A frightful mess of blood, gore and science gone awry, the Zombie Tacomapocalypse was a huge success for the mad, world-ending geniuses at Treefish Studio. An art show to end all art shows (not to mention the world itself), the first Tacomapocalypse was a thing of surprising beauty, and the launch party was just the shindig to send the world out on.
But, a year has passed and the world seems to have forgotten that it ended. So now – just like the Rapture – it’s happening for a second time: tonight, from 5pm-9pm, Tacomapocalypse II launches at Amocat Cafe.
Described as “a humorously macabre art show” by one of the open calls for arms art, this year’s Tacomapocalypse will feature live music by Gibson Starkweather, a mob of fully re-animated zombies, tasty snacks (including your own brain) and a horde of flesh-eating artwork depicting zombies, ghouls, The End of the World as We Know It™, Tacoma and possibly a dash of love. Because you just can’t bring the world to an end unless you love it enough to tenderly caress it as you stab it to death, re-animate it and set about fulfilling your evil, sadistic plans of doom and mayhem. [Editor's Note: The end of the world may or may not contain actual love. Possible alternatives include sadistic infatuation and bloodlust.]
Though last year’s show failed to permanently end the world, 2012′s Tacomapocalypse II – predicted by the ancient Mayans long ago – is sure to stop the orbit of the Earth, freeze the sun solid and implode the very fabric of our reality.
And if not, there’s always next year.
Official Press Release:
Tacomapocalypse II, the second darkly humorous group art show hosted by Treefish Studio and Amocat Cafe, begins February 3rd, 2012 at Amocat Cafe, 625 St Helens Ave, Tacoma WA. Two- and three-dimensional art featuring apocalyptic themes by local artists present a bold alternative to the Valentine decor more commonly expected at this time of year.
Opening festivities begin at 5:00 PM, and will include snacks, additional artists on hand, live electronic music featuring Gibson Starkweather, a zombie horde, and other special features and shenanigans, to conclude around 9pm.
Tacomapocalypse II runs through February, and is viewable during Amocat’s regular winter hours of 7 to 2:30 Monday thru Friday, and during special events as they happen (Such as the monthly music events. See their page at AmocatCafe.com for updates and further details.)
For the last three months, I’ve been pretty heavily involved with Occupy Tacoma. It’s a movement I believe in, and a movement that I don’t think is going away anytime soon. Unfortunately, between my involvement in the movement, assorted client work and various personal crises (man, the plural for “crisis” really doesn’t look like a real word), I haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on personal videos.
That includes this one: an emotional montage of Occupy Tacoma’s October 15th march and rally, organized in conjunction with Occupy events all over the world for a global day of action. The rally concluded with the beginning of Tacoma’s physical occupation of Pugnetti Park, which Occupy Tacoma renamed Occupation Park.
With the movement on a bit of a slow pace, hampered by the dead of winter, I hope this look back at October will help reinvigorate some of those who have gone into hibernation mode until spring. And I hope everyone reading this, who lives anywhere near Tacoma, will come out to the Union Station Federal Courthouse on January 20th for our Occupy the Courts action. For more information on that and other future Occupy events, keep an eye on OccupyTacoma.org.
Voting requires that you register at KingOfWeb.com, but once you’re registered you can vote ten times every day. If you don’t want to commit to me, votes can be spread out to multiple people, but given how low a vote count I’ve got right now, I’d love you forever if you voted for me ten times a day.
I talk a bit about why I want to win in the video above, but basically it comes down to this: I’m still on a slow recovery from having my home condemned out from under me just weeks after moving in back in 2009. I used all my money moving in, and had a carefully crafted financial plan to build my money up again, but it depended on things staying stable. Less than three weeks after moving in, I got home from lunch to notices on the building door, from the city and the fire department, saying that everyone had to be out by that night.
I was briefly homeless – not living on the street, as I had a floor to crash on, but still very much without a home – and from then on, it’s been a struggle. I was, that very month, beginning a review period at work, and the stress caused my job performance to suffer. I was let go before I could pull everything back together. I’ve since lived on donations, odd jobs and self-employment as a videographer and editor.
For the latter part, jobs have been sparse, but I’m starting to pull myself up, get more clients, and whatnot. But I’m still jumping at any chance I get to better get out of the hole I’ve found myself in. I competed in YouTube NextUp unsuccessfully, and now I’m trying my hand at King of the Web. Some of the smaller monetary prizes would, at least, help me rebuild a rent buffer, but the larger ones – even second place – would help me purchase new equipment with which to better find work in my field.
