June 10, 2007Love and Monsters Ho hum. Guess I better get in an incomprehensible entry here, lest all that time I'd spent shuffling ten years worth of files around proves as hopeless an endeavor as, oh, locating a working Commie64 disk image of "Star Rank Boxing". Or roleplaying newfangled collaborative-story RPGs (like, most recently, the Ghostbusters-themed "InSpectres") without impersonating a lobotomized orangutan. Or possibly even attempting another Frank Exchange Of Ideas with individuals of a 'progressive' persuasion. (Alas, that rule that stipulates you can't support American military action unless you've personally lugged an M-16 through some godsforsaken combat zone abroad remains in effect -- America! Love it? Then LEAVE it! -- but of course those on the Bravely Dissenting side of things still don't have to risk financial ruin or prison buggery by making an equally Principled™ announcement to the IRS that they're no longer paying taxes to finance American McImperialism, maaaan.)And at what point did the 'Blother' start going this namby-pamby, glorified art gallery route (for extremely loose qualifications of 'art')? Probably around when my unsupported old Sharp Mobilon interrupted the writing process for the 5,128,488th time, screaming "help, my batteries are dead"? Meh. Anyway, here's some tedious new scratchings, demonstrating yet again how quickly I suck the life and spontaneity out of any newfound Photoshop painting technique. The first is a hella grim tableau of (presumably steam-driven) eldritch industrial artifacts and tattoo-imprisoned demonic entities -- hey, you got Niven in my Mieville! You got Mieville in my Niven! -- while the other illo (prob'ly not work safe, but you can tell that even from here) is mostly just an excuse for a drool-chinned yours truly to lecherously render big happy wimmin with big happy billowing Secondary Attributes:   (For extra XP, just add your own crudely obvious double entendre in a word balloon over the macaw!) Topical guano: recall when I'd argued for allowing megacompanies like Coca-Cola, Google, et al, to train their own (presumably genengineered and cyber-augmented) athletes, and let 'em compete against existing 'national' teams in the Olympicks? Yes, yes, I know -- pure running dog lunacy lifted out of post-Stranger Heinlein, from one clearly ingratiating himself before top-hatted plutocratic overlords, etc. etc. But you can NOT deny their extensive advertising know-how would've provided the 2012 Games in London with a more accessible logo than... whatever it was... that was unveiled this week:  Okaaaay. To be fair, I get the gist of what the designers intended; something evocative of magic-markered But it IS a slippery slope, don'tcha know! If we abide that hateful standard of Empire, subliminally sneaking its way onto coffee mugs and t-shirts and other sports bric-a-brac, why, inside a decade we'll be powerless to stop King William when he orders the Royal Navy's shrunken remnants to 'take back' Boston, Bombay and Hong Kong! Er... right. However, times -- and interpretations -- change. As a child of the Bicentennial, I certainly had the particulars of the Revolution drilled into my head much earlier and more emphatically than most. Yet flaunt that distinctive cruciform before me today, and you know what's the first thing that springs to mind?  Not brutal colonist-stomping redcoats, but Joe Elliott, crooning in Def Leppard's video for "Photograph". (And that's probably how it should be.) May 24, 2007Tee-vee Indolence #2 *blink* Wha? But, I don't -- whoa. WHOA. I'd say more about the season finale of "Lost" -- except it's kinda difficult to form words when your jaw's firmly embedded in the ground. Anyway, nice job, writers. I can't even claim you 'tricked' me, as there was plenty of little clues lying about, a la M. Night Shyamalan. "Hey, the hero... twice over!" And thank the Gods some plot elements (Sawyer's revenges, Rousseau's daughter, John "Gilligan" Locke's stubborn inability to join the Dharma Initiative's distinguished... uh, ranks, etc.) were finally resolved. Because chewing on questions like "whose coffin was that?" until February 2008's gonna be torture enough... April 30, 2007Distributed Stupidity Insert pent-up Wilhelm Scream here.If y'all hadn't noticed earlier, for the very first time in its decade-long history, my website got shut down because of excessive bandwidth usage -- too much downloading goin' on. I'm not sure whether to be pleased or annoyed about this, as one of the immediate (and incredibly annoying) things Earthlink did when they swallowed up Mindspring back in '01 was scrap my daily web statistics. So who the smeg knows what happened? Maybe a higher-traffic site linked to me one day? Or some vengeful 1337 h4qu3r type -- hellbent on ensuring that all human discourse assume a uniform monotone of Apologetic Quasi Religious Self Loathing cometh At any rate, s'probably just as well, as these past few weeks have been one disastrous crisis after another for yours truly. Beginning when a krovvy lump -- the red, red vino, my little droogies! -- got hacked up one fine morning. Oopsie. Contracted pneumonia, both lungs -- but the ol' meatware was apparently too retarded to make me aware of that little life-threatening fact. A couple more painful maladies appeared shortly thereafter, and then there was always my pet Incurable Disorder Which Must Not Be Named -- but enough of that whinage. Dum de dum dum de dum dum de dum OOOOhhhhweeeeooo...  That's supposed to be Timelord Numero Diez and Ms. Tyler -- haven't been able to viddy the third season Martha episodes yet. Truth be told, I'd actually been something of a "Doctor Who" aficionado, growing up. Or rather the Tom Baker episodes a certain snow-filled local UHF station broadcasted each week out of Outer Mongolia, whose otherwise craptacular video reception you still couldn't receive unless you pointed a television's bunny-ear antenna in such a way that maximized the chances of gouged-out eyeballs for everybody walking into the living room. IAE, though the new series is a major hoot (especially bits where they affectionately rationalize dated stuff like the Tardis' appearance and Daleks' lethal toilet plungers -- EXTRICATE!), I sometimes miss the original half-hour format, with its occasionally arbitrary/laughable 'cliffhanger' endings. Oh sure, you'd complain and get frustrated over the lack of plot resolution -- but absolutely nothing would keep a hopeless addict like yourself from tuning in yet again seven days later. Er -- well, almost nothing. Eventually