jello puddin pops

Here is a picture of me from New Years Eve.  The caption is there because sometimes, in the right light, I look like I’m doing a Bill Cosby impression.

Here are a few updates from my life:

1. I have started running.  By “started” I mean I literally started today; I ran/walked for about 20 minutes.  I have started a blog about this, and you can read it here: Josh Goes A’Running.  I won’t write about it here, though.  This blog is for self-deprecation and my strange mental patterns.

2. February Album Writing Month is next month (obviously), and I am participating.  I suggest that if you want to listen to the songs I create, you head to my profile there, as I am not going to update my blog about it, because that just seems redundant.  Also, if you are a songwriter or have ever wanted to be a songwriter, I suggest you sign up!  It’s an amazing community full of professionals and amateurs (and people like me, somewhere in the middle), who are all extremely helpful and kind.  It’s almost annoying how nice they are!  If you do sign up, say hello on my soundboard thingy and I will certainly listen or read your stuff!

3. I’m thinking about dumping the joshuabelville.com website.  This will be done because it seems awkward to run two completely separate websites, when all of the good stuff is here on this site.  My new plan is to merge the webspace together (as I had separated it earlier) and just forward joshbelville.com to zornog.net, or perhaps to a subdomain on zornog.net.  What do you think?  Do you even give a shit?¹

4. There is no four.

I said that I would update this blog more and I have been lax about even that, and I apologize.  Truth is, not much is going on in my life right now besides working and watching every episode of 30 Rock on Netflix.  C’est la vie!

Those of you who actually visit this site (rather than just subscribing to the blog¹) will notice a new site design.  I’ve removed the music aspect of the previous design and made this site into more of the personal, writing-oriented site that I intended.  My writing and comics will be the main focus of this site.  I hope you think it looks spiffy.  I think it looks very spiffy, and it’s quick and all that.

None of the writing stuff is actually available yet, though.  It takes a while to build pages for each thing that I write, and I just wanted to get the design up first so that it was obvious that the direction of the site was changing (really just going back to its roots).

Regarding comics: the real reason Test Comic hasn’t been updated in a month or whatever is not because I am lazy, but because my computer FREEZES every. single. time I try to make a new comic.  There’s nothing more frustrating than opening up Photoshop, loading the sprite sheets and backgrounds, making everything look nice and pretty, and having the computer freeze 3/4th of the way through the process.  I am on a path to purchase a new computer, which will take me a couple of weeks of work.  Once that happens, though, expect new comics and all sorts of fun stuff.

NEW SITES!

I now have websites for Here Lies Laika and King of Trees, my two musical side projects.  The King of Trees site is here: iamthekingoftrees.com, while the Here Lies Laika one is here: herelieslaika.com (and is not linked because I haven’t even started it yet!).  Expect awesome stuff to come from those sites very soon.

What about me?  Well I’ve got a blog coming up very soon about how I played hooky from work and got caught.  I am also working on a new EP, because I recently purchased an electric guitar and distortion pedal, and I’ve got three songs that kick ass and am working on more.  My love life is still dismal and I purchased the 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons books the other weekend.  So we can see where I’m headed.  Hopefully I pull my ostrich head out of the sand soon and check out the world.

I thank you all for reading and sticking around, though.  You’re all nice people.

Okay!  joshuabelville.com has been registered and is now awaiting a large transferral of files.  So here’s a quick breakdown of what going to happen with that website and with this one:

1. Most importantly, the “music” portion of this website will be transferred to jb.com.  That includes the 12 EP Project as well as my free, internet-only album How I Remember You.  All music stuff will be located in the music.joshuabelville.com directory, EXCEPT FOR the 12 EP Project, which will be located at 12eps.joshuabelville.com (just because it looks prettier than music.joshuabelville.com/12eps/)

2.  joshuabelville.com will contain two main portions: acting and music.  It is my “professional” website, while zornog.net/.com/.org (I registered them all!) is my “personal” website.  jb.com will contain my acting resume and photos and headshots, and an EPK (that’s electronic press kit, not a fancy new pregnancy test) for my music.