On that point, I’m especially working at buying a new camera; mine died last spring. I’m currently utilizing a borrowed camera, but I have to return it by Christmas. Right now, I’m not sure if I’ll have enough saved up by then to buy a new one of the quality that I need to make the videos that I do (both for myself and for clients). It doesn’t help that self-employment comes with a lot of cost: trips to promote my business, license fees, etc.
I don’t mean to sound like I’m sure I do; I know everybody has their own sob story, especially in this economy. But that’s a little bit of mine, simply because I want to let people know why I want this so badly. I love making videos, films, movies…it’s what I live and breathe. I have some lofty goals, and many stories to tell. So please consider helping me get there. And thank you for taking the time to read this.
And hey: anyone and everyone who shows up in costume tonight – be they zombies or Bruce effing Campbell – will be my personal hero. My personal heroes are all special people who I promise to kill quickly and painlessly when the end comes. The rest of you? Yeah, the rest of you I chuck at the zombies while I run away.
Be sure to tag tweets with #Tacomapocalypse if you’re the sort to go about summarizing the downfall of humanity in 140 characters or less. Which is really more characters than you’ll have time to come up with before you become lunch.
I haven’t made an animated GIF since the days of dial-up. This archaic, yet wonderfully nostalgic, bit of Internet culture seems to have made a resurgence since its near demise in the early aughts. No, I don’t count the continued existence of animated GIFs on 4chan and Myspace as a continued existence. We will not speak of either site – much less the horrendous use of awful animations on said sites – again. From my personal point of view, animated GIFs all but ceased to exist (relatively speaking) for nearly a decade, with Flash animation and streaming video taking their place on most websites.
With the advent of Tumblr, reddit and similar sites, the animated GIF seems to have returned with a vengeance. Better still, the GIFs being produced are quality, and largely appealing for me to look at (as opposed to the disgusting or seizure-inducing GIFs at the sites I said I we wouldn’t speak of again…yes, I am aware that I’m breaking my own rule).
So I decided to try my hand at making an animated GIF again, in the age of high-speed Internet and fancy-schmancy software. I took a snippet of my adorable niece, Annora, from the very end of my latest Vlogtag video, and the result was, well…this GIF.
Before Halloween comes to an end, I thought I’d put together a little playlist of must-see Halloween videos. It may be late in the day – or early in the next, depending on what time zone you’re in – but I couldn’t let Halloween pass without posting something.
Besides which, no trick-or-treaters have come to our door at all tonight, and I’m bored.
We start with the usual lineup of awesometastic YouTube friends. First in line: Molly Lewis!
Last year, for Halloween, Molly put together an amazing (and wonderfully tounge-in-cheek) Poker Face cover video. We’ll start with that as our dash of Gaga-licious flavor from the Ghost of Halloween Past.
This year, Molly decided to up the ante. One song? One costume? Eff that noise! This year Molly has put together an incredibly clever (and still wonderfully tongue-in-cheek) mashup of Ke$ha, Katy Perry and more. There’s even another sprinkling of Gaga.
Now it’s time to leave behind the lighter comedy as we travel from the West coast of the U.S. to the East coast of the U.K.
As most of you are aware, I’m part of a collaborative channel called Vlogtag. Two other members of this channel, Helen and James, uploaded a video today that I think is one of the most creative and entertaining videos on the channel to date. I must confess, as much as I love hearing about my friends’ lives, I get tingles of giddiness when the vlogging mold is broken in favor of making something fun for the Hell of it. It certainly gets the viewer in the right mood going for Halloween, and sets the bar pretty damn high for the rest of us uploading videos this week.
Simultaneously stepping further into darkness and departing from the usual classy cast of my personal YouTube in-crowd, local horror fanatic Bill Read has just directed his very first short film. Being the first, there’s certainly some parts that could use improvement, but the parts that work reallywork. The end isn’t quite what you expect, and there’s a good bit after the credits that moves us back into comedy again.
Now, the cafe that professes to be “your local counter-culture and political vortex” adds another rivet to its repertoire: comedy.
Tonight at 6:00 PM, Amocat Cafe will feature an hour of improvisational comedy. I’m putting this together as a joint show, representing multiple local comedy groups that I’m involved with: The Tokens, Norman Tweeter Productions and the all-new Small Change improv group.
The show is free, but we do suggest that you purchase a drink or a snack from Amocat’s tasty selections, and one of my many hats will be out for those who feel generous enough to tip the performers.
