Miscellaneous

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!

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.

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.

... 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.

Well, our big epic tag sale is done with, and I have my garage back. I've been bitching about this for a while, but now that it's over this is the last you'll hear of it for a while.

The tag sale is a fund raiser for a local animal rescue that rescues dogs from various pounds and animal control centers in the state that kill animals after often as little as ten days. We're 100% volunteer based, and we only have a small facility for about ten dogs at a time, so funds are always tight. These big donation based tag sales are pretty much our best money maker.

So this crazy tag sale went on for two days, in my front yard, with my wife, myself, and several other volunteers helping to run the whole thing. Now, I could go on about all the junk we had and how much stuff there was, but I can sum it up in one quick sentence: We sold four thousand dollars worth of junk. FOUR THOUSAND. Keep in mind that a lot of the junk we had we were selling for fifty cents or a buck, and people were making extra little donations here and there for different stuff to help our group out, but at the least 3700 of that came from sales.

That is a truly staggering amount of stuff. And there was hardly an item we sold that I hadn't moved at least once or twice.

So what I'm trying to say is that I hurt all over, as if I had been in a bad bar fight or spent a weekend running for my life from angry bears. But it was for a good cause, and everything went really well. Or rather, it mostly went really well...

Occasionally I come across people, mainly online, who bitch and moan about animal rescue stuff, and how we shouldn't waste one cent on animals when there are people in need. But this tag sale illustrated to me exactly why I prefer doing charity work for animal oriented organization instead of thing for people. Now don't get me wrong; I donate to humanitarian causes as well, but the majority of what I do for charity work is for animals.

On the second day of the tag sale a guy shows up with his wife, and starts haggling like crazy for every item. Haggling is an interesting cultural phenomenon I've noticed, in that Americans really don't do it. We're just not into it, and it comes across as rude and cheap to most average Americans. I don't know why, that's just sort of how things go. I don't know why Icelanders are insulted by tipping or why other countries think you're a sucker for not haggling over stuff, it's just how the cultures evolved. But anyway, this dude was an immigrant from either Haiti or some French speaking African country, and he was all about haggling.

Well, sort of.

I'm the guy that usually winds up haggling during our tag sale events. I'm not really a people person, but I can certainly fake it for a good cause and get shit done to move the junk off of my yard (double motivation). I get that haggling is a cultural difference, so it doesn't bother me, even while some of my fellow volunteers are really annoyed by it.

But this fucking guy and his wife were using it to run a scam. They'd split up, pester a person to knock an already absurdly low price down to something like a dollar for a 27 inch TV (I'm not exaggerating), get rejected, and then switch places and bring the item up to the person running the cashbox and claim that one of us had let them have it for pretty much nothing. On top of this the guy was a rude prick, yelling from across the yard when one of us was helping another customer and acting mad when we didn't immediately leave them to help him. He and his wife tried the price swap lie scam five or six times until we caught on, and then we basically stopped haggling and told him either pay five bucks for a TV or put it back and leave.

So, of course, five minutes later, his wife is bitching us out for not selling a DVD player for 2 dollars instead of four, when one of the other volunteers catches him with his car on the curb loading everything he could grab into the back of his car. Four TV's, a couple of VCR's, radios, and anything else electronic he could grab. We realized pretty quick that his wife was just running interference while he stole the entire electronics table's worth of stuff. Naturally he said that he had paid one of the other volunteers for the stuff, but we knew he was full of shit. They had a little game of pretending not to know English when confronted about their theft or lies on the prices of things, but spoke it just fine when it came time to argue over a twenty five cent price difference.

The president of the rescue, a woman to be feared when you invoke her wrath, bitched the guy out and got most of the shit back. We didn't call the cops on them, and I'm sure they made off with a pile of free shit that they stole in the end, even after getting himt o unload the extra TVs. In hind sight, I don't know if we should have or not. I'm not real good when confronted by truly shitty human behavior, but I see it often enough that I should be, although what I usually see is blatant racism. That's another post for another time though. Whether our decision was right or not, I'm sure as shit not letting that guy back on my property.

