I've been spending a shit load of time at DeviatArt lately, to the point that I'm neglecting my blog even more than usual. One thing I've noticed a lot of people use is Livestream, to basically broadcast their desktop while they draw. This is, in my nerdy art-geek opinion, one of the coolest things ever. It's so cool that I even started doing it. The program is flash based, so naturally it's a bit unstable, but it does get the job done.

This causes some problems though. In order to get the word out past DeviantArt, I'm going to be forced to use twitter. It pains me to do so, but it must be done. I've gotten a lot of notice on DeviantArt as well, so it may be time to make one of those new-fangled facebook pages and whatnot.

No Myspace though; fuck Myspace.

Anyway, just so you can see what kind of stuff I work on, this is one better than average sample of what I work on in livestream. THis one is already about half colored, a large portion of which was done in a later broadcast.

I guess this means I need to get this site back up into better running shape, clean up some CSS, and se tup some proper links and widgets for the facebook/twitter/livestream bullshit.

This is my attempt to be 'too cool for all this social networking junk, but I'll join it anyway since all of you plebeians are on it' while trying to hide my starry eyed wonder at all this wicked cool technology. How am I doing?

Anyway, here are the new dorky links of note:

http://www.livestream.com/plognark

http://twitter.com/plognark

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Plognark/280296857134

Well, I got my entry completed for DJ Shwann's art contest on Deviantart. I found out about the contest late, and had to rush, so I got... well, let's just call it tunnel vision. That's what happens when your base image is five THOUSAND pixels wide an you can zoom in on a character's cuticle flaws. You lose sight of the big picture. For example, tits that looks like someone's rump.

Here's a before and after:

Really, wow, how did I miss that. I mean, the touch up isn't great, but the first 'set' really did look like the asscrack of a relatively hairless plumber all spilling out and causing nausea and mental anguish.

At least they're hairless, if they weren't I'd have much bigger problems.

Anyway, in my continuing attempts to not suck this has been a solid round of failure with a helping of introspection and humility to wash the bitterness and self loathing down.

Seriously though, they weren't even at the correct angle, they're all cockeyed and pointing the wrong way, as if she had a growth on her chest that was pressing them outwards and to her left. Like one of those cancer people with the hundred pound tumors. God damnit.

First drawing of 2010! Tried out a few new techniques with textures and brushes.

Some sort of cyborg critter...I figure it's a super alert tough alien slug critter that gets a complex forebrain, proper legs, and enhanced auditory sensors. It's got a keen sensory cluster to keep an eye out for aerial predators in its natural environment.

Yeah, this is the sort of stuff I make up when I'm bored at work.

This is a commission piece I did for a comic writer, AuraComics, on DeviantArt of her Original Character Enya beheading a Medusa. I really went overboard for a regular commission, but it was fun and I got to test out a bunch of new things and stretch my artistic muscles a little bit trying to make everything work.

Decided to go back to hand drawn lettering rather than a digital font. Takes the same amount of effort really, and for some reason all of the feedback I've gotten seems to indicate people like my sloppy handwriting. I don't quite get it, but I'll run with it :)

I'm still on my way to making Steamvolt into a standalone site, but I've got a few roadblocks regarding PHP and my motivation level as far as mangling code goes, so it'll probably have to wait till next year.

A while back I decided to ease off on political statements on my blog. People who go on and on about politics tend to look like real jerkoffs no matter what political affiliation they tend towards. A person's political extremity is directly proportional to how large of a douchebag they are.

However, sometimes politicians say things that are so mind numbingly stupid that I just can't let it go. These past few weeks are one prime example of political bullshit of epic proportions.

John Shimkus is, of course, a Republican, and made the following statement regarding man made global warming and the EPA ruling that CO2 is dangerous:

"Does EPA propose we stop breathing?"

...

So I know this will reach all of five people, but I feel I need to vent somewhere, and I refuse to spread anything political on Facebook or anything like that and be a total hypocrite, so I'll put it here where it's on my dime:

...

Shimkus, you fucking imbecile, this has to do with the carbon cycle. Breathing is part of the normal cycle. Digging up multiple trillions of tons fossilized carbon is not part of the normal cycle, you dumb disingenuous tool.

...

Naturally, some of the real bottom scrapers of the conservative movement (like Sarah Palin) think this is a great, catchy little statement. A hell of a lot of them are all up in arms over 'climategate', which is even less meaningful to Global Warming science than the Piltdown Man hoax was to Evolutionary Theory.

With all of this bullshit the Republican party sure looks like the anti-science party lately. Not that this is a new trend for them, but it's got no hope of being fixed with the current crop of science illiterate buffoons that have been elected.

