Radiant Comics

My league’s fantasy football season is chugging along. I like fantasy football. I find it fun to play. Our league is just for fun but a lot of fantasy football is really betting in disguise i.e. people only play for money. The winner of a money league gets half the pot that everybody pays into at the beginning of the year and the rest is divided up amongst the second and third place teams. Or else there are web sites and such that sponsor really big prizes. But I’m not a gambler. Gambling doesn’t interest me so our league has no money involved in it. And, anyway, if life has taught me one thing it’s that there is no such thing as free money.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people who say they like fantasy football really just like gambling. I think that’s true of football in general. Football is a big betting sport. Gamblers love to bet on it. I think of former Stern show member Artie Lange when I want to illustrate the football/betting point. Artie was a big New York Giants fan and a gambler. But most of his memories of the games, that he spoke of, involved bets he made. And when he gave up gambling he didn’t watch football much anymore. He also talked of betting on whatever random football game to, “Make it more interesting”. That’s a phrase I’ve heard, and read, gamblers use all the time. Football fans don’t need a bet to make football more interesting. As a matter of fact I find a bet quite distracting.

I’ve made small bets before, a football pool here and there, and it only served to annoy me during the game. It takes me out of the moment. It’s like going to a movie and not really paying attention to the story but just waiting to see if key things happen. Like if you had the over in the over/under number of explosions in the movie. All you would care about is when the next explosion was coming. The movie itself would mean nothing to you. That’s what I think football means to a lot of gamblers to claim to like football. Nothing. They remember plays and games on which they won or lost bets but not the ebbs and flows of the game itself. They find joy in the highs and lows of winning and losing their bets but not in the game itself.

What this all has to do with my fantasy football league is our playoff structure and the bye week. We have ten teams in the league. Six of those teams make the playoffs. Of those six teams the top two teams get a bye during the first round of the playoffs. That means they don’t have to play in the first round and in the second round take on the winning teams of the first round. That’s a typical ten team fantasy football playoff structure.

So coming in first or second place is a big deal. It saves you having to win a playoff game. Everyone would rather get the bye than not because we’re all competitive and that’s a competitive advantage. So here is the strange thing: It’s also a little bit of a disappointment to get the bye because you don’t get to play fantasy football for that week. Who wants a week off when you’re playing for the sheer fun of playing?

Think about it. In my league we’re all playing fantasy football not because we’re gamblers and want to win money but because of the joy of the game. It’s fun. It’s fun to keep track of the players, see what they do on the field, and try to figure out who will do well so you can get them on your team. I like it because I get to pay even more attention to football than I normally would. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea who a lot of players in the NFL were without fantasy football. But now I have fun following even the obscure ones. And then if I do well all year and get a bye I get to not play for a week. What? That doesn’t sound like a reward.

I think I’ve gotten the bye two out of the last three years and this year I might or I might not. It actually didn’t help me competitively the two years I got it as I lost my first playoff game. The year I didn’t get it I won two playoff games. So nothing is for sure. Except that both years I had the bye I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to play fantasy football for that weekend. I set my lineup and watched what my team did but it didn’t matter. I had to wait a week to play. What fun is waiting?

Since my purchase of art supplies last week I’ve been a little obsessed with magic markers. This might not seem so strange since I bought a few new markers, have been trying them out, and have done some work with them but it really is strange because I don’t have a whole lot of uses for magic markers. At least the colored ones.

I certainly use many black magic markers for my initial thumbnail drawings and wouldn’t want to give them up because they’re such a useful tool but after the thumbnail stage I don’t use markers much. And I don’t have much call for colored markers at all. Yet they’re so cool.

The only time I’ve been using colored markers is when I make my “Cartoon Art Cards” that can be seen at this blog on Sundays as my “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip. The cards are small and the coloring is not sophisticated in terms of technique so I’ve always just used some cheap-o markers to do that job. That’s all I really need for that. No expensive “Design and Illustration” markers necessary.