But back on my original point, people wonder why other people help animals rather than other people. I figure those people just haven't met enough other people yet to get it.

Lots of random bullshit to talk about this week. I'll start with the computer stuff: CS5 has been released, and I've been toying around with it quite a bit. I'm almost certainly going to get the entire design package, which will set me back a pretty penny, but I think it'll be a good investment.

However, it's not all rainbows and kittens and happy sunshine stuff. There are some issues, and things I'm not pleased with, but the overall result is positive.

Photoshop CS5 is the big dog out of the deisgn package I'll be using most of all, followed by Indesign and Flash, and hopefully Dreamweaver to make site updates smoother and less stressful. Pretty much everything on this site was built using Drupal and edited the hard way with notepad and tearful prayers to the pantheon of web computer gods known as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE5, IE6, IE7, and IE8 that they'll all take a liking to my work and see fit to display it properly. 99.99% of the time one of these fickle asshole deities decides he's on the rag and scorns my pathetic mortal attempts to please all of them at once, and I curl up in the fetal position and wish for a quick death.

So, anyway, I'm hoping the fact that Dreamweaver integrates with common CMS's (like Drupal) will help.

Anyway, back on Photoshop CS5: It's good. It's got really slick features, severalof which I'll probably never use. Content aware fill is some sort of fickle black magic that looks to be awesome for photographers, but rarely useful for us digital painter types.

Puppet Warp is cool and I'm fairly certain that there will be good uses for it, I'm just not quite certain what yet... at least as far as my work goes.

The Blender Brush is my new Photoshop crush, as it were. I like it, although I recognize that it's got some peculiar behaviors and limitations. Even so, after playing around with it quite a bit (and using it on the girl in the pic above) I think it might be perfect for my personal workflow style. It behaves oddly with multiple layers, but I think as long as you're aware of it it'll be good. The old school blur and smudge tools were about as useless as tits on a bull, as the saying goes, so this is a good improvement. People coming from a Painter 11 or Paint Tool SAI background will probably dislike it (and my internet research seems to bear that out), but for those of us who got started in Photoshop it's a good addition to add to the arsenal.

The last bit is the Bristle Brushes. This is where my disappointment mainly lies. The Bristle Brushes map each brush bristle as a 3D object that dynamically moves and shifts based on pressure, tilt, rotation, and interaction with adjacent bristles. It's the best 'real' bristle simulator available; light-years ahead of other similar products from Painter. However, they're obscene CPU hogs. They lag terribly, even on a current higher end system like my desktop (Phenom 2 black Quad core). The only solution so far is to make the bristles short and stubby and work close so that you don't overtax the CPU and GPU on the redraw. I actually made the girl's hair above using one of the new bristle brushes. I like them, but I feel that they can't possibly be that processor intensive. I'm hoping Adobe will patch them or do something to tame these hungry bastards, because they're quite fun to use.

Ok, enough tech talk stuff. My next topic is my garage: It's full of shit. Not literal shit, but donations for a charity tag sale that's going to be held on my front lawn. See, I work with local animal rescue groups, and our biggest fund raiser is tag sales that we run a couple times a year. Lots of people donate stuff left over from their own tag sales or that's just laying around in their garage and get a nice tax write off.

The problem is that some people have an over inflated sense of how much their cast off junk is worth. This is tough, because you don't really want to alienate people making a charitable donation of any type.

But, god damn, some of this stuff is incredible. I mean, really, I can't sell a dirty crushed plastic child's Easter egg basket. Also, no one wants your old skis. I don't care that you paid hundreds of dollars for them so you could tear up the slopes back in the day; they damn things do not sell. Also, keep your old printers. I've got boxes of printers that I'm going to wind up dumping off at an electronics recycling center. Seriously now.

