As the time clicks by, we sit here toiling away on the last remnants of our independent study class. We have come far in these past few months. Much farther than we ever could have hoped for. I am quite pleased with our progress, although it has somewhat deviated slightly from our originally intended path. We do intend to start pumping comics out at a faster rate as soon as the summer months arrive and it finally settles in that we have graduated high school. We hope that our talents/abilities will grow as we plow through more and more content, such as comics, posts, clothing designs, and various machinima projects and podcasts. We will probably start advertising once we start to get into the habit of following a semi-decent comic schedule (at least one comic a week). Probably through the use of Google Ads and Project Wonderful.

With that being said, I think that there is much potential for what we may accomplish as long as our goals and motivations stay in the right place. We may even start another site design at the end of the year or at least a little after our work start to become more consistent and hopefully, maybe even a little traffic will regularly make its way toward us. The only traffic we have really received is from us and various other friends whom we have annoyed until they had finally crumpled and gave in, and thus making their way to our site. Everyone quite enjoys our work, but I guess since people tend to be forgetful, people who have already visited our site rarely make their way back regularly. Surprisingly, and yet quite disturbingly, the most traffic we have gotten wasn’t by word of mouth or by ads but in fact from Google searches on the term “Pokephilia” originating from an older post. God only knows what they were actually hoping to find.

In all honesty, I don’t know what to expect over the next few months to a year, but I think whatever happens will make or break us and quite possibly decide what the future of this website holds. All we can do is work as diligently as we can and hope to appease the masses as we spew random thoughts, gestures, and whatever else falls out. I’m kinda hoping that at some point we might be able to find a third person that we can use as our underling that will bring any sort of talents we might be lacking (such as common sense? dear God!) I think a third person would make things run a little bit smoother and provide a fresh new outlook on what we hope to accomplish.

Also i have been noting that with the release of the Apple IPad there are numerous challengers that are surfacing to meet the challenge of bringing the gap between desktops and mobile computers. Such devices include the Pandigital Novel, Dell Streak, HP Slate, Archos 9 Tablet, and the Que Pro Reader developed by plastic logic. Such devices are taking advantage of the lacking features that the IPad missed. But is it too late? Has the IPad’s niche already been carved in the upcoming tablet PC battle? If we aren’t careful we may experience a wave of mass produced tablets that will flood the market with more useless technology. All we can do now is to stand back and watch as the future unfolds.

With graduation coming closer, the money is flying as people are scrambling to get all of their parties set up filled with all sorts of food, beverages, deserts, and of course your Uncle Tom who always gets so drunk that he ends up punching out the 12 year old cousin, Billy, who he claims is cheating with his wife. As we all know, the end of the school season is here. Some of us are graduating high school finally (like me *thumbs up*) and hopefully making something of our meaningless and rather uneventful lives, while others may go on to accomplish great things, like inventing the world’s first rocket powered plunger/toothbrush. Others, well. . . we all know that you’re just going to end up on the corner of the street (interpret that as you may) doing various things for money. . . selling bagels, mayhaps? (I think not). And then, of course, there are all of those college graduates who actually believe they are going to change the world. You know, I think a spot just opened up next to the guy selling bagels: you might want to check that out!

You might be wondering why I didn’t bother to mention all the kids graduating from kindergarten . . . come on seriously!?

Music is the human soul conveyed in the language of sound. This artistic symbolism, through its many pathways–metal, rock, pop, electronic, country, classical, and many others–has inspired and driven billions of people throughout history. Its importance is expressed within itself and in other forms of media, through art, through literature, and through modern counterparts, including TV and the Internet. To truly grasp the impact it has had on society, one can pick a single, well-known song from each decade for the past decade and see how inspired it is, how it derives from the events of the time, and how inspiring it is. How many people have songs pulled into action?

Probably more than most people care to count.

Cameron and I are both advocates of music. It sickens me to see music programs taken out of schools, and it sickens me more when music banned. We both play guitar, and we both listen to music almost constantly. Music has inspired a great deal of our work, both past and present, and will continue to for the rest of our lives. In my streams, you’ll hear a constant… err…. stream of music. On occasion, you’ll even get to hear and watch me play guitar, awful as I am. What matters is that music is an inspiration for all Glabnak works, a motivator, an auditory stimulus seemingly designed to push our works to new levels of excellence.

Not say that our work is excellent.

I am disappointed that neither of us has really experimented in the craft of making music. I suppose this will change, when we have more free time. For now, though, we can only play what is there, or make things up at random. As a side note: would any of you be interested if Cameron or I recorded us playing and posted random snippets on here? I suppose I will anyway, regardless of the public interest, but if anyone has any thoughts on the matter…. well, there’s the comments section. We want to do something with that death-electronic idea we had a while ago, maybe something a little more clean and acoustic (though we both have awesome distortion and love showing it off). Who knows what we might come up with? I certainly don’t. I practice for hours every week, Cameron practices however long he does, but we don’t do anything with it. This annoys me slightly, and it frustrates me when I see others our age doing something with their talents. Of course, most of those people barely try to exert themselves, but is it better to do something crappy than to not do anything at all? A rhetorical question, readers, but one that may very well deserve an answer at some point in the future.

