Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

Today I picked up the new Shadow Out of Tim stickers and they look great (above right). On my way back I stopped in at Divine Industries and Allen gave me some www.discrevolt.com cards of the new album (also pictured above). We got 100 of these cards which basically you use to download the songs from the new album. It’s a bit experimental but we think there is a market for them. They’re cheaper than buying the album, but you don’t get all the packaging. I myself have always been a packaging guy (for my favourite bands, at least) but I can understand the other side. So we’re interested in ways of making them fly. The band is releasing the album worldwide on the 21st of June, and having the fan appreciation week starting on the 14th, but maybe we’ll make these available to the hardcore fans earlier than that still. Like tomorrow or something. The cards are also vaguely collectible. It will be an interesting experiment, and we may do more cards for the back catalog.

for Mom

The annual Star Wars convention “Star Wars Celebration” is wrapping up today and I gather they have showed some trailers for the upcoming Clone Wars CGI TV series. There is a clip of George Lucas talking about it on starwars.com but I’m not going to make you listen to it just by dropping some [link] like a lazy blogger. No! You can come to expect more at Toren’s Absolute Blog. He says that the Cartoon Network 2D animation series was a ‘test’ for this new ‘big budget’ series which will be more like the movie (“Attack of the Clones” presumably). Because it’s episodic they don’t have to deal with the Skywalker story, It’s more a bunch of various adventures, and they can do some more “oddball” things with “smartass comedy with contemporary humour – not Saturday morning at all.” They’re bringing in new characters, and they have one episode with nothing but clone warriors, and one just about Kitt Fisto.

Oh, I just found the trailer. I can’t post it here so you’ll have to go away. [Link: http://starwars.com/video/view/000478.html] I’m glad to see they included one of the more interesting characters from the 2D cartoon – the bald, Tim-Burtonesque female Sith.

And the live action series is still a few years away.

This “Be A Guest Host on Turner Classic Movies” would be awesome, but not open to Canadians like me. Also, have you heard about this TV series coming up, “The Sarah Connor Chronicles?” Weird.

So CampyCon was a lot colder than last time! Next time, we try July or August I think! My mantra of “no bears” was not successful, for not only did we see a black bear on our drive up the mountain, but there was in fact bear prints and scat in our camp! Oh dear.

We got the same campground as last year

but there was so much snow on the ground that we couldn’t pitch our tents in the nice area that we used last time:

But we found an alternative and set them up.

Sadly, due to last-minute tragedy Geisel had to cancel, and Messel didn’t make it up either, but we had Joseph to fill in.

On the first night we had some BBQ and played Fantasy Scrabble! The rules of Fantasy Scrabble are simple. 1. Do not talk about Fantasy Scrabble (to jocks). 2 Rules are the same as regular Scrabble but any word you can shoehorn into a fantastical setting are worth double points.

Ours was a very difficult board, I wanted to see a lot more ’swords’ and ‘gandalfs’ and ‘xorns’ but oh well.

After that I ran some Spaceship Zero – the “Asteroid X” adventure which was fun but we were getting sleepy and distracted. Luckily I got in a lot of marshmallow roasting – I loved it! When will they make Splenda marshmallows? We went to bed after 1:30am and I worried about bears in my sleep, and the birds woke me at 5:30 am because I’d left my earplugs in the ‘house.’ But I perservered and we all got up another 5 hours later, had a very sausagy breakfast and played some Magic: The Gathering.

Apres that, Jason fled and the rest of us went on a hike. A long hike. A long, arduous hike through the snow, and I was still way overdressed. But it was lots of fun and we found a weird empty cabin and a collapsed outhouse (hopefully before it was used but we didn’t check).

We went through character generation for GURPS Goblins and it was more arduous than the hike, (I don’t think GURPS will ever be my system of choice) but when we finally got to playing it was lots of fun, and we all spoke with East London accents. Through no fault of Geoff’s I started to fall asleep during the game, but we managed to wrap it up and hit the tents, and Joseph gave me a +1 Blanket of Sleeping.

The four of us had to pack into Simon’s car with all our gear, with comical results.

Huzzah, CampyCon!

Four Photos from my hike up The Chief with Joyce ‘n’ co.

This is The Chief. It’s on the way to Squamish.

Going up is tiring

Joyce enjoys crack.

At the windy peak you can see Squamish in the background.

I can’t believe I’m going to be away from the internet for almost 48 hours. But at least I’ll have tabletop RPGs to keep the nerd quotient high. No bears!

Sorry I’ve been neglecting you, my little blog. We’ll spend some quality time together soon, I promise. I will say that I got my personalized pens yesterday and they look good.

Also, in case you’re a comic book fan, Scott “Understanding Comics” will be at Sophia Books next Thursday.

Because it had been so long since I’d bused out to Chilliwack, I called Greyhound to remind myself of the schedules. It was lucky I did so because that’s how I found out that there was a strike and I wouldn’t be able to get there by bus at all. I had to borrow Joyce’s car and I got in a minor scrape in North Van going to pick up Mario. Victoria Day weekend means terrible traffic and in fact I have never seen it so bad for such a stretch. It was seriously stop and go from Vancouver to Abbotsford.

When we finally pulled up to the practice space, which is above an RV place in the industrial area of Chilliwack (where Mario used to live) the entrance was blocked off with vehicles. “What gives?” I asked Mario, and he told me that there have been a lot of break-ins and other criminal activity. There was even a SWAT team down the road to arrest one of…Canada’s Most Wanted? Ah, sweet Chilliwack. I helped Mario bring his equipment in and then I decided I should bring in the swag from the trunk just in case. As I was walking back out to the car this man came running out into the street wearing nothing but his underwear (it was not a sunny day), ducking and weaving and looking around like he was being hounded by chupacabras! He barked at me a couple of times and so I decided to get in Joyce’s car (“Stan” as it is known) through the passenger seat and lock the doors. In case he started whacking the windows or jumping on the car like an angry chimpanzee I put the key in the ignition so that I could drive away if need be. I sat there probably for about five minutes as I watched him do his feral monkey gait in and out of the street and parking lots. Finally he got far enough away that I thought I could make it back to the jam space without being accosted. As I opened the door I heard a dinging noise that I hadn’t heard before, but in my state of mind and unfamiliarity with Stan’s working bits I dismissed it. Foolish, foolish me. I had just locked the keys in the car.

Mario had, in the meantime, called the police and in about 15 minutes three cars showed up and grabbed monkey man, who as it turns out lives below the jam space, in the RV park. I doubted that the cops would just get my car open for me but I had to ask. They did call a tow truck though. While the band was practicing in the building I waited out in the rain and sang along softly to myself. Another 20 minutes and $52 later I had the car open again.

The weekend picked up from there. Good thing too.

Good rock show last night at The Vault. No complaints about the new material so far! Devon was there and he gave me one of the very first run of Thickets shirts – even I didn’t have one of these, until now! Before the times of computrons and digital garment printers, we made our shirts with a cardboard stencil and an airbrush. Behold!

Also, I made up a group on Flickr, currently with 78 photos and graphics of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. If you have any Thickets photos, feel free to add to the group! Thanks

Here is the URL:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/383696@N21/pool/

Thursday June 14 is Fan Appreciation Day for The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets! We’ll have some special events so stay tuned to any of the following sites for more updates:

http://www.myspace.com/darkestofthehillsidethickets

http://www.thickets.net

Facebook Thickets Fan Club: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2201042436

http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/thedarkest

I’m working on new buttons and stickers.

Here’s the blurb I did up for a press release the other day:

When is an H.P. Lovecraft story not a book? When it’s an album by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, of course! Following their seven year tour of outer space in support of Spaceship Zero: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, ‘The Thickets’ return to Earth and the waters off New Zealand in a very special operatic adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time.” In HPL’s original tale set in 1913, Professor Peaslee of Massachusetts has his mental faculties swapped by an alien mind and learns terrible truths about life on Earth and beyond. The Vancouver, BC nerdcore band’s The Shadow Out of Tim—their third full-length album and fifth CD release—features modern marine biologist Dr. Timothy Vess’ descent into madness brought on by similar circumstances. The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, a cult mainstay since 1992, take you on a rock ‘n’ roll tour through space and time, painting sonic pictures of the ocean deep, mysterious ruin-covered islands, and Paleocene jungles. Five out of five Cthulhu scholars agree – The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets’ The Shadow Out of Tim is the perfect soundtrack to occult investigation!