Whining

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.

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.

No one who ever had to buy a toilet auger was happy about it. Yet another thing, along with Preparation H, Jock Itch cream, and home HIV tests that you rarely see people carrying to the checkout counter with a smile on their faces.

Anyway, this should give you a good idea of the sort of week I'm having and why I've been sort of inactive.

In other news, however, I CAN'T WAIT FOR CS5! I think I'm going to go all out and get the design package this time. It's expensive as hell, but there's so much good and useful stuff in there that I think I can justify the expense. At least it's a tax write off for my business, so it's not a total sucker punch in the wallet, but I'm still looking at dropping over a grand on the entire thing. And that's after some upgrade discounts for already owning a current Adobe product. I need/want Indesign and Photoshop at a bare minumum, and that would set me back nine hundred alone since I don't own any version of Indesign yet, so I might as well spend a little more and get the whole shebang.

The new Dreamweaver actually supports CMS's like Drupal (what this site runs on) so I should be able to actually get the themes beaten into working order the way I want without having to resort to live testing anymore.

The other thing I'm excited about is putting out an art book, thus the need for Indesign. I've used a trial version of older versions and loved the hell out of it, and current on-demand print companies actually manage to produce good quality stuff. I took a course from Schoolism on self publishing, and learned that I absolutely do not want to publish my own book through traditional channels. Yes, I could make more money, but I would have no time left for anything else. I've already got enough problems balancing my side projects and creative hobbies with a full time job as it is, so I can accept making a little less to do the on demand thing. It's the same reason why I went with Cafepress for shirts and swag instead of making, marketing, selling, and shipping all that shit myself.

I've had a few people say I should just pirate the software since it's so damn expensive, but I have to admit, ever since I started creating intellectual property, my opinions on digital piracy and I.P. have changed a bit. Hell, i don't even download music torrents anymore. I'd feel like a hypocritical douchebag if I bitched about people using my creations without permission and then doing the same unto others. Doesn't look too good for a registered business to pirate software either.

Well, it was looking like I was going to dodge any sort of serious illness this winter, but as a last parting shot from the flu season, I've had a 100 degree F fever for four straight days, a sore throat, sinus congestion, and all the aches and miserable symptoms of either a really bad cold or a relatively mild flu.

This sucks.

...

Picture unrelated; just a random sketch I did that went crazy with the coloring.

In other news, I'm actually contemplating dropping another $200 to upgrade to Photoshop CS5 when it comes out just for the improved color picker alone. How sad is that? Oh, and I covet the new Wacom Cintiq, but that's wayyyy out of my budget. Alas.

I've been drawing a lot of imps and hellish critters lately when I'm not grinding away at the Steamvolt comic. I'll admit, a lot of my inspiration comes from Barlowe's Guide to the Inferno, which is a pretty incredible piece of work.

Now, I'm not the least bit religious, and I don't believe in any of this stuff, but the concept of it I find fascinating. The whole notion of damnation and eternal torment and that there's a place for sinners and such to go once they die. It's just interesting stuff. The imagery such ideas conjure up, along with the emotional impact they can have are pretty intense. So chances are, I'm going to keep sketching stuff like this for a while now.

This one started out as a pencil sketch back in 2007 or maybe early 2008. I finally got around to slapping some color onto it. I was thinking of this critter as sort of a scavenger and hunter, with a jaw for crushing bones and a rasping tongue to extract marrow. Sort of like Hell's version of a Hyena. Yes, these are the things I actually daydream about. Fun stuff!

And speaking of Hell and damnation, I was stuck in a three hour long motivational seminar yesterday at work. Now, I'll admit, this one wasn't as painful as some of the one's I've been forced to go to in the past, but it was still pretty mind numbing. The best thing I got out of it was a goofy sketch I whipped up on a notepad while I was trying to stay focused.

Yep, I'm in a slump. Been in one for a while, actually.

It's sort of funny, because I've actually been pretty productive, but it's always the completion of any project or getting through the boring details that defeats me.

As you can see, I've done a pretty major graphic update for the header of the site, and also added in a spiffy tiled background that I spent far longer on than even a person with OCD should. I think it came out pretty well though, so whatever.

