Captains Log...Stardate 234.14...what is this? Mayan?

We've got our dishwasher back up, but our engineers tell us it will be two more weeks without the washer. I may have to break down and ask someone to invert the polarity and make a warp bubble. Or something. Augh. Hope life support holds out, as the summer weather is over 100F on a regular basis.

So July (WTF happened to June?) has arrived and I've seen most of the major movies I've been looking forward to. I think about the only two left on my radar is the next Harry Potter film (still miss it's releases around Christmas) and District Nine. So far, things haven't played out exactly like I thought.

Spoilers, speaking in tongues and nonsense behind the cut. ( Read more... )

Land of the Free

Happy Fourth all! To my overseas friends...just take it as an excuse to get a drink.:)

As told by the victim, Mark Waid. Story is halfway down the page (in italics) in the middle of this Quesada interview. Stay the *&^% out of Vermont.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=21852

Captain's Log code 1, 1a, 2b..no wait...computer, cancel destruct sequence. *&^%$#! I always get those two mixed up.

I underestimated our enemy (Picard was right, they were waiting in the freezer masquerading as bratwurst) and as a result we took heavy damage. We lost both our dishwasher and our clothes washer. We needed to retreat to the NCC Dreadnaught to keep our laundry piles down and to prevent me from showing up at work in Renfaire & Club clothing. The new Destroyer BMW-135 Prime has since newly arrived on the scene to aid in cover as I shuttle out pockets of resistance. The engineering and repair team should be here on Friday so we can go faster than impulse. As it is, it's just communications and life support.

The Stuff mocks us as our laundry and dish piles grow. THE LINE MUST BE DRAWN HERE!

Not "The Stuff" which is the yogurt goo from that awful 80s movie, but clutter. Despite Sunday being one of those get-out-of-the-wrong-side-of-bed-and-off-a-cliff sort of days, there has been significant progress and much things tossed out. Most of it is paper. Some of it is things that need to be filed and stored such as the paperwork for our house, but there is also things like old utility bills from our last department. I also went through the art supply drawers which were suffering from let-just-cram-random-crap-in-there syndrome.

Stage one went thusly: Yank everything out of the closets. That way you have a place to store the sorted stuff when you're done. Clutter was sorted into boxes. Paper went in two designated boxes, and "objects" went in another. Some minor closet improvements were done. Same thing went for my workbench/desk drawers. During all this, things that were obviously trash were thrown out. Bags were started for thrift shops, Salvation army, and Half-Price books. In fact, I made a run to Half-Price with two bags. occamsnailfile recommends giving books to the local library instead of Half-Price. I may consider this for the future. I haven't in the past due to liking the pocket change in exchange for the dead trees. And, I also had bad experiences with my hometown's libraries (one public, one college) giving you attitude when you tried. It was rather like the Dunkin Donuts experience we had in Boston when we went through the drive-through at 11pm and asked for donuts. The reply: "Donuts? Uh...we have sandwiches."

Stage two will involve sorting what's in the boxes. I know. This is all exciting and you're on the edge of your seats. But it's very cleansing. Mom tells me that there is a Chinese saying that if you want to change your life throw out eight things. (I have the feeling the saying is one of those that if quoted to an actual person of Chinese heritage, they'd look at you and go "What?") But, if you change when you throw out eight things, then at this rate I'm going to evolve.:P

Excerpt below. Article here: http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2009/06/17/latest-femmenerd-snubs/

"Charlie Jane Anders (again) rounds up the two most recent clueless dissings of female genre fans. In the first, as Johanna reported, the huge, Fox-owned gaming site IGN ran a contest for a trip to Comic-Con that was originally only open to

males who are both legal residents of the fifty (50) United States and Washington D.C. and who are at least between 18-24 years of age as of July 23, 2009


Well, this spawned a bit of hue and cry. As some pointed out, this was not just a “lucky winner gets a ticket” contest but “the lucky winner gets to be IGN’s lucky guest blogger/video talent/reporter."

“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”

O'Sensei (founder of Aikido) believed in something similiar. He would visualize hacking away the negative while doing sword drills.

Wraith as in Stargate Atlantis, infamous for "culling" their food source (people.) They also have nifty leather trenchcoats.