I suppose I'll get some random spambots and angry responses to this; should be fun!

Yep, it's NEW COMPUTER TIEM!! YAY!!!

So, I do pretty much all of my artwork on my tablet now, and my desktop has been relegated to the purpose of gaming and web browsing, and maybe some other stuff now and then. Mostly, games.

Problem with this is that you can't play games if the computer is a piece of shit. Well, not new games anyway. So it was time for an upgrade; it's been about three years and change since my last update, and it was high time to get something that works and can do stuff again. My wife needed a new machine as well, since hers is a piece of crap even worse than what I've been using.

So I hopped on newegg and ordered up a whole truckload of parts to build our new computers, since doing it that way can save a person hundreds of dollars and ensure that you get the best parts available and that the manufacturers don't skimp and give you crappy memory or a junk motherboard.

This practice is fine, unless something comes in DOA.

Yep, sure enough, there was a dead motherboard in the batch.

For those of you who've never put your own computer together, it's hard to explain the unbelievable aggravation levels that can be created when something goes wrong. See, debugging failed computer parts can be a pretty mysterious process, and there are sharp pointy metal fins on every god damn thing you'll be working with. It's sort of like automotive maintenance, only it's nearly impossible to tell if something is damaged just by looking at it. And if something is obviously dead from looking at it you've probably had to disable your smoke alarm and open the windows to air out the evil purple smoke of electronic death from your living space.

I'm not a person who handles frustration well; at least not form machines. Like I've said before, I expect people to disappoint me horribly, but machines should bend to my will as a superior tool using mammal. (HAHA superior! LOL!!). If you've never been so frustrated that you find yourself doubled over, feebly pounding on the case while tears stream down your face, begging it to 'Just work!! for fucks' sake WHY WON'T YOU WOOORRRRRK!!!!' then you've obviously not been doing this long.

Anyway, this time was just like the last time, and the time before that, and I wasted many hours debugging hardware and swapping parts in and out and leaving bits of valuable flesh all over the sharp jagged projections of the computer case. The motherboard is still en route, so hopefully the replacement will work.

The good news is that my wife let me use the working one to play games and putz around, since I don't think she could possibly tolerate me moping and grumbling for the next week or so as I wait for the replacement part to ship.

Initially I went into this whole windows thing with a hint of optimism that I fully expected to have crushed and ground to dust beneath Bill Gates' vicious dream-crushing boot heel.

However... I have to say... it pretty much went smoothly.

Now, I put this copy on my tablet, since that's what I do all my art on, and that's what really needed a bit of a boost to get running more smoothly. As mentioned before, I was really hoping for the performance boost from a 64 bit OS, which, quit frankly, has materialized more or less as promised.

So it's taken me about two and a half days to get up to 100% functionality again. And a huge portion of that time (nearly a day) was spent with me trying to track down exotic tablet drivers (I had to use Vista 64 drivers to get some tablet buttons to work).

Two days to get a fresh OS installed and port all of my important files and get all the hardware and software I need working has got to be a record for me, as far as microsoft products go. Not just a small improvement; I think it used to take me weeks to get everything cobbled back together in the past.

The performance gain is huge as well. Granted, a big part of that may simply be from going to 64 bit from 32 bit, and using almost all 64 bit software now. That also let me use my full 4 gigs of RAM (rather than 3.12), so I can't really say how this would stack up against Vista 64 performance wise.

I also finally got around to plopping that new hard drive I bought way back when in this thing, giving me an extra 140 gigs to fill up with garbage. The new drive runs sort of hot though, which causes me a little concern, but so far so good.

I do have a few complaints though, so it's not all puppydogs and rainbows.

1. I want my old "Show Desktop" button back, you bastards! They moved the god damn thing to the right side of the screen with a tiny icon now, rather than the old left side one we're all used to. Of course, someone already wrote a utility to insert a little .exe that does the exact same thing, so it's sort of resolved, even though I shouldn't have to go through hoops to get it.
2. Let me pin what I want, god damnit. Pinning is a weird new sort of concept that I do like; it's sort of a merging of the old taskbar with the quick launch bar, and it's actually done fairly well and is *gasp* almost intuitive. For some reason Microsoft has seen fit to only let you pin links to .exe's though; you can't pin a folder or link or anything. This is dumb, in my opinion, although there are convoluted tweaks/hacks to get it to pin anything. They should just put in an option to allow users to pin whatever the hell they want, although I can see how non-savvy users might get completely befuddled by it. If they change this, this would actually resolve issue one.
3. I can't think of anything else right now. I feel that I should have more than two gripes, this being a Microsoft product and all, but that's all I've come up with so far. I guess that's a testament to Microsoft's efforts to get past the well deserved drubbing they got over Vista.

