Fan-Hitting...

Ah, derby drama.

My life is full of it at the moment. Which is a pain.

Things have been rather rocky with the Derby Dolls for a few months now. There were many events and many contributing factors to things going not-so-well. The overriding reason is that our banked-track league hasn't had a space to put up our banked track in almost a year. That's caused a lot of problems, and now things have come to a breaking point. Literally.

One group of girls broke away and have formed a flat-track league, which has attracted a lot of the Derby Dolls' "fresh meat" skaters as well as some veterans who haven't told the Dolls officially that they're thinking of switching leagues. The coach has left and is forming his own league. So far he has 6-7 really good skaters who want the intense training he gives. They also haven't officially told the Derby Dolls that they're going to skate elsewhere.

The morale of the Derby Dolls is at an all-time low. The two owners are literally ready to quit. Looking at things on the surface, I can understand why. But now I also have found myself stepping in and trying for one last chance to resurrect this monstrosity that I've dedicated almost three years of my life and sacrificed my career over. Why?

It looks like our track will be put back up on the rooftop of our former warehouse home. We can have as many practices as we want and have different focuses for those practices instead of having the one-size-fits-almost-no-one practices that we've had to have due to not having access to a skating surface for more than three days a week.

Since we don't have a place where we can practice and hold big events at, the team captains for the league are proposing a four-bout-a-year plan where we went out a place for a weekend and cramm as many people as we legally can so that we get out there, do banked track, get seen, get press, and get money to keep everything going.

For the moment I'm playing the part of inspirational speaker to the owners and the other team captains. Jeezus, how fuxxed up do things have to get if I'm the one telling people that we can get back on our feet?!

I'm giving this two more months. If those two main goals are on the way to accomplishment, I'll stay with the league. If not, I'm outta there. What I'd do next, I'm not sure.

Anyway, here are yet more photos from the SXSW bout. Which I'm still the most proud of for myself...I actually skated pretty damn well at that event:

Giving an illegal smackdown to jammer Betty TaRoll:











Getting dogpiled by the TXRD as a result. Three girls it took to get me down:

Ha ha ha

This just cracked me up:






















In other news, I'm shovelling Scooby doo as fast as I can. The fecal matter is hitting the fan in LA roller derby land. I need to get an oil change for the car this week. As well as the motorcycle. Bleh!

Harmonic Generator

Because I'm bored, and apparently so are you. A Datsuns video.

The Spirit of Truth

I wanna go to this guy's church. Plays Parliament and drops the f-bomb more than Beavis across the street.

Word!

This segment runs for awhile, but it's hilariously addictive. Language-wise it's not work safe.

Done donedonedone...

I finished the Bakersfield logo.

I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I want a t-shirt of it ASAP. Too bad I won't have the prestige of doing the Derby Dolls logo. Picky bitches.












Oh yeah, I now have work to do, as well. Thank goodness. I almost have enough time to do it, as a special added bonus. Life is good.

More Whining

Work has been stoopid. I had a crazy minor deadline early in the week last week, and the supervising director still hasn't gotten around to finishing his notes on my stuff as of yesterday. Uh, helloooooo, I kinda need the notes so that I can finish the fuxxing board by the other insane deadline I have to keep!

It's a huge board...over 23o pages of two-panel Scooby stupidity...around 10 script pages originally. Cleaning it up will be a major fuxxing bitch. It'd be nice to have the notes so that I can do the job within a reasonable amount of time and I get to maintain something resembling a life.

Insert huge editing THWACK! here.

Below is a w-i-p version of the amazing Bakersfield Rollergirls logo that I'm actually almost done with. I think I mentioned before that the idea is a rejected Derby Doll logo idea. Bakersfield seems to like it just fuxxing fine, which is hella cool.

Suckratomatoes

This past weekend I went back to the land of my misspent youth for a short visit.

I grew up near Sacramento, CA. A nice place to be from, lemme tell ya. Well, Sactown itself isn't as bad as growing up in one of the outlying agricultural towns that are repulsively chock-full of rednecks. Rednecks who throw things at people who aren't rednecks like them. Yeehaw, indeed!

Anyway, it's been two years since I was in that neck of the tomato patch. I spent most of my time looking at some killer art at a killer gallery, seeing old friends in the form of my high school buddy Shonda amongst others, and meeting new friends in the form of the Sac City Rollergirls. The collision of old and new friends was hilarious, as of course my old friends know me by one name while the rollergirls know me by my skate name.

