plognark's blog

*Apologies for no art on this yet; I'll get some soon, I promise! [/lame excuse]

I know I've been doing a lot of triple-topic blog entries, but this one entry is going to be alllll about this: Phil Plait at TAM 8: Don't be a Dick. The linked video is about half an hour long, so it might be a bit much for people with precious free time. It took me almost three days to finally get the time to sit down and watch/listen to it. This is a topic that I'm keenly interested in though, right up there with comics, video games, and boobs.

I'm an atheist. I don't really make any secret about it, but it's not something I wear on my sleeve. It's only a portion of my personal identity, I guess. I used to be really, really active on atheist and skeptical message boards. Part of it was started from being stuck in a craptastic cubicle job working for a horrible company, so to kill time I trawled the internet. People naturally want to find like minded people, what with us being social creatures and all. But that can be kind of rough when you're in a minority of any sort, whether racial, political, or religious. Religious folks (Like ~85% of America) tend to react sort of negatively to atheists, so most of us keep it on the down low. I didn't really know any other atheists in real life, so I was delighted to find a vibrant, active online community of non-believers to hang out and chat with.

I'm not really a confrontational guy, but the anonymity of the internet is a nice little insulating blanket against the discomfort of getting into someone's face for real. It made it really easy to just completely rip into people with different world views than my own. So that's what I did. Bored at work? Let's go yell at some young earth creationists on IIDB. Waiting for the business analysts to find their ass with both hands? Lets go rile up those homeopaths and psychic frauds. It wasn't that hard; I didn't even have to go and crash other forums, there were plenty of creationists or pseudo-science devotees coming to our little atheist forum to dump shit on our heads for the exact same reason that I took the time to engage them. I suppose we can take from this that there are a hell of a lot of people stuck in shitty jobs with internet access and time to kill...

Anyway, this went on for a good five years. I got really involved. I started researching stuff just to win arguments. Hell, I got so involved that I actually started doing a skeptic and atheist themed comic called Fundyville. That's pretty fucking involved, I think.

It didn't last all that long though. Mostly because the comics were laughably horrible, but there was something else lurking beneath the surface there... an uneasiness... an unsettling discomfort with the whole concept. It took me years to figure out why I couldn't get into it and commit to the whole atheist themed thing... But I did finally figure it out; one day it just dawned on me:

*pause for dramatic effect*

I was an asshole.

Or, in Phil Plait's more civil-conversation-acceptable terms, a dick. A real raging, confrontational dick.

There aren't too many principals I live my life based on, but I've got some really big high level ones that do me pretty well. One of those is this: try not to be an asshole. It's a little like Bill and Ted's 'Be excellent to each other' only with a sharper point on the end. This is one of the reasons I don't have political or philosophical bumper stickers on my truck. I'm not looking to shove my beliefs (or lack thereof) into anyone's face. If you have that kind of bumper sticker on your car, you're probably a dick, just a little fyi.

At the same time, you don't want to be a total pussy and let people walk all over you. It's ok to be an asshole to people who are assholes first, or to people who are complete shitheads, but try not to be the one to start it. And most importantly, know when to quit. On the internet, it's a lot harder to figure this out. It's real easy to sit back, sip your latte, and just unleash a scathing vomitous heap of bile and hate onto some unknown douchebag on a web forum.

But the internet isn't real life. When you have to sit down, look a person in the eyes, and have a conversation or discuss some heavy topic, it's a whole different experience.

And I think a lot of people are losing sight of that. There's been a gradual blurring of the wild-west "go fuck yourself" mentality of the internet with real life discussions. What I'm saying is that a lot of us are turning into assholes. Real insufferable pricks.

By 'us' I mean people in general, not just atheists. Take a look at any news broadcast and look at the mind numbingly retarded rhetoric that they're filled with now. Look at blogs, facebook, twitter, all that shit. People just spew out the first angry thing that comes to mind. And now that people can do this from their smart phones it's getting even worse, because we don't even have a few minutes to calmly and rationally think about what kind of idiocy we're about to share with the world. People are just venting their spleen for the world to pick through.

But it doesn't do one fucking bit of good. I guess if you want to get people who think like you to buy your shitty merchandise it's effective... but as far as actually advancing any sort of agenda it's about as good as poking people in the eye with a sharp stick: "BELIEVE AS I DO, FUCKERS!!" *poke*

So, about three years ago I kind of gave up on atheist forums. I hung out at a sort of goofy non-serious 4-chan /b style ranting site for a bit, but even that got boring. This isn't to say that I gave up on my opinions or became less skeptical; just the opposite in fact. What changed was that I just didn't see the point of back and forth dick waving with young earth creationists anymore. Did it help anyone? Nope. Hell, I even tried to convince myself that I battled 'for the lurkers'... those anonymous non-participants who were desperately seeking solid, concrete refutations of irrational beliefs. But really, I was just fucking with people I didn't like and venting my frustration in the most hateful way possible.

