On being sick and the last four days

February 3rd, 2010 by Mike | Posted in blog | Comments

It’s been a crazy past four days.

• I moved into my new place in Allendale with Brian and Josh on Saturday
  • This includes moving a bed, a desk, a TV + stand, all of my comics & trade paperbacks, a bookshelf, stereo & speakers, all of my DVDs and books, all of my clothes and other odds and ends
  • I also helped Brian move his bed, desk, dresser, desk chair and other things into his room
• I acquired a cold after unpacking 80% of my said moved stuff in my room (I blame the dust)
• I’ve watched at least 8 episodes of Supernatural with Katherine as well as the last few episodes of The IT Crowd, series 2
• I’ve sorted 200+ comics and filed them in my longboxes
• I’ve washed all of my clothes and arranged them in a functional way in my room
• I picked up last week’s comics on Saturday
• I shot some of Jeff & Mike on Sunday in the blistering cold over at Whitecap Comics with Jeff and the rest of the J&M crew
  • This only made me more sick

I’m sure there’s some more in there, but overall it’s been a long four days; so long, in fact, that my body decided to give me a big middle finger yesterday by keeping me in bed instead of going to work and class.

So, I’m still battling this cold and I’m making myself go through class and work today sniffling and coughing–oh yeah, I acquired a cough last night/this morning. DayQuil to the rescue!

This week is going to go by quick, I assume. Rest tonight. Comic Book Club, tomorrow–we’re watching Batman. Friday will most likely mean D&D. Saturday will be dedicated to shooting Jeff & Mike. Sunday is the Superbowl–which I really don’t care much for, but will probably be spent drinking beers and eating chili with Jeff and some people. Whew. This should be fun.

I hope everyone else’s past four days have been good. I’ll be around with more random updates.

The drag and drudge

February 1st, 2010 by Mike | Posted in blog | Comments

This is what I wish I could be doing... sleeping in a wagon...?

I have a cold.

What I wouldn’t give to just not be sick this second. I could do any day but Monday. Monday is my worst day. My longest (11am-9pm) day of the week including 3 of my 4 classes and work.

I’m just tired. This pseudo-fever I have is making me groggy and being bored in my two CS classes doesn’t help.

The prospects of playing D&D later tonight are keeping me going though… Slowly but surely…

Looking for a To-Do list

January 25th, 2010 by Mike | Posted in blog, random | Comments

This is an issue that haunts people day and night: What To-Do list application should I use?

If you know anything about me, I am the type of person who gets things done typically in order of mental priority. It’s a bit of a burden. So! Last night while laying in bed, I decided that when I woke up I needed to find a good To-Do app of some kind to keep my mind focused on tasks I may have and to make sure I remember the shit I need to do.

My options based on 20 minutes of research are these:

1. To-Do for the iPhone
   • This seems like a pretty sweet application with many uses, but $10? That’s a little rough.
2. Google Tasks on the iPhone
   • I had no idea this existed, and the benefit is that it would sync to my GMail account so I could access this stuff all over–seeing that I use every aspect of Google that I can.
   • The only issue I have with this option is that it runs through the iPhone’s browser and isn’t it’s own app which makes it a tad annoying.
3. Pen & Paper agenda
   • I’m talking about using a small agenda that I carry around 24/7 to keep track of everything.
   • In all honesty, this seems like my best choice.

My decision is pretty much made, but if anyone has any better suggestions I’d like to hear them. I hate having a terrible memory…

Getting involved

January 19th, 2010 by Mike | Posted in blog | Comments

I’ve been at GVSU for three and a half years now. It’s really crazy to think about for me. Three and a half years of knowledge, partying, friends, enemies, good times, and bad times. So much stuff.

Although the main goal of going to college is to ultimately get a degree in something and use that degree to get some high paying job and blah blah blah, I have to say that, when it comes down to it, getting involved outside of academics was the best choice I could have ever made at GVSU.

Three fantastic things have come out of me getting involved:

1. I’ve met and kept many great friends
2. I’ve created something I am overly proud of despite it’s many flaws
   • That would be my TV show, ‘Jeff & Mike Write A Comic Book‘
3. I’ve discovered how much I like to talk to groups of people, especially those I’m comfortable with

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the new year

January 5th, 2010 by Mike | Posted in blog | Comments

2010. Welcome.

So. This year began with high hopes. D&D with some friends, then blammo: My house got robbed. Not like “100% everything gone” robbed, but more like “we’re taking your video games and probably coming back for more” robbed. $2400 worth of stuff taken in a two hour timeframe. Yeah. We filed a police report, got some finger prints taken around the house and were told to tighten security.