It could be nostalgia that’s making me more interested in magic markers than I should be. Back in my freshman and sophomore years of college (84-86) markers were the first color medium that I learned to be good with. I used to make all sorts of color marker drawings and sketches as I studied commercial art. I was skilled at using them and had fun with them. When I moved on to study fine art I learned a lot more about color and learned to use paint. Paint is much more versatile than marker can ever be and easily blows them away for finished work but I still used my markers a bit in the preliminary sketch stage. Then computers changed that.

It was in 1996 that I bought my first computer. After that Illustrator and Photoshop served all of my preliminary sketch color needs. The computer became even more convenient than markers. It was so much easier to make changes on a color sketch. I could run through a whole bunch of different color schemes in a fraction of the time it would take me to color them with a marker. After that my colored markers were sent to the closet.

Gouache is one of the mediums that I have used for years. It’s a watercolor but instead of being transparent it’s opaque. I usually only make small gouache paintings. While my oil paintings can be as large as three by four feet my gouache ones are measured in inches. My normal size is five by seven inches but sometimes they go a little bigger. But not much. I like to keep my gouache stuff small. It speaks to me at that size.

In that spirit I decided to try and make some color marker drawings at five inches by seven inches. Turned out that I didn’t like them. They just sat dull and lifeless to me. I have no problem with the smaller, baseball card sized, marker drawings that I had made previously but I thought the five by seven inch ones would have looked a lot better if I had done them in gouache. I really have no idea how to make a good finished drawing in colored marker nor do I have any idea why I’d want to.

You would think that this determination would deter my interest in markers but it hasn’t. I’m still going online and looking at various markers and oohing and ahhing at all the cool sets. They’re neat. I think the main attraction of them is instant color. That’s what markers are. Uncap them, make a line, and get color. Unlike paint of any kind the markers instantly dry. There is no transition from wet paint to pure color. It’s pure color from the tip of a pen. That’s cool even if it doesn’t make for a finished piece.

Colored pencils don’t give you instant color. With a colored pencil the color of the paper almost always shows through. You have to bear down on the pencil to really cover the paper color and even then it won’t always cover well. If you want red it’s scribble, scribble, scribble then red with some flecks of white (the paper color) in it. That’s why a lot of colored pencil drawings are done on toned paper. If the paper color is going to show through an artist may as well take advantage of that fact. With a magic marker its scribble then instant red.

It might also be that magic markers appeal to the collector in me. Collectors like to acquire things, put them in order, and have complete sets. That’s how markers are sold. You can buy them one at a time and build your own palette of colors or buy the prearranged sets they sell. For some reason I wanted to buy a bunch of blue ones. Maybe because I like the one new blue marker I have.

One final odd thought from marker land. I still have a whole bunch of my old markers. Some of them are twenty five years old and they still work! Yet those ones don’t interest me at all. It’s like I dismissed them from my mind years ago so they don’t count. It could also be that I know I’ve had no real use for them for fifteen years. But then why do I think I’d have a use for the new ones? The mind is a strange thing.

I got a big order of art supplies last week that I bought from the Dick Blick website. It’s always fun to get a big box of art supplies delivered even if it is expensive. But the newness of anything wears off and then it matters what you make with the art supplies. That’s what I’m contemplating now. What to make.

The bulk of the art supplies was acrylic paint. I got fourteen new tubes/containers of paint including a $20 tube of orange. I mention that only because I usually try to stay away from $20 tubes of paint. At least it was a big tube. I haven’t even had a chance to use the new paint yet and that’s a bit of a disappointment. It’s perfectly logical that I haven’t used them yet as I just finished four large paintings in a rather short amount of time and haven’t had the chance to start another but still I feel little bad for no reason except the realization that art supplies aren’t magic. I really expect them to be when I’m anticipating their arrival.

