Since I’ve been spamming this blog with the newly added comics from that era, it only made sense to try and transcribe it here to share with the rest of the world. Oh, and for the record she got an A+ on this report…

Where Fresh Is the Taste?

Miriam Rouziek

It’s the way a sandwich should be. Its where fresh is the taste. Its home to a possessed ice machine and the legendary “evil” parmesan topping. This is Subway, where the employees will always greet you with a smile (or at the very least a smirk) and your food is always fresh when you order it…mostly.

On this particular day, I was greeted by “Chuck,” a hockey-masked, machete-wielding employee. Chuck, of course, is actually Jason, a good friend of mine. He was making sandwiches as usual, but since today was Friday the 13th, he had gotten permission from the manager to dress up for the occasion. Most of the customers could care less that they were being served by Chuck, but a few of them stared and stayed on their side of the counter, instead of leaning over to look at the choice of veggies, like they usually would. According to Jason, one customer, upon seeing him dressed as “Chuck,” leaped back and muttered a phrase that would make your mother blush. “Its customers like that that make Friday the 13th and Halloween all the more enjoyable,” he told me. Apparently, Halloween had come early this year.

I sat down in the back of the store, hoping for a quiet place to just look around and take in the scenery. Instead, I found that it was not quiet at all. The ice machine, which is supposedly possessed, emits an annoying high-pitched whine and drops ice at random times of the day. When I went to investigate, all I heard was the whining of the machinery and the loud whirring of the fan blades above me. Maybe I just came at the wrong time of the day.

The only other employee in today was Bryce, a former Infantryman in the US Army. he’s being trained to close the store at night, a job that was offered to me a few weeks ago and that I politely declined.  Bryce is much quieter and less apt to dress up on days like today. He’s also quicker to scream “Go away!” when he sees people drive up to the store, whereas Jason simply grumbles and goes behind the counter to prepare for their orders. Today, though, there weren’t very many customers so Jason and Bryce simply took turns serving customers while I sat and watched.

Jason, dressed as Chuck, presents the customers with a (fake) severed foot and asks if they’d like a six-inch or a “foot” long. Some customers laugh, but others are too busy staring at the menu to notice. He cuts the bead as usual, unless the customer is especially “zombified,” as he puts it, in which case he pulls out a machette (cleaned and sanitized, of course) and “sacrifices” the sandwich to a random god or demon. “Once, a customer jumped back and screamed bloody murder,” he told me later. “Then he laughed and I finished making his sandwich.” Jason tells me that these are the customers that make dressing up for Halloween and Friday the 13th more enjoyable. I can’t imagine why.

Later on, I asked Jason to show me his infamous “Adventures of Chuck” comic strip. Chuck is seen going about rather ordinary tasts around the “Subs” store: closing the store, serving sandwiches, and making “evil” signs and sigils on the floor of the store. Many of the characters in the comic are a parody of other workers, such as “Angry” Teal (Bryce), the Sweeper (a parody of myself), and Rufus the Evil Manager (a conglomerate of all the managers the store has had since Jason has worked here.) The comic is fairly well thought out and has ganined fame amoung our circle of friends. “The scary part is, most of it is true,” Jason says. “Sometimes I don’t even have to make up the stories. I just write about what goes on here while I’m working.”

Since I’ve started coming here more often, I’ve noticed that the store is usually pretty empty unless a football game is going on at the high school across the street. Most of the customers are out-of-towners or regulars who are stopping by to get dinner on their way home from work. Jason describes the football games as “evil. We’re usually too busy to finish one sandwich before we’ve got customers ordering fifty more for the kids on the field or in the band.’ On a “normal” day, like today, there aren’t many customers coming in. They reminded me of sheep in the way they showed up-they saw one person in the store and suddenly remembered that they wanted a sandwich too. Soon, there would be a line of about five or six people waiting for sandwiches.

While Jason and Bryce busied themselves serving customers, I took the liberty of investigating the smell by the back door. It turned out to be the bathrooms. The back area isn’t much different from any other Subway, but it smells funny enough though its been cleaned twice already today. Of course, the smell isn’t coming from filthy bathrooms, its coming from the countless bits and pieces of food from sandwiches and bags of chips that have been brought into the bathrooms. No one knows why people take their food into the bathrooms. It’s a mystery better left unsolved. The back door itself has changed quite a bit. A few years ago, it was simply a steel door with a deadbolt lock in it. Now, it has about five locks and chains going up and down the left side. Jason tells me its because someone broke in one night last year.

