BenPaddon.co.uk

When I went to San Diego for Comic-Con last month I was lucky enough to find some great accommodation at a perfect price - free. Michelle and David were happy to put me up, even though they were in Europe for the first two days of the Con. They were very much there for the weekend though, and we had a fantastic time hanging out. We were all thinking the same thing - “Why don’t we do this more often?” - to which the response is “Well, what’s stopping us?” Last Monday (the 11th) happened to be Michelle’s birthday, and she planned a karaoke night on Friday. So on Friday I went into work for three hours, and then hopped in a taxi to Burbank Train Station and, from there, caught a train to San Diego. Twice in the space of a month. Crazy, eh?

What a weekend, though. Karaoke, Tropic Thunder, Rock Band, and spending time with people I don’t see nearly enough of. I just wish I could do it every weekend.

Perhaps the nicest thing one person can say to another is, “Have you lost weight?” And it’s something I’ve been hearing on and off for the past month or so. Michelle asked me if I’d lost weight when we had lunch back in July about a week or two before Comic-Con, for instance. A couple of people at work have commented on it as well. Most recently was this weekend, when Michelle flat out told me that I’ve lost weight.

After months of not really looking at myself in the mirror for fear of what I might see, I had a proper look last night before I went to bed. And I was not as disgusted as I expected to be.

Now I’m sure there are people out there who’ll think to themselves, “But Ben, you’ve always been very tall and kind of thin. Did you really put on that much weight?” - the answer is, “No, probably not.” I put on a noticable amount of weight, but I’m not gigantic. I just started to get a bit of a spare tyre around the midriff. The last two times I’ve gone back to visit family in England they’ve made a point of constantly reminding me that I’m a little tubbier, though, with Westy in particular making a very conscious effort to crush my spirit and leave me an empty husk of a human being (his excuse was “If I make fun of you it’ll motivate you to lose weight,” which is bollocks). Similarly the first thing my Mum said when I visited her back in March was, “Oh my word, look at the size of you!”, which was… well, not nice. In fact the only person to say anything nice about my physique was Patrick, who said I had broader shoulders (which was probably a more polite way of saying “You’re fat,” but he was nice about it so I’m giving him points anyway).

It’s another example of England making me feel inferior, and playing on my insecurities. I’m better than that, and I’m going to prove it.

So as much as I would love to go back to Comic-Con today, there’s a chance I might not. I’m absolutely shattered - so very, very tired - and everyone else here is asleep. It’s a bit awkward because I have Dino’s camera and he and Casy still have one of my bags of swag, not to mention the fact that I still have a few interviews to record. It’s… well, it’s awkward. At the very least I’d like to say “Turrah!” to Scott, Kris and the other HalfPixel dudes (although I will be seeing Scott again at PAX). And Mark, obviously.

I’m so tired, though.

Dilemma.

I’m not going to lie to you. I’m excited.

In about an hour and forty-five minutes, I’ll be on a train bound for San Diego. This is probably the largest event I’ve ever been to (if you ignore some of the re-enactment cons I seem to recall my Dad taking me to when i was a youngster), and I’ll be getting the chance to meet some pretty swanky people. It’ll be great to see Michelle and David again, and super-nice of them to let me house-sit for them while they’re in Europe (because looking after someone’s house while they’re on holiday is cheaper than, say, booking a Ridiculously Expensive Hotel during the convention season).

I may record a videoblog. A proper one. I’m still undecided on that one.

Prepwork for the first Jump Leads book is very nearly done. All that’s left to do is to sort out the cover art (JjAR has that base covered), add captions to the concept art and covers at the back of the book (twelve pages of sheer, undiluted brilliance, incidentally) and insert Kris‘ foreword (which hasn’t been written yet). I’m still gutted that we couldn’t include Issue #3 in this book, but with the issue set to be about 40 or so pages there was no way to keep it in the book and sell it at a halfway decent price.

Oh, we’re open to suggestions for the book’s name, by the way.

I’ve been living in America for an entire year.

It feels… well, it feels odd knowing that. One year. 365 days. Just shy of 8,760 hours. I’d write out the number of minutes but then there’d be a dangerous risk of more than one of us bursting into song. Nevertheless, a year is a long time to be doing anything, and even though on the day I arrived in LA I was mostly spaced out from a lack of sleep it still counts.

