Spontaneous Friend On the way over I thought about another time I'd gone to visit him. It was nearly thirty below and there I was walking through the biting wind to say hello. This time, it was nearly 11 and he'd just told me he was in town overnight. Years earlier, he was on stage with The Subterraneans and blew a string on his bass. He didn't have any spares and there were no other bass guitars around, so I drove home to get mine. Another night, I was supposed to meet some people I didn't necessarily want to be alone with, so I dropped in and picked him up on the way. And yet still, he once called me at six with a free ticket to Nine Inch Nails at seven. The seats were only several rows back from the stage.

It's nice to have a spontaneous friend.  ¶ 7:18 PM

  Untidy She came over one night, upset. I rushed around the room tidying up my things, nervous and frantic. My living room was a mess. Still. I meant to clean the day before but never did, distracted by something that took an entire evening. I had no idea what was going to happen that night, only she did.

I had come into new thinking recently. Nights were often filled with distractions, not with her. Maybe her presence wasn't wanted then, maybe I just didn't know what sort of presence I wanted. Maybe.

When she told me she was really leaving that night, I did not want her to go. I could not confess to myself that my mind had been wandering for some time. Distracted. My room was so cluttered then.  ¶ 4:53 PM

  Programming Languages My first exposure to programming languages was at Peter's home. He showed me something he made in QBASIC where you guessed a random number that the computer generated. The game itself was uninteresting, but when he showed me how he'd made it I was fascinated. I could do that. So I taught myself using the help menu. It was tedious progress on an old Pentium 386, but this was long before internet and instructional books.

Years later, my family got a modem, and soon after, my friend Dale introduced me to mIRC. The interesting thing about mIRC was that you could develop your own scripts, and since the language was similar to what I already knew, I was immediately fascinated. Once again, using help menus and examples, I programmed several different scripts, including a bot that people could play various games with. Soon after that, I learned how to program in HTML, once again self-taught, and made a few simple web sites, like this one and this one.

I'm not sure how I came about learning PHP and MySQL, but most likely it was as a result of talking to Rob. (Rob runs Logical Hosting, which I recommend to anyone looking for domains.) They were fairly simple languages to learn, albeit much more powerful, and there were a few peculiarities to the languages that made my self-instruction more difficult than it had to be. Then, as of a week ago, I've been learning CSS. Yes, on my own.

Ahh, the story of one geek's progress.  ¶ 10:02 AM

  BEAM Comics I can't recall if it was Eric's idea or my own, but around the same time we started making our own comics. It was Eric, at any rate, that took it most seriously, and I remember this because he was the first to use blank instead of lined paper, the first to ink over his pencils, first to go through and colour each and every panel by hand.

Around 1993, I'd been doing a comic called The Rubber Bandit and another called Batsquirrel, and Eric was doing a comic called Silver Squadron. I ended up doing a spin-off called Silver Squadron Chronicles, which remains somewhere completely written and mostly drawn. At the time, this was the closest we'd been to working together, until the following year when we created a comic called Mutaman for an Environmental Studies project. We were allowed access to the photocopier in the staff room to make copies for the entire class, and found ourselves in a geeky form of heaven.

In 1995, Eric and I walked to the Reddi-Mart at lunch. While walking, we came up with an idea for a comic that turned into Cireekim: Alien Parasite. The story was poorly conceived but we managed to run it out to three issues. After each issue we would go to the staff room and use the extracurricular Art Club as an excuse to go wild on printing. We sold them to friends and to teachers and anyone that would buy them. And that's how we became publishers.

We called our company BEAM Comics, which stands for the Best of Eric and Michael. It might have been a naive name though, because the best is yet to come. Yes, I'm ending this on a cliché.

(Incidentally, the fourth and final issue of Cireekim is still unfinished. Eric's half of the book is all written, drawn, and inked. My segment is mostly done; several pages aren't completely lettered and inked, but it's mostly done. I swear.)  ¶ 5:32 PM