those aforementioned death-tenna rituals got on everybody's nerves, and before long someone 'accidentally' snapped off the UHF knob. To add insult to injury, a few years later I crossed paths with an astonishingly pretty blonde gal in one of my AV classes, who was completely obsessed with all things Whovian. Naturally all my nerdly, endearing knowledge about the series had conveniently dissipated by then -- while that massive compendium of useless PopCult trivia called 'the Internet' was still in its embryonic stages, an exclusive realm populated only by savvy university students, scientists and gub'mint types. AUGH! (But hey, chalk another one up for the cultural Anglosphere, eh? If an ignorant rednecked Guardian/BBC-loathing Yank like me can still name all the Pythons, pre-ordered "Deathly Hollows", smugly peppers his blog entries with bits of Nasdat and laughs out loud at Rose T.'s supposedly UK-exclusive lines like "oh my God, I'm a chav!" or "Not exactly the NHS, is it?" -- then there's hope yet!) March 20, 2007Clockwork Express Well, with less than a week to go, the I-CON committee still hasn't announced a winner to their schedule cover contest. So at this point, I'm just going to preemptively assume I've lost, and post these babies already. In case you're blinkered, the monochromatic version with the typography and quaint retro single-digit-LPI line screen was my original submission -- conveniently minimizes the conventioneers sporting black fingers all weekend, y'see:  Yeah, yeah, let's hear the collective groan. "Another fut'urban scene? Hasn't the well run dry yet?" But as other recent pieces demonstrated, I've returned to local-coloring land with a vengeance (or at least a mild hankering for revenge -- against what, who the smeg knows). Insofar as increasing productivity goes, this is a very good development. The next step is to try to take the technique (applicable to every artistic medium, really -- paints, colored pencils, what have you) and figure out how to strategically muck it up afterwards using computer-exclusive thaumaturgy. Best analogy I can think of is a now-common practice in Hollywood today, whenever footage goes to a post-production house. S'called 'digital grading' I believe, but it's largely just pulling out wild colors with the computer, replicating effects that, in the old days, would've required specialized camera filters or differing film stock. And no, don't know why -- I just adore Wexford Oakley. It's a very 'steampunk' typeface, simultaneously evoking urchin-packed (hah!) Dickensian squalor and outlandish tech nearing critical mass (or self-realization). Had the coot been in the 'content-delivery' racket, Ebenezer Scrooge would've flaunted it upon every bit of marketing bric-a-brac available (all while screaming at Bob to get the lead out on this week's viral, natch). Whoo-hoo! I just scanned/uploaded some more photos again! Really love this first, of my grandfather (apparently tinkering with a new Marx Magic Shot one Christmas morn). It's nearly thirty years old, but believe me, the guy could've just as easily enjoyed himself playing a first-person-shooter video game today -- blood mist, inner-city psychosis and all:  Recently I got a chance to read what amounts to his memoirs, describing a childhood in Liverpool, England -- and subsequent travels around the world, toiling in various capacities (porter, steward, chef) upon merchant and pleasure ships. Unfortunately, since he wasn't really a 'literary' type of writer (or more likely, there was just too much experience to distill) a lot of it reduces to a progression of ever-changing places and ship names. Still, there are exceptions -- grim and cruel ones mostly, like one passage dating from 1914, where (as a boy) he'd stayed at a train station to see his older brother off to war (this'd be World War I, of course) -- an act of familial devotion which earned him a caning from the school headmaster the next day... frickin' bastard. Or another ordeal several years later -- one of the vessels he'd been serving on took on thousands of soldiers as part of a military convoy; influenza soon swept through these passengers like a scythe, and each day the ship decks filled up with bodies -- a veritable carpet of new dead, to be buried at sea. Ye gods. Compared to that business, even the tacky Weebles-filled malaise of late-70's America must've felt like a warm blanket. Anyway, I hope to transcribe his remembrances as plain text in the future; right now it's still a humungoid 25-megabyte PDF of scanned handwritten notes. (Admittedly that's small potatoes to some of you out there, who can apparently download the entire Human Genome Project during a bathroom break. But not moi.) Next up, we have the required exercise in self-embarrassment. My elementary school put on a circus. A HUGE one, encompassing almost all the kids from first to third grade. As near as I can remember (and perhaps schoolmate Scott can refresh my memory, here), there were 'main event' performances taking place on the gym/stage before a seated audience -- kids dressed as silly clowns, lion-tamers (and lions), trapeze artists, strong-men performing feats of superhuman strength, etc. While in the cafeteria, there was the 'side show' -- which hosted games of chance, crafts booths, bearded ladies and the like:  Anyway, as you can plainly see, I was the sideshow's magician -- and not an especially good one. Spent several hours in a cold sweat before tolerant adults and skeptical children, nervously performing the worst acts of sleight-of-hand imaginable with a chunk of carrot, in a ludicrous attempt to make spectators believe a thumb could also dually function as a pincushion -- so long as it was safely concealed beneath a convenient draping of handkerchief, or course. Oh well. At least I wasn't mangling Latin and waving a wand. And lastly, we have the latest exhibition of Advanced Feline Idiocy, with your vacuum-skulled hosts, Buster and Fang:  (So now y'all know why I'm so woefully behind in my Bas-Lag readings...) Ah, yes... what else? Well, after enduring a moonbat abortion last year that bore only a vague resemblance to Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta", I'd become quite cooled to receiving any comic book-adapted film whose promotional blurbage loudly exhorted 'FREEEEEDOM!' So it was with great reluctance (and a fully-charged Leftist Bullshit Deflection Shield) that I approached the theater to bear witness to "300". <keanu> Whoa. </keanu> How was such a movie even permitted to be released, so soon after the petty