Alec Longstreth's Blog, page 34

Shorty's

After a week in the suburbs with my parents, I was starting to get a fever... PINBALL FEVER.

The day after Christmas, I googled "Pinball Seattle" and came up with a bar in the Belltown area that looked very promising, called Shorty's. On Saturday, I grabbed some lunch with my sister at Mama's Mexican Kitchen, one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle, which happens to be two doors down from Shorty's.

I walked in at noon, right as the bar was opening, so I had the whole place to myself....

Seattle Xmas!

Whoa, ELEVEN DAYS without a blog post? I guess I AM on vacation!

It has been an eventful eleven days, in which I've seen a lot of friends and family. As some of you might remember, my sister Galen got married this summer, so this year she is spending Xmas with her in-laws in California. Since I wasn't going to get to see her in Seattle, I chose to fly home from Newark, NJ so that I could see her new place with Nathan in New Brunswick, NJ.

I was on the same train out of White River...

Last Call for the Holidays!

The semester wraps up this week and then on Saturday I started working my way back to the Pacific Northwest to spend the holidays with my family. I'll also be spending some time with Claire down in California, so if anyone wants to order any Phase 7 stuff, now is the time! (Is there any better holiday gift than handmade minicomics? I think not!) I can take orders up until Friday night (12/18), but after that people will have to wait until the new year for me to send out comics.

And while ...

Winter Has Begun

The day that Max and I did our 24-hour comic also happened to be the day of the first really big snowfall up here in Vermont. It's been snowing a lot, and each morning now, I wake to the sound of the snowplows scraping down Main Street.

Really, we lucked out this year, as winter got started REALLY late (I've seen it snow in OCTOBER up here before). Hopefully that won't mean that it'll stretch longer into Spring...

Anyway, the biggest bummer about the cold up here in New England isn't the...

24-hour comic #9!

Max de Radiguès came over late Friday night and at the strike of midnight, we sat down and started a collaborative 24-hour comic, which we finished Saturday night at 10:41pm. It's called "The PAM Artist", and you can read the whole thing over in the comics section!

This was my ninth 24-hour comic, but only my second one drawn with another person (the other being Crispy Ginger Crumples, which I drew with Aaron Renier in 2006). It was pretty rough for me after the first 8 hours or so... I...

Second List Results

Yesterday I wrapped up my second "list" experiment. Last year I quit a week early, but this time I was able to see it all the way through.

Above, you can see my final progress chart, which has quite a bit of variation. I only had three perfect days, where I checked off all ten items on the list. My worst day was Thanksgiving, when I only checked off three items. My average was 7.4 items per day, which was pretty good I think. I definitely accomplished a lot this month on projects that ...

T-Day with the GCB

My best friend Gabe was in town this weekend for Thanksgiving, which was a lot of fun. Gabe is the sort of guy who can really appreciate the smaller pleasures in life, so we did a lot of eating, drinking, talking and playing pinball while he was here.

Holly Foltz once again invited a bunch of the CCS students over to her family's Thanksgiving dinner. And just like last year it was an extremely relaxing gathering, full of awesome food (including Gabe's Mom's famous cheese biscuits, which...

AlecLongstreth.com v2.0!

Tonight I FINALLY finished the redesign of my illustration portfolio site, which is now online! This is one of those "top secret projects" I have been working on for a super long time, so it feels good to finally have it done! The old v1.0 site was really starting to feel outdated, so I'm glad to have this much-improved site in place.

I wrote a bit more about the homepage image over on my illustration blog, so head on over there if you want more details.

And thanks (as usual) to Mr. Nate...

Nicaragua Comics Travel Journal

Another great comic book that I read recently is the Nicaragua Comics Travel Journal by Marek Bennett.

Marek makes me feel lazy. I like to think of myself as a busy, productive person, but Marek does pretty much everything I do (he self-publishes his awesome Mimi's Doughnuts Zine, he teaches comics and he even makes music) and then on top of that he also does WAY MORE stuff that I will never do.

The Nicaragua Comics Travel Journal documents Marek's amazing trip to Central America, where he t...

The Secret Science Alliance!

One of the items on my daily "to do" list for this month is to READ COMICS. Each time I attend comics show, I walk away with a huge stack of minicomics and usually a few book-length comics as well. And for whatever reason, I am really anal about reading all the comics I get, in the ORDER that I get them. At this point, I'm still trying to get through my stack of comics from the Stumptown Comics Festival (which was back in APRIL), which means I still have stacks of comics to read from