The next day after not sleeping, I, along with everyone but one of my room mates, got the fuck out of dodge. You can’t call somewhere you live your house if you don’t feel safe sleeping there.

Now, I’m currently residing at my parents house looking to sublease my room as well as all the other vacant rooms in the house. If you know anyone willing to live in a cheap house in the south-east side of Grand Rapids, let me know.

As for now: I’m just looking to find somewhere to live. Allendale looks good, but it all depends on if I can find somewhere and afford it. (My buddy Brian and I are looking towards the trailer park just across from GVSU)

Let’s just say these last few days have been crazy. Lack of sleep, too much sleep, breakfasts made of turkey-jerky and cigarettes plus D&D. Here’s to hoping this year can only go upwards.

I’d also like to thank everyone on Twitter who were supportive of everyone at the house. We all really appreciated it.

For now, I’m looking forward to just going back to school and getting back into a somewhat regular schedule. I’m keeping a positive attitude in that sense.

Now, back to my Degrassi marathon on TeenNick. Man I’m a sucker for this stuff.

It’s the last post of the decade

December 30th, 2009 by Mike | Posted in blog, rant | Comments

It’s December 30, 2009.

At 7:58am.

I’ve only been up since 7pm yesterday. Should I sleep? Maybe. We’ll see.

Anyways.

This year’s been a good one I’d say. I’ve had some fuck ups, some mistakes and some misfortunes. I’ve had some awesome times, made new friends, and have smiled more than I have in a long, long while. Lots of shit has gone down.

What to say for the first decade of the millennium? Not too shabby. I’m apart of that generation who came from 28K internet to 2Mbs internet. We’ve seen the birth of mass video streaming (ie. YouTube) and Twitter and MySpace. Comic books almost died and somehow made their way back to being amazing. We grew up with BitTorrent and the smart phone. We’ve created a new style and form of speak (I’m talking about 1337 and lol’s and such). We’ve made phone conversation’s pointless. We made being smart a cool thing and being geeky a thing of fashion. We made Digg and Facebook and Reddit and Twitter the way to get news. We made Google. We made LOLcats. We made 4chan. We made Photoshop a regular thing. We made sci-fi even cooler than it already was. We turned the year long trend into the week long trend. We made over communication a daily routine. We made the music industry cry and distributed petabytes of information in the blink of an eye. We’ve done this and more than I can think of, yet we’ve only just begun to grow up. It’s been a crazy 10 years to say the least*.

Me personally… well, I’ll say this decade has had it’s fun. More than I can remember and some I’d like to forget. Next year only brings more complicated and fantastic parts of life: growing up, prospects of graduating college, being with my (new and fantastic) girlfriend, Katherine, more D&D, more comic books, more hobbies and habits and emotions. We’ll see how it goes.

As I do every year since, well, probably 2005 or so, I don’t plan on setting resolutions. I feel no need to. There’s no sense in setting goals for the year to come that will most likely not flourish. I’ll set them as they come as I always do.

I can hope though.

I can hope for a dream job, good times with friends, good drinks and stories and jokes. For survival and laughs. For good thinking and good travel. For good fortune and good luck. I can hope for all sorts of things, and I will every day.

But all and all, 2009 was a good year. I tip my hat to it and to the rest of the first decade of the millennium. It’s been fun.

* yes everything there is nerdy/tech related but that’s me and that’s what I know…

Haunted Forest

October 25th, 2009 by Mike | Posted in blog | Comments

This past week I got a call (or text, I don’t remember) from my buddy Brian about helping out in a Haunted Forest up on Belding, MI, with a group from GVSU–the Capoeira Mandinga group. I agreed seeing that I was flat broke from my 21st birthday celebration the weekend before in Chicago and so Saturday I went out to Belding and the epic began.

We arrived and it was cold. It looked like it was going to rain and man was I not dressed to be out in the cold and/or rain for five hours. Luckily, they provided a nice warm tent for us to hang out in until 7pm and some free brats as well.