demagogues and ersatz pacifists of the Democratic Party achieved their ill-gained victory? As the air was still being fouled with recommendations that the President hold a summit with "Twelth Imam" Ahmadinejad, and other similar transcendent bits of advice? And especially this precise historical moment, when terms of America's capitulation to the same revolting totalitarianism that'd been exhibited on September 11, 2001 are now being hammered out? "300" defiantly, ferociously repudiates ALL of this mush, with all the subtle nuance of a Louisville Slugger. "Peace at any cost"? Never! Negotiation? Up yours! Surrender? Bite me! Of course, the real controversy still stems from the Islamic Revolutionary Cesspool of Iran (yet again), whose deranged leadership somehow found time between Holocaust-denial workshops and nuke-Tel Aviv planning sessions to bellyache about the Persian Empire's rather unflattering portrayal in the epic. Such creative license, the mullahs shrieked, would soon provoke a jingoistic let's-crush-Iran frenzy among American audiences -- presumably where thirty years of hateful rhetoric about "the Great Satan", holding hostages, engaging in major naval battles, providing support to murdering terrorists, secretly building atomic weapons and openly declaring an intention to use them had failed, I guess. The funniest home-grown defense I read stated that Americans would feel exactly the same way if some dusky towelheaded filmmaker beat our own domestic cinematic genii to the punch, and extruded a flick that featured, say, the Colonists as mindless slave-whipping, native-killing barbarians. Ahem... YEAH, RIGHT. About fifty-five percent of us kneejerking rednecks (myself included) would balk over that one. But ah, the Worldly and Enlightened remainder -- they'd exult in this New Brave Foreign Voice Speaking Truth To Power, smear their objecting fellow countrymen on the other side of the aisle as intolerant First Amendment-shredding brownshirts typically crushing dissent as usual -- and otherwise bury this same Persian camera-jock in Oscar gold. (And meanwhile, the U.S. government wouldn't take any stand at all. Well, okay -- except maybe the President, who might issue a brief statement condemning the film. It'd be duly ignored, unless he was Republican -- in which case for the next two weeks every third-rate newspaper and television talk show would overflow with sneering editorial content about the disgraceful Commander-in-Chief's tenuous grasp on reality and criminally misplaced priorities. Yes, such is our Orwellian police state.) At any rate, it speaks large, tragic volumes about how far we've fallen since a certain bright smoke and pulverized concrete-filled morning, when America's self-loathing intelligentsia now factor in the foamy esthetic proclamations of theocratic tyrants as being worthy of any consideration. Proudly, even. We must listen to The Rest of the World, y'see. We need to embrace a New Global Sensibility in all our productive endeavors (but, y'know, not so much that we'd then do something silly and irresponsible like selling McDonald's hamburgers abroad. Now that's just baaaaad...) Feh. March 8, 2007Waiting For A Star To Fall (Nostalgic sigh. I always loved that Boy Meets Girl tune... what? Oh yeah? Well, so's your mother.)Anyway, yes -- I'm still alive. Been rather hypocritically holding back on flaunting some new headache-inducing art from last (and this) week for silly superstitious reasons -- y'know, 'jinxing' oneself, currying disfavor with the Gods with prideful exhibitionism, and all that prehistoric rot. But when The Word does finally come down, I'll surely post the mind-numbing mediocrity here, along with my usual multiple kilobytes of Eh? What's that? Something from the sketchbook, instead? Erm. Trust me, you would not enjoy the stuff I've been drawing in there lately. Oh, admittedly they're the same caliber as other scratchings on display here, but their content is, shall we say, a bit too specialized for public consumption. The only exception to this same steady convoy of billowing, slavishly-rendered femmes who look like they were lecherously co-authored by Russ Meyer and Gaston Lachaise is stream-of-consciousness technophilia like this:  Heh. And in other geeky pop-cult news, I think it's safe to say fright-wigged David Bowie's twenty-year reign as 'Best Goblin EVAR' has now officially drawn to a close. (And no -- the entire Raimi-filmed Osborn clan was duly stripped of that title several years ago, upon DNA testing/discovery of their surplus "Power Ranger" costumes. It was quite the scandal...) February 21, 2007Irreconcilable Indifference Well, no new Photoshop greasy-paintery glistenings, as of yet. It would seem that desperate/nervous "let's kick off 2007 with a bang" creative energy which fueled yours truly last month has been damped out, thanks in no small part to the recent calvacade of Unspecified Health Woes (this week's indignity: a head-stuck-in-a-vise, forcible-lung-inversion variant of the common cold, creating minor mountain ranges of wadded tissue paper everywhere -- whine, gripe, kvetch). But I'm still sketchbook-drawing, which is marginally better than (or equivalent to) nothing: (Do you actually need a fanbase to indulge in 'fan service', though? So many questions...) Also stopped by that aforementioned RPG/hobby shop the other day, and managed to get my hands on a copy of one of Estes catalogs. See, as a prepubescent, I'd built a 'Big Bertha' model rocket with my father -- though for some never adequately-explained reason he always balked at installing an electrical chemical-propellant engine into the thing. Undoubtedly t'was the very high likelihood of his clueless son spending his remaining days sporting an rakish eyepatch and/or brain damage for the reluctant ladies (darn that '3 Dexterity' roll-up!) Anyhoo, it was oddly comforting to see the company kept the quiet dignity of their product line, and largely resisted that insane push between, oh, 1989 and 2001 to take everything 2 D X-TREEM!!!!111 Oh sure, you've got balsa-wood versions of Ansari X-Prize contestants -- Burt Rutan's beholder-eyed SpaceshipOne, et al. But that's just the early 21st Century equivalent of craft NASA would've built, had the agency been more concerned with successfully lobbing metal into The Black, instead of indulging the fantasies of eco-catastrophists (who apparently never heard of Godwin's Law). Incidentally, Estes continues to sell the Bertha. It's now clad in some faux-stealthy black pseudo-ceramic. Which almost makes about as much sense as giving Lovecraft a long-overdue makeover, by way of Fisher-Price -- but who am I to argue?  