Which brings me back to the video I linked above. Phil Plait pretty much nailed it with his talk. When you act like a confrontational dick, you turn people off. They become entrenched, and you lose the ability to get through to them. I can't tell you how many times I got into a written pissing contest with some pseudo-science devotee just to score cheap points against them or wait for that one "gotcha!" moment when they'd slip up and say something idiotic or hateful. And they did the same thing to me in return. In the end, we accomplished nothing. Not one damn useful thing. They didn't do a thing to make me understand their perspective, and I know I certainly didn't help them see mine. And as for the 'lurkers' I mentioned? I'm sure they didn't get a whole lot out of a hundred pages of back and forth "You're an irrational retarded fuckwad! And here's why!"/"You're a delusional god hating faggot! And I can prove it with THIS!".

I get the frustration and aggravation that feeds into the vitriolic attitude on internet, I really do. But it's pointless. It gets you nowhere, and accomplishes nothing. There will always be someone else out there with irrational and potentially dangerous beliefs, and you're just going to have to accept it. If you want to make your point, just lay it out there calm and rationally, and leave it at that. That's just the best it's going to get. You are not going to change anyone's mind on the internet, and especially not by yelling at them and calling them a stupid dipshit. Don't let yourself be baited and dragged down to that level.

So as Phil says, don't be a dick. Shitheads are legion... but that doesn't mean you have to join them.

Lots of random shit today. For starters, the sketch above sucks, but it's the first chance I've had to really sit down and just doodle stuff. No real idea what it is, just some kind of beaked golem thing. Whatever. Finding free time is a real bitch, although step one is cutting out video games, quite frankly (ironic given my last post). Video games eat time and shit fun. If you want to get other stuff done in life, you really gotta cut back. I'm always amused by geeky gamers who trash professional sports or non-sports like golf for being a huge waste of time, while they'll burn six hours straight in a friggin World of Warcraft raid. I'm not a sports guy; I'm a gamer at heart, but I gotta call a spade a spade here. If you play copious amounts of video games, you probably should shut the fuck up about other people's hobbies being a 'waste of time'.

In other news, this: An asshole opines on how to screw people over and foster terrible professional relationships. This article generated a hell of a lot of furor all over the internet, particularly on DeviantArt where I'm pretty active. It's an incredible article, and a spectacular example of the kind of douchebag to avoid if you do freelance art. His basic premise is that you can save money on a game design project by hiring young, inexperienced artists and lying to them and manipulating them into giving you as much as possible for your money. he even includes social engineering techniques right from the Dilbert pointy-haired boss school of project management. While technically correct, that yes, you can often get some quick savings by being a sleaze, he's completely off base on long term success. Nothing he said in there is unique; it's all the same sort of techniques employed by used car salesmen and scam artist everywhere, going as far back as the concept of money and contractors.

I've got more thoughts and information on this topic, but it'll have to wait till I get home and can access my links. Ok, sort of changed my mind about taking the time to dig up more information and opinions on this. I think the guy's article speaks for itself, really.

And last but not least, all the World Trade Center Mosque craziness. In case you live under a rock, a group wants to put up an Islamic Cultural Center two or three blocks from the World Trade Center site in New York City, and a lot of people are freaked out over this. This center will be the equivalent of a YMCA, from the description, and the guy who's behind it has actually worked with the George W. Bush administration and Obama's administration on international programs to foster tolerance and cooperation between the U.S. and Arab nations. He's not a terrorist or any of that B.S., he's a liberal/moderate Muslim, just like most Muslims.

The issue is really simple: people who are opposed to this are shitheads. For starters, this is private property. The site in question is a run down old retail building. There are absolutely no laws that will prevent this from happening. Nothing. Debates about whether they have the 'right' to build there are idiotic. Secondly, the first amendment. You know, that whole freedom of religion thing. The part that a lot of conservatives seem to want to selectively apply when it suits their voting base. And third, the first amendment, because that's pretty fucking important here and deserves a second mention. Someone give this to Newt Gingrich, he could use a refresher:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

A lot of people, indeed, a majority of the country, seem to think that this is a bad idea and that they shouldn't be allowed to build there. The perception seems to be that this is an insult to the victims of 9/11, and they equate it to putting up a giant Nazi Swastika next to the Holocaust Museum. That's actually a pretty interesting mentality. There really are a lot of people who think that this is a religious war, and that we're at war with the entire Muslim world. I guess it goes to our tribal tendencies, and of humanity's tendency to separate into us vs. them camps. Hell, polls are indicating that twenty percent of the country think Obama is a Muslim, so who the fuck knows what these imbeciles are really thinking. This is the same as thinking all Catholics are child molesting pedophiles, or that all Atheists are immoral monsters, or that all Teapartiers are racists, or that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world, or that all Black people are crooks and welfare exploiters. Pick a stereotype, almost any one can apply.

You just can't paint people with such broad brush strokes. The actions of a small subset of assholes in any group can't be applied to the entire group. It just doesn't work that way. But we all do it. Again, it's that idiotic tribal mentality our species just can't get past. The latest tack I've seen is a lot of commentors asserting that Islam isn't a real religion, it's a political system designed to control and oppress people, and thus it isn't protected by the first amendment. Ironic, given how people who espouse this attitude often want to force the rest of the country to bow to their religious beliefs and prejudices.

The angry backlash is just another indicator of a portion of our country's xenophobia and hatred, although it's a good way to spot people who really don't give a fuck about the constitution or the law.

