Media and Culture

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'.

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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.

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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.

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

***This is what paying attention to commercials can do to you***

I don't wind up watching many commercials. I have a DVR that my cable company was nice enough to give me, so I can generally avoid them.

But, every once in a while I do actually watch a show when it's airing, and then I have to sit through the commercials. Normally I just tune them out, as we all do, but the other day I sat and really paid attention to them for some idiotic reason.

Commercials are fucking horrible. It's not just the shitty products they're trying to push off on gullible little consumers, it's how they're presented. I mean, the products are terrible, no doubt, but the fake, trite way in which the announcers try to sway your opinion in a 30 second spot is chilling in the same way that a kind and polite serial killer/rapist is. It's just bloody well wrong on all levels.

I know that there's almost an art to this whole process, of getting people to buy shit through advertising, but it's an evil art, sort of like calling upon the powers of the great cthulhu to spread madness throughout the lands. I know people are gullible, and our brains are wired to make us stupid and susceptible to certain types of arguments, but knowing that wouldn't you want to, you know, not be an evil douchebag and leave people alone? It seems to me that the entire purpose of commercials is to infect your brain with inane jingles and catch phrases, like some horrid auditory plague, so that when you see their products that vile little saccharine blight of information that's wormed its way into your deep memory comes rushing back to the forefront unbidden.

Like McDonalds: "I'm Lovin' It" preceded by a brainless little "bada-bababaaaaa". That pops into my mind when I see McDonalds shit uncontrollably. I can't help it. And I don't even see all that many commercials, the shit just sticks there, like a shotgun of putrid memes that waste the activity of precious braincells.

There are plenty more. Like GEICO, the mother of all overzealous ad campaigners. I figure those fucks could discount every policy holder of theirs fifty bucks a month for the staggering amount of fucking advertising they buy. I mean, how many companies do you know that have like, five different simultaneous ad campaigns going on? I mean, really, how good can their fucking service be if they spend half of their budget on shitty caveman and lizard ads.

And speaking of which, one of these days I hope the caveman snaps, grills up the gecko over an open fire and sucks the marrow out of his bones. Then he can track down some of those idiots with the piles of Viagra and Ciais who are always inexplicably hanging out on the beach in separate bathtubs, murder them, and steal their boner meds. Then he can swallow two entire bottles of the erection stuff, and then track down that bitch Flo from the Progressive insurance commercials and bash her over the head with a club and go completely retro back to his roots and drag her off to a cave where he'll have his way with her using his new ten foot erection. And maybe he can curb stomp the Walmart smiley face, shatter the blue K-mart enema bulb looking thing, and brain a couple of walmart greeters on the way there, and perhaps stab Ronald McDonald and the Burger King through the heart with a wooden spear. AT THE SAME TIME. Then it can end with him falling in battle as the Capital One vikings come to steal Flo from him so THEY can rape the shit out of her, but then caveman and his giant cock fight them off but succumbs to wounds inflicted by the viking interlopers, and everyone winds up dead, raped, eaten, or broken.

Man, wouldn't that be awesome?

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Holy shit I'm getting worked up just thinking about all of the gray matter I've wasted storing this useless god damn information. I think you get my point, I'm going to go sit in a corner quietly for a while.

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.

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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.

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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.

My buddy Dave mentioned this bit of wicked coolness, and it needs to be shared, so here it is:

http://gizmodo.com/5231112/best-video-ive-seen-today-will-make-you-smile

Seriously, that is just too cool for words.

Advertising firms should hire at least one pervert per ad team. I'm convinced of it.

Why am I convinced of it? Because of True North Snacks. I'll give them a free plug, since their commercials have been making me giggle like a nervous schoolgirl for weeks now. No, no, guys, this one's on me. No monetary compensation needed: the lulz are enough.

So I saw Cloverfield this weekend, and I loved it. It's fucking great. I have just one caveat:

If you get motion sick, this may not be the movie for you. The whole thing is filmed first-person perspective as if it was through a hand-held cam-corder type thing. It's like Blair witch, only more so.

That being said, I'll now engage in some spoilers and such.

*SPOILER ALERT*

This is an unfiltered scan of a pen-sketch I did in a couple of meeting yesterday. My brains were turning to gelatin, and threatening to ooze out of my ears, so I had to start drawing like a mad man to prevent catastrophic nervous system failure.

So it turns out that Dumbledore is gay! Now, at this point in time, there is an epic list of things I could say. I could start breaking out the gay jokes, or wax poetic on societal tolerance and such. But really, many other people will say more eloquent and informed things than I could ever manage.

So a while back I was discussing a former over the counter* prescription diet pill that went over the counter: Alli. At about the same time that this diet pill was released, Wendy's put out the mother of all grease bombs, the Baconator. Coincidence?

Anal seepage. Two words that induce terror in the mind of most people. :shock:

Ok, so there's this new diet product called Alli (pronounced Ally), which is the first FDA approved diet pill. It works by binding to some digestive enzymes in your stomach, stopping the absorption of about 25% of the fat you eat. It's not a magic bullet; you still need to eat a low-cal diet to actually lose weight (as all diets that actually work require).