WHAT: An hour of improvised comedy
WHEN: 6:00 PM, TONIGHT
WHERE: Amocat Cafe
625 St. Helens Ave, Tacoma, WA
If you can’t make it, The Tokens will be having their own performance – sans yours truly – on Sunday at 7:30pm. More info on that on The Tokens’ home page.
Back in June, I made a promise: I swore that if I won a certain Frost Park Chalk-Off, I’d use the prize – ten Spanish doubloon replicas and a Mayan calendar medallion – to make a pirate-themed video. Now, at last, the promise is fulfilled.
I shot Captain Manley and Shannancy’s Shanty back in June, shortly after winning the chalk-off, but due to some technical issues and hilarious continuity problems worse than any of those that made it into the final product, I haven’t had the opportunity to complete it until now.
The script was largely improvised, but the more impressive improvisation is all the props and lighting we managed to pull together with no planning or preproduction. Aside from the use of the doubloons and the calendar, there was nothing pre-planned about Shannancy’s Shanty; it was the spur-of-the-moment, “Hey, let’s shoot something right now” project.
So it’s really quite nice that we ended up with full costuming, controlled lighting and an amazing collection of props and set pieces that just happened to be lying around. Most of the credit for this goes to my roommates, Stuart and Kendra of Treefish Studio. The lighting rig, the props, the set dressing and most of the costuming comes courtesy of the random-yet-insanely-useful things they’ve accumulated.
Be sure to watch through the credits – I’m a big fan of the increasing trend in movies wherein something is inserted after the credit roll is done.
The story revolves around a group of twelve brain-whammy super-powered types called the FreakAngels who were somehow responsible for the end of the world. The details of how and why are not initially disclosed, but the result is a story that gets the lovely setting of a flooded, post-apocalyptic London. All of this is beautifully rendered by Paul Duffield, who I had quite sadly never heard of before. His art is lovely, and Ellis’s writing is, well…splendidly Ellis. So go read the comic. You won’t regret it.
All that aside, the point of this post isn’t to go on about how Ellis is an effing genius (which he is), nor how Duffield’s art is fantastic (though it is quite nice to look at) or even how FreakAngels is proving to be a really enjoyable read (again, go check it out). The purpose of this is to talk about the creative process.
I still get asked with appalling regularity “where my ideas come from.”
Here’s the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.
Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”.
And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.
That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.
From my chair.
See, this is the good bit about writing. It’s what keeps you going. It’s the wild rush of “shit, did I think of that?” with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities.
It’s ten past two in the morning, and I’m completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it’s the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.
Faster than the speed of anyone.
That’s how it works.
This is, quite possibly, the best description of the creative process I’ve ever seen. When you get an idea, and even moreso when you’re actually working to implement that idea, it is exactly like that. This is how I feel when I’m creating, whether it’s alone or with collaborators. When things just fall into place and inspiration is like a plentiful drug that just keeps being dumped into the room for free, it feels like that. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing, video editing, drawing or what have you. It doesn’t matter if I’m alone in my room or out getting chalk all over my clothes on a city street with a dozen other people. It doesn’t matter if I’m the brains behind the operation, or focusing on the seemingly small task of perfect spotlight operation for a theatrical production.
All of it, no matter how big or small, no matter what it is or who else is involved…it feels just like that. Exactly as Mr. Ellis describes.
It has a life of its own. It makes you feel powerful, it makes you feel like the world is yours to create or destroy. But in the end, you are not the one in control; you’re a pawn, whose only purpose is to bring the magic to life. It takes you along with it, through every sensation that Ellis describes and so many more, and you just have to hope that you didn’t lose your phone and all of your spare change on one of the last seven loop-dee-loops.
It’s a rush like no other, and I truly hope everyone experiences it at least once in their life.
This blog is currently under the control of Adam’s Canadian girlfriend, Shannancy. Muahahaha!
As this is being written, I am sitting in Sea-Tac international airport, waiting to catch my 6:00 am flight to LA. I am dictating this blog, via cell phone, to my lovely Shannancy, the totally awesome and magical and super super amazing person you should totally subscribe to,who has been kind enough to stay up and chat with me so I don’t go insane sitting around a not-quite-empty airport that is filling up as I speak. I actually love airports… They’re jumping off points to new adventures.
At approximately 8:41 this morning I will arrive in LA and will shortly thereafter be picked up by Amber (AKA TheAmberyOne) and Karissa (AKA Imgonnabeatree). Throughout the rest of the day more and more of the Classy Ladies — the strange people I call friends — will arrive, using assorted means of transportation. It will be the first time we have all seen each other since the 2009 North West YouTube Gathering. Damn them. Damn them for getting to see you when I’m stuck here! STUPID CANADA, BE CLOSER TO CALIFORNIA!
