squirrels, pills and ninjas created by his new roommates to see which one finally ends up, Driving Bill Crazy."

Oh, yeah.... Confused about the title of this post?
This might help.

Oh, Man - 95!

So, while i've been in retreat from the outer world, Stan "The Man" had his 95th birthday. Amazing that he still manages to find the energy for self promotion and all those fun cameos while nearing 100 years old. Joan must either be amazing or terrifying. (that's a joke, son. I done my time)

So, still crawling out of the cave, but such an occasion needs must be marked, no? But how does one choose among the many, many, books he's written over the decades?
We don't! Instead, we'll look at Stan writing about writing comics. That makes sense, right?
So, let's go way back - 70 years back, to 1947, to get a glimpse at early Stan teasing hints of the master promoter to come with an odd and amazing little booklet -

This was only a half decade after Stan Lee's first writing job (the text page for Captain America #3), but he was in a singular position at Timely/Atlas/Etc that allowed a perfect view to create this look behind the scenes of comics. While indeed a "little booklet", it does weigh in at 100 pages, but i want to run it in its entirety, so we'll break it up into 3 parts. Settle in and take a look behind the scenes in the early days of the comic industry as Stan Lee shows you the "secrets" of the craft - though much is common knowledge these many years later. Of course, what makes this book truly Odd can be seen on page 6 and the back cover - a facial hair free Stan Lee!

Join us later today for the second part, in which you get to try your hand at writing, drawing, and lettering comics!  (I checked - the TOC indicates we need exclamation points)

pages from Secrets Behind The Comics (1947)

Friday Fun & Games - Computer Edition v.01

I'm still running off kilter, and today's post will reflect that by more than mere lateness. It's not too late to go visit Friday Night Fights instead. (Though it might be too early to vote as yet)

I'm still just tossing messages in bottles out of the cave currently, but i'll be venturing out soon. Meanwhile, it is and it isn't time for

Let's journey back 33 years to 1984 and take a look at how we used to do fun & games on our computers. It was 4 years after i built my first Sinclair Z80 system, and home computers were becoming a thing. But it was still a very hands-on DIY affair in many respects, as we'll see in the second Marvel Super Heroes Computer Fun Book:

If you wanted to have fun and play games on your computer, this was how it was done in those ancient days:

That might be semi-incomprehensible to modern gamers, so let us flip back a few pages and take a look at the instructional reference...

Y'know, looking back - I don't want to hear any more whining (or even whinging) about having to set up modern games to run properly on the system. We used to have to customize the code by hand!

Here's a couple more programs from the book:

For the truly curious, Basic (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) emulators still exist, and you can run the programs for yourself to see what was considered "fun" on the computer in the early days. It would be a few more years before i got involved in the industry. By that time Floppy Disks had arrived - a huge game changer, along with internal hard drives.
Imagine that - in the early days, there was no internal memory beyond the OS. You had to load whatever you wanted to do onto the system via a modem like system with the data stored as sound on a cassette tape, or type it in by hand. If you had mainframe access, you could dump a stack of punch cards.

30 years ago, computer graphics consisted of 4 colours with resolution of 300x200. One might note that means the pixels were rectangular, not square. Somehow, the original programmers didn't think that might affect simple things, like drawing a circle.

3 decades later, we live in our games, and there are people forming personal (and sexual) relations with computer generated imagery.
Damn.

How long before our game characters can look out at the player and ask "Do You Bleed?"

pages from the Marvel Super Heroes Computer Fun Book 2 (1984)