I also got a couple of storage boxes for photographs. I’m a person who enjoys organizing things and I have my small collection of fine art photographs just stuck on a shelf. They are mounted and protected in mylar so they weren’t unprotected but I want to be able to look at them easily without them sliding all around. I decided to buy an art storage box for about ten bucks. For me that’s a lot of money for a box (though it’s on the cheap end of art storage boxes) and in the past I’ve made my own storage boxes for less money but this time I wanted something a little fancier. The box was perfectly alright but ended up not looking as fancy in real life as I though it would. It’s just a paper box.

What’s weird about liking to put things in order and getting special boxes and such for the stuff to be ordered is that it’s exciting to get the boxes but once everything is in order the excitement is gone. The whole point of putting stuff in order it to make it convenient for yourself in the future and in the future it is cool to have things easily found and accessible but once everything is away in its new place there is no reason yet to take it out. So you stand there with everything in its place and say to yourself, “That’s nice. Now what do I do”. Order only shows its value when you need to get something done.

The other interesting thing I got was a variety of new markers. Since I was enjoying making art cards with the Sharpie markers I bought a while ago I decided to get a set of 36 Bic “Mark-It” markers. They’re cheap, $20 for the set, general purpose permanent markers much like the Sharpies and I bought them just for fun. I do like them.

Another purchase is some small black Copic drawing markers that are refillable and have replaceable tips. I tried these out right away and ended up spending quite a bit of time with them doing some tiny drawings. I usually don’t draw as small as I did with these markers but they lent themselves well to it and drawing that size ended up helping me out with some character designs I wanted to do. They were a nice buy.

Copic Sketch markers have a very good reputation but I haven’t used them much. That’s because they weren’t around in the US (they’re Japanese) during my marker heyday sometime in the 80s. I used mostly Berols and Prismacolors back then. I only recently got back into using markers and so decided to order a black Copic sketch marker to try it out.

Copics have a good reputation because they last a long time and come in a wide variety of colors. They are also expensive at $5 to $7 a marker. A set of twelve is $60 and up. The black Copic Sketch marker was the one thing they screwed up on my order. It came in a black Copic Sketch marker box but it was a Teal Blue regular Copic marker. The Sketches have a different tip than the regulars.

In the end I was glad they made the mistake because it’s such a nice blue. It’s well pigmented. If all their colors as as rich I can see where their reputation comes from. The thing I didn’t like about the Copic was it’s shape. The marker’s barrel is square. That’s good for not rolling off the desk but I found it a bit uncomfortable to hold. It sure is a nice blue though. Now I want to try out some other colors but I have no real reason to. I don’t uses marker that much. Still I might get a few more.

The rest of the order was filled out with my usual pads of paper and bottles of ink. They look impressive sitting there right out of the box but then they go into their usual places and wait to be called on and be used. There’s that whole order thing again.

It’s not often I place such a large order all at once but I needed to restock my acrylic paints. This summer was the first time I painted on a large scale in acrylic (usually painting large is reserved for oil paints) and it ate up my stock of acrylics. It was fun getting a whole bunch of stuff at once. It took me about two weeks to figure out everything I wanted. I must have put on and taken off from my “To Buy” list twice as much stuff as I ending up getting. It was a fun process but now everything is bought, put away, and is waiting to be used. The magic is over and it’s time for the work to begin.

Spending money uselessly. That’s what is on my mind tonight. “Why?”, you might ask. Video games I would reply. Not that I think spending money on video games is spending money uselessly; quite the opposite. Last month I bought a brand new copy of “Halo: Reach”. It was money well spent. I normally wouldn’t spend $60 bucks on a new video game. I don’t even want to spend half of that. But “Halo” games are the exception. I really like them and they’ve always been worth the money to me.

I’ve already played “Halo: Reach” all the way through on the second hardest setting and now I’m playing it on the hardest setting. For some reason that’s been my habit with “Halo” games. I don’t like to play it on the default “Not hard enough for me” level so I immediately turn up the difficulty. But I don’t want to beat it on the most difficult setting first because that would give me nothing to do after I finish the game. So second most difficult and them most difficult it is.