Once the customers have been served, Jason and Bryce resume their seats at the table in the far back of the store. The topics range from everything from football games to the new breads, bad customers to bad haircuts and everything in between. Today, the conversation roamed from one about a particularly bad employee, to one about paperwork, and then one about the manager. Nothing escaped their conversation, not even the ice machine. Apparently the manager hadn’t cleaned the nozzles well enough so Jason had to clean them again. “It was just gross. I was wondering why everything tasted weird.” It’s a gross thought, but not at all uncommon in the fast food industry where there’s slime in everything, from ice machines to grease fryers.

Today, you see everything from pierced eyebrows to full-body tattoos in the workplace. You may not always see an employee wearing a hockey mask sacrifice your sandwich to some random demon (most likely made up on the spot). And you’ll probably never see what he has to clean up in the bathrooms when the store has been closed and the customers have all gone home, but then, why would you want to?

This is brought on by coming home from work, and reading over my backscroll (A backscroll for the uninformed is the buffer of events that is displayed on screen in my MU* client from the period I was inactive until I was active), to discover that we do in fact have a new player, and seemingly from the information in their character profile, fall within the “Pokémorph” category. This concerns me slightly, as from past experience, the community with these people are less then tolerable unless they are within their own element.

Coupled by the fact that they have stated in their character profile, they are of a species of Pokémon from the upcoming 5th generation of games, which hasn’t even been released yet. There has been no On-Screen proof of what this type of Pokémon is capable of, or where it will fall within the upcoming Power Scales of the yet to be released game. This kind of behavior worries me, as this could prove to be an issue in the future, especially if this new person starts doing things based on the fact that this new species of Pokémon hasn’t even been shown yet, so they are ‘assuming’ that it should get this or that. Some may wonder why I feel this warrants a rant, however, its because I can rant about it on this space, that I choose to do so.

As a general rule of thumb. I don’t like Furries and Pokémorphs at all. They generally cause more headaches then really ever needed or desired. Many Staffers of MU* games can attest to this fact, and unless they are within a game that is themed towards their specific niche, they will cause a lot of problems.

I tried the [I MAKE WEBPAGES] bandwagon for the longest time but it got me nowhere. Either someone would offer to get me hired onto a place and would take the job for themselves or I’d be ignored completely. I even voluntarily remade existing ‘auto-generated’ webpages for people in hopes they’d be impressed with my style and run with it to get my name out. Saddly this also didn’t get me far.

It wasn’t until the online gaming community TwistedMUCK (then ChronoMUCK) was created that anyone acknowledged the name as anything more than an over glorified email address. And shortly after that the Petting Zoo videos began. Now the name is tied to a rather vast number of projects and my solo efforts have umbrellaed out into a small number of people with like-minded goals and similar levels of sarcasm.

It’s funny looking back at the days when Marr0w was nothing more than an AOL screen name taken from my never finished comic books how the name once again means more than a title for one person alone. Back then my friend Bryce kept borrowing my account and the two of us started many a conversation with the same people having to go to vast efforts to make them realize that we had a similar mindset and where not the same person. That quite possibly could happen again at some point if I didn’t threaten bodily harm to the other members of Marr0w_Productions if they so much as hinted at it…

There was a point to this and it involved explaining why so many projects have come and gone since our outdated blog was replaced with this one, but in hindsight maybe it’s better to simply leave it at that. Maybe I’ll get around to making that point later as an excuse to post again.

“Alex” in this case is actually Aaron, whom you’d know here as Pheobus or Caliga, either way… AWESOME! Someone’s impressed enough to write about us!! I’m glad we’ve spent the past few days working on the exterior of the station instead of simply the inside… -_-;;

http://shinisl.blogspot.com/2010/04/space-destiny.html

Well, I’m not going to use it to rant. That’s what Livejournal is for however, and I’ll leave the rage over there.

What I -will- talk about here though is my seeming obsession with movies and books. And not just any old movies and books, but those that fall within my realm of intrest that were books turned “Hollywood” or vice versa.