Around 7 Brian, Duncan (a mutual friend of ours) and I were assigned costumes. Brian was a werewolf, I was a zombie, and Duncan got the most bad ass part: the crazy Doctor. We donned our costumes and took a tour of the ‘forest’ while there was still daylight and eventually were assigned our spots to creep people out.

8:30pm came and we took our places and waited for groups of people to come through. Being a zombie, I was in a ruined and dug up graveyard, in an open coffin–totally Dracula style. Let me just say that two hours in a casket and moving around for 30 minutes all night had me freezing my hands and feet off. I almost ditched the whole thing I was so damn cold, but I did managed to scare a few people by leaping out of the near-darkness of the coffin.

At 11:15pm they ended the whole ordeal and thanked us all graciously. I pulled my plastic mask/wig off and I swear a liter of condensation fell off the mask and onto my hand. It was ridiculous. The best part of the night was when the event leader, Cindy, begged our friend Duncan to come back to play the Doctor in the ‘forest’ because he was so good. Mind you, Duncan is a theatre major at Aquinas and basically knows how to act like an insane person. I wish I had seen him in action.

All in all, it was a great night despite being utterly angry at the cold of the coffin/graveyard I was in. I had fun.

(the links to the costumes above are the actual costumes we wore.)

Warped Tour and the summer time

August 3rd, 2009 by Mike | Posted in random | Comments

About a week ago, my good friend Tori IMed me and asked me what I was doing this past Friday. Now, this requires a bit of explanation: I had made plans with 10-12 people to go up north to Tawas City, Michigan, to a cabin my cousin owned in what would be the third year in a row of what I’ve come to call “Rapinstock” but after some botched planning, mistaken date understanding and bad luck, all of that backfired straight into my face. When all was said and done, I ended up having a free weekend. After a bit of talking, Tori “convinced” me to go to the Warped Tour with her in Detroit.

So, Friday came and BAM! We (ie. Tori, her boyfriend Dave, a guy named Nic and myself) were on the road at 8am and heading towards Detroit. We ended up arriving at the show at 11:45am and man oh man were there tons of people. We headed straight to find a schedule and managed to make it on time to see Big D and the Kids Table, followed immediately by a band I have loved for about 7 years now: Anti-Flag. They played a few songs and we headed over to try to see Bayside. After some major misunderstanding on my part, we found out we were at the wrong stage and had missed the whole Bayside set. It sucked, but we headed straight to see Less Than Jake. Holy crap, they put on a fantastic set. We followed that by We are the Union, which was pretty damn good, then hit up Bouncing Souls. Mind you between those three bands we traversed the entire damn concert area, but it was all good.

We split back, half way across the Comerica Park parking lot (where this all took place), and sat and saw Senses Fail–who were pretty damn good–and then saw Streetlight Manifesto immediately after (the two stages were right next to each other). Man Streetlight was damn good. We took a break for an hour–because all sorts of shitty hipster-fuck-bull-music was playing–and got some pizza inside of the ballpark.

We proceeded to see Bad Religion on the main stage and I was fucking impressed. 45+ years old and still kicking ass. It was truly a sight to see. Finally we headed to the other end of the damn concert to see the most packed fucking show of the night: A Day To Remember. I got elbowed, sweated on and generally sick given the amount of sweat and weed that was around. It was the worst show of the day for sure.

All in all though, the entire concert was one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in a long while. But I’m pretty sure this upcoming weekend’s Wizard World Chicago will be pretty top notch seeing that 1. It’s 3 and a half days long and 2. it’s all comics. I’m pretty damn pumped.

Nevertheless, I’m damn sure I got my years worth Vitamin D from all of the sun I took in. I’m glad I went to Warped and I’d do it again–that is, if the bands are just as good as they were this year. I had a hell of a time.
Read the rest of this entry »

A quick story about my night

June 21st, 2009 by Mike | Posted in random | Comments

So, I haven’t updated in like 3 months.. yeah.

I felt the urge to spread the tale of awesomeness tonight that I had.

It all began with my new found buddy Brian offering to Jared and myself to go out to an “Ugly Sweater Party” hosted by some people he knew from his work. I agreed, as the idea of such a party made me laugh a bit. So! After Jared and I bought some seriously 90s prep-looking sweaters from Goodwill, we proceeded to get picked up by Brian and head for this party donned in our sweaters. Mind you, it was a good 80 degrees out today, so wearing these sweaters was a serious task for us. Anyways, we get to the party and have a good ol’ time with the 15 or so people there and at some point later on we ended up talking in Scottish accents. Jared, Brian and I were just going at it non-stop. So, we end up taking off from the party around 1:30am to get some IHOP–as we were ALL in the mood for something to eat. Oh and we got semi-lost/confused on the highways coming from dropping off Brian’s friend Erica, but we made our way to IHOP eventually.