Anyway, that's all for today. Fear not though, I've got more irrelevant opinions on the way!

Way back in the day, in the early days of real time strategy game development, there were two games that came out at roughly the same time: Total Annihilation, and Starcraft. This was a crazy time, when PC games were still king, World of Warcraft was barely even conceived of yet, and cellphones were barely capable of making calls, let alone playing full versions of Final Fantasy or Sim City.

If you haven't played either of these, you're probably too young to remember (damn you young kids) or older, in which case you probably won't give a crap. The two games had some rather profound differences. There were other RTS games out, but they were all pretty shitty. Starcraft and T.A. were pretty much the best ones out there, with Warcraft 2 still getting plenty of play.

Starcraft, which later became the unofficial national sport of South Korea, was a sort of representational game, much simpler in interaction but with far more character development and faction differences. T.A. was aiming to be a lot more big-picture tactical and to have a hell of a lot more options and strategies. Starcraft, by comparison, felt a little childish and simplistic.

Now, keep in mind, that was just my impression at the time. I really wasn't that keen on starcraft, even though I played the hell out of it. I just liked the full on battle feel of T.A. better, even though the game had some fatal flaws with its AI engine once a lot of units started crawling around. Of course, if you look at the sales and continued popularity of Starcraft, and the collapse of Cavedog (the company that put out T.A.), it's obvious which game stood the test of time. There was even a high-fantasy T.A. called Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, which was a bit of a flop, as far as I can tell. Not a bad game, but it was lacking in the charm and character that Blizzard does such a good job of putting inot their games.

I think what it was is that T.A. was an RTS game designed for brainy nerds who over analyze everything. Starcraft was, well, built for a broader mass appeal. Starcraft also had some of the best balanced units across three very different factions I've ever seen.

So anyway, moving on, it's 2010, and there are now successors to each franchise. Starcraft 2 doesn't need much introduction, but Supreme Commander 2 probably does. SupCom is a good game; it's actually put out by square enix, but it's the same head guy who was behind T.A. that got SupCom put together. The combat is awesome. Booming barrages of artillery, massive tanks, missiles, rockets, nukes, giant mecha, etc, etc. It's fun as hell. I haven't played SupCom 1; I didn't even realize it was a successor to T.A. until I saw an add for Sup Com 2. It's good, I enjoy it. The interface is slick and very intuitive, and the fact that you can zoom out to a full tactical battlefield overview is incredibly nice. There are some balance issues though, so it ain't perfect, and there need to be some more options in PvP games.

Starcraft 2 is pretty awesome also, although for different reasons. For starters, the single player game is fantastic. It's actually got a good plot, there are great cut scenes, and there's a system of purchasing specialized upgrades for your forces and choosing missions that's just awesome. Great job on the single player game.

But the combat... it's a little clunky to me. Sup Com 2 just plain has a better combat interface. Some of the restrictions on build queues and stuff in Starcraft seem artificial, designed to just force you to micro-manage stuff that's otherwise meaningless and automatic in Sup Com. I don't really like the restricted units for PvP; a lot of the older units from Starcraft 1 and the single player game aren't available.

So I was really kind of sour on Starcraft 2, for more or less the same reason I was down on Starcraft 1 and prefered T.A.

But I figured I'd give it a chance and keep playing before really rushing to judgement. And that's when I noticed something that will relegate SupCom to irrelevance and keep Starcraft 2 going strong for years and years to come.

Player Designed Content. In SupCom, there is none. You hop in and play, and beat the shit out of other players, and that's that. There aren't any custom maps, there's no extra map packs or anything. What you see, is what you get.

Starcraft 2, however, is now obviously designed with custom content in mind, and people are already taking off and running with it. I hopped into a custom game last night, and found a full-on four man tower defense mod beta map. All of the rules and systems had been retooled, and it was fun as hell. Still a little clunky, still needed some work, and the final tiers of upgrades weren't completely coded, but this was more or less an entirely novel game based off of the mechanics and visual elements from the core Starcraft game. That kind of flexibility is, in a word, awesome. In fact, they've even got a contest to design the best custom map for S.C. 2 already. I don't even think the game has been out for a month.

So SupCom is pretty much doomed, in my humble opinion. The lack of custom content is going to drive people away, as the game gets old and stale. I wish some of the cleaner interface options in it were transplanted over to Starcraft 2, but that tremendous customizability and the easy interface and ability to just hop into any type of custom map trumps anything Sup Com has to offer. It's a pity, because it's a good game, but it's just not going to hold people's interest.

So while Supreme Commander has some better interface options and cleaner combat, it can't evolve organically. Starcraft 2 wins hands down as a better RTS just for how flexible it is and how much cool content is going to come out for it.

EDIT: Ok! All better! Comments actually *were* working, there was some kind of glitch from an image I had renamed at some point that screwed up a node number in the database. I DONE FIXED IT! So go ahead and comment away. I'll keep my eye out for more bugs. :)

Looks like the comments aren't displaying correctly, so don't bother making any until I get it fixed. They're in the database, I think, so once I get some updates and do a little code tweaking and module updating they should be back and working right. I'll make another update here once that's set.