Aww! Isn't Ancient Lurking Unearthly Horror just oh so cuuute? (That color scheme should coordinate rather nicely with my Coop devil-femme sculpture, too. Yes, soon my desktop will be a veritable McDonald's Playland of Evil! Heh heh heh!) And for all those anxiously waiting for that Great Political Smackdown -- well, forget it. The ennui-inducing futility of that enterprise hit me towards the end of last year; I'd watched some leftwerp visionary babbling on the idiot box, who was making an quite astonishing argument in support of soi-disant 'redeployment'. To wit, that "hey, well, we also abandoned South Vietnam without suffering any serious consequences, Geopolitick-ally speaking. So what's all the fuss about?" Indeed. Apparently millions of Southeast Asians butchered by communism triumphant, our defeat there subsequently emboldening Islamic fascists in Iran (whoops!), and the lingering "American self-loathing is a virtue" credo fostered daily by geriatric Boomers upon her universities and in her media never really counted at all. Yes, let's do the time warp again! Pleh. It's like reality isn't even a consideration, any longer. What truly matters, see, is the sustainment of oh-so-fashionable contrarianism -- that somehow it's Brave and Rebellious and Revolutionary to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with medieval topplers of skyscrapers and their allies. Because, y'know, we're all Little Eichmanns toiling in the oppression machine anyway, maaan. Over and over again, I see the same tired accusations and bumper-sticker slogans being made that've already been refuted twenty times over -- as if the mere act of repeating them (with accompanying airs of sneering self-righteousness, later parroted ad nauseam by dire-voiced engines of 'mainstream journalism') will make such fantasies 'fact.' And maybe it will. Certainly worked for the Dems, last November. At any rate, the truth is over the past six years, I've come to know the other side's present 'worldview' quite intimately -- and NO LONGER EFFING CARE. At ALL. I'm so consumed with contempt for the tortured knots of concrete-set falsehoods that led them to their present reprehensible stance -- and a stark helplessness before the monumental task of unsnarling even one percent of that tangled mass -- that pretty much anything overheard/read about Controversial Subject 'X' is now going to be summarily ignored. Just like how you'd handle the rambling speeches of any wild-eyed, unhinged subway patron: whatever. At long last, that standard rejoinder carries some weight. February 14, 2007Bah, Humbug 2007 Which (as if you haven't guessed) is now my standard Scrooge-styled rejoinder to anyone making the blithe assertion "Happy Valentine's Day!" Truth be told, I can't recall a single instance of this accursed centennial that approached, in any shape or form, the light-filled realm of 'happiness'. Alas, not even during those years when yours truly was deeply in love with some gal, and ostensibly more receptive to the holiday's scarlet-hearted, chocolate-and-flowers-dispensing lunacy. And most ESPECIALLY not when the occasion was exploited by nefarious amateur match-makers in order to herd desperate-faced singles into 'mixer' pens, speed-dating and other dubious constructs. Feh.I tells ya, what this particular twenty-four-hour batch really needs is a festive animated television special by Rankin-Bass. Perhaps something in a Greco-Roman vein, with Cupid/Eros having to meet his quota of mortal love-puncturings, or else be horribly devoured by some bug-eyed mythological beast spawned through the gods' wacky penchant for incestuous dalliances. Then, at long last, bitter misanthropes like me could still get into the romantic 'spirit of things', without bringing down all Those Who've Found And Live With Their Truest Soulmate In Eternal Peace, Love and Happiness, blah blah blah. Oh, and on the subject of old-school Humbug! (and circular trains of thought curiously resembling a Moebius strip), here was the final version of last year's Escher-ripoff Christmas card, paired with one of my recent temporary retreats into soi-disant 'graphic design' (in this case, a logo for a fledgling jewelry company):   Yeah, yeah, I know. Obsessed with spheres, much? Of course. Also sphere-shaped objects, fleshy yummy sphere-shaped bodily protrusions, and Michael Crichton novels. January 30, 2007Woe Is Me Well, this is shaping up to be a most unpleasant week. First, my printer decided it wouldn't use the color 'black' anymore. Oh, not right away, of course; only after the needless purchase of a new cartridge by a no-name manufacturer, who apparently didn't fuss over such trivialities as, say, keeping the liquid ink in the package. Then the trusty palmtop Mobilon's RAM bursted like a soap bubble, taking with it all those programs and settings so painstakingly installed in the past. But the absolute worst indignity of all: my body's now trying to painfully twist itself inside out yet AGAIN -- thus consigning yours truly to a now-familiar panicked, suicidal fetal state.Sigh. Think it was Larry Niven once made the wry observation that "old age ain't for sissies". And though I'm still several decades away from being lumped into that demographic, yet (really, dammit! I'm younger than Johnny Depp!), unless there's some ascendent medical technological changes by then, with my notoriously low physical discomfort threshold, I'll be surely begging for admission into them Soylent plants before too long. Sigh II. Oh, and pray tell, just what grim visual expression did such misery conjure up?  Yup. Baby effin' Transformers. Beat that, Mr. Giger! Incidentially, this now makes three consecutive Gordonian celebrations of 80's pop culture. There's something profoundly sad and wrong, there. (But in my defense, I'll still claim "We Are The World" as the vilest song ever written.) January 20, 2007Lazy Micro Blog #6 Aaaand the comments have returned! Along with all the other pointless Blogger HTML-streamlining guano! Yes, it seems the problem was with my Internet provider, and their changing the entire FTP uploading directory structure, without doing something silly like informing their customers. Odd, that. I'd think handingAt any rate, here's ya latest Gordonian crapola. Though it took scant less than five hours, I'm afraid the rather cynical/dated/nihilistic subject matter (namely Alan Moore's "Watchmen") still didn't deserve the overwrought level of loving attention I'd put into this ultimate-plot-spoiler pic.  