We carry on the Scottish (Irish for Jared) accents into IHOP and sit down and take our orders and the waitress honestly believed us to be from ‘across the pond.’ She kept asking us simple questions about why we were here in Michigan and how it’s been since we got here and all that jazz. It was a serious riot. But of course, to keep ourselves into the mood, we kept speaking in the accents while the waitress was away making sure the other customers believed us as well. We made up a story about Jared’s uncle Brenden who was a real party animal and how he was in jail for some reason and Jared kept getting snobbish because ‘we knew damn well why his uncle was in prison and how we shouldn’t speak of it any more’ trying to play off being ashamed. Brian and I played it as if we were cousin’s and how Brian could drive whereas I couldn’t because I didn’t want to take the damn driving test here dispite my being here in the US for a year and a half. We kept our composure for about 45 minutes and didn’t laugh or break character for a second. It was flipping fantastic.

So my night ended in serious talk in Scottish accents and badassery. How about that?

Things have been going down

March 25th, 2009 by Mike | Posted in blog | Comments

Since my last update (almost a month ago) things have been going down.

A student at GVSU was shot on accident or something–no one really knows–I’ve gone unprotected on Twitter, I asked for more hours at my new job, debt is slowly consuming me, I’ve started to drink more water, I’ve been on a Kanye West binge, I’ve switched Twitter clients on my Mac (from Twitterrific to Lounge), I’ve started trimming my comic solicitations (that happened today!), and the biggest of them all: Jeff & Mike Write A Comic Book has begun shooting.

Let’s talk about that last one a bit more. So! After GVSU’s spring break I went to the GVTV meeting that Wednesday and after finding out my producer and (former) director were unavailable to shoot that weekend and was feeling kind of crappy about the show. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere. So many delays with people and I figured it was never going to get aired. Anyways, at the GVTV meeting I mentioned that we were delayed due to people’s availablity John Tremblay jumped on top of things. We had our location, we had our actors–well, two of four–and all was ready to shoot so a crew was assembled on the spot. It was then that I managed to the courage to ask one of the members of the GVTV club to be “Frenemy” on the show. I had been wimping out for the last two weeks to do so and as soon as I asked him he immediately said yes. So we were set. All we needed was the girl character: “Andrea.”

After the GVTV meeting I was so excited for the show I decided to treat Dallas and Jeff to some ‘late nite’ food at the Main St. Pub just off campus. We sat down and hung out for a bit and Jeff and I explained our show to a bunch of Jeff’s friends who we ended up sitting with and for some reason this girl, her name is Ashley, was like, “If you guys ever need any help, let me know,” to which I asked if she wanted to play “Andrea” on the show. She agreed and I almost jumped ten feet in the air because, hey!, we managed to get our whole cast set in one effing day!

So our first day of shooting was planned for that Saturday (March 14 for reference) with the new crew (John Tremblay, Adam Burl, Ryan Smith, Jon Sessions, and Randy Strobl) and the whole cast (Jeff, Randy, Ashley, and myself). Ashley ended up not even being needed, so I sent her home, but after about four hours of shooting, Randy was taking control of the directing and I just threw it out there that we really didn’t have a director and if he wanted the position, it was his to take. Again, he immediately said yes. All of the awesomeness goes to John Sessions for the mastery on his part that day. After six hours of shooting we packed things up and it was an incredible day.

This past weekend (the 21st) we found out we had to re-shoot almost all of what we shot the previous weekend due to some lighting issues and some mis-matching with a camera that no one could predict–which was no problem at all. We started shooting at about 1:30pm and kept on going until about 7. We were only a three piece crew after Greg Farmer–our producer–showed up then after her left, Leah Vukovich showed up to save the day. All in all, we filmed a few different scenes and, according to the crew, everything looked a lot better and Jeff and I were pretty good as well. All in all I was satisfied with everything we got done. I’m so pumped for filming the rest of the show.. which will be taking place at Nick & Rob’s. ha!

From how things are going, the show will be airing next semester (September ‘09). I’m excited to see how ridiculous it all looks on screen.