We don’t have any money to support this. What we have are a particular set of skills. Skills we’ve learned over many hundreds of hours of practice. Skills that make us a nightmare for people like you. These skills are… unrefined. We haven’t really tried to refine them; we simply play, and that hones them to dull points. However, someday this will surely change, and who knows? Glabnak might be the conduit through which our electric and eclectic skills will flow. Until then, readers, I bid you adieu. Find some good music.

I’ll leave you with a list of some things you might want to plug into that there Google.

• Animal Collective (experimental rock/electronic band)
• Animals as Leaders (solo instru-metal band, very excellent)
• Netherbird (releases all of their music for free, have a new album coming out on Saturday [Monument Black Colossal])
• Xenath
• Tesseract
• Devin Townsend (YOU SHOULD ALREADY BE LISTENING TO THIS GUY)
• Opeth (THESE GUYS, TOO, SERIOUSLY YOU PEOPLE SICKEN ME)

Slenderman. This being, born of a Something Awful thread on paranormal images, has sparked many offshoots and even has a fan base.

A horrified and paranoid fan base.

I did not come across the Slenderman myth until a month or so ago, stumbling upon a thread on the Zathyus Networks Resource forum about the YouTube series, Marble Hornets. This myth started out as nothing more than two simple images (this one and this one, respectively) started a terrifying meme that has left yours truly a bit afraid of the dark. I’m not afraid of saying that, but I sure am afraid of just about everything. Luckily, my baseless paranoia has calmed.

Slenderman is an unnaturally tall enigma, with no face, always wearing a black suit with that damned tie. He is a shape shifter. A teleporter. High Octane Nightmare Fuel. He is a killer. A mind-breaker. He can be anywhere and everywhere. He shifts through darkness, watches from afar, but take heed: if he approaches you, you are certainly doomed. He is sometimes accompanied by strange behavior, odd pictures, odd video clips, distorted audio, and, worst of all, companions, such as Marble Hornet’s masked man, also known as totheark. Do not ask me why he is so terrifying, this Internet-spawned face of evil. I do not know.

Marble Hornets recently came out with entry #26, turning it on a new course: confronting Slendy. I have a deep love and a deeper hatred for this series (the former because of its high production quality and intriguing story, the latter because it took away my security) and I would love something to come from this, either to continue recording documentary-style or to switch to a normal, cinematic style, following J as he goes to save Alex and his girl from the horror of Slenderman.

Eighteen days. This is how many in-school days remain for Cameron and I. Our publicly-funded educational journey (funded by the Tax Payers of America™, may it do ya) is almost over. Graduation is upon us. Our lives are beginning.

We have each come far in these last twelve years, though we have known each other for a short five. Since meeting, since becoming friends, we have accomplished little but gained many skills. I learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, becoming a self-proclaimed Webspert (though many would argue with me on this, I do have quite a bit of knowledge on these subjects). I have learned C++ (to a degree; I haven’t tried my hand at anything for quite some time) and PHP (allowing me to build this website, regardless of if it’s based on WordPress or no). I have learned how to use many different pieces of software: Photoshop, Paint.NET, Flash, After Effects (to a point), Premiere (to a point), InkScape, and many others. We both have learned how to play guitar fairly well, though we do nothing with it…. yet.

We gave both seen each other grow and develop in our own ways. I’ve seen Cameron’s art skills; he has talent! Though I have seen his skill dwindle quite a bit from lack of use. Let’s see if we can’t change that. We both have a general knack, as many do, for gaming; we are both fairly proficient at any game we get our hands on. Our views have changed and grew, our abilities have bloomed and developed, and Cameron has become more familiar with his sensitive side. I have become obsessed with furries (:3), but this really isn’t a recent thing. Whatever.

The shop is up! The forums are up! Now the only thing we need to do is advertise. We need to tell people about what we’re doing. We’ve got about $50 of AdWords credits from our hosting plan, and about $25 for Yahoo! ads. We will also do some general advertising on forums, telling people about our site first-hand and trying to get them to bookmark it (which you should!). We’ll make more comics. Animations? Maybe. Machinima? Well, we will eventually. We’ll make more shirt designs. Wallpapers. Tote bags. Wait. No. Not tote bags.

On a side note: invite your friends to the forum! It’s right there, sitting in the navigation bar, waiting for you (yes, you, not someone else, but just you, the reader) to go and discuss stuff on it. Do it! Yeah!