BACK IN ACTION! For once, something positive!

I have finally gotten all of my shit transferred to the new host, and even got this bucket of bolts website back up and running. I think there are a few hiccups here and there, but it seems to have gone well. I guess it helps that I've done this several times before, so it wasn't too painful. The most aggravating part was trying to get the information from my old host so I could actually get the transfers completed.

Anyway, that is all, and here, have a goofy sketch of... something. With bunny slippers and a lizard. I dunno. Um, never mind.

My last post was full of anger and rage, so here's another on to throw on the pile. I don't really do positive.

However, I do try to do positive things. I'm not sure where that puts me on the pessimism/cynicism scale, maybe more cynical than pessimistic.

One of these positive things is working with an animal rescue group. I admit that this was something my wife sort of dragged me into; I doubt I'd be involved if not for her motivation. I'm not a joiner, really. It doesn't come naturally to me. My usual charitable efforts consist of giving money to worthy causes, but I've typically been rather selfish with my personal time. No excuses really, I'm just generally sort of lazy and prone to getting lost in my own brain.

This is further complicated by my issues with dogs. I was raised by a crazy person who (among many other psychological issues) was a pet hoarder. At one point when I was a kid there were three simultaneous litters of puppies along with all of the pound dogs we couldn't properly care for, totaling up to about 40 dogs. Three litters of 8-9 puppies and a dozen full grown dogs. Yeah, forty. It was a pretty unmanageable situation, and it left me with issues.

So let's just say I was a very reluctant animal rescue volunteer to start with. I like animals and all, I just wasn't really mentally equipped to deal with them all that well.

But I got over it. Confront your fears or something.

See, we started with this whole animal rescue thing about three years back after we got our first dog. We got him from a pet store, and found out that yes, he was a puppy mill dog. A little online research lead us to find out that the company that sold him were a bunch of ultra-right wing religious freakshows with seriously questionable ethics and a litany of health code and animal cruelty violations. In other words, raging shitheads. A topic I covered several years back.

So as a form of penance, and because we discovered how fucked up the world of dog breeding and puppy mills is, we started volunteering.

We volunteer for both a local and national breed specific rescue now. And, well, a few things have become apparent to me, during my trials and tribulations as a volunteer. I will list these observations one at a time, with an explanation, for full clarity. I will also word this to be as accusatory and hostile as possible, because quite frankly, you fucks have it coming. So this is my gift to you, dear owners (or potential owners) of pets in America:

TAKE CARE OF YOUR GOD DAMN PETS, ASSHOLES!!

HOLY SHIT! YOU PEOPLE ARE FUCKING INCOMPETENT!! MOST OF YOU SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO CARE FOR A HAMSTER, LET ALONE A DOG OR, HEAVEN FORBID, A CHILD!!!!

That's my opening statement. You lazy bastards sicken me. And now I will go into details why.