I don’t even know what the story-line is in the “Halo” games. They spend a lot of time and energy on the plot and, I guess, most people are interested in it but I don’t care. I like the shooting things aspect of the game. There is a good variety of real and alien weapons with which to shoot all the enemies in front of you. To me it’s all about tactics and performance. Not plot.

But it’s not “Halo” that has me thinking about spending money uselessly. It’s “Street Fighter 2” or whatever version they’re up to now. Way back in the early 90s I used to play “Street Fighter 2” on the Super Nintendo quite a lot. My friends and I would get together and mash buttons for hours. the winner keeps fighting and the loser passes the joystick to the next guy. We had fun. It was a good competitive game.

There have been other versions of “Street Fighter 2” over the years and I think I even bought one or two of them but my friends and I aren’t in our 20’s anymore and the days of three or four of us hanging out regularly to play “Street Fighter 2” are over. It’s still a fun game but with only the computer to play against it gets dull quickly. None of the old crew even have XBox360s to play over the internet with and I have no interest in playing random strangers. Yet when the new “Street Fighter 2 (Or is it 4 now?)” game went on sale for $25 I decided to buy it.

The games still sits on my shelf because I haven’t finished with “Halo: Reach” yet but that $25 isn’t even the spending money uselessly that I’m talking about. I have a couple of other friends, they were too young at the time to play “Street Fighter 2” with me, who are big fans of the latest “Street Fighter 2” version. Such fans, in fact, that they bought $125 arcade-type joysticks to play the game with. I’ve had arcade joysticks for other systems but never $125 versions.

One of the knocks against the XBox360 is that it’s analog controller is not adequate for playing fighting games like “Street Fighter 2”. It just wasn’t built for them and doesn’t do a good job with them. So a serious “Street Fighter 2” player buys a different controller. The prices for these controllers range from $40 to $400 but the $125 arcade joystick is generally considered really good. I haven’t read anyone write that a $400 joystick is any better.

So in my mind I want to buy the $125 joystick. There is your money that would be uselessly spent. It wouldn’t be uselessly spend if I actually would use the joystick but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t. I don’t care that much about “Street Fighter 2” anymore. As much as I’d love to relive my glory days playing “Street Fighter 2” with my friend that’s not going to happen. I know that. Yet still every now and again I check Ebay and Amazon to see if there is a bargain to be had on those $125 joysticks.

It’s a good thing I find it fun to research things on the internet. I’ve even found cheaper joysticks that people mod with actual arcade replacement parts to make top notch joysticks. Of course a modded-up joystick will run you nearly $100 anyway. That’s a lot of time and effort to save $25. Maybe you could save more if you really looked around.

I’ve spent many a dollar uselessly over the years. I’m generally cautious because I’ve never had a lot of money and probably have spent less money uselessly than the average person but the temptation is still there. An actual arcade type joystick is a cool thing. The big buttons click when you push them, the joystick snaps and centers itself, and it has an overall solid feel. It’s a nice object in and of itself. But I’ll get nowhere near $125 worth of use out of it.

I saw an interesting thing when I was looking at auctions of joysticks on Ebay. Most of the auctions are from stores looking to sell joysticks. Only a small percentage are from people looking to sell their used ones. That makes sense because you have to be a pretty hardcore player to drop $125 on a joystick and a hardcore player probably wouldn’t be selling his.

I saw an auction from an actual person and clicked through to read the description. He said he was selling his joystick because he realized he bought it just to have it. He wasn’t a hardcore “Street Fighter 2” player and barely used the joystick. Realizing that he put it up for sale.

I saw a little of myself in that description. Except that I’d probably never sell the joystick. It would just sit there to be pulled out and used once every blue moon. I still have my Sega Dreamcast system with a nice joystick. I got that stick for under $20 since I bought it after the Dreamcast was discontinued. About once every two years I pull it out and have a game with it. It’s a nice stick and I don’t regret getting it. But I don’t want to spend $125 to have another one sitting next to it collecting dust. It sure is cool though.