We are converging upon the land of celebrities, beaches, skin cancer and fake boobs (Careful what you say; I grew up there.) because this weekend is the biggest event in YouTube’s history. This weekend is VidCon. This weekend I am a giant squid of anger and jealousy.:(
My poor sniffly Adam is awful at dictating. ^_^
VidCon is one of the few events in existence to use the dual meaning of the word ‘Con’. The word ‘Con’, in this context, can mean either ‘conference’ or ‘convention’. That is a surprisingly fun sentence to read aloud. Try it! I DARE YOU. Conferences are generally seen as a group of professionals getting together, trading notes, attending workshops and learning more about their craft. A convention is more often something like a comic convention, with booths, celebrities and fangirl-y geeks. Vidcon, however, serves as both a learning and networking opportunity for video professionals, as well as a gathering for Youtubers who simply want to spend time with one another and meet their favorite YouTube stars. I wanna learn and network and gather. Dear Santa, please send me to VidCon!
Yeah... This didn't work. I'm still in Canada. -- Shannon
There‘s no parking in the red zone… Adam is currently pissed off at the airport announcements.
Personally, I am attending VidCon for both reasons. In addition to wanting to see all my favorite Youtubers, and my friends, the Classy Ladies, I will also be treating it as a professional conference, and, as such, have prepared a large number of business cards to pass out. My hope is that I’ll meet a few interesting people willing to collaborate on new projects, and perhaps gain a few new supporters as well. My hope is that I’ll get totally famous by dating Adam.Heck, if I get can a paying gig out of it, even better! Please give my boyfriend money so he can eat.
Also in attendance will be Jeff Klein of Norman Tweeter Productions. Amazingly, Jeff managed to snag a ticket to VidCon after the event was sold out, which just goes to show what perseverance, not to mention Hank Green’s email address,can get you. Jeff and I will no doubt be making many crazy puppet videos at VidCon, including ones featuring a brand-new AdamTheAlien puppet. At this point I don’t know if I’m more jealous of Jeff or Adam; they’re both ridiculously fun to collaborate with.
Anyone who was following my videos back in March, around the time of the Emerald City ComiCon, (Aside from my car asploding, that was a fantastic trip.) may remember the first AdamTheAlien puppet. This version was incomplete, and still had a lot of modifications to go before it was finished. It had foam hands that I may have broken several times. Ultimately, the number of changes that needed to be made necessitated the creation of a brand new puppet. I am ecstatic to say that the new puppet looks exactly like the chalk drawings — right down to a tiny fedora. It doesn’t have an awesome beard though. Silly beardless alien.
It should be noted that at the time this is being written, I still have not released all of the 2009 North West YouTube Gathering videos. Not to mention the 2009 Americhordal Gathering. Given that, and the fact that I am currently working on videos that will pay my bills, I cannot say with any assurance when my VidCon videos will be up. I can say, however, that I will get them up as soon as I can. Sometime after VidCon 2012? In the meantime, as the event is going on and afterward, simply search ‘VidCon’ on YouTube. Or click the link I just gave you. I’m sure there will be no shortage of videos. Including one of me just crying.
At this point in the dictation, the sun is rising over the airport, meaning that my boarding time is nearing.The sun is almost completely up here, it’s a little bit ridiculous. Before I sign off, I wish to issue a challenge to my readers: in the comments below, please write suggestions, ideas and challenges for videos I should make at VidCon. If you tell him to shave his face, or kiss someone, or anything else that I deem bad, I will kill you with my mind. If your idea is chosen, you will be credited in the correlating video. I’m changing whole sentences from sleepy grammar to correct english… Sleepy Adam is adorable.
At this point, it is time for this sleep-deprived and airport-addled Alien to say mushy things to his girlfriend, urinate, brush his teeth and board his plane. Watch this site, Twitter, my YouTube channel, and the Vlogtag channel for VidCon antics as they happen. Until then, fare thee well, and may your day be more entertaining than this airport. AIRPORTS. ARE. AWESOME. Plus you were talking to me for over two hours. Quitchyerbitchin, VidCon attendee.
–AdamTheAlien
I must say, it was a joy to help Adam write this, and fill it with my own thoughts. If you enjoyed my thoughts, you can go read more of them at my blog, which has recently been emptied of writings, but will be filled up again soon.