1. First, get your god damn pets spayed or neutered. I can't stress this enough. I direct this mainly at men. Guys, seriously, your dog doesn't give a fuck whether he has his nuts or not. It doesn't affect his manhood in the slightest, because dogs aren't as insecure as you pencil dicked mouth breathers. It will alleviate stress, prevent overpopulation, and make your dog much more pleasant to be around. You know how fucking cranky you get when you haven't gotten laid in a while? That's what intact dogs go through all the time when they're full of raging hormones, times ten. See, they can smell when a female dog is ready to go, and it drives them berserk. No one wants to deal with your untrained and undisciplined dog when he's raging like a horny teenager.
2. This brings me to point two: There is no need for you to breed your dog. Your dog is not that special. There are thousands more like him, and there are plenty of reputable, and also disreputable, breeders out there making sure the dog population remains sustainably high. We really don't need you with your half assed schemes at making a few bucks by selling off poorly socialized puppies to people. For starters, you won't sell all of the puppies, and then you'll be left with several adult dogs you don't want, and eventually I'm going to wind up having to care for them or they're going to get euthanized. This goes ten times over for Pittbulls. If you read this and still feel the need to breed your dog, go punch yourself in the mouth in front of a mirror a few times and just don't fucking do it.
3. That segues nicely into point three: Pittbulls are not the devil. In fact, I generally find that the breed doesn't have a lot of bearing on how nice or mean a dog is. It's all about how well you train it, and how well you treat it. They're sort of like children that way. If you're mean to your child and don't give them any boundaries, they're probably going to grow up to be a stripper and/or a drug addict. Apply the same logic to your dogs. If you happen to be a failure as a human being, do us all a favor and don't get a dog and don't have kids.
4. Take your animals to the vet. Let me clarify: take your animals to the vet, you stupid ass. You know what's fun to watch? And by fun, I mean like trying to watch "Dancer in the Dark" and not kill yourself afterward? Seeing an entire litter of puppies or kittens succumbing to something like Parvo Virus or Feline Distemper. Or watching a dog that's never been treated for heartworm cough up blood because the only treatment for a severe case is to dose him with arsenic to kill the worms, and now the little decaying worm bodies in his blood stream are causing lung embolisms. I imagine it feels a little like snorting a satchel of pop rocks and thumb tacks. There are a ridiculous number of diseases around to just make a dog or cat keel over dead. I see a lot of pricks get the bare minimum legally required rabies vaccine (if that) for their pet and actually decline heart worm tests or any other vaccinations. Another common thing I see is people who get a cat or kitten, assume it's just fine as an indoor cat, and never ever bring it to the vet. Then, several years later, they're shocked when it gets sick and dies and they have to pay through the nose for vet bills. A little prevention goes a long way. And if you're an anti-vaccine nut, I hope you die from whooping cough, and I'd appreciate it if you stop reading my blog, and also wasting the air I need to breath.
5. Train your pet. If you can afford to drop hundreds of dollars on a purebred dog, you can afford some training classes. And for you guys, again, because I see a lot of you imbeciles thinking you know anything beyond how to wipe the drool off your chin: you don't know shit about training dogs. You may think you do, but I'll bet money you probably don't know shit about shit. It's an odd guy thing that a lot of us just assume we're going to be able to train a dog, effortlessly, by sheer virtue of our manliness. If you think this, I have news for you: you're a raging douchebag. I can't tell you how many dogs I see where some slope headed neanderthal declares a dog 'untrainable' because his ham fisted approach that 'worked for my daddy' doesn't do shit, so they just dump it off at the pound to be killed and move on to get another one. Alternately, there's the well intentioned young women who coddle the shit out of their little lap dog and don't understand why it acts out. In both cases, let me say this: Dogs are not toys, they're living critters, they have their own personalities, and they take a little time and effort to work with. There are plenty of trainers available all over who can help you with training. Hell, at least watch some Animal Planet to get some basics, they have a billion dog training shows on. Which leads me to our next point...
6. You are not the dog whisperer. No, really, you're not. I don't care if you watch Cesar Milan 24/7 and buy all of his books and videos and whatever the hell else he sells. Your TV viewing doesn't translate to experience with a dog, and his show is edited to hell for content and an enhanced sense of drama. He also confuses "calm and submissive" with "scared to move" a lot, but that's my own personal thing. He has some good methods, as do most professional trainers, but until you've actually worked with dogs you still don't know shit. Don't try that pinning domination thing unless you actually know what the fuck you're doing, it'll just get you bitten or confuse the hell out of your dog.
7. This next item applies to people trying to get rid of their dogs. Just be honest, we don't want to hear your bullshit excuses. We've heard it all. Seriously, you wouldn't believe the crap that people come up with when they want to get rid of their dog. He smells (yeah, really), he's untrainable (bullshit), he won't stop peeing on things (see training), we're having a family crisis (so bad you can't afford dog food?), we just had a baby and don't have time for him anymore (you should have thought of that before, dimwit), he's too hyper (take the fucking dog for a walk you lazy shit, you could use a few minutes moving around yourself, fatty), I suddenly found out I have allergies (after three years???), he's suddenly turned vicious to our kids (don't let your baby crawl in the dog's food bowl while it's eating, dumbass), the dog bit our son (don't let your kid poke the dog in the eye with a stick for fucks sake), etc, etc... Usually we find out the truth is that the dog has health issues and needs surgery or something, and usually people lie to us about it since they're afraid we won't take the dog in if it needs serious medical intervention. The only really legit excuse I see, and I see it way too much, is that a couple is getting divorced and have to sell the house and neither can find an apartment that allows dogs. I see a lot of people getting laid off and having to leave their home too. It sucks, and I get the feeling a lot of those people didn't try to hard to get a pet friendly place to stay, but at least I can tolerate that one. The ones I love in particular are the fucks who get their house foreclosed on and just leave the animals behind. We see a lot of dogs that are on the brink of starvation because some fucknut packed up and moved and just left their animals in an empty locked house. Which brings us to the next point...
8. Shelter dogs aren't maladjusted terrors. In fact, most of them are pretty well adjusted and love people. Some dogs, like pittbulls, get a bad rap from the news, and we do see an incredible number of them that were bred for fighting or guard duty and have been basically beaten mean. But I've seen plenty of adorably friendly and cuddly Pittbulls too. The thing is, as a rescue group, we don't take in aggressive dogs. We get our dogs from local pounds that euthanize them all after ten days, and most of the ones we take have been just abandoned or dumped somewhere once a family is sick of them. They had a family and were well socialized, maybe with a few training issues, but that's it. People just dispose of them. Maybe I'm a bit of a bleeding heart, but that's kind of fucked up to me.
9. And lastly, No, we will not surgically remove dog nipples. Yes, that's in response to any actual request. I just can't make this shit up. Yes, the dog had puppies once. No, it's not common practice to cut nipples off. I don't care if you're uncomfortable rubbing the dog's belly when it has nipples. Although I guess I can apply this to special perks and treatment some people want from poor animal rescues... Folks, this is a volunteer operation; not a single one of us gets paid for our time. Haggling for spa treatments for your potential adopted pet is just really bad form, since the fifty dollars we'd waste at the groomers could maybe go to pulling another dog from the pound about to be euthanized. Which do you think might be a better thing to do? Jesus christ I really can't get past that nipple removal thing though. Wow. And it wasn't like, one member of the family, the whole clan of them were on board with this whole nipple removal idea. The whole idea that people like that are living and walking around confuses and frightens me.