I'm going through a massive cleaning "enough is enough" binge. My background is Half-pack Rat, half Wraith. My Dad kept everything and the kitchen sink, and Mom goes through and throws out anything that isn't nailed down or on fire. The result is that I keep everything up to a point and then I explode and ruthlessly go through everything. It does go into a boiling point into where I get enraged and start reciting Picard's "The line is drawn here!" anti-Borg speech in First Contact.

As a result, CHOW (Character of the Week participation)is on hold until the culling stops. This is not (as nachtwrym would say) a great tragedy of our times as I am taking a course in designing video game art at The Gemini School next month. In the meantime, I've got things and more things in boxes. Paperwork is being gone through and organized. Artwork and Sketches are FINALLY being categorized and boxed away where I can find them. All the Al stuff is FINALLY being rounded up. In fact, I found some stuff that I hadn't seen in eons that can be useful today. And I finally found a schematic that I had been looking for in about ten years. And I've got a start for all my art references that I have been collecting since er, birth. Ten years with two moves is not condusive to good recordkeeping.:)

But it seems like I've got a constantly generating bag of stuffs for Goodwill, Buffalo Exchange, and Half-Price Books.

Wow. Twenty years of Project A-kon. For me personally, it's been seventeen years of anime mayhem. This year was planned to be relax-o-con as I no longer feel the need to wake up early and try to not to miss anything. Instead, it was wake up at noon and stay up until the wee hours. Epic success. No photos from me yet, but here are tons of galleries of folks running around in costume here:

http://www.a-kon.com/bm/News/its-the-a-kon-20-photo-galleries.shtml

More detail of my experience after the cut.... ( Read more... )

Fwoom (pt. 2)

Back from Project A-kon! Currently playing catch-up.

I was doing my usual chit-chat with one of my favorite local coffee shops and kinda stumbled upon having my work shown there in October. I'm thinking of entering my character work, which is an unusual theme compared to the fine art abstract offerings you usually see. If it goes well, I thought it might be fun to just run with the coffee shop theme and make a tour of all the places in town.:)

At the moment though, no more artwork until a few weeks after Akon. June Al will be due when I get back.

Taking the adage of getting back on the horse after getting bucked off, I did another Character-of-the-Week. In the process I found out a possible reason of why The Green Fairy didn't make voting. There was a new rule implemented that WIPs (Work in Progress) be included with the entry. This is to facilitate both sharing processes and to ensure that no pre-done work gets shoehorned into the forum challenge. This piece did make voting and people will be looking at it this week.

This week was "The Outlaw". It took about an hour less than The Green Fairy. It's also different in technique as I did a full pencil drawing traditionally before taking it into the computer. Picture and description behind the cut. ( Read more... )

Unfortunately, my entry into last week's CHOW didn't even make it to the finals for voting. Naturally this was met with dinosaur-like sounds and mixed feelings. It's still a success as proof of concept that I can whip up something within that time frame. But still, I wasn't expecting that.

My iMac started acting strangely in booting into a blank screen and holding. It would require some tricks and resetting to get it to boot. It seems to have gotten over it but it seems time to just zero it out and start over. That and the drive isn't formatted GUID, so it couldn't boot it off of a recent Leopard disk. When I got it, it had Tiger installed and came with a Leopard upgrade disk, so it was formatted Apple Partition Map. My FW drive (dual-partitioned as Rosencrantz and Gildenstern respectively) was setup from that computer, so it also wasn't GUID. This means I could start over by installing Tiger then Leopard then all the way to 10.5.7 or I could take my FW drive to work and create a real solution by partitioning it properly and then put a system on it so I can both boot and rebuild off of it. But I felt like my evening was wasted during this whole event.

Tried brainstorming some ideas for my hobby website while backing up stuff and diagnosing...still dead ends.

Grawr! I say.

My entry in ConceptArt's "Character of the Week" Challenge. The subject was "The Green Fairy" aka the personification of absinthe. I had a clear idea, but actually didn't start until Wednesday for the original sketch. Kept a log of how much time I spent each session. This took 14 1/2 hours. Hope voting goes well. I'll keep my fingers crossed. Picture after the cut. ( Read more... )