Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

As far as I can tell (my childhood memories are spotty at best), I've always loved Halloween. The October celebration of ghosts and goblins and high-fructose corn syrup touched something deep inside my evil little heart, as you can see in the photo above, where I proudly display both a cornucopia of seasonal items and my finest Gecko Hawaii shirt. In the spirit of the season, I have taken the liberty of scanning and collecting some old photos of these early Halloweens to share with you. It's like peeking into your trick-or-treat bag at the end of the night...let's see what we've got! This photo is the earliest one I could find. I'm wearing a dinosaur onesie that my mom sewed based on a pattern she purchased at Michael's. I'm also apparently camera shy, or perhaps weeping. Equally likely, I suppose. Oh, and one note: most of these scans are from old Polaroids that survived a house fire and a closet flooding, so if they're washed out and/or ashy,

         I awaken with a simple desire: to pick up where I left off in Final Fantasy III . I am finally getting around to playing the game, two years after its initial release, in the fallow period before I get my Nintendo 64 for Christmas. I am borrowing my friend's copy, as well as a gargantuan strategy guide he has downloaded from the primordial internet that is approximately the size of the FBI's file on the John F. Kennedy assassination. These few late autumn days off from school give me the precious time I need to take on this adventure that some say lasts upwards of a hundred hours. I have spent the last several wandering back and forth through a small patch of forest fighting dinosaurs.      I'm still adjusting to my environment. Just a few months ago, my family moved on up from our mobile home of ten years to a two-story townhouse on the other side of the city. Though I'm still rather annoyed that we never went back to retrieve the rest of my belongings as

There was a time when all I wanted to do was write for television. Not local access television (I checked that off the list long ago, and wrote a four part series of articles on this very blog about it), but actual commercial television. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember-I have crudely illustrated stories about Godzilla from when I was eight years old to prove it-and being able to create something that would air nationwide, and having a budget with which to produce this, was an extremely tantalizing prospect. I even went so far as to write an official “Steel & Marsilio” pilot in case I managed to make some inroads with Comedy Central or some such thing. In order to progress with this goal, I moved to Los Angeles, one of the great epicenters of television production. This move was ill-fated from the beginning. I had been unemployed for a few months before I moved, and assumed I would be able to find a job in L.A. before my money ran out. Not a television jo