Last Monday, I very cleverly managed to pour boiling water from the kettle onto my hand.
After I posted about my misfortune on Facebook, I was asked if I would share my wisdom and experience further by producing a list of things that you probably shouldn't do.
So here it is. In case you're wondering, all of these have been verified by me or a trusted third party.
1: Pour boiling water from the kettle onto your hand. Now you wouldn't really think this needed to be said, but apparently there are some idiots out there that still think its a good idea.
2: Eat spicy food before bed. I know, it sounds like an awesome idea, but I am reliably informed that your anus will take revenge in the morning.
3: Leave a dead mouse right where the Sky engineer is going to set up his ladder. Unless of course you like bursty dead mouse guts squirting all over the patio and his shoes!
4: Inhale tinsel. It hurts.
5: Tell people about your week off. Because they find things for you to do!
6: Make fajitas with vegetarian 'steak'. It's like eating brown strips of polluted snot. You know, like when you've been in the London Underground. Yuck.
7. Offer to make a 6 episode cartoon series for your brother in your spare time. Turns out it takes up every waking moment of your life.
8. Leave the TV on BBC1. Because at some point, Eastenders will come on and make you bleed from your eyes and ears!
9. Imply that they may be a list of things not to do. Because then people expect you to show them the list. Lucky I'm good at listing things!
It's that time of year that the internet explodes with rumours about new iPads.
There are tons of exciting rumours about retina displays and quad core processors and and super HD cameras and extra strength batteries and stuff like that.
But none of that is important. The internet seems to be missing the point.
So to help them out, here are the upgrades that I fully expect to appear on the iPad3:
You will notice immediately that it is chrome. I'm bored of my plain black iPad and the white one makes me feel a bit trashy. So chrome is the obvious answer. Shiny, shiny chrome!
The new iPad will have a robot arm. Robot arms make everything a little bit more awesome. It will be useful for holding my tea. It's also very handy to have an extra hand when I'm looking at por... er... pictures of steam trains.
A Knight Rider light display is an essential part of the modern gadget. If your gadget doesn't have a Knight Rider light display, then it's probably shit. If you prefer, this could alternatively be a Cylon visor, which may complement the chrome look better. The two are pretty much interchangeable, although KITT was way cooler and Mr Feeny was never actually proven to be a Cylon, despite everything.
The one thing that iPads have always lacked is LEDs. LEDs are brilliant and I think Steve missed a trick by not including them in the original design. So it just makes sense to have a bunch of multi coloured LEDs that don't really do anything other than look pretty.
One of the things I find most tiresome about my current iPad is that fact that I have to hold it. Hover jets would be a simple and effective way to solve this problem.
Awesome apps are essential. Until now, apps have been pretty average. But with the iPad 3, I confidently predict that there will be working Death Ray apps with which to zap your enemies, or their peaceful planets with no weapons... Also, there will be a tea app, which brings me on to the final innovation...
The Spout. Genius. Obviously if you're gonna have a tea making app, you're also going to need a spout to pour it from!
Well there you have it. I look forward to buying my new iPad in the spring!
First we had to come up with a compelling concept. When we started, all Russ knew was that he wanted six episodes of a Dungeons and Dragons related cartoon.
The first idea we (by which I mean Russ) came up with was to sit four gamers around a table, playing D&D and making in-jokes about it. But that didn't really grab me. It felt like something that had been done before, and probably better than we could.
So we turned it on it's head. What if we had four fantasy characters sitting around playing a game of Real Life. That's when our imaginations started running riot. You wouldn't just be limited to jokes about nerds and D&D cliches, but you could actually have proper social commentary on real life issues as well!
Wait, did I say 'social commentary'? I meant lame jokes, obviously. Duh.
We had our basic concept. And we decided to name the cartoon after the game that characters played in it:
I worked up some notes and designs for the characters. Russ made me redo them about four million times, coming up with useful changes and suggestions.
Erric the knight, for example. My initial drawing of him looked like this:
As Russ pointed out, he looks more like a wannabe guard than a noble adventurer. So then we decided to work that into his character. Now Erric is, indeed a noble knight, however he also has a 'twin brother' in the local militia. No one has ever seen them together.
After his revision, Erric looks more like this:
The other characters went through similar reworks - Malach, may well be an uber-powerful wizard in hiding. Bilar the dwarf has a secret that he doesn't want anyone else to know - let's just say that he's probably over-compensating for something! Sheenah the barmaid was a late addition. She's only working in the bar to pay for her tuition!
The point was to take cliched fantasy characters and put a spin on them that made them a bit more interesting and, hopefully like nothing you've seen before!
