If none of that makes any sense to you, I’m sorry. This is some nerdy tech shit. I made a Raspberry Pi Plex Server years ago using the same Pi and an external hard drive and used it till something stopped working. Tonight I thought I’d try again but with a thumb drive. I managed to get the server running on the pi but it’s not recognizing the movie files on thumb drive. After a few hours a gave up for the night. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.

My buddies and I rented a private theater this afternoon to watch The Batman. There were 15 of laughing and joking throughout the whole movie. It was so much fun and I can’t wait to do it again.

This is important.

While I was hiking today I started thinking about memorable movies about aliens. One of them was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Specifically the dinner scene. When I got to back to my car I sketched myself as Richard Dreyfuss’s character with the mashed potato mountain on his plate.

I was planning on getting more shit done today but didn't. I went to Eastridge for a quick photo in front of the mural and interview. Afterwards I went to lunch, watched the new Matrix movie in the theater and came back home to watch more movies and TV. Not very productive.

It hadn't even been 24 hours since I finished the Eastridge mural that I was right back on site. This time I was only passing by on the way to the movie theater. I went to see the King's Man. On the way in I saw that one of the stanchion ropes was off so I closed it back up. After the movie, on the way out, I saw it was open again and once again I closed it. I hope no one's going up to the mural and touching it before it gets the protective anti-graffiti coating.

I drove to Elk Grove, Galt then Sacramento to visit family. I ate a delicious German dinner, watched Spider-Man: No Way Home in the theater, again, and spent the night at my cousin's house and forgot to write a blog post.

Today at the mural I was visited by a group of Spider-Men! They came dressed up to watch the movie Spider-Man: No Way Home at AMC. They were posing for pictures in front of the theater and I asked them to stand in front of the mural. I even showed them the chunky little Spider-Man I painted.

I sketched, but didn't ink, my Inktober drawing for today. It's the face of the moon with a crashed rocket in its eye. It's the from the 1902 French film, "Le Voyage dans la Lune" (A Trip to the Moon). I was watching a show tonight where the characters were painting a full moon and I got the idea. 

After biking 13 miles last Sunday, hurting my knee, working 7 days in a row and ending the week DJing the Local Color Estate Sale, I finally took a day off to rest. I spent most of the day in bed watching TV (two episodes of Star Wars: Visions) & movies (The Outsiders & Die Hard). Tomorrow I go back to work on 31 Skulls duty. Figuring out how we're going to run this year's fundraiser.

Ran more errands today, got invited to work a secret collaborative art project, watched the movie Black Widow in the theater and sketched these two late at night.

We’ve been watching “What We Do In The Shadows’’ the TV series the past few days and it’s just as funny as the movie. The most recent episode we watched had the cast from the movie plus other famous tv & movie vampires.

I spent all day cleaning and at night drew myself dancing with a broom, like Turbo in the movie Breakin’.

I have a 27” monitor that was given to me a few month ago that I finally want to put use. I want to use it in 3 different ways: 1 - Connected to the DSLR that’s mounted overhead on my rig so I can see what the camera sees while I record myself drawing. 2 - To watch movies & shows via a streaming device. 3 - A monitor for a Raspberry Pi computer running a retro video game emulator as well as regular computer capabilities. I thought it’d be a simple task but the monitor only has one HDMI port and no speakers or audio-out ports. I haven’t tried connecting my camera because I need a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, which I don’t have. I connected my Raspberry Pi but needed speakers so I went to the store and bought a set. When I came back I played a couple games for a while after connecting the speakers to the computer. Afterwards I swapped the Pi for an old Roku Streaming Stick but gave up when I realized there’s no way of getting audio from it without buying a separate piece of hardware. So now I’m looking at HDMI switches that also export audio to get it all to work. The shit never ends.

No artsy fartsiness of any kind. Just coffee, food, laundry, and movies. I watched Karate Kid 3 (I’m rewatching all the movies before the new season of Cobra Kai drops) and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. I think I liked KK3 better.

AKA: Netflix and Eat.

I did laundry, watched the movie “Slither,” (which is fucking good!) and started inking (digitally) this EMN Phoenix piece.

I was really sad yesterday when I learned that actor Chadwick Boseman passed away from cancer. I'm a huge fan of the Marvel movies and thought he did a kick ass job portraying T'challa, aka the Black Panther, in four different movies. And although the Black Panther solo film was not my favorite of the series it was by far the most culturally significant movie in the Marvel universe, and cinema in general, for the way it portrayed the primarily African American cast of characters. I remember hearing about people taking classrooms full of children of color to go see the movie when it came out for the opportunity to see themselves as the hero on the big screen. Fans loved his character and we were all looking forward to seeing Chadwick return for the sequel. It really sucks losing him right now in the middle of the pandemic and civil unrest due to racial injustice. 

"Wakanda Forever"

Last night I started reading Lord of the Flies again. I had to read it in middle school or high school as an assignment but I don't remember much besides the general story of a bunch of young kids getting stranded on a deserted island and becoming savages. What I'll never forget is a scene from the 1990 movie where they kill the character named Piggy. He was a dorky fat kid in glasses and I saw myself in him cause I was/am a dorky fat kid. I think that scene scarred me for life. It's a short book and I'm 3 chapters in right now. When I'm done I'm gonna rewatch the 1963 black & white movie and the 1990 color version. 

After posting this on Instagram someone commented about a real life "Lord of the Flies," where 6 Tongan schoolboys got shipwrecked and stranded on a deserted island for 15 months in 1966. Their story was a much happier than this book by William Golding.

Just went thru emails, updated my calendar, made a couple phone calls, worked out at home, walked for a few miles, and rented Jojo Rabbit. Tomorrow I go back to work on this sumumabitch.

Redux on the left. Original artwork on the right. 

When I printed the EMN shirts with the original artwork, a lot of the smaller details were washed out or blurry. Now that I'm going to print more I decided to redo the parts of the image that weren't so sharp. I printed the original artwork in black & white on paper then highlighted the parts that came out blurry on the t-shirt. I then digitally made some of those lines thicker and redrew others completely. This should result in a better looking print on the next batch of shirts. I feel like I did what George Lucas did to Star Wars when he released the Special Edition versions of his original trilogy. 

I crossed these things off my to-do list today:

• Read & sent out work emails. These are for upcoming events I'm DJing 
• Went thru personal emails and unsubscribed from a bunch of mailing lists.
• Cleaned my desk. I threw away and put away a lot of shit.
• I updated my to-do list. 
• Created a doc to log all my cash & credit card sales at events this year.
• Spent a long time looking for all the info needed to fill in that doc. I had the numbers written on a bunch of different notes. I even had to go thru my recycling bin looking for notes.
• Made plans to go out for dinner tomorrow with my cousin Reyna. She assisted Arely and I at the Jazz Festival last month.
• Paid my car registration and renewed my Costco card online. 
• I went to cook the chicken & veggies I bought last week but the chicken went bad so I just cooked the veggies.
• Spent an hour or two stretching & lifting weights. I watched the first half of the movie Turbo Kid while I was stretching.
• Went to gym and got the treadmill for an hour. I ran 30 and walked 30. It's been almost a month since the last time I ran.
• Uploaded a couple posts to my Insta @frankiemcfly
• Now here I am posting my daily blog entry before bed. I think this is blog post #27