Meeting the Sac City girls was the perfect example of this...I hooked up with Shonda and her sister for some catch-up time and got ready to go out. We were to go to a fashion show that one of the Sac City Rollers founders was holding, and I had been in contact with a few of those girls so they knew that Tara Armov was showing up.

We get to the venue. Not a lot of people are there yet, as they're being fashionably late. OK. So we mill about and drink some schnapps that we brought along. The fashion show goes on. It's not long at all, so after the 15 minutes of fashion stuff we mill about some more. Occasionally Shonda will talk to a rollergirl, and would introduce me. The Tara connection isn't made until we'd been there after an hour or so.

All of the sudden the whole freakin' league descended upon me, "YOU'RE Tara Armov?!!?!" Yeah, I've only been lurking around for a freakin' hour already. Heh! The turnabout was fun and funny, and the girls were cute and ambitious. They've even hired our coach to come up and have a workshop with them in a couple of weeks. Toooooo funny.

Anyway, if these girls really get the skating thing going, I might find myself back up there sooner than two more years. We'll see!

More Becca: Nature Girl

For some reason I don't have the early sketches of Becca: Nature Girl, but here's some more pitch artwork.

We have Becca giving an alligator some alligator shoes.








Here's Becca trying to scrub the spots off of a leopard.













I should probably tell the story of how Becca: Nature Girl came to be.

A few years ago I was working at a large studio, as was Incredibly Cute Friend Becca. One day at lunch we were walking to the cafeteria, and saw some squirrels romping around. The studio lot is swarming with squirrels, and they're usually friendly since they get fed all the time by employees. Becca was ready for feeding fun, as she had some almonds or something with her. She sees the squirrels and screams, "SQUIRRELLLLLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!" at the top of her lungs and literally started running after the squirrels.

Squirrels don't take getting screamed at and ran upon too well. Predictably, the squirrels in Becca's sights ran like hell into the underbrush. She got mad and actually threw the almonds she was carrying after them. I just about died laughing.

Of course I gave her a bunch of grief for running and screaming at essentially wild animals. Of course the jokes started flowing, and it was imagined how funny it would've been if Becca had been a girl scout as a child and tried this stuff. Hilarity ensued.

After lunch I went back to my desk and drew a quick doodle of Becca dressed as a Brownie and running after terrified squirrels with the title, Becca: Nature Girl across the top of the page. People who saw it thought it was funny and thought we should try to make a pitch idea out of it. So we did. Unfortunately, no takers. Damn.

I still laugh about the original squirrel incident. I wonder what would've happened if one of the little furry bastards stood their ground.

Scooby DON'T

I'm trying frantically to stay on schedule with the Scooby Doo direct-to-video project I'm on. I usually don't have to stress out so much to be on time. I spent alllllll weekend working on the shit for a rough pass that's due later today, and it looks horrible, as I ended up xeroxing up tiny little thumbnail drawings 220% to slap down onto the board paper to turn in. Hideous!

Yesterday I found out why I'm having such trouble. The script is divided into three acts, with a sequence director and two storyboard artists drawing for each act. For my act, I have the largest section with the most action to draw out of the three of us assigned to the act. Is that supposed to be a compliment or something?! I think I get this Friday off because of Good Friday. I hope so, as I need a breather to recover from the news that I'm seen as somewhat competent for this crap.

Here's a drawing from a series pitch that I was part of a few years ago. It's based on my amazingly Cute friend, Becca. It's called, "Becca: Nature Girl". I'll explain the premise of it later:

Finally...sun!

The sun is out. Pretty novel for us these days. For whatever reason, the rainy season has shown up very late for LA-LA Land. I can finally run some errands on the bicycle.

The Entropy Project now has its own blog. Check it out and bookmark it here. It doesn't get updated too often, but all the new updates are going there.

My favorite foodstuff right now is wrapping a flour tortilla around a block of chocolate. Just thought I'd share.

The One Hot Day Over the Weekend

happened yesterday when the Derby Dolls had our first flat-track bout. We apparently had around 600 people show up and we made a buttload of money. Check out photos that our own Lucky Liger took here.

I wish I had a butt like JLo instead of the flat white girl ass that I currently possess: