The wood came from a recently town-down old swing set. I didn’t like the two pallets I had on hand for this. I had an old rattle can of black paint that I used to just barely darken it up & kind of make it look more aged.
I got the one skull & forearms/hands from Giant Eagle. I got the other skull, hands, chains, lights, & netting for the back at Dollar Tree. All-in, I think I have around $20 to $25 in this? I swapped the hands for the skulls because the sizes made more sense to me.
After letting the pallet dry, I stapled the lights into the bottom, then I stapled a weird grey ratty cloth under that. Then, I just picked a spot, positioned the skulls, arms/hands, & chains, then plugged it in. OH yeah, I put a weird motion-sensor screamy thing in the one corner too, because it was super-annoying everywhere else.
Do you like to put a DIY spin on Halloween or other holiday decorations? Show me what ya got!
Well then, it’s finally here. I finished maze book number two! This one is better than the last one, I promise. The first was sort of a test run just to see how Amazon KDP works. I wholeheartedly appreciate everyone that bought that book, but this one just objectively looks better and much more time was put into its creation. It ought to be much more challenging and enjoyable, IMHO.
This book a collection of a bunch more larger mazes, and a few small ones that I have been drawing since late 2023. There’s no common theme other than most of the mazes have a silly vibe. A few have no vibe at all. There’s aliens, rodents, yard work, holiday stuff, rock n’ roll, a treasure map, food, retail aversion, gross stuff, & more.
You Can See Yourself Out: A Collection of Fun, Irreverent, Festive, & Wild Hand-Drawn Mazes (Front Cover)
I hope you consider picking up a copy for yourself, & maybe even one for a friend? If not, just sharing the link to someone who you think may enjoy it, or just sharing it in general would be awesome.
The link is https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9Y7SFXS and I’d love if you could share it, review it, favorite it or save it to a list… anything to help even if you’re not interested in a purchase. You could give me a good (or terrible) review or add it to your list on GoodReads too, if that’s your thing.
I had fun making a collage with punk ‘zine vibes for the cover. I busted out the mixed media, printed on weird paper, got two cutting, ripping, & coffee staining… and unearthed the leopard & cheetah print tape.
All of the mazes were hand-drawn, scanned in, edited (& “solved”) in paint.NET, & put together with Open Office. I haven’t stepped into the world of digital drawing yet, and I like my free programs. Someday, I’ll probably dive into GIMP a little more.
I love drawing the mazes, and it’s a great creative outlet like blogging or making music or playing out live. I’m sitting on a pile of old ones that I can convert into a book… but I need to make sure they’re all solvable and do the solutions.
Some are too big to fit on my scanner, and scanning with my phone has less than desirable results… so I’m gonna have to go somewhere like a FedEx Office store and hope they can help before they all disappear. I have a problem picking up any notebook that catches my eye and is the right price, regardless of size & paper type. I like the feel & the calming of pen on paper.
Because I have been excited about this, and I made a small collage with leftover bits, I popped up some new merch designs in my TeePublic & RedBubble stores with that new collage & the book cover images. I do have some older designs there with a few of the mazes that are featured in this book too. If you have an account & follow me on either of those sites, it may help my stuff get seen a bit more. I’d appreciate any form of liking/sharing/tagging if you’re so inclined!
In fact, check out all these designs from or inspired by the book, you can get them on all kinds of merch at each store! (I ordered a sticker, a magnet, a coffee cup, & a hoodie so I’m already in the hole.)
If you want to know what it’s like to be a parent, let me give you some insight.
Tonight we were putting up the Christmas tree. It is old & the top 3rd didn’t all completely light up last year. I did sort of attempt to fix the problem to no avail. Again this year with a replacement bulb to no avail.
Because the kids were excited, we continued to decorate. About 95% done, I remarked aloud (my mistake?) that we should get a new tree. So, everyone got out of their PJ’s into regular clothes and we ended up going to Home Depot. Excitement was off the charts.
At Home Depot, there were a bunch of great trees for all kinds of price ranges. All four of us finally settled on a tree that we liked. (It’s really cool… pre-lit, and can be all white or different colors!)
Looking for the tree on the shelf, of course they didn’t have one. Neither did any of the other local stores. We bought the floor model for a slight discount but the caveat was that there was no box.
The kids managed to bounce around the store with Christmas Spirit like Will Ferrell in Elf while sort of processing that this was the only tree if we wanted that tree.
Us purchasing the tree from the floor was apparently the most exciting thing we have ever done and we (well, half of us) danced to the checkout with 3 shopping carts in tow… the useless race car one because we can never not get it, and two regular orange carts, one with 2/3 of a tree and one with the remaining 1/3 & stand.
I had wanted to get a rubbermaid tote for it, but the ants in our pants had grown great in their numbers and were humming the chorus to “Ode to Joy.” We checked out and came home with the plan that we could continue the tree decoration process tomorrow.
So of course, once in the house, we promptly assembled & started to decorate the new tree while un-decorating the old tree. Oh the excitement was uncontainable!
Being that garbage collection was pushed back a day due to Thanksgiving, I wanted to put the old tree on the curb.
I told the kids to say goodbye to the old tree and Ian looked like I just told him we were going to skin and eat Butterscotch (our cat) after roasting her over an open flame. Once the crocodile tear rolled down his cheek, it set Molly into big sister sympathy tears mode.
We had talked before about getting a second tree for the dining room because it looks nice in that window from outside.
Guess who is going to try harder to fix that Christmas tree because he is a sucker for recently overjoyed and now crying children?
Now, that’s a hell of a guitar. It’s made from guitar parts (obviously) and an old toy Millennium Falcon. It’s even got Han & Chewie action figures inside. How insane is that? Despite the plastic-laden sound that it gives off (you can hear it in the video below), I’d love to have something like this, just for the sheer oddity and geekiness. Can you imagine rolling up to a show, and pulling that out of a case on stage? People wouldn’t know what to think. (Unless you were in the Phenomenauts and they’d already seen your van.)
Urlesque has a cool initial interview and a nice follow-up about the guitar and the process that Stevens used to put it all together. Oddity Central has a good article too. I’d love to see how much this goes for when it sells. Sadly, probably more than I can afford to drop on a guitar right now… but maybe I’ll hit up some toy shows & build my own. Ha ha.
Our seats were in the EI-2 section, row L. We were ridiculously close to the stage and not so far up & to the side that we couldn’t appreciate the view. I need to write to Mr. Scalzott again for providing the free tickets and hospitality of the arena.
I’ve got to say, this was an excellent show… and I’d love to go back if I can afford to next time they’re in town. The TSO really knows how to put on an event. The Star Wars: In Concert crew could learn a lesson from them in lighting, lasers, fog machines, floating remote stages, hydraulics, and pyrotechnics. Actually, they could learn a few lessons. I can imagine a hybrid of the two that would be absolutely ridiculous. Maybe I need to write to the TSO, John Williams, and George Lucas. Ha ha ha.
A few things surprised me about the show… I had no idea that there were vocals & power-ballady type songs, and that there was a cohesive story for the most part. I feel like it kept it entertaining for all types of people. The narrator & vocalists were awesome. Sadly my prior knowledge of the TSO consisted of an mp3 with an incorrect ID3 tag, mislabeling “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” for “Carol of the Bells” (which it arguably is… along with “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”).
I had no idea that Alex Skolnick or the other guys from Savatage were associated with this. Skolnick wrote articles for just about every guitar magazine that I ever picked up back when I was learning to play & read tab. They made the show like a metal concert at times… I thought one guy in the front was going to have a heart attack and die when he threw metal with both hands as Alex was molesting the fretboard in front of him. When the show reached it’s second half, they introduced some stuff from the new album, Night Castle. I swear they snuck some Sabbath & Metallica riffs in there. There was even an old-school 80’s-rock drum solo… and I think I loved the fact that old ladies were watching the solo in abject horror as much as I liked the spectacle itself. They also had a girl playing the electric violin… I saw it more than I heard it… but it was visually pretty cool element, like the spinning keyboard.
I didn’t know that it had heavy religious overtones. I mean, I knew it was a holiday concert… and I’m certainly not opposed to religious ideals. I just didn’t know, and found it surprising… especially with tightly clothed women dancing like strippers in front of fire. I think it’s cool that they can integrate the stuff, maybe some overzealous idiot out there got the message to loosen up a bit. While they played a medley that included the melody of “Canon in D”, the girls were dancing scantily-clad on the stage… and I asked my wife Bethany if we had to call t “Canon in Double-D”.