Do you know what takes more concentration than I thought it would? Taking pictures as I bike ride. Of course that might be because I never though to do it before so the amount of concentration it would take never entered my mind. I have looked at various helmet cams that are out there but only because they showed up on Amazon by chance. Those cameras are usually just cheap, low resolution video cameras that save to a flash card and have a strap to attach to a helmet or handle bar. I guess they’re for extreme skaters or some such to video their runs. I’ve never bought one but I’ve checked them out them online just to see what they are all about.

My picture taking on my bike started with a friend’s request to take some pictures of the colorful fall leaves that are around here this time of year. I stepped out my door and took some snaps but then, as I was getting ready for my bike ride, I decided to bring my camera with me on my ride. I was planning to stop and snap a quick photo or two if I saw something I liked.

I put my small camera in the pocket of my windbreaker and as I was riding decided to take it out and see if I could capture a video of my ride. As I was still riding I took the camera out, turned it on, and got it to start filming. The touch screen came in handy for that. Of course then I had to ride with only one hand on the handle bars and hold the camera out in front of me.

Usually when riding I’m not so much thinking as acting. I’ve got my eyes open and am aware of the traffic around me but I am trying to keep my mind clear. If I let my imagination wander off I can lose the sense of where I am and that’s not good when I’m out for a ride. A little while after I start my ride my concentration kicks in. Then the ride becomes pure body. My legs take over and know what to do.

As I was taking the video I became hyper aware of what was going on around me. With one hand on the handle bar I had to actively concentrate on keeping the bike straight. I was on a blacktop road so it wasn’t hard to do but I still had to concentrate on it. Normally keeping the bike straight never crossed my mind. I also had to keep the camera as level and even as I could. That all sure was new on a bike ride.

I knocked off a very quick video but then decided that going up the big hill ahead probably wasn’t the best time to be working the camera so I put it away. After I topped the hill I pulled it out and started it up again. I was probably only filming for five minutes but when I was done I got an error message that said my memory card couldn’t be used. That confused me. I got a new camera lately and put my 8GB card in that one and this, my pocket camera, had an old 2GB card in it. I should have had enough room but I didn’t. I turned the camera on again and noticed the bar that lets me know how much time I have left to film was short. I decided to save it for a downhill.

I went back to my normal riding until the downhill came and I pulled the camera out again. Once again I found myself having to concentrate on holding the bike straight and holding the camera. I had to slow my legs down but that was easy. Then I had to check my speed with the hand brake which gave me a third thing to have to concentrate on. It was a little awkward and weird but I got the shot with just a little space left over. I decided to use that little space for one more small movie that turned out to be the bumpiest part of the road. That short piece is nearly unwatchable.

All in all it really was a challenge to shoot hand held while riding my bike. It really doesn’t move the danger meter that much but it took a fair bit of concentration. A clamp or mount of some kind holding the camera to the bike would probably be a much better idea. I’m going to have to try and rig something up.

When I got home I finally saw what my memory card problem was. There were three episodes of TV shows stored on it. I must have used the card to shuttle some digital files between my desktop and my laptop and forgotten to delete them. I don’t remember doing that or even using the card so I must have done it sometime last winter. At least the card is fine.

And here is the ending to that story. After I wrote all of the above it inspired me to make a camera mount for my handlebars. I found an old bicycle rear view mirror lying around, took off the mirror, and taped a quarter inch bolt onto it. The bolt matches a standard camera tripod mount. I also put a nut on the bolt so that after I spun the camera onto the bolt I could lock it down a bit by tightening up the nut against it.

The rig worked well but unfortunately the video was nearly unwatchable. There was just too much camera shake. Without my body to be a shock absorber every little bump it the road was transfered to the video. The hand held bike video was pretty shaky but the bike mounted video was even worse. I guess there is a reason all of the sports cameras I saw were mounted on helmets.