But alas -- that's what always happens whenever yours truly starts rendering. Immediately everything else fades into the background as irrelevant, inconsequential clutter. Even such questions as "why the HECK am I even doing this?" don't penetrate that Photoshop/Prismacolor-induced trance, until long after those heady fumes of dubious accomplishment have faded (or I start contemplating my social itinerary/bank account/both). Oh well. Still, there's a Bug Eyed Monster, so I suppose it wasn't a complete waste of time. And if the loathesome Comedian had been replaced with one of those voluptuous nymphs out of the 1st Edition D&D tomes -- then that, me droogs, would've been True Art. Maybe next go-around... January 10, 2007Insanely Grating Still in HTML-land, alas and alack. As per the Perpetual Internet Obsolesence Act of 1999 -- which mandates that any useful free doodad upon the Web be recklessly 'improved' with glossy processor cycle-draining GUIs and unwanted new features requiring the latest version of Internet Explorer Download NOW! all while ignoring issues of said widget's continued operation -- it appears Blogger isn't making any effort to solve my (now month-old) glitch. Nor even acknowledging there's a problem. Which -- after having attempted to publish via five other browsers, four alternate machines and three different ISPs -- is now clearly on their end.Fortunately, such frustration comes in quite handy when you're badly artistically visualizing something like, say, the world of "Tron". There's scant difference between a implacable, ravenously hungry god-AI, and your average New Economy bulwark, after all:  Yeah, well, if the Master Control Program's capable of cracking high-level military encryption during bathroom breaks, it can also damned well approximate SOME level of emotional expression onto its avatar, too. Nyeah. Anyway, back to Blogger, I can only assume they're 'shaking out' uneducated swine who rely upon FTP publishing, and so cheating the company out of those vital herbal Viagra advertising dollars. Well, that, or else it's <tinfoil_hat> their new Google overlords, typically Crushing Dissent and silencing Voices Speaking Truth To Power. </tinfoil_hat> For the time being though, guess I can fake things with Olde School uploading. Heck, it's even easier than Blogger's present method, which involves lots of superfluous login hooforah, illegibly typefaced OCR-foiling authentication graphics, and other needless time-consuming security-minded rot. Of course, this still leaves out the all-important OTHER half of the soi-disant 'blogging' process: namely, you the reader -- and your caps-locked, epithet-laced speculation about my possibly being a closeted member of the Ku Klux Klan. But o'er the past year, I think I've more than adequately demonstrated my zeal for reader commentary; when and however these silly techno-wrinkles are ironed out, that capability Shall Return!™ (...he emptily promised, chafing his hands with censorious relish) In other news, the new Democratic-controlled Congress was spared a long-overdue creation of a new orifice at Tom Gordon's vitriolic hands, when Apple Computer (now just Apple, Inc.) distracted him with their latest fawkinawesum bit of technology. Namely, the iPhone.  Gaaaah. I hate you, Steve Jobs. So. The Fruit Cult satisfies pressing consumer demand for a widescreen video iPod, a neo-Newton running full OS X (though not a tablet, damnation), AND a Apple Phone, with a single integrated product. Well, with a head full of recent patent filings, I ridiculously over-expected something like this last February -- better late than never, I guess. But as much as I'm drooling in Soulless Consumerist Excess™ right now, noting how bland, ordinary and monotonous the video iPod I bought eight months ago suddenly appears today, and otherwise mulling over a purchase -- can it be denied that Apple's opened a Pandora's Box, here? I'm referring, of course, to the cacophonous panorama of customized ring-tones (or, more precisely, ring-soundbites) that'll now sweep the land. Wherever people congregate en masse, soon the air will be ever-droning with long-forgotten media catchphrases, guitar riffs and the infinitely repeating chorus of the Baha Men's "Who Let The Dogs Out?" (Hmm. Maybe it's time I reconsidered Luddism.) December 31, 2006Resolution Olde School hand-coded HTML (yuck!) note to all: as of today and o'er the past couple of weeks, my Blogger account hasn't been functioning. Comments and entries can still be added, but for Ghu knows what reason, nothing's being uploaded here. Anyway, hopefully this situation should (read: better damned well) be rectified after the holidays. In the meantime, since I'm not keen on posting the final Escher Ripoff Christmas card art yet, please enjoy(?) a recent hastily scrawled gutter-minded jokey-sexist recognition of the impending New Year, instead: And believe me, you'd very much rather download big-nippled zaftig goodness right now, than my highly acidic observations about fellow Graciously Apolitical co-celebrators over the season, and the tidbits of indisputable wisdom they'd all-too-freely dispensed (when not pointing and screaming Body Snatchers-style at household religious iconography, of course). Some notable examples: "I think Democratic sweeps in the US Congress have fundamentally altered America at a quantum level. People just seem inherently happier now, the water and air tastes cleaner, and the entire national landscape just feels so much brighter than usual. Such is the wondrous healing power of a fifteen-cent minimum wage raise." So, needless to say, my resolution for 2007 involves (among many other dubious objectives) seeking out and finding people I can hang around with in a social setting whose glib pronouncements won't make me want to kill myself/them/both. Happy New Year! December 8, 2006Daze of Infamy Behold, Free Lunch Studios' tenth consecutive homegrown Euphemistic Holiday Card (unrendered)! And almost certainly the last, as quite honestly this silly annual ritual lost its appeal for me 'round 2001 or so. No, the Christmas season (okay, I oppressed thee, call the ACLU) is reserved for eggnog guzzlement, watchin' Laurel and Hardy lay the sharp pointy smackdown upon overly-padded Bogeymen, and usual drunken pining for gothy lost loves. Not sitting bleary-eyed in front of Adobe Photoshop, by gum! Yup. Let it never be said again (or even once!) that Thomas "File Off The Serial Numbers" Gordon is a geysering font of originality. For pinching Escher's