HACK HACK HACK

One more time for just-in-case:

IF YOU ARE ON AIM AND DECIDE TO SEND ME A LAUNDRY LIST OF MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR A SHOW I JUST TOLD YOU I HAVEN'T SEEN YET, IT IS GOING TO PISS ME OFF AND I AM GOING TO TELL YOU SO.

IF YOUR DIPLOMATIC RESPONSE TO THIS BEGINS WITH 'HAHAHA,' WELCOME TO THE LAND OF BLOCKED.

For fuck's sake. I'm starting to regret having made my AIM name public again.

In other news, I caught Jesse's plague and it knocked me on my ass. I've been doing a lot of sleeping today and just walking up the stairs tires me out. I'm also becoming intimately familiar with slightly bloody phlegm, which is a definite experience.

Lovely word, phlegm. Right up there with smegma, sputum and election.

Art Post

I posted a new sketch montage on DA this evening. Click for make big:

Death Fucking Sucks

Rain's brother Sam and his girlfriend lost their new baby. I can't begin to imagine what they're going through, but I bet it sucks a whole lot of ass. I will be going to the funeral if I can.

Damn.

Second Verse, Same as the First!

I just put in a table reservation for this year's Anime Detour. It's within an hour of here and there's no hotel fees to cut into my budget.

I woke up this morning feeling actually nostalgic for cons, and Animazement will coincide with my existing plans to go visit Rain in Asheville this summer. So that might be pretty efficient. Need to make a shit ton more buttons for it than I did last year, though. They were picked over long before Sunday morning.

There was snow on the ground for Thanksgiving this year. Only a dusting actually stuck, but it kept coming down for like 24 hours. I have high hopes about this winter. I have some evil plans for when the real snow comes. They involve a sled dog harness, some cross country skis, and a very confused pointer puppy.

Suddenly, Turkeys! Thousands of them!

Ganksthieving so busy. Belly so full. Updates so erratic.

Where the hell did November go?

Kingdom Hearts Is Fabulous

Beat Kingdom Hearts at last.

It only took me a year: 7 days to play the game and the other 358 to hack my way through all 9,000 permutations of the end boss. Golly but that was a lot of pee breaks!

But now it's over and I can say I made it through the game and at least now I have some idea as to why everyone's always like OMG SLASHETY SLASH since it first came out. That game was so homoerotic it should have been titled GAY TWINK HOMOSEXUALS IN THE KINGDOM OF FAGGY FAGGY GAYBUTTS.

I did notice that they threw in a few Tinker Bell panty-shots (and let's not even mention Kairi The Hydrocephalic Fish-Wife) for a bit of camouflage, but I was not fooled. No, not fooled at all. Who was Sora reaching for in longing and desperation while Utada Hikaru wailed about "the way that you make me feel tonight?"

...Yeah, EXACTLY.

That aside, I did enjoy the game even though I got lost every five seconds because I do not cope well with 3-D game environments. Walkthroughs are my bitch.

Paint The Little Drummer Boy Black

This rather horrible mashup of two vastly different songs appeared in my head this evening and has been stuck there ever since:

I see a red door and ba-rum-pum-pum-pum
I want to paint it black ba-rum-pum-pum-pum
No colors anymore ba-rum-pum-pum-pum
rum-pum-pum-pum
rum-pum-pum-pum
Want it to turn blaaaack...

At first it was funny but now it's driving me absolutely dogshit. The saddest thing is that it still beats the holiday muzak that probably spawned it by a country mile.

Two Adaptations

I watched Mazes and Monsters, hoping it would be as funny and stupid as the book. It ended up being just stupid, for the most part. It was about on par with Reefer Madness, which I didn't enjoy at all. I was able to fast forward through the boring shit in order to find out if the main character would be sucking any dick like he did in the book, but they cut that part out. That was the best part, too! (He flips out and thinks he's in a D&D game and gives a blowjob to a 'paladin' he meets in the streets of NYC, convinced it's part of his quest.)

That aside, they made a movie out of The Mist, and I'm totally looking forward to it. It's one of Stephen King's better stories, especially if you get the campy surround-sound radio-play audio version and listen to it in a dark room. Just the other day I was wishing they would, and now suddenly it's about to be in theatres. Heh.

Left wrist has deteriorated and is constantly braced. Typing is a real pain in the ass. On the bright side, I have hazelnuts and a nutcracker, and life is good.

HOLY FUCK WHAT THE CHRIST

OH GOD FUCK JESUS CHRIST NO

KILL ME NOW

THEY WILL FLY. THEY WILL BLOCK THE DAYLIGHT.

Someone called 'theirundertheground' left the best comment ever in response to an amateur unicorn sighting video:

"weather this film is real or not, does not create the truth. I can tell you that many things we have heard of in stories are true. Unicorns are real. Also there are Elves. We must be ready. The things that are real are scary. One day Earth will be attacked by hairy strong human like beings with wings. there hair is like sheep wool and covers everything but there face. They will fly. There will be so many they will block the daylight. They have no weapons they will kill us with there hands feet and mouths. They will keep coming from the sky. We will all die. They are very strong. The government knows. They will not tell us because there is nothing that can be done to save us."

