The "J" Stands for Jepsen

And all the aliens try to kill me/ but give me a space gun/ and I'll be happy.

@Emperor_Ethan
facebook.com/pinky.empire

Happy Easter!

My first hand-drawn .gif

Click image for animation.

Behold!

You have seen it and you can't deny it, I have a .org url and that makes this blog super legit. There are no two ways about it, I mean business with this think and all my super awesome blog posts. Of course the real mission here is to make a doorway into the future, that future being the one where I and my loyal minions rule all of space as far as mortal man can reach. Consider this your invitation to our little group and join with me as we step into that brave world of danger and certain peril; never looking backward as we go higher and higher into the starfield and our rule becomes absolute.

For some, there may be an element of confusion. "Emperor, is it not your goal to conquer the Earth?" I have determined that the Earth is just too full of people, and people complicate everything. I would much rather rule space and the vastness of resources that abound there that muck about with all the petty issues of politics and economy that go on on this highly habitable ball of dirt.

Once again, let me invite you. Come and rule the galaxy with me!
Excelsior!

The First [07/06/11]

Unusual, that's what they called me

Made my name a laughingstock
A byword for nerds and freaks
Declared me an outcast

But I kept doing what I wanted to do
Realized my dream, if
Only that were true.

Please give this a thumbs up if you have ever felt the same way.

Attention Span [06/28/11]

Ah ha, what have we here? The rare second post in a row! What could this mean, that Ethan is exerting a little extra effort to accomplish his goals, or maybe that he actually cares when something goes up on his blog?
No such luck, oh casual reader, it is simply my latest brief explosion of thought. Recently I watched a video by Craig Benzine aka Wheezy Waiter on Youtube and he mentioned a condition called "popcorn brain" and I looked it up and read an entire article--read, not skimmed-- and I realized I have chronic popcorn brain. I never remain on one task or another but flit around like a mental hummingbird. Mental only, as the metaphor completely dies when it hits reality. I have been reading Nero Wolfe in short bursts, 5 or 6 pages to a time and I highly recommend Mr. Rex Stout's work (start here), but I rarely focus for much longer than that. With my drawing I take it in installments as well, doing one sketch and then pausing to watch TV. Even in the evenings when I am watching Conan I sit with my iPod and play Bejeweled 2 during the commercials. The fact is, I have two tracks in my mind, the foreground and the background. I am sure there are psychological terms I could dredge up from my memory of PSY101 but I will leave it to "foreground" and "background". In the background I can be thinking of anything, and it is usually the task at hand such as walking the dogs or even drawing but in the foreground, I am running over new stories and new characters almost constantly and letting my mind wander, in a controlled way. I am writing all of this to say that I think my perceived lack of focus is more of a mechanism to focus my mind even more, creating a place where my thoughts can follow a path to their conclusion without the constraints of trying to manage them or force them along. It is not untrue to say that I have had some of my best ideas while I was being the most lazy.

Atopia [06/27/11]

The darkest times were some of the most pleasant in his memory, when he rolled into sleep like a seal under a wave and breached again sometime in the light; it was at those times he forgot where he was--or better wasn't. His home was far behind him now, if the metaphor of time and distance still had any meaning. It was in this early light that he was really feeling alone and lost as the air around him bubbled into earth and ruptured into stone. He turned gingerly and deftly pushed off of a rock bracing himself and trying to get his feet toward the ground. Gravity was relative here but sometimes it seemed the ground had a deciding vote and so he floated down like a deflating balloon to rest his toes in a little patch of sand. He just stood, weakened a little from the ease of weightlessness until he forced himself to exercise, doing all of those things that gym teachers make you learn and you vow to never do again. He laughed a little at the irony and then stood to look around. He was lucky, this time, because there was an apple tree, old and gnarled and producing fruit. The light looked like the sun for a few moments and he felt like it was autumn in an apple orchard. Then the sun fractured into thirteen smaller suns that turned blue and looked like cosmic fireflies.
That was when he got a real surprise. This was the second time he heard it, but the first time he had assumed he was hearing things. "Hey! Hey, hello?"
He looked around the tree and past a spindly camel with mosquito wings the size of catamaran sails. And there she was, a human woman, real as real could be. Hello, he thought as he waved.
She was walking cautiously toward him, and he broke from his reverie and walked to her as well. They met at the place the camel had flown from and he took another bite of apple.
"Are you real?" She said, in a voice that was distant and familiar all at once.
He nodded, swallowing.
"Oh, well, Natalie," she said, touching her collarbone, "who. are. you." She said the last words deliberately, forming them in an exaggerated fashion.
He rolled his eyes. I'm not deaf, he mouthed, I'm mute. My name is Peter."
"Oh, sorry. Bet that happens a lot," Natalie had a Georgian accent that was sweeter than peach cobbler, "Not here, obviously but, you know," she blinked and smiled when she saw Peter smiling, "Where abouts y' from?"
Ohio.
"Oh, I hear it's real pretty in the fall in Ohio. But y'all get snowed in pretty good too, huh?" Peter nodded. "Yeah. Say Peter, did you get caught in that snow about, oh it is so hard to tell time here, but about a month ago and there was no land, just blowing wind and big hunks of ice?" He nods again and indicates a scar on his arm. "Oh, that looks bad, I got whacked round the head pretty good but that didn't last but an hour. How long do you figure you've been here anyway?" A year. "Me too! I suppose the same thing that brought me brought you, huh, a whisper and a hiccup in the ground?" My hiccup was in the sky. She laughed at that, a deep laugh and sighed. "So what do you figure this place is, if it is a place?" As she asked and he thought the ground turned to giant crystals of salt and they tumbled into a crater like a bowl of glass. In an instant they were holding on to each other as they fell deeper into the crater. In that instant, they both knew that they needed a friend.

Just a little writing exercise again, written in 45 minutes or less kind of thing.