I also don't need a broken golf putter, dismembered GI Joes, or a lone baby shoe with no match. Also, no one really wants a hundred pounds of worn out Spongebob Squarepants memorabilia or Teddy Ruxpin tapes.

And if you do feel compelled to drop this stuff off, please do a rough inventory ahead of time, rather than opening every box at our place and photographing and cataloging it while we wait around for your distracting sense of nostalgia to wear off.

Also, no, you can't have my riding mower or snow blower when tag sale time comes. They ain't for sale, which is why they're hidden inside the garage behind a closed door.

Anyway, I notice that I tend to do these entries with three topics merged together. I have no idea why, I just sort of like combining three ridiculous and generally unrelated topics together. So there, take that.

I had to take a trip to NY City this week for some animal rescue stuff that my wife and I do, so I dragged my diseased and barely recovered ass to the train station along with the wife, two friends, and a precocious French Bulldog named Rako.

We all went into the city for a couple of days to see the sights and eat the food. I thought that maybe walking around would help me hwark up all the snot and mucous that my body has collected from my bout of bronchitis, but really, it just made me make even more lung glop. I still toughed it out, and we got a chance to see the Tim Burton exhibit at the NY MOMA, which was insanely crowded but wicked cool. I know a lot of people have mixed feelings on Burton, but it was really damn awesome to see all of the corpse bride and Nightmare Before Christmas figures and all sorts of wacky sculptures and stuff. I didn't realize how large some of the models they used are; Jack Skellington is about a foot and a half tall, and Oogie Boogie has got to be two feet high.

If I was still contagious at that point, I'm sure I infected about five hundred people, but I'm pretty sure the antibiotics took care of that part. Ah well.

We also saw some really famous works like Van Gogh's Starry Night, Wyeth's Christina's World, and Monet's Water Lilies. I think I was the only one who was into that part.

We also saw some cool art at the Animazing gallery, with work by Dr. Seuss, Schultz, and others. Good stuff. And, of course, a stop at the Carnegie Deli for some awesome food. The bacon there is so good that it may in fact ruin bacon for me for the rest of my life.

The other bit of news I have is about Steamvolt. This is good news though, so don't panic, all five of you who follow my comics XD.

I had a bit of a discussion with Quaz72 on DeviantArt, which came out of the blue, about the content and direction of Steamvolt. I have to say, he made some damn fine points. The fact that someone picked up on things that had been eating away at the back of my brain without any prompting makes me think that my concerns were 100% well founded.

So what this means is that I'm going to make a few tweaks to the previous pages. This is something I generally try to avoid; I think it's always best to just work and keep moving forward, but there's room for exceptions in serialized work, I think, especially when it's new and you're just getting it established. So hopefully everyone can forgive my minor retconning and revisions ;)

Here's what I plan on doing: I need to go back and redo some of the font based text by hand, since all of the feedback I've gotten indicates that people like my messy hand written text, for some odd reason. While I'm doing this, I'm going to actually tweak some of the dialogue and imagery to make the story less tightly linked to the 'real world'. I always like alternate earth and alternate history type stories, but for my own work, I need to separate what I'm doing a bit more. I've got it too tied in with the alternate timeline stuff, and it's distracting from the characters and other things I'm trying to work on. Trust me, this will be good. It gives me a lot less restriction on where I can go with things, and the imagery and stories are going to be better for it.

Anyway, you can read our helpful little exchange here.

The little onion dude is my first real sketch since I've started to feel human again. Now back to work!

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

It's a testament to the capabilities to irritate people that I've now had to employ two anti-spam modules for this site to keep the bastards at bay. I've barely got any readers, and the two randomized captchas I added have still blocked nearly 6000 spam entries. There are still some spambots that got through, so I had to employ an Akismet module to catch the rest. That's s hell of a lot of spam. I mean, seriously, how much Viagra and Cialis do we really need?

Since I've been somewhat inactive, here's a little 15 minute armored robot sketch to commemorate my continuing efforts to armor my site against spam.