Emergence of Weird

Here, listen to this weird crap that Audacity did to this recording.

I'm up really late, so late that it's now mid-morning. I was playing guitar and thought I'd try recording a song with this shitty ambient mic I have, which is so oddly sensitive my guitar playing records fine but my singing causes it to distort, which just shows how loudly I sing these days. I didn't always sing that loud, I developed a loud singing voice due to singing in my dad's band with a shitty sound system and the mic never had enough gain on it. The song is one that will be on Acoustafuckit Parte Tres when I get around to doing it (I don't have enough songs yet, I really want to get to the fourth Acoustafuckit because that one's going to be called Acousta4kit). I played and sang the song from several feet away so as not to distort the mic too badly. When I listened to the playback the guitar sounded pretty good, the voice not so much, but everything was swimming in this awful ambient noise. So I turned to Audacity's ever unreliable Noise Removal effect, which often removes far too much noise or so little noise you can't tell it removed any. Even if you get it to remove just the noise you want the finished sound usually has this odd treated quality, and kind of a phaser sound.

Well just to show me it could still surprise me, this time the Noise Removal effect did something new. It muffled everything but gave it this strange synthesized and phased quality like I'd played it on an old keyboard or through a really weird stompbox but no, it's just acoustic guitar and my voice. I am now trying to think of a way to use this really strange really cool sound in a future recording, and also hoping that when it comes up I'll be able to figure out how to get it to do this again.

Satan's Evil Square presents "Comics I Gave Up On" Part the First

Like I said when I brought you HAIC: The Lost Story a few months back, there are a bunch of comics on my hard drive in various stages of completion that I never bothered to finish or post anywhere. What keeps happening though is I go into my old Satan's Evil Square folders to get at half-finished designs from the HAIC era to adapt for Joe Bivins: Man Genius, and I stumble upon old scripts and designs for things I never finished. Towards the end of the Satan's Evil Square era of my comics making (which was followed by an extended break from comics during which I mostly did this Blog), I had a shit-ton of projects which fizzled out, sometimes after I did TONS of work on them.

Here's one: The Fart. I invented a VERY STUPID character, a supernatural detective in the vein of the Shadow. His power? FARTS. I drew a bit of clumsy concept art and made it into a little poster which I threw up on Satan's Evil Square, violating my current personal directive: "Don't talk about a project before you are actually doing it." I made this rule after hyping the shit out of Star Trek: Titmouse and then never actually doing it. That annoyed even me.

An aside: very amusingly, when I went to get the link to that poster I noticed that my comment beneath it invokes SEVERAL abandoned projects, including the aforementioned Star Trek: Titmouse, as well as Sgt. Moustache, Torando ZX 10,000 1/2, and the Rambling Crazy Man's second arc, which was titled "Banana Split", by the way.

We're talking about The Fart now because I happened upon the script, barely more than a fragment, which I wrote in 2006, and had forgotten the first two lines, which just about made me pee my pants laughing. Here is the entirety of what I wrote for The Fart:

THUG 1: Hurry up and jimmy the lock! I don't want to get caught with my pants down!

THUG 2: If your pants are down, you better pull them back up quick or I'll have to jimmy YOUR FACE!

THUG 1: Ooh! I'm REAL SCARED!

*sniff sniff*

Dude, what did you eat for dinner?

THUG 2: What are you talking about? Ewww, dude, did you fart?!

FART: WHAT YOU SMELL IS THE MORAL DECAY IN YOUR SOULS!!!

THUG 1: Dude, who the hell is that guy?!?

FART: I AM THE FART! LONE CRUSADER OF THE NIGHT! I STRIKE TERROR INTO THE NOSES OF EVILDOERS EVERYWHERE!

THUG 2: Dude, seriously, that's lame.

THUG 1: Yeah, what are your super-powers, stinking people to death?

FART: Powers?

I'm silent...

BUT DEADLY.

NARRATOR: The Fart: private dick by day, costumed vigilante by night! Specializing in stealth, dine and dash, and olfactory combat, as well as his personally designed martial art FART FU, he uses his detective skills and his arsenal of FART BOMBS to fight a never-ending battle against the seedy criminal element of Colonopolis! Formerly a police officer, he was forced into retirement after developing a rare sphincter condition, causing his farts to be extraordinarily strong-smelling and manifesting as visible brown clouds. He soon discovered he could control the visibility, strength, and volume of the farts, and finally developed the ability to create farts with special properties, such as knockout farts and night vision farts. He decided to utilize his new found abilities to become a costumed vigilante and take back the streets!

I was very enamored with this stupid idea, but like many of my more ambitious ideas of the time, I had no confidence in my ability to actually draw any of it. So rather than finish writing even ONE STORY I spent my time trying to figure out how I would draw the damn thing, and as that very quickly became frustrating as shit, I gave up. Now The Fart belongs to the ages.

NEXT TIME ON Satan's Evil Square presents "Comics I Gave Up On", read the shocking tale of the lost episode of Stolen JPEG Theatre, "The Mysterious Doctor StrangeDuck" and see actual art and nifty concept sketches and scripts!