supra-rational visuals twas contemptible practice enough. Commit that same crime twice, and you've pretty much consigned yourself to the Abyss of Derivative Artistic Mediocrity for all eternity. (Well, that -- or else the Timelessly Wealthy Realm of Hollywood. Same difference...) Ah, and four kilobytes of exceedingly sarcastic, embittered rambling about yesterday's 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor -- and how Baby Boomers (and their Gen X-Y-Z thrall) just loooove to spring big throbbing nostalgic tents over long-past American conflagrations against tyrannical fascism while actively subverting the one we're engaged in today -- duly snipped, in the interest of Collective Seasonal Bliss. Yes, may your respective Shaven Yak Day be ever free of my buzz-killing political vitriol. Or somethin'. Also scrawled a somewhat related (and wholly geeky/pathetic) treatise on the inherent problems in reviving a certain filmic 'franchise' today. But fortunately enough, a picture's worth a thousand words, and this cryptic spot illo pretty much explains it all.  (Still stumped? Contemplate the acronym 'PKE', my friend. And then weep, most profusely. Or even risk your career writing a daring, clever script.) December 1, 2006Drawin' Fool Wow. That didn't take long! A little rapid-fire something for Ten Ton Studios' first-ever digital art contest. In case y'all were wondering, the players are Vash the Stampede from "Trigun" and Faye Valentine from "Cowboy Bebop". And no, I'm not a big Japanime fan, but this obscure, quirky couplet was far more preferable/interesting to render in Photoshop than the cringeworthy alternative. Namely, over-exposed, over-muscled men in tights. Shudder. November 30, 2006Fall Fall Fall... Gad. Guess I better get yet another minimalist blog in -- before November ends and my usual low-level grumpiness becomes a genuine Funk. Of course here's the obligatory incomprehensible sketch-vomit, whose JPEG algorithm-destroyed, barely-visible 'technique' is a sneak preview for this annum's Gutlessly Nonspecific Holiday card. (And the theme this go-around? "Crude butchery of M.C. Escher's legacy, yet again") Incidentally, doesn't that doodling just ache for a gratuitous Lakeside Computer Perfection cameo, somewhere? Yup, cometh the advent of FTL space travel, I fully expect every vessel in the Solar Union to have at least two of those things prominently displayed in the control room -- just for nostalgia/bewilderment's sake. Ah yes, and the 2006 election results. Well, believe me, I've already written scads of quite vitriolic bits about it. But with the afforementioned Generic Celebrations Of End-Year Diversity fast approaching -- and their spirit of feigned 'brotherhood' -- I think I'll be reformed-Scrooge 'charitable' for now, and inconveniently rant about that particular subject come January 2007 instead, when the New Dawn For America (or whatever idiotic name the lamestreamers give the event) is imminent. Oh, and obviously this same apolitical courtesy will be extended to me, at various parties this season? Yeah. Riiiight. IAE, it's clear Osama was overly generous in his estimation of American military willpower. Paper tiger? Try kitten of marglefargin' Kleenex. Or, perhaps, a little poetic anecdote. Recently, I saw one of those "United We Stand" bumper stickers. Obviously'd been stuck on pretty closely after September 11th, for the magenta ink comprising the American flag's stripes had completely vanished over the years of exposure to the elements -- just as stagnant water drippings will, eventually, bore a hole through the hardest mountain rock. Anyway, what remained now was only a pale cyan for the star-filled field, and lettering.  T'was also a spot-on illustration of our present state of affairs. An America exhausted and drained, weak blue shadow of its former enraged red-blooded self. And now 'united' only under a banner that's three-quarters white. Sigh. (On the upside though, as one of the newly Dissenting Disenfranchised, I'm free to scrawl/inflict fawning commentary about Survivor's overly-sincere 80's-era defiance-anthems again! Yay!) October 31, 2006Lazy Micro Blog #5 Alas. Chronic (and non-candy-related, really!) gastrointestinal malaise coupled with the usual legendary Gordonian indolence/despondency prevents yours truly from regurgitating something suitably macabre for 'Ween 06.So in its stead, I reluctantly present a TALE OF TERROR, circa second grade. Insert bad Cryptkeeper pun here. October 12, 2006Dork Cred #4 -- Photo Roll Playing Sigh. I guess we're never gonna have hovercars, are we?Been digging around old photographs recently, so this'll be a somewhat quirky/experimental blog entry, insofar as GUI consistency goes. For some unfathomable reason there're people out there using the WWWeb, who still can't grasp this basic concept of thumbnails leading to higher-resolution graphics. Ah well. First, to get the ball rolling, here's the obligatory self-indulgent sketchbook bit:  Yes, yes. That bionic oinker provided a great opportunity to plug Jon Hoenig's porcine-themed economic texts. Or perhaps even earning one of those nifty fatwa-thingies from the Religion of Peace™ (this nanosecond's infidel-icious outrage: the Apple Store in NYC). Well, I'll merely confess that lecherous, corrupt lump called my "mind" was, er, elsewhere at the time (hint: not upon the pig). And, in the luridly disturbing non-spirit of Halloween -- let's now clickwhirl the ol' iPod to 'Saint-Saens', pry open the dust-shrouded Wardrobe of Embarrassment with a rusty crowbar, and let loose all them cackling skeletons! The scrawny shirtless git playing the trumpet's yours truly. Yeah, laugh it up:  Oh yeah? Well, your mom. Once upon a time, this would've been the third item published by my enemies to ruin any bid for future political office (after sordid pix of the 1995 Psilocybin Mushroom/Hershey's Syrup Incident, and an interview with a certain futile love shrine's owner, of course). However, I think the stigma associated with the game's largely dissipated nowadays -- what with musclebound lunks like Vin Diesel writing nostalgic dice-hurling accounts, the hugely successful Potter/LOTR Axis, and teeming thousands having their will to live voluntarily sucked out via World of Warcraft, et al. (Hi Scott!) IAE, it appears our characters were smack dab in the middle of the Slavers modules -- yup. Naturally we'd gotten there after completing the previous Giants series. I don't know why disrupting the commerce of unethical merchantmen would've been considered a greater challenge than, say, fighting hundreds of beings several times larger/stronger than you. Or for that matter, resisting such obvious adolescent geek-baiting situations as this (from "Hall of the Fire Giant King"). But then we're also talking about a world populated with psionically-powered slime and cube-shaped dungeon janitorial services -- so I s'pose different rules must apply. Next, my seventeenth birthday, celebrated in Maine. Sigh. Testosterone, where are you?  