The next stage was to get some voices for the characters. After all, it would be silly if I did all the voices. They'd end up all sounding the same. But we also knew that we wouldn't be able to get all the different voices we needed into a studio at the same time. Studio? Hah. We were doing this on practically no budget!
We decided to see whether we could do it all on-line. There must be plenty of people out there with half decent recording equipment and most of them will have voices, right? They could record it at home and e-mail it in to us. Then I could assemble all of the voice clips into a coherent whole.
We put together a short sample script and then Russ put out a casting call. We expected a little bit of interest. Maybe twenty or thirty auditions, if we were lucky.
We got over a hundred.
Apparently there's a lot of people out there who want their shot at fame, even if it's only through the medium of cartoon! Even I put in an audition!
We had to listen to every single one of them. We've both agreed that if we ever have to listen to those lines again, we might just give in and drink the Kool-Aid. Some of them were easily dismissed because of terrible performances or awful sound quality. The rest was not so easy. After a week of listening and choosing and changing our minds and arguing over who was best (me, obviously!), we eventually settled on our cast.
From left to right: Malach (Me!), Bilar (M. Darin Young), Dee (Melody Mooney), Duncan (George Ledoux), Erric (Joe Gawronski-Salerno) and Sheenah (Karen Bogen).
At this point, we pretty much had a recorded script. Not wanting to waste it, we decided that we would turn it into an introductory mini-episode. So I had to draw it and animate it. And draw it and animate it, I did. That was a lot of drawing and animating! But once the drawing and animating was done, I had templates for future episodes. Hopefully there will be less drawing and animating to do for the remaining six episodes!
Look. Here's a picture of me animating that wasn't hurriedly staged this afternoon for this blog post at all:
Before you ask... no I didn't comb my hair for the photo.
While I was busy doing that, Russ amused himself with the fun stuff - contract negotiations and the like.
We even had a theme tune provided by my longtime collaborator, Jon Steadman.
And then we had a minor crisis a week before the episode went live:
As mentioned above, we had decided to use the name of the role-playing game as the title of the series: 'Real Life'. Shortly after Russ started to do a bit of publicity, he discovered that there was already a web-comic out there called 'Real Life'. We didn't want to upset anyone, so we decided to change the name.
Well that started a week of agony, trying to pick an alternative. We tried pretty much everything on to see if it would fit. Variations on the original title like 'Playing Real Life' or 'Real Life Adventures'. Nothing really floated our boat.
Then it occurred to us that we had the perfect title sitting just outside the Tavern in which our heroes were gaming. The name of the tavern: 'The Perturbed Dragon'!
And that's pretty much it. The genesis of 'The Perturbed Dragon'. Also a potted history of the last month or so of my life - well, the bits of it when I wasn't at my day job, anyway!
Here, for your perusal (and hopefully, entertainment) is the first episode. Or the Pilot. Or the Prequel. Or whatever you want to call it.
What's the collective noun for beards? A matt of beards? A clump of beards?
Much discussion has been had about my ever expanding facial hair. While most people agree* that the more beard I have, the more handsome I am, another vector of comment has generally been along comparative lives. Specifically, that people think that my beard makes me look like other people.
I thought it would be interesting to illustrate this post with sketches of myself with the facial hair of the people I am accused of looking like. So here goes:
The manager of my local comic book store told me that I looked like Brian Blessed. Mr Blessed has the single most awesome beard of all time, so I consider the comparison to be a favourable one!
Several of my workmates seem to think that having a beard and wearing glasses means that I look like Ricky Tomlinson, because Ricky Tomlinson is the only other person in the world who has a beard and wears glasses. Hah. Bear and glasses only make me look like Ricky Tomlinson in the same way that having hair makes you look like Shane McGowan!
My boss' boss recently informed me that I reminded him of Rasputin. Far be it from me to disagree with my boss' boss. I'd like to think that I'm a bit less of a whack job than the Rasputin... but I'd probably be deluding myself.
At the time I was accused of resembling Hagrid, I needed a haircut. It wasn't this bad though. I did, however, take the hint.
A couple of weeks ago, my Dad refused me entry to his house on the basis that I looked like a terrorist. That said, he's a Daily Mail reader, so you can't really take anything he says seriously.
One of my nicer friends told me that I looked just like Teen Wolf. You remember Teen Wolf, right? That awesome movie where Michael J Fox played the handsomest basketball player in the world! He's a bit like Hagrid's better looking younger brother. As it happens, I have an older brother who's not as handsome as me, so the parallels run deep!
My favourite accusation though, took place just before Christmas when a mate informed me that I was almost certainly Young Santa.
( * by an unconventional definition of the word 'agree' )