All the rage right now is Vampires. Among the most forward Fan raised is The  Twilight Series. The 4 book series was written in 2005 – 2008. That’s a book per year. I’m not a fan of Ms.Meyer’s adaptation of Vampires, specifically the ‘Sparkle’ as I don’t see that being real to any level of Vampire folk lore. A friend on Facebook said that the only time Vampires should sparkle is when they step into the sun and explode. That’s as close as it should be. I’m not far off from agreeing with them.

However, aside from my utter distaste of that portion, I read the first book, then watched the 2008 Movie to compare. In my experiance a lot of book to movie sujects always loose something in the media translation. This is no less true for Twilight.

Book 1 : Twilight

The story over all is good, and I think it’s a decent read for someone in their early teens. I enjoyed it over all but I feel like it lacked something important. I don’t know what it was. I don’t have a major in English, I don’t study writing or how everyone says it should be done, but what I do have is an insatiable love of books. Mostly of the Sci-fi/Fiction/Fantasy genre, and my collection of books only serves to grow larger.

The characters are full through with simple desires and the courage to struggle through what is Teen Angst. While S.M. did a wonderful job of capturing the fight of what one should do and what one wants to do in that age group, it felt too constructed. You might say that because it’s a book, I’d get that feeling anyway. That’s  not true. David Eddings for example draws me in so deeply into his Belgariad and Mallorean series that I am left straining to know what they are doing and thinking, and how they are feeling. Meyer doesn’t get far enough into her charecters to make me feel like they are seperate from their writer.

Final thought: It’s a decent book, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it good. Perhaps the next 3 books will give me something more then what this one did.

The Movie: Twilight

Very well done I think, as far as filming goes. The characters however fail to impress upon me what Ms. Meyer wrote about them. In the book, she describes one of the Main Characters, Edward, as a very fluid emotional guy. She explained what he was doing that instantly portrays to my mind what she wanted him to do. The movie lacks that quality, although I’m not blaming the actor, perhaps only the Director.

They way they handled the action though was nice and felt as realistic as a story about these kinds of Vampires can feel. It seemed like a major part of the book was left out of the movie, although it was almost word for word from said book.

The girl who played Bella did very well; I really could understand the charecter from even just how she turned her head and looked at Edward in a few scenes. The only thing I failed to enjoy was the lack of Happiness emotion. Sure there was plenty of fear and nervousness, and a hint of “You kinda overpower me with your awesome sexiness,” but there wasn’t a part that I can remember where she really looked pleased with anything. Maybe it’s just me.

The guy who played Edward was visually appealing to the part, and pulled off a lot of the angst, but felt much less defined then he was in the book. This character defiantly lost something of his charm in translation. He wasn’t nearly as intruding as before, and I found myself quite a bit less attached to Edward.

Oh, the Cullen Family did marvelous, portraying exactly as they read. Alice specifically caught my attention as did Carlisle. I couldn’t really feel anything off with them.

Final Thought: A good movie, though not something I would strive to put on my Movie Rack.

Welcome to the new and improved Unfinished Projects blog. How new? How improved? Well, if the link still works take a look at:

http://marr0w2.servegame.com/blog/

I’d say this is a massive improvement. But then again I’m biased because I have my LJ-icons back. ^_^

This is ALSO one of those never-before-seen comics. I had to cut apart one of my sketchbooks to bring it to you!

Foreshadowing. I know Chuck becomes a serial killer. My videos on YouTube prove that. But how? What pushes him over the edge from sarcastic sandwich artist to psychotic, foul mouthed, killer? That’s the inevitable conclusion of this comic series and one I’ve never pushed the story towards until now really. This comic was especially dear to me because not only does it begin to bridge that gap, but it was an entry into the Gorillaz search for a star contest… which it failed to even place in. Oh well.

You read that right. It says posted 2004. It took me quite a while to get my head back together and I when thought I’d try my luck drawing again, well I did it with Chuck. The art style has somehow improved since the last 2001 comic, but they take longer for me to draw at this point. There was a whole comic book style plot planned out, with a few random half-sketches for it too… but this was the only page of it that was in a psudo-finished state.

Why are Sundays so bad? You haven’t seen the Church rush when they let out have you? It’s a NIGHTMARE. It takes the early-morning-zombies thing to a new extreme.