New things happening at Mahamari.com!

A big thanks to everyone who came out to the Underachievers premiere screening last night and filled that auditorium! We really appreciate your support for the movie project, and it was a lot of fun to see everyone’s hard work come together and shown on the big screen. Underachievers was the product of the cooperation and toil of many dedicated volunteers, and it was a delight to meet and work with such a vibrant group (including the shy folks who were too bashful to come up on stage for the Q&A). I was a bit bummed that I didn’t get to meet the flashback sequence artist and animator Phillip Gedarovich who brought my comic panels to life for the movie’s comic book sequences, but thanks for doing a great job on those!

Though there’s still a tiny bit of final polish work to be done on the movie, the director believes it’s just about there and will be submitting it to film festivals soon, so I’ll probably post more about the project as I hear news. There will probably be more screenings in the future too, so if you weren’t able to make it to this one, you’ll have the opportunity to check out a future showing once everything is finalized. Thanks again for all the support!

If you’ve been here before, most likely you know that for the last nine months or so (that’s long enough to create a human being!), I’d been working with the director/producer and crew of the independent feature film Underachievers – The Champions of Mediocrity, creating the comic book art (and a couple related props) for the movie. The film is now scheduled to premiere on Saturday, March 6, 2010 at Santa Clara University, here in the California Bay Area.

Join us for the festivities! Most of us in the crew haven’t seen it yet either, so it’ll be really exciting to see how everything comes together. You can count on it being a laid-back and lighthearted evening: Underachievers is something of a romantic comedy about three dorky twenty-something guys, their girl and job problems, their struggles against their high-school nemesis, and their geeky escapes from reality. It’ll be fun.

Tickets can be purchased from EM West Productions for $11 apiece, or they can be picked up for $15 at the door. It’s all available on the ticket site, but for your convenience, here are some more details of the event!

Underachievers Premiere Screening

Date: March 6th, 2010
Time: 6:15pm – 10:00pm (the website says 10:30pm, but it should be 10pm)
Location: Recital Hall – Santa Clara University (located in the Music & Dance Building) | 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA
SCU Campus Map
Ticket Price: $11 prepaid or $15 at the door

6:15 – 6:35pm Doors open for seating (please check in; first come, first serve seating)
6:40 – 7:15pm Year in review & pre-screening entertainment
7:20 – 9:00pm Underachievers – The Champions of Mediocrity screening
9:10 – 9:40pm Behind the scenes and Q&A Session

I’ve been informed that tickets will not be shipped. Instead, please bring your Paypal receipt as proof of purchase. Thanks, and we hope to see you there!

After a little bit of waffling, I decided that I’d try out WordPress for my website announcement and blogging needs. I’ve been loyal to Blogger for a good decade or so, and I’m not dissatisfied, but WordPress’ customization options appeal to me, and I’d like to give them a try. Besides, I like the idea of installing the software on my own server and being able to kind of poke around in it at will. ;) I love Open Source.

Anyway, trying out new things is fun! I’ve been looking into interesting and user-friendly ways to build our upcoming design firm and gift boutique websites, so it’s a great time to be experimenting with this stuff. (If those two items sound mysterious to you, don’t worry – both projects are still somewhat under wraps, and I’ll keep you posted!)

Wow, it’s already December! Time really passes by. It’s been maybe one of the most stressful years I’ve seen in a while, but it’s been a productive one regardless. My work on the independent film Underachievers is now mostly complete, and the movie is slotted to premiere in March 2010. I’ll post more on that as the date nears (and as allowed).

Anyway, thanks very much for visiting, and I hope you all enjoy a warm and safe holiday season! Elris (my poor neglected site mascot from ages past) gives you her best wishes, too:

I’m looking forward to 2010. Here’s to a great new year!

My update and doodle posts will now appear on my website automatically as an HTML-parsed RSS feed! You’re welcome to subscribe to my posts using the handy little orange RSS button at Mahamari.com. You can expect doodles and other creative news to show up here in the future.

After a bit of poking around in the PHP script, I finally managed to massage the RSS parser into doing what I wanted it to do. It might seem like a small victory to get a little blog feed to display on a website front page, but it was slightly complicated to track down the problem. It ended up that the glitches were caused by my hosting service’s specific PHP settings, so it took me something like a week to track down the problem and write up a little patch to fix the problem.

Anyway, it’s fixed now!

There’s at least one known issue with the current website, though: it currently doesn’t display correctly on IE7. Sorry about that, folks – I don’t have IE7 on my machine, so I couldn’t test it. I finally made the switch from HTML table formatting to a more up-to-date all-CSS approach, so something probably isn’t supported properly in IE7. I’ve tested the site on IE8 and recent versions of Firefox, though, and it displays properly on those browsers.

Welcome to the new website, Mahamari.com v7! I’m still in the process of coding a few things for the site, but I’m putting it up early because (as far as I know) except for this dynamic news/blog thing I’m still working on that will go here, it’s all set to go! Thanks for your patience, and thanks for visiting! Feel free to shoot me a note if you notice anything wonky during your stay – thanks!