Oh well, guess I look cute, in an effeminate, Audrey Hepburn-styled way. Yet absorb a hefty cutting implement next to the cake, and the whole picture takes on a most disturbing air. One gets a distinct impression that as soon as I grab that frickin' knife, I'm gonna spring up from the table and proceed to gleefully fillet the photographer. Heck, that may have even been on my mind at the time, because -- insane grinning notwithstanding -- that period was NOT an overly happy one. OTOH, maybe I've just got my hands down my pants. And hey, scope that well-executed frosting iconography, eh? An artist's palette -- AND a computer! Whew! Thank god I outgrew all that juvenile crap!  And lastly, the inevitable, vacant-expressioned kitties. Smokey! Smokey BABY!  Gad. What IS it with Russian Blues, anyway? I'm aware such felines are bred by professionals to be overly friendly with their owners, but just what attributes are the gene-wranglers selecting for to achieve that end? 'Cause if I could use a single word to describe every one I've encountered, it'd be 'dopey.' In other smeggy news, North Korea apparently lit off The Big One, this week. Whew, that Karl Rove fella sure gets around, huh? First he made the price of gasoline artificially drop using his Commodity Influence Ray... and now THIS! (Darn. And just when we were finally getting back to Important Issues too -- like banning trans-fats in restaurants!) I jest, of course. But to paraphrase The Pursuit of Happiness, at such abysmal moments in history, "you've got to laugh to prevent yourself from crying". And to be honest, I DO kinda wonder how those appeasing ostriches we call "Democrats" (with a straight face) will ultimately handle this. Particularly when up until now they'd been over-investing themselves in this fantastic notion that surfing a wave of dirty e-mails and proclaiming American failure will somehow carry them into power again. Oh, obviously the Donkey Boys can't league themselves with what they've always proclaimed to be an illegitimate dictatorial regime, run by an evil warmongering tyrant. But they also can't support Kim Jong Il, either! (Nyuk, nyuk.) So my guess is they'll just do their usual bitter finger-pointing routine, in defiance of historical reality -- why, this never would've happened if WE'D been in charge! -- and then go right back to calling their opponents PERVERT ENABLERS. Except in that alternate reality where what's-his-face DID get booted out of office on the strength of electronic correspondence. In which case they're slinging INTOLERANT HOMOPHOBES, instead. The nuance. The nuance... October 5, 2006Tee-vee Indolence #1 To the writers and producers of "Lost"...I've enjoyed your science-fiction themed show over the past several months, though must confess that with all the story's loose threads and oh-gimme-a-break one-degree-of-separation coincidences, the only way you're ever going to pull yourself out the plot chasm you've dug for yourselves is by introducing yet another Dharma Initiative Station... preferably one equipped with an Infinite Improbability Field. But that's besides the point. Hey look! LOOK! It's Megs, dammit! Ahem. Anyway, the premiere last night was par for the course, answering a single question while simultaneously introducing ninety-six surrealistic new ones. I dug how y'all covered previous ground concerning polar bears/sharks, Sawyer's cagey situation was most hilarious ('specially his anticlimactic 'reward') and Kate was... exceedingly hubbalicious in that dress. (T'was also most gratifying to see that "Henry Gale"/Ben hates Stephen King, too. Now that's truly the stuff of leadership.) However, in the future, please realize most of your viewership expects only ONE flashback story per episode -- usually boring retcon explorations of 'human relationships' -- and that they generally endure such syrupy conventional drama, just so they can see what goofy weirdness is taking place on the Island this week.  With that in mind, please ALSO realize that it is the height of abject cruelty to kick off a new season with a brief flashback of something that is TOTALLY HOLY FARGIN' RAD for a change -- to wit, the Galt's Gulch-styled retreat of the Others -- and then, after the commercial break, replace it with yet more run-of-the-mill Jack-angst about his alkie papa. Now that's just mean... October 3, 2006Pop Cult '06 Because Stephen King remains a contemptible putz, I believe I'll call this one "The Girl Who Loved Mean Giant Badass Robots From Space": And yes, in case you were wondering, that IS the ever-plucky Penny Gadget. Yet another in a very long (and pathetically sad) list of painted-celluloid females whom yours truly futilely hankered after in his preadolescent years -- that is, when he wasn't also crippling his mediocre artistic development slavishly emulating their Disney/Japanime-distorted features. Still, with the widespread stylistic quirks rife in animation today -- ones that'd make Bambi look like some grim, obsessed avenger -- I suppose it could've been far, far worse. (Oh, and any pointers to relevant Cybertronian-slash-Puny Fleshling fanfic will be duly ignored. For God's sake, it's horrible enough reading the sue-thored exploits of, say, one of Rowling's heroines gone bewilderingly amnesiac/goth, without having to also indigest highly improbable naughty bits. Or the inevitable revelation that 'SNAPE IS A VAMPIRE!!!!111') Anyway, at present I'm in my monthly writhing-in-agony mode. This belies the process of relaying messages about my brother's newly-born daughter somewhat, as happy news should never, ever be delivered in an unenthusiastic death-monotone that a state of physical discomfort always affects. T'was also a wee bit galling that the birth announcement was made via cellular camera/phone e-mail -- one of the few bits of modern tech whose usage I still eschew, preferring instead to watch several dozen feature-length films on a tiny handheld device like one of those geriatric codgers rambling on about the glory days of whalebone corset repair. And for obscure genealogical reasons not adequately explained yet, they opted to name the