So, aside from the nipple removal, which I think was a one time incident (I hope), those are the top things I'd like to say to people who have dogs, or want to get dogs, or want to get rid of their dog. Some tidbits apply to cat owners too, because a lot of you suck at caring for your animals too.

Anyway, this rant was brought to you by the nice couple who dropped off T-bone at our place this past weekend and lied to our faces about all of the medical issues he has and the surgeries he needed and why you were giving him up. It was really awesome when he turned purple from overheating and asphyxiation because you said "Oh, he doesn't have any medical issues, he's just a little overheated and makes loud rasping noises!" and then ran out our front door as fast as you could to avoid our questions. The ice baths we gave him after you left kept him from dying, and the vet doesn't think he has any permanent brain damage from chronic over heating, although he's still at risk for tracheal collapse.

You'll be happy to know that the soft palate trim, neuter, vaccinations, heartworm tests, and nasal passage surgery went well, although we think that they two and a half years you decided to not get him treated have probably given him a hernia, so he's still vomiting about fifteen times a day and needs to be on IV fluids so he won't die. I'd like to think that if you can afford a rare thousand dollar purebred puppy you could have afforded some basic medical care, but what do I know. And we know you knew what was wrong with him, since your vet told us all about how they've been pleading with you to get him these surgeries since he was a puppy.

I can't imagine what listening to this dog desperately gasp for air every minute of the past two years must have been like, and can only say go fuck yourselves for not taking proper care of him.

Well, it's been fun, but now I'm going to go drown myself in the toilet to get away from you people.

Holy crap do I hate my current web host.

To be fair, it's not just them specifically, but certain business practicies in general.

See, I wish that companies would put a lot of effort into making a decent service or product, rather than sinking all of their efforts into thwarting people from trying to leave. If you fucking pricks took the team who went out of their way to design a nearly inscrutable and buggy web registration transfer system and applied them to maybe setting up databases and services that didn't suck a camel's nutsack maybe I wouldn't be trying to get as far away from your craptastic company as possible.

Dickheads.

I mean, really, what the fuck can a person do with a 100 meg cap on an SQL database? I had to purge my entire indexing table so that I still have room on this stupid site for everything to keep functioning, and trust me, I don't get a whole hell of a lot of traffic here.

I've run into the same shit with some other crappy companies, like credit card companies, magazines, and pretty much anything that's subscription based. Once again, here's a hint: I feel I need to be redundant and repeat myself: Instead of making it difficult for people to bail on your bullshit and nearly useless service, work on making your stuff suck less.

I've been meaning to do a tremendous number of updates and build a new theme from scratch, but I've been holding off while I get this hosting issue resolved. Hopefully some of this aggravating drek will resolve itself next week, although my entire life thus far has geared me towards anticipating further disappointment and disatisfaction with pretty much any company I deal with.

Which is good, because it means I have the mental fortitude to handle a pretty large truckload of failure from people and businesses I have to deal with.

This daily does of cynicism has been brought to you courtesy of 1and1 internet host, Sirius/XM satellite radio, and Hartford Toyota. May you all rot in hell for sucking. Oh yeah, and IE7: you suck too. And Apple; you also suck. I like the iPhone 4 a lot, and I don't give a fuck that it can lose some signal if you poke the proverbial soft spot in its proverbial malformed infantile skull, but you're still raging assholes for scaming people with that fucked up signal algorithm all these years and trying to kill off flash and lying about the real motives behind it. Oh, and people who develope fully flash based websites: You're fucking clueless. Flash was never intended for such a fucktarded usage. Way to break browsing continuity, douchebags.

Who else can I rant about?

Ok, soft targets now. Democrats: go fuck yourselves. Republicans: go fuck yourselves, twice. Teapartiers: first go fuck yourselves, then kill yourselves. Glenn Beck: I hope you go blind, you pasty faced mutant. Mainstream Media: you suck, and you're spineless; Rolling Stone magazine owned your worthless asses. Fox News: you suck, you're completely fucking delusional, and like it or not you tools are mainstream media, you fucks just cater to the lowest common denominator of media consumers.

Hmm... who am I forgetting?

Well, lots of people and companies and such. I think that's good enough for now though.

ETA: Almost forgot, Andrew Breitbart is a true scumbag. I hope he gets raped in prison some day for his lies and scams. There are enough problems in this country without schmucks like him manufacturing fake racial tension.

...

Oh yeah, the picture! I dunno, I was trying something new with perspective and mashing different cultural style elements together. I think it's actually a pretty shit pose now that I look at it a few weeks after drawing it, but the character has potential.

I'm being oppressed at work again.

Not even one tenth as bad as my previous job, but still, I naturally rebel at idiotic and pointless attempts to control employees.

In my previous job, the people running the place were unfathomably clueless and corrupt morons. You couldn't kick over a stack of papers rotting in a cubicle without finding some example of corporate malfeasance, cronyism, and blatant multi-million dollar conflicts of interest.

And that company was actually one of the less corrupt ones I know of. Our direct competitors were ten times worse. The turn over rate and company hopping in the insurance industry resembles the stereotype of an inbred southern town where everyone marries their first cousin, so it's easy to get a lot of dirt on the corporate culture of the competitors.