A lot’s happened in that year. I’ve been working at Disney for 11 of those 12 months. Jump Leads launched a mere two weeks after my emigration and has received critical acclaim from a number of unlikely sources. I’ve made friends, I’ve failed to start learning to drive, and I’ve become the Producer for SoulGeek Media. I’ve been to Disneyland so many times I’m starting to feel guilty about it, considering the number of terminally-ill children who’d love to go but can’t because their parents can’t afford it. I’ve amassed an unhealthily-large collection of Mr Potato Heads (for those of you who want to know, an unhealthily-large collection is basically owning more than two - I presently have nine). I’ve been given free entry to Comic-Con because of Jump Leads, and received $600 from the American government just for existing. I’ve seen parts of California I didn’t even know existed, I’ve been to Houston in Texas, and in two months I’ll be trekking up to Seattle, WA for PAX08.

So what are the plans for the year ahead? Absolutely no ruddy idea. It’s all been very “as it happens,” really. I’m going back to England for two weeks in September, and again in December, and then probably again in March. I’m trying to get fit and lose a little weight (even though absolutely everyone who isn’t my Mum or my friend Westy insists that I don’t need to). I’m hoping to see more of America, to maybe head up to Canada, and to definitely, definitely learn to drive. Fo realz this time.

In the more immediate future I’m hoping to get rid of this ruddy headache.

Living in LA has given me a ton of opportunies and opened up a number of doors for me, and it looks like this next year could be very interesting and very, very busy. Here’s to another Awesome Year, I guess!

So hot they named it twice. Also, fuck me that’s hot.

This evening my Dad, Stepmom and I drove over to Ikea (by way of a British pub in Burbank named the Buchanan Arms, which was quite nice despite the fish not quite meeting the standards set by the Robin Hood) where I bought myself a shelving unit for my ever-growing collection of DVDs, books and vidjagames. I was fast running out of space on my current shelving unit, which is more or less the size of a termite’s intestinal tract, so I decided I shell out the dosh on a fairly non-crap sized thing to put my shit on.

I could talk to you about how much of a pain in the arse it was to put the unit together (in short: surprisingly easy, although I had to move it out of my room and into the kitchen to slide the back on… hang on, that wasn’t quite as short as I was aiming for) but instead I’m going to talk to you about Bob Marley. “My,” I hear you say, “That’s quite a tangent even for you, Ben.” But stay with me, because it is loosely connected to our excursion to Ikea.

Whilst in Ikea looking at lighting (because the desk in the office isn’t quite as well-lit as it could be, and in the interest of not causing our retinas to dissolve into a fine paste we were on the look-out for some nice desk lamps) I spotted a guy with dreadlocks. I was ill and my brain wasn’t quite functioning properly and so mentally I made a rather childish observation - “Hey, that guy looks like Bob Marley.” I spent the rest of the walk through Ikea with “No Woman No Cry” stuck in my head, and rather oddly it was (I think) playing on the in-store PA system as I was going through the Check Out. So, not twelve minutes ago, I bought “Legend” on iTunes. I also looked up the guy on Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit) and discovered he died of Toe Cancer.

I’m not kidding. The guy had melanoma on the big toe on his right foot, and chose not to have the thing amputated because it was against his religious beliefs as a Rasta. The cancer spread throughout his body until it reached the terminal stage, and even then he refused to draw up a will because to do so would bely the Rastafari belief that death is not an inevitability*. I’d spent a long time believing that Bob Marley had been shot at a concert for being too much of a hippie or some such thing. But refusal to let someone lop his toe off? Seems a little silly to me. The guy could still be knocking out cracking tunes today if he was willing to part ways with the big spud on his right meatslab.

Oh well. Not much that can be done about it now, is there?

I want to do another webcomic.

I’m obviously not abandoning Jump Leads, so don’t worry about that. I’m constantly writing scripts, constantly coming up with ideas, and that story is far from over. No, I’m very much feeling the need to work on a more traditional three- or four-panel “slice o’ life” comic. Something a little more close-to-home. Something semi-autobiographical.

And I want to draw it myself.