You, sir, are made of win and awesome.

Checking In

Not much going on. Working on a project with a due date that's just a smidge closer than I'm comfy with, but it's my own damn fault for putting it off this long anyway.

Speaking of things that got put off, somebody told me they got an email some time ago explaining that the BUMP book is officially cancelled, with refund info for the people who pre-ordered it. I hadn't heard about this, but I'm not surprised.

Looks like I'll be coloring the 2004 Halloween comic and putting it out myself after all. I kind of look forward to it.

Last night i sat down with a ruler and a piece of paper and drew up a 24 hour shedule. Then I laminated it and used whiteboard markers to fill in tasks. I'm hoping it helps me manage my time a bit better. I live pretty much without clocks these days and I think the lack of structure is largely to blame for my decreased productivity and flailing. Hope it works.

This week I installed a cable in the backyard. It's about 30 feet long strung between two trees by eyelet screws, with a ten-foot lead hanging down from a pulley so the dog can run back and forth. I added some more line to extend his reach a bit. He still gets himself wound around trees like crazy so I have to make sure his collar is loose enough to slip off in case of emergencies while I'm inside the house.

Screwing in the eyelets fucked up my left wrist something fierce, so I'm bracing it again. My knee is a lot better. Aleve really helps me get through the day, and I can ride my bike and get Stupid his exercise if I'm careful not to pedal too hard.

He hates his headcollar SO much. I can barely help laughing at his misery. I took pity on him once and loosened the nose loop just a bit, and he went and pulled it down and chewed it clean through. He thought he had ruined the collar, but I just cut off the excess length of the neck strap and sewed it over the nose loop as a patch. He looked a bit crushed when I put the slightly deformed, lumpy patched loop back on his nose. Don't fuck with me, dawg :\

The Malt-o-Meal plant smells like a different type of cereal every time I go outside. Yesterday it went through like three flavors in an hour. I think one of them was chocolate.

art post

Long past time I tested out the Embed feature on DA:


Okage: Shadow Molestor by *AtomicFireball on deviantART

An Update on a Saturday? That's Un-Possible!

Two new pages are up this week!

In other news, I finished Okage: Shadow King last night and it was AWESOME. Best ending theme I've heard in a long long time, too. More on the game later, but for now I'm going crazy from Too Much Computer.

bork bork bork

ARGH. I messed up my knee again!

I think this time it started the exact same way--moving boxes. Then it popped a couple of times for unrelated reasons, and last night it started twinging. Since then it's gotten so stiff and sore I can't climb the fucking stairs properly. So I'm going to bed!

On the good side: I found the ongoing raffle tickets in the garage, and will be drawing the second and third names tonight. Hopefully this update will be finished and ready to post around the same time.

Art Post

I have posted the warm-up art for today! It is a horrible little cartoon titled Scrubs - Then And Now:



Spoilers obviously.

Magic's Pawn Drinking Game!

One drink when:

-Vanyel thinks, "Oh, gods!" in despair.
-Vanyel thinks, "No one cares about me."
-Vanyel cries. (Two if he cries himself to sleep).
-Vanyel has a nightmare. (CHUG if the resultant angst gets him laid).

Two drinks when:

-Two or more adults spend a mealtime talking about Vanyel.
-Somebody observes that Vanyel is broken inside. (These wounds, they will not heeeaaaal)
-Savil collects another gay male friend.
-Somebody's eyes change color according to mood.
-Somebody swoons.
-Vanyel has a prophetic dream about the climax of the third book.
-Every character in the story hovers anxiously around Vanyel's Bed of Pain, even those who dislike him and whose presence serves no function.
-Vanyel's "channels" are described as "raw" from having been "blasted open." (NUDGE NUDGE WINK WINK)

Three drinks when:

-Somebody has a magickal seizure.
-Somebody commits suicide.
-Somebody slits their wrists but is saved at the last minute.
-Vanyel's grief makes the castle shake.

Chug the rest of the can when:

-Vanyel gets his wizard on. (Add another drink for each Talent discovered beyond the usual one or two present in a Mage). **NOTE: You automatically lose the game if you pass out before the list is complete!**
-Vanyel's magic does NOT render him unconscious or emotionally devastated.
-Vanyel takes any decisive action.
-Any sympathetic character observes that Vanyel is not the center of their universe.

Haunted Raffle Over!

The Haunted Sketchbook Raffle has ended!

I spent today moving. Drove up to St. Paul and packed what little remained of my stuff and the bathroom/kitchen supplies that hadn't been grabbed before. I even grabbed the thirteen dollar parmesan cheese Seebs loves to occasionally place spaghetti noodles beneath. It was one of the few foods from the fridge that could be saved.