The experience jaded me quite heavily towards corporations and corporate structures in general. There's nothing in this world that's so shitty it can't be made worse by organizing a committee of MBAs to try and fix it.

So I was delighted to wind up working for a small, non-public company not long after being laid off from the old shithole. I actually still like it here quite a bit.

But some rules are stupid.

For example, our new No Personal Laptop rule. It's not even a rule, per se, but more of a directive from the executives and upper management that they don't want personal computers on the property. It's a security risk, they say.

Which is ironic, because I use my personal lap top to log in to work every afternoon.

For those who don't know, I use my tablet PC to make pretty much all of my art. So during the day, when things are slow, I would often whip up a quick sketch to keep my easily bored and understimulated brain from getting me into trouble (see my previous entry about stupid decisions).

This kind of puts a cramp on my style. It's not a really big deal, which is why I categorize this under the "whining" category. It just means I have to go back to a good old fashioned sketchbook and scan stuff in later.

I realized how deep I am into the digital art thing when I reflexively tried to hit the 'undo' hotkey on my mechanical pencil. Oops.

The other irritant is that it cuts my web browsing down a lot. I jailbroke my iPhone and turned it into a modem, so I used my laptop for all web browsing, avoiding any use of corporate resources for cruising the interwebs.

Logically speaking, telling me I can't use my laptop at work is actually a bigger security risk than letting me have it, but I don't think that my explaining this in short sentences to the policy makers here will really fly, or be good for my continuous long term employment efforts.

Well, at least they let me use my phone. Which is practically a computer in its own right, and capable of just as much mischeif in the wrong hands as a laptop...

Ok, I'm going to stop complaining before I irritate myself into trouble.

I have come to the inescapable conclusion that I'm stupid.

When I was in school, I was one of those kids that never did any homework but aced tests without trying, and people used to be shocked how well I did on standardized tests and told me I had enormous potential, and how smart I was.

But they were wrong; I was a god damn moron. Just completely fucking retarded when it came to pretty much anything but taking tests.

I can avoid some of the blame for my gross incompetence by the fact that I was raised by a certifiable lunatic, so I didn't develop too many life skills that would have helped me get through life. I mean, I didn't learn to properly wipe my own ass until the summer after 8th grade (hint: keep wiping until the paper comes out clean, even if it takes and entire fucking roll to get there).

Anyway, enough about my childhood traumas. We all had them, blah blah blah, woe is me, waaaaah, etc. Here's how I realized that I must be stupid.

When I was 19, I was fresh from a brutal clusterfuck of a year long enlistment in the military, honorably discharged but even more psychologically screwed up than when I went in. I had a doctor. Went in for a sinus infection once, and she asked my age. I told her I was nineteen, and she said "Ohhhh, just a baby" all condescending like. It really pissed me off. I knew I was 19, but I had already been through quite a lot of shit in my life, and this bitch was barely out of residency, so who was she to call me a baby. Yeah, I know she was just joking around, but I was an uptight touchy prick back then. Anyway, here's the problem: she was right.

When I turned 20, not much happened. I looked back on my last year of teenage life, and realized I had made a lot of stupid decisions. Not life altering ones, just a string of dumb decisions and misconceptions about stuff. So my 20 year old self concluded that my 19 year old self was a dumbass.

I turned 21, and saw the string of stupid decisions I had made when I was 20, and thought "Wow, that was retarded. I'm so much wiser now than I was back then."

I turned 22, looked back on my 21st year of life, took inventory of all of my fuckups, and thought "well, I wasn't as moronic as I was when I was 19 or 20, but I was still pretty ignorant and foolish. I'm in a much better place now.

I turned 23, took stock of my array of personal failures, and thought "well, it wasn't as bad as 21 or 22, but still pretty bad. I'm doing much better now.

I turned 24, asessed my level of fail from age 23, and then I started to, shall we say, notice a distinct pattern. I'm hoping you can spot it too.

So now I'm well into my 30's, and this pattern has predictably replicated itself each and every year since. I look back on the previous year, and think "what the fuck did I do all that for". I mean, now and then I manage to do something that doesn't suck, so it's not all bad, but there's plenty of stupid mixed in there.

So 32 is creeping up on me rather quickly now, and I suspect that I will look back on my 31st year of life and think "wow, that was dumb."

The only logical conclusion here is that I will consistently do stupid thing throughout my entire life, but won't realize it until much later. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

I will admit that as I get older, I have managed to improve my stupid to reasonable ratio every year, but it's such a small incremental improvement that I'd have to be 150 years old before I stopped being a dolt. And I suspect this improvement rate isn't linear, so I'm doomed to suffer at my own hands for... well, the rest of my life.

Depressing, but at least I'm aware of what the future holds for me: A string of bad decisions punctuated by occassional successes.

...

Is that too dark a note to end an entry on? Ah, fuck it, good enough for today.

Not really sure what to say about this that hasn't already been said.

I guess I'm getting old enough that this type of grotesque corporate negligence doesn't shock me in the slightest. I've worked for huge companies before in the insurance industry, and the catastrophic clusterfuck of bureaucracy and red tape and insular political backstabbing made me want to throw up more or less every day. I had to stop reading Dilbert comics because they were too painfully similar to real life.