On some level I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for something to go catastrophically wrong, because Microsoft has conditioned me to have that Pavlovian response when working with their products, but so far, so good.

I think I'll wind up making a post about optimizing Photoshop CS4 for Windows 7, especially from a tablet/notebook perspective.

The image there is an evil Horgle Slug, some sort of space vermin I made up and drew today. Rainy days are nice, because I don't get any glare on my tablet screen when I'm drawing during lunch while chillin' in my pickup. Saw the new Star Trek last night, which was pretty damn good, so I'm in a sci-fi mood, rather than wacky fantasy like normal.

Well, I'm gonna take the plunge and get windows 7 for my tablet. I've been running Vista, which I got somewhat late in its life cycle, so I didn't have any of the issues that the early adopters did, but for some weird reason Fujitsu installed a 32 bit copy on this thing. I don't know why the hell they did that, given that it's got a pretty beefy 64 bit compatible core 2 duo, but whatever.

So after waiting a little bit, I haven't heard any real horror stories, and in fact, I've heard some pretty positive stuff about the performance of windows 7, so I was considering getting it. What tipped me over the edge was Photoshop CS4, because CS4 has some pretty interesting features I only recently learned about.

Now, CS4 had some little candy updates and perks they were promoting, but there's one feature that really made me happy: They resolved the 66.6% zoom issue. What the hell is that, you ask? Well, I'LL TELL YOU because I'm nice like that. See, when you do digital art, you zoom in a lot. Or at least, I do. The problem with photoshop is that when you zoom to odd values like 66.6% or 33.3% the image gets all chunky and pixelated. This is because they use some kind of crappy 'nearest neighbor' sampling system that makes the image look like garbage.

This has annoyed me for a hell of a long time, and actually has come close to pushing me into the Painter 11 user camp, and prompted me to try out other good programs like Sketchbook pro, artrage, SAI, etc. CS4 finally solved this issue by using OpenGL off of video cards to render the image. This is the same way your video card would render a video game. Pretty slick!

At first I wasn't sure my laptop could handle this, given that it's got an onboard intel chipset, but a few driver updates later and I got the sucker working. HAPPY DAY!

Now, in my research of all of this OpenGl craziness, I discovered that CS4 is also a 64 bit program, and that since I can't drop a video card into this thing, I can at least get an operating system that can use my full 4 gigs of DDR3 ram and take advantage of some nice code optimization that's come out. This may spur me to actually install my larger hard drive that's been sitting in a drawer too. I'd love to have another 300 gigs of storage or so on this rig.

So if all goes well, I'll have Windows 7 and CS4 later this week. I know that being optimistic in the face of anything Microsoft related is sheer folly, but I can't help but be a little eager and excited about a rather significant system upgrade.

In other news, I have also discovered that codecs are a pain in the ass. Anyone who looks at any amount of porn on the internet is going to find, sooner or later, that they need codecs to watch this junk. The problem with codecs is that they can completely botch up other functions, and slow your system down in the same way that too many active processes can.

Case in point: Against my better judgment, I picked up Fallout 3, because I just wanted to make sure I never ever have any free time ever again, and that my marriage falls apart due to my neurotic game obsession. The game is awesome, but it initially ran like shit on my system. This was disheartening, but I have OCD, so I couldn't just let it go.

So I finally dug up some forum posts about the fact that the Oblivion engine that Fallout 3 is based on does not work will with a codec called Vimeo. The one culprit turned out to be a sound codec that causes the game to hang for a few seconds every minute or so, getting progressively longer and longer after each hitch. There are few things more frustrating than being in a huge gun battle with super mutants and cannibalistic raiders and the game decides it needs a good fifteen second pause to sort its shit out. I found myself tense, waiting for the action to continue, hoping that muscle fatigue wouldn't cause me to screw up my aim and get my little game avatar shot to death.

So anyway, I got a utility to list and disable codecs, and now my entire desktop PC is running better and smoother. Not just Fallout 3, but pretty much everything. Figures, doesn't it?

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about watching too much internet porn.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Click the image for full size!

You can buy prints of it from Deviantart here!

Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year, and I'm usually too busy/lazy to make any art specifically for it, but this year... this year I have conquered my own apathy! Yay life!

I always figured that sitting on a broomstick would cut off blood flow to your extremities. Hell, you don't even have stirrups to lift your ass up and let the pins and needles go away.