We kind of abandoned everything in there during the move and the smell gives this fact away. There is a half-full gallon jug of milk that probably won't slosh if you shake it (even more terrifying: it might taste okay due to the power of the atom).

My favorite tupperware container was full of sliced cabbage that stank up the entire neighborhood when I dumped it out. I found the word CROATOAN carved into some suspiciously furry rotisserie chicken just before I shut the door and began crying hysterically on the kitchen floor. Adventures!

When I got back home, I stuck my hand down the side of the easy chair in the living room to see if my iPod had slipped into it... and pulled out my missing camera! The crazy thing is, I had checked there quite early in the search and found nothing. All the files are intact and everything still works. I had to break the news to the formerly missing camera that, in my grief, I had found another to love. She took it pretty well for a piece of sensitive photography equipment that's just spent four weeks lodged under somebody's ass.

The other night I walked to the gym, hooked my dog to the front door, and worked out to my little heart's content with no one around to bother me. It was a long long walk along a busy highway, but this was pretty late at night.

I got the Captain a Gentle Leader headcollar with the last of my money. He hates it like the fires of hades, but I've never had more compliant and docile behavior out of a dog.

Within five minutes of leaving the house with the Captain in his headcollar, he was my bitch. This after three months of yanking his leash and darting into traffic and generally ignoring my every attempt to make him walk nice. I tried everything--treats, reinforcement with praise, commands, tugs on the leash, getting a different leash with variable lengths.

I did the thing where you stop every time the dog tries to pull (to remove the reward and teach him that pulling is pointless). No dice. I would refuse to move until he stopped acting out, and move on only to have it happen again five seconds later, then again and again and again for the next thirty minutes.

I even put a choke chain on him. That sort of slowed him down a bit and stopped him dashing into the street, but he was still borking my wrists up by yanking on them every time we left the house. If he saw a squirrel or a bird, forget the chain, it'd be a nonstop tug of war the entire way home because he was set on going back.

The worst part was stubbornly walking along with the leash at a set length while he dangled at my side. Was the leash too short? No, he just preferred to choke himself every two seconds rather than walk with me. Now, I'm all for a battle of the wills (because I always win those), but I know futility when I see it. So, the headcollar. At 25 bucks it was kind of a pricey experiment, but I was pretty much out of options and I'd read great stuff about the results. And oh my fucking god, it worked like a charm.

When he's not attempting to slide across the countryside on his face to get the damn thing off, he is walking calmly by my side with a loose leash. He still hasn't accepted this new restraint on his lifestyle, so left to his own devices he tends to paw at it frantically and then slump to the floor in a fog of ennui so complete he may die at any moment. But I just laugh. Oh, how I laugh.

Best of all, he's mellower. He barely notices the cars and trucks that used to send him bolting. My wrists feel amazing because all it takes is one short, mild pull and the little furry son of a bitch is doing EXACTLY what he's supposed to do, and that boils down to good times for him, because dogs LIVE to please their pack leaders and he's getting the idea that his current behavior is precisely what I want out of him.

I'm the one with the thumbs, baby. Do not fuck with me.

Scarlett Johansson is a Fatty Fatty Fat-Pants

CNN just lauded Scarlett Johanssen for her role in bravely shattering body image stereotypes and being a role model for big girls everywhere.

Way to reinforce a stereotype and make young girls paranoid by randomly singling out people who actually fit in rather well and patting them on the head for at least showing up. THE PRECEDING STATEMENT WAS CLEARLY WRITTEN BY TERRORISTS. IN TRUTH, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BACKHANDED COMPLIMENT AND OUR CULTURE IS TOTALLY HEALTHY.

It's always sad for me to see a reporter wax feminist and progressive while spreading the body-image distortion crap. At least they also gave screen time to actual sexy big girls like Tyra Banks and Jennifer Hudson, but c'mon!

Belation

Belated raffle results will be up tomorrow morning. Belated update sometime thereafter.

Meanwhile, here's some belated Halloween art!



Real life is neato. Or will be when I have time for it.

WHOOSH!

October 2007 Photo Post: Digest Edition!

Trying out the macro settings.


My dog on the roof outside my bedroom.


Neat fungus by the Cannon River.


This shot was almost discarded until I realized it wanted macroing.


The bustling metropolis of Northfield!


The bustling metropolis of Northfield, part deux!


My favorite autumn shot.


A nice view of the Cannon riverbank taken from Northfield's river walk, which leads to the dog park on one end and center of town on the other.


Rah found this little guy in the street.


Flooded park walk.


The dog park.


The Captain watches a much braver dog fetch a ball from the river.



The leaves on the tree that overhangs our yard turned the best shade of buttery yellow, which was charming until there was a windy night and the tree shat its entire load of foliage down over the yard I'd just raked a day before.


More leaf porn.


Another "testing out the macro" shot, included simply because SHIIIINY.


(Sorry to all you slow-modem types. I'd use a cut but Blogger doesn't work that way.)