Like I mentioned before, it being entertaining to everybody… I mean everybody. There were all kinds of people there… classes, ages, stereotypes, whatever group you want to name, they were there (except maybe race… it was all crackers up in there). I did see an extraordinarily high amount of mullets though. I’m talking prize-winning specimens like the comb-over on top/hair down to my ass & the trimmed up top/pony tail in the back.
I can’t say anything negative about the show itself, the seats, or the arena… except (you knew it was coming) that I found the parking rate to be amusing. By looking on the Arena website, it listed parking in the lot where we parked as $7, but it does note “Event parking rates differ for each Mellon Arena event. Check your event’s information page on this website for specific parking rates”. The funny part is that it said nothing about parking on the event page other than the fact that no pre-sold parking would be available. Parking was $15… more than double the normal rate, which is fine, but there was no prior indication. I paid in mostly $1’s and even some quarters.
I hope the TSO and the Mellon Arena don’t mind if I share some crappy quality cell phone photos…
From: Eric Carroll me@myemailaddre.ss To: Customer Service Mellon Arena info@mellonarena.com Sent: Mon, November 30, 2009 Subject: Horrible seats for Star Wars: In Concert
Hello Mellon Arena Customer Service & Ticket Sales,
I am taking the time to write to you this evening to express my disappointment in the sale of our seats for yesterday’s Star Wars: In Concert event at the Mellon Arena.
While I understand that we purchased the “cheap” $33 seats (two of which somehow magically totaled $93.40 instead of $66.00 for various dubious Ticket Master fees — including a “printing fee” in which I used my own paper & ink — which are not your fault), I feel that your integrity is to be called into question when considering the vantage-point from exactly where we were expected to sit throughout the show.
I would think that you would be familiar enough with your own venue to know that the seats in section E13, row M are blocked from seeing anything above a certain height at the other end of the house thanks to the lower edge of section F hanging directly above us (and directly in our field of vision). I would also think that you would know what this height is, and that the screen coming in for this particular show was being touted as “a three-story-tall, high-definition LED super-screen — one of the largest ever put on tour.“
Apparently I am quite wrong, my friends.
Please see the attached image from my cell phone so you can fully appreciate the vantage point from which we were expected to view the “live music and film elements … synchronized in order to create a full multi-media, one-of-kind Star Wars experience.” You’ll note the bluish-white line behind the orchestra that is the very bottom of the giant partially-visible screen where the movie clips played.
I can tell you that the ushers in our area got an ear-full from several other angry concert-goers (including my wife who had purchased the tickets for me as an early Christmas present). Our row had cleared out of all but 4 people by the time the 2nd song had started. I would have left also, but the concert had started, and I wasn’t about to miss any of what I could actually see by running around like a madman trying to find a seat.
I did notice several rows almost empty down to the right of the floor, while seats to the back & sides were full… surely this is a commentary on the outrageous prices charged for the show? It only made it all the more infuriating that a seat with a better vantage point sat empty during the performance.
In lieu of trying to “sneak down” into the “better” seats, at intermission, we made the trek down & back up to section F and asked an usher there for permission to sit in any unoccupied seats. We were pointed to some open seats, and several others filtered in around us with the same idea as the show came closer to starting again.
From this height, the speaker array on the right still blocked a good portion of the screen, but at least it wasn’t cut in half… and from here, we could actually see the “laser show” being projected on to the ceiling.
While I found the concert itself and exhibits throughout the arena to be an exhilarating experience, the full multimedia-experience in the arena was sadly stained by the poor choice of Mellon Arena to sell seats with a substandard view of the main event.
I have been to countless events over the years at the Mellon (& formerly the Civic) Arena — from concerts, to Penguins Games, to circuses, to I think even a truck & tractor pull with Bigfoot & USA-1 when I was a tiny young lad. They have all been great memories… and this is the only time that I have felt wronged by the venue.
I hope that you take these thoughts into consideration when selling seats for the remainder of shows throughout the last standing days of the arena. You’re making memories for people, please try to make sure that they’re positive ones, and that they’re not marred by poor logistics. I’d ask for our money (or half of our money) back if I thought it would get me anywhere, but I am more concerned about the experience than the money.
Thank you for your time, I hope that this is passed on to the appropriate parties, and I do look forward to a response.
World (and Lunar) Domination 