And that was just some shitty paper pushing company that doesn't really have anything to do with natural resources (other than consuming them at alarming rates) or people's lives or the environment. All they did was push money around and fuck themselves and their clients over in the stock market like every other clueless investment 'expert'.

So I guess the thought of a huge company like BP cutting corners and unleashing an environmental catastrophe through sheer negligence and stupidity doesn't surprise me. Not even a little bit. Actually, I'm surprised that this hasn't happened sooner and more frequently. Sort of like car accidents; I've been in a few, and now that I've been driving for almost fifteen years I'm actually amazed that I make it to work most days.

I generally try to avoid political and religious stuff on my blog since I eased up on my youthful militant anger that was spawned by a sudden realization that people are often quite horrible. But I'm not sure if there's a point in bothering anymore. Do I want to avoid offending people and keep my opinions to myself, or just let it all hang out? I don't really want to alienate people, but I'm also not a fan of censorship. I also don't like preachers, whether they're preaching religion or politics or patriotism or whatever brand of unthinking dogma they want to force other people to adhere to. It's pretty easy to turn into one of those tools, and the first step is opening your mouth too much.

That being said, people with strong opinions are interesting. Even if they make an ass of themselves they're entertaining to watch at least.

I figure if I draw something cool with every blog post I can probably get away with a lot of opinionated ranting.

So let's start off with a good, soft target: Conspiracy Theorists.

This is a pretty easy one: If you're a conspiracy theorist, shut the fuck up. You're an idiot. I don't mean day to day conspiracies about corporate and government espionage or negligence or human rights violations. We all know that shit happens. I mean the big retarded stuff, like alien abductions, that 9/11 was a government cover up, that global warming is a 'new world order' plot, or that the government blew up the BP oil rig on purpose. Yeah, that's right, that's the latest conspiracy theory nonsense I've had the misfortune to stumble across. It's sort of like when your cat shits outside of the litterbox and you step on it with bare feet early in the morning before you've even gotten your contact lenses in.

I subscribe to a few rules in life that generally seem to get me through each day without accidentally committing suicide or fucking my life up: Occam's Razor (Look it up), The Golden Rule (you oughta know that one), If it sounds too good to be true it is, Don't walk down stairs with your hands in your pockets, and one of my favorites: Heinlein's Razor.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".

Pretty simple. Granted, there's a follow up line that sometimes gets ommitted that reads "But don't ever rule out malice", so I suppose those conspiracy theory douchebags can get a little bit of credit there, but frankly, successful grand consipiracies are so god damn uncommon simple because people can be really god damn stupid.

As a species we're pretty good at building stuff and figuring things out, but only every now and then. When you get down to it we're just horny bipedal apes trying to outfuck the other apes in whatever way we can manage. Cynical, sure, but I feel the need to call it like I see it. It seems to be isolated instances of cooperation, hard work, and inspiration that get our species ahead, but 90% of the time we're just kind of taking up space and screwing everything up. I find that little 10% pretty magical and awesome, so maybe I'm not a complete cynic... Maybe a 90% cynic. Yeah, that sounds good.

Where was I? Oh yeah, BP and conspiracy theorists: both of you can go fuck yourselves. That about sums it up.

... with my web host. Yep, it's that time. My current web host no longer meets my needs, so adios, you bastards, I'm starting the process of switching over.

It may take me a bit of time to get everything transferred, so updates here may wind up being even less frequent than their already glacial pace before.

In other news, Look! A Cyclopean Zombie Cybernetic Steam Gorilla! I named him Steve (No relation to anyone living, dead, or related to me, it just seemed appropriate). He's been subbed to Mojizu and should be up for voting in a few weeks, if anyone's interested. I still don't have a good handle on the blender brush in Photoshop CS5, but I practiced a bit more with this guy.

Other than that, not much. My job has banned the use of personal laptops in the office, which makes a lot of sense considering that most of us who have them use them to log in to work remotely. Bloody brilliant. I have a real sense of contempt for senseless rules and regulations that do nothing but appease people who are in a position of power but don't really know what they're doing. However, I have a sense of love for my biweekly paycheck, or more specifically the food and shelter it buys me, so unlike my last emplyment venue I will not be fighting the man on this one. My wife might kill me if I did too, so that adds double motivation to lay low. I still get some good drawing time in during lunch though, so that's all well and good. I've also brought a good old paper sketch book in to do sketches and concept work when things are boring and slow... which they are... oh how horribly so...

Oh yeah, and I now have a SHED! YEAH! A MOTHER FUCKING SHED!! I'm so domestic now. Well, I needed a shed to move a bunch of the lawn and garden crap that's invading my workshop in the garage out. This'll give me both space to work on sculptures and other projects when it's warm, and a spot to park our vehicles when it gets cold again.

Hmm... what else have we done... well, we got a car (a new prius) which is cool, we've trapped and spayed two feral cats this year with the animal rescue... socialized and placed four of six wild kittens with new homes... and failed at gardening once again. Awesome.

Ok, enough mundane details; I'll have more wild and weird pics for everyone later.