Yes, I know, I hate everything I draw. But I want to get past that. I want to break that barrier and try to get myself to a state where I am once again happy with my cartooning. I have no understanding of anatomy, no real grasp of technique, my style is wobbly and any hands I draw look like shit, but I want to give it a go again. Two years ago I decided I was too frustrated with my art to continue working on Fried, and I decided I wasn’t good enough to do Jump Leads. But I want to break that cycle. I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to bring Jump Leads to life (and just as well really, as JjAR is doing a much better job of that than I ever could) but I reckon I could get myself to a place where I can say, “Alright, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

Hopefully I’ll have something more concrete for you in the near future.

For those of you who are constantly bemoaning the fact that I don’t update my blog that much at the moment, I point you in the direction of my Twitter feed. Generally I’ll usually update that with What I’m Currently Up To™, and I can even update it from my mobile phone. So there - technology has made stalking me that little bit easier.

I keep forgetting that my birthday is coming up. I know the date - of course I know the date - but it never quite clicks in my head that my birthday is coming up soon. I’ve already had a couple of cards, and I didn’t expect either of them. Probably because I forgot my birthday was approaching on both occasions.

That’s it, really. I think this entry is more or less to remind myself that my birthday is coming up. Lawks.

I have a tendency to over-analyze things. I’m constantly over-analyzing my own actions for one, and that’s something I believe I’ve gone into previously. I have difficulty sometimes figuring out what motivates me, what causes me to say and do some of the things I do. Since learning that left-handed people are more susceptible to neurological disorders such as bipolarity, acute anxiety disorder and paranoia (largely due to the left-handed brain being wired up differently from the right-handed one), I’ve started mentally chalking up my bizarre actions to simply being left-handed, and have begun trying to pigeon-hole each action into a particular neurological disorder in much the same way that Harold Crick found himself tallying the Comedies and Tragedies that occurred in his life, the exception being I’m doing it purely in my head, and my list is rather bigger than just the two options. It’s entirely possible I’m looking for justification where none actually exists, and by considering this I’m now over-analyzing my over-analysis, which is surely a Bad Thing.

I have discovered, or at the least decided, that my main reasons for doing much of what I do is because I need to feel like I’m entertaining. I have an overwhelming desire to please people, to make them smile and laugh if at all possible, and that drives me to say and do things that I know will perhaps make me look stupid. I’m willingly making myself look the fool just to get a quick chuckle out of people - often people I hardly know - and that strikes me as very dangerous behavior.

Back in America again. I owe you stories and you shall get them (I keep saying that, I know), but for now here are three four lovely tidbits:

• I thought Spring would have started in England by now. I was wrong. Leaving my coat in LA will not go down as one of my brightest ideas.
• The Thing was fantastic, and I shall definitely be going again next year.
• I am tired and jetlagged and ill.
• My coworkers did the most incredibly awesome thing while I was on holiday, and I’ll share it with you when I get home.

That is all.

Before I approach the story of the Fetish Ball, I have to talk about my commute into work this morning. There are probably very few subjects in the world less worthy of being written about than the act of going to work, but today was different because today I got on my shiny new bicycle and cycled into work.

Cycling from Sunland-Tujunga to Burbank is no small feat. It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to do it, and in doing so I realised that a lot of the roads my Dad usually drives along to get to and from work are very, very long, but moving along them at a slower pace allowed me to take in much of the scenery, sights and sounds that I had previously not paid much attention to. I never really take in much of Sunland Blvd when we whiz down it in the car, but cycling along it I got to see some interesting things. There are a few houses in dire need of a good bit of work, for instance. A small row of houses absolutely stank of pot. And no, that really isn’t a large enough plot of land to keep horses on.

I’m still largely unfamiliar with Californian Traffic Law and how bicycles factor in to them, so I tried my best to adhere to what I remembered of British Traffic Law and hoped that would do me (obviously I decided not to cycle on the left side of the road). I was fairly relaxed, although I probably would’ve been a bit more relaxed if I’d had a helmet. Unfortunately the store I bought my bike from haven’t had any new helmets for a while as their supplier’s warehouse recently burned down in Mysterious Circumstances™, so my head is relatively unprotected. Well, I say “relatively”. I mean “absolutely”.  I’ll ask Dad if he’s willing to make a detour to Target on the way home from work today so I can pick one up.

Getting to work under my own steam was fantastic, and I can’t wait to get up tomorrow morning and do it all over again. I feel like my legs are going to fall off, but honestly I don’t think I could care less about it at the moment. I’d forgotten just how much fun it was to cycle long distance like that.