3.  zornog.net will containg my writing (prose, poetry, etc) and my blog, and Test Comic and other nonsensical/silly stuff that I do.
3a. Unless someone decides to write something soon, I am ENDING the Trifecta blog.  It seems redundant if I’m the only one writing.  Plus it should be its own website, if anything.

I think that’s it.  Essentially, jb.com will be a sleeker, simpler site and zornog.net will just contain all of the junk that I like to do.

I don’t expect this to be a quick process, but I do expect it to happen in fits and bursts, probably on weekends.  So don’t freak out if something suddenly moves or disappears — chances are it’s probably on the other site.

Okay!  Thanks for following along, I hope this isn’t too confusing, and I hope you enjoy joshuabelville.com (when it goes live).

Hi everyone!  My website hath been down for many moons.  Nothing serious — my domain name expired, that’s all.  GoDaddy was nice enough to let me know about this the day it expired, so that I had to scramble to find a way to renew.  See, the same day that my domain expired, I had gotten a new bank account here in Oregon, so I didn’t have a debit card.  I tried to use my temporary debit card but it wouldn’t work, so I was freaking out a bit.  And then I remembered that I could transfer money to my PayPal account … and that’s what caused the delay in renewing my domain, literally waiting for the “check to clear,” so to speak.  But it did this morning and so now the site is back up for another year!

Now I just gotta pay my webhost bill … which is a bit outlandish…

Anyway, I’m busy with work and the play, Test Comic will come back as soon as I get a chance to make some more, and you should all check out the 12 EP Project if you haven’t already.  I’ve gotten some nice responses but not as many as I’d like!  Go, download, listen and respond!

Now I’m off to work!

If you head over to my actual website (of which this is a part, technically), then you will notice that I have a mailing list and a twitter … thing. I decided to incorporate a mailing list because sometimes I don’t want to have to go through the myspace blog or the facebook note in order to get people’s attention about updates on my music or new shows or whatever. Plus I have a feeling that my family (especially the older ones who look at facebook like a monkey looks at a robot) will have an easier time reading a mailing list e-mail than churning through some social networking thing. So if you would like to be a part of that mailing list, then head over to my website and sign up. It’s through NotifyList.com, which is a nice basic (FREE) mailing list site.

I got onto Twitter because I thought if I ever was wrongly arrested by Egyptian police for anything, I could update my Twitter and get out of jail. That alone makes it a sound investment. So if you want to be my Twitter friend (that just sounds disgusting), then head over here and follow me or whatever it is you kids do these days.

Twitter truly is the creation of a generation of which I am not a part: the Google generation or whatever the fuck they’re calling them these days. Attention spans have dropped to the point where all kids need is 140 characters to write their life stories. Facebook lets you know about people instantly. Gone are they days of instrospective LiveJournal entries by skinny goth kids who write about how much it sucks being a suburban white boy; now, GothKid90 just jots “life sux” on his mobile phone and Twitter and Facebook send it off for all of his friends to see. Gone are the days where Alfred Hitchcock could get away with ten-minute long single takes (go watch Rope, it’s fantastic); now each scene is comprised of one hundred shots of a million different things, all of which detract from the plot.

Oh well. It’s hard to determine if this is a good thing or not, because I personally haven’t done any scientific studies comparing attention span and intellegence. My assumption is that having a short attention span does not mean you are smart, much in the same way that wearing glasses doesn’t mean you’re a nerd.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote Hocus Pocus entirely on scraps of paper, Post-It notes, napkins, etc. He was like Twitter 1.0.

On a side note, I started the mailing list because I got an e-mail from last.fm saying that their royalty program was in full effect, and I wanted to tell everyone to listen to my tracks on last.fm so that I could earn royalties for it, because that’s totally cool. So, uh, go do that.