The problem is the details. See, I got all this graphic stuff done, and now when it comes time to properly implement it I'm just fucking exhausted. I have no desire to try and sort out this drupal theme and get shit working right. I know I have the ability, just not the will to grind through it. I mean, seriously, this is about the tenth time I've sat down to really hack the CSS on a theme for a blog/website, and I'm completely fed up with it.

I think I have a solution this time, however. Instead of (continuing) whining about it, I'm going to find someone and give them monies to solve my problems for me.

Now, this prospect makes me nervous, because I'm pretty picky about projects and such, but I think this is simple enough that I can psychologically let it go and let someone else do the ugly, painful parts. Now, don't take this is an open invitation to submit job applications; I've already got some people in mind who I can inflict this suffering on. I'm just saying is all.

Probably a big part of this "case of the mondays" shit is the crazy things that I bring into my life; like fostering extremely aggressive dogs for an animal rescue, or rescuing cats from crack addicts. That's a lot of stress, similar, from what I've seen, to what some of my friends who now have kids are going through. I'm not sure which is more dangerous: sharp teeth and claws, or opposable thumbs. Both have a high potential for disaster.

Which reminds me of another thing, my bulldog is the same size, weight, and shape as my friend's one year old son. And I mean, if you've seen a one year old, their heads are enormous... Sorry, random thought there.

I also found out that my dog has nine nipples.

Yeah, another random thought.

Did I mention that I'm actually allergic to dogs and cats? Yeah, I'm also half retarded I guess. Long haired cats make me so allergic that I can barely breath. The cat we rescued from the crack addict (maybe it was an alcoholic, I'm not sure, either way that cat was almost dead from neglect) is a long haired cat. So guess who hasn't been able to breath for the last month. That's right, THIS GUY! YEAH!!

Anyway, I think that I need to start delegating some of my shitty tasks to other people so that I can actually focus on the stuff I like doing. Like that little image of ennui and apathy there; that was really quite fun to belt out with my tablet, and quite frankly it's the first thing I've enjoyed working on in quite some time. Didn't feel like work, ya know, more like venting.

I seem to draw a lot of rabbit-rodent like things. Not sure why that is... hm.

Well, ok, that's all for now. Oh, and Rush Limbaugh is still a traitor and a tool (HA! Got a political jab in there at the end!! AHAHAHAHA!!!).Ok, that is all.

Well, it's election day tomorrow.

Finally.

This has been a pretty crazy election year... I'm glad it'll be over soon. I'm especially glad that Obama appears to be winning by a huge margin too; maybe we can get finally get past this historical period of Republican idiocy.

In other news, I'm waiting impatiently for my new tablet PC to show up. I can't really afford the thing, but the extra hours of work I'll be able to put in while commuting and during lunch will be most excellent.

Other than that I'm still plugging along on Flash projects and researching how to code browser games. Not a whole lot of art lately; too much insanity between job, house repairs/renovation, foster dogs, and my own neurosis to get much done.

Getting the tablet will be nice though. There's a lot of times I just need to bugger off and find a place to chill out and do some work, and I've got a back-log of over 60 sketches that have been scanned I've not had a chance to do any digital coloring too. Same with some of my comics and other ideas, and this website is held together with the virtual equivalent of chewing gum and duct tape.

That's one of those shitty things about having so much stuff to do at home: you just can't relax and actually do any side projects when your to-do list is two meters long. Blarg.

Well, I'm going through the arduous process of rebuilding my database still, with specific attention on the Blog entries.A funny thing I noticed: I whine a lot about trying to get this website to work, without actually producing much content. I suppose that's the story of my life...

Well, I've let this site lie fallow for a while now, because I have very little desire to grind through my database and tweak several thousand tables so that they're compliant with the new drupal. That's HOURS of work I have to look forward to.

Currently missing are half of my links and all of my galleries and every forum entry, and probably other stuff I just haven't come across yet.

Been a while since I posted, and although it may appear like I've been pretty inactive, I've been doing a lot of shit. So this is what I've learned:

• Sleep is for the weak.
• Trying to live out the first point will make you start to hallucinate.
• Paintball is awesome fun.
• Paintball is not awesome fun if you're not wearing a cup.