Nate Beaty’s Journal

Way back in 1999, in the midst of my 5-year computer hiatus, I mocked internet and television with this gem in the first issue of Brainfag:

Twelve years later, not only is the concept not as far fetched as it was when people still had 20” TVs with knobs and 15-lb cathode-ray computer monitors, I live it every day:

Poor Blog. Are you feeling old? Left behind? Still mumbling scathing invectives about Facebook and Twitter between gritted, coffee-and-cigarette-stained teeth? Still threatening to end it all, nobody cares anyway, what’s the point, anything beyond 140 characters or 2 minutes old is nothing but digital dust?

Don’t worry, you have one use left. A parking garage for aging, disparate bits and belches! Don’t cry, Blog. Here, read this to the people:

I drew a 11-page comic about my breakdancing days for the KIDS anthology. I’m pretty sure this is the funnest thing I’ve ever drawn. During the writing & inking, I spent a week watching ’80s breakdancing movies and only listened to the Breakin’ and Beat Street soundtracks and random hip hop dj sets recorded on the radio 25 years ago.

Click image and Blog will show the story bigger to your eyeballs:

Here are some random illustration jobs and jubilations:

T-shirt for my pal Alex’s birthday. Funny once you realize that “philately” is pronounced “phil-late-uh-lee”, which took me about 3 months to learn after drawing it.

This is a Japanese dragon, with three claws, for the great Free Comic Book Day kid’s activity book, Dragons!, put out by Tugboat Press.

I inexplicably drew a penis on Lisa Hanawalt’s girl dog, Indy.

Urging my overbearded buddy Alec to finish Basewood postehaste.

I put together a website for my cousin Johnelle’s furniture and french funk boutique in Berkeley, mignonnedecor.com

.. along with a site for her awesomemom Kimberlee’s boutique, located in beautiful Brantome, France, thebohemians.fr

This is the year for weddings! My longtime friend Scott was among the newlies, and I designed and printed the invitation for him and Cat:

Once again, click image and Blog will show all the invitation pages, bigger to your eyeballs:

While in Portland, I also renewed my passion for an old flame of 20th century technology: film. Jake and I roamed around shooting photos of Bongmobiles and water towers which he developed over beers. Upon returning home, I developed, scanned and uploaded an annoyingly large number of photos to my flickr. Here’s a small sampling:

There’s more as I’ve actually been quite busy despite the silence. But I’ll let you rest, Blog. You’re wheezing so hard, I’m afraid you’re going to keel over. Rest. More soon.

The X-Files aired just as I was entering my extreme luddite phase, dropping out of computer science classes and heading for the woods. Now that I’ve settled into my mid-30s eating snacks and staring at a constant streaming Netflix connection, I’ve started catching up with the adventures of scintillating Scully and melancholic Mulder. It’s a pretty consistently great show. There are definitely some turds (I’m only up to season 5 so far), but I’m regularly impressed by the level of writing and production values. Great show. Worth the hype.

One of my favorite elements, besides scenes of Mulder crying, is when Scully has to run. She really moves, and it cracks me up every time. I figured there must be a collection of scenes of her running somewhere on the net, but alas, I’m going to have create my own.

From season 4, episode 24: Gethsemane.

Sidenote, Gillian Anderson and I share a personal quote: “When I think of normal, I think of mediocrity, and mediocrity scares the fuck out of me!”