gal 'Louisa'. Which makes me exceedingly glad my "you'll have a boy" prediction fell through. A limerick-friendly sound like 'loo-WEEE' is only a few steps removed from, say, 'Gaylord' in Darwinian schoolyard terms. Also endured a recent futile exchange on MySuperfluousness regarding the latest attempt to re-mold America into a spark-hydranted Alan Moore utopia (with, presumably, labor camps for those unreconstructed die-hard tinkerers who still enjoy loud fast things). Sorry, I think a $100,000 tag for ANY rolling conveyance that isn't also equipped with a bed, kitchen and a toilet should be outrageously silly to anybody (besides overpaid Hollywood celebs eager to demonstrate their Oh, not that there isn't a market for short-range e-mobiles to mundane joes -- hell, most of my automotive travels span no more than thirty miles. But if their manufacturers aren't even going to make an attempt to compete with their IC-powered counterparts -- preferring instead to market inflated wares to a tiny gullible clique of wealthy Kool-Aid drinkers who delusionally think they're 'making a difference' -- well, more power to 'em! The spirit of P.T. Barnum lives on! September 25, 2006Screw You Guys, I'm Goin' Home! Well, suppose there could've been a far better way to break this streak of grouchy silence, than an undeserved cameo by one of my lame insult-spouting indestructible bounty hunters, circa 1982. Then again, after the last glorious color-and-mammaries-filled entry, almost anything would've been a step up (or down, if your esthetic tastes/moral degeneracy matches mine). But if we also consider recent discourse in that otherwise useless cesspool of posturing gangsters and death-worshiping psychopaths laughably called the 'United Nations' -- then Snits Cosmocan's reappearance really IS in full compliance with the present simpleminded fourth-grade-schoolyard Spirit Of The Age. Yes, some generational cycle, I'll get around to scanning all the rest of the "D.B." installments. They'll be most illuminating, especially for those of you out there who've already concluded (after scoping FLS' mountains of self-indulgent tripe) that I'm a hateful hate-mongering hate-ball. Believe me, none of this present rambly sarcastic-incoherent stuff even holds a candle to the violent nastiness I'd scrawled as a kid -- where dialogue like "eat THIS!" and "DIE!" got regularly passed as 'witty' repartee. And oh, the corny epithets! The zero-dimensional characterizations! "Artwork" that, in one glimpse, would suck away ten IQ points forever (assuming you failed your saving throw against Mind Stultifyingly Dull Imagery, of course). And oh, how I DO miss it... Ahem. In any case, I've heard many of my 'fellow travelers' claim that last week's circus was the final straw breaking the camel's back out on a limb, yadda yadda -- as if the UN's previous sixty years were any shining record of idealistic utopian internationalism triumphant. That, henceforth, we should abandon the grand fraud immediately and start up a competing global-gub'mint organization -- comprised of truly free, democratic countries -- such as the 'Anglosphere', Japan, India, et al. -- and set the unhinged orb to rights again. Y'know, kinda like how "The Real Ghostbusters" was far superior to Filmation's "Ghost Busters." (Okay, admittedly those 'fellow travelers' DID tend to get a wee bit goofy with their analogies.) My own cartoon-derived take is somewhat different though. I think the remnant patchwork of fascist/commie/banana states would then -- after forming a cocoon, or something -- metamorphose into an organization similar to Hanna Barbera's mid-seventies 'Legion of Doom', with a membership of wacky hand-chafing villains who'd pool their ill-gained resources for this week's planetary domination bid. Presumably at ten frames per second. Maybe even inside a suspiciously Vader-shaped structure too, if they're lucky enough and the considerably less gullible/tolerant 'Real UN' doesn't nuke 'em flat. So you can probably say I'm not an advocate of that route. Better to just scrap the existing structure of corrupt bureaucrats, rewrite the gawd-awful Charter, and more-or-less wait for gold-tossing naked women to magically rain down from the sky (this last possibility being far more likely than the rest). On the other hand, it's also a source of mucho puzzlement when enlightened transnational globetrotting souls who rant on about AMERICAN HEGEMONY at social occasions always reflexively balk at this notion of the US doing a Cartman shuffle: "...yes, I do think my country's an evil ignorant overweight petro-sucking Gaia-raping imperial empire, arrogantly overextending itself foisting <roll eyes>"democracy"</roll eyes> and Chicken McNuggets upon the Rest Of The World while ignoring pressing problems at home. But withdrawing from the United Nations? Why, that's just silly crazy nutty isolationism!" Sigh... August 4, 2006Countercounterculture Ooh, ooh! Succubi! Or is that succubuses? NO! SUCCUBI! By gum, America needs less people loudly belaboring the obvious ("...whew, it's sure hot today!") and more gratuitous usage of irregular plurals! Or plurae! Likewise, less dorky role-playing speculation about why underclothed soul-drainin' demonesses (or demonessi!) would writhe their way out of the Abyss' curiously numbered strata and into a clearly high-tech futuristic society (the Cthuloid medallion? Change of scenery? Ridding the multiverse of Ted Kennedy's bloated, cybernetically prolonged carcass once and for all?), and MORE shrugging indifference to my tortured online efforts at racy imagemongery and drivelicious prose! YES! Give me your apathy now! I WANT IT! Ahem. Anyway, for some reason, I always get more Photoshop-hypnotized fooling around with crazed light/color alpha channel arrangements (like this), than when I'm just doing vanilla rendering. No doubt it's probably 'cause that part of the process doesn't require quite as much vein-protruding-from-forehead 'grunt' work -- once all those tedious illumination masks are saved in, I can then just kick back, tweak on-screen levers and watch all the jazzy colors whirl about, maaaaaan. Presumably, this would've also been the proper time to load up the bong with herbal tea, set the ol' iPod to non-stop Floyd and otherwise behave like a Deep Artist™ should -- incoherent and retarded. But alas, I've never tuned in, dropped out, nor even fallen down. Indeed, that was an unfunny running joke during my first month at college. Since yours truly sported a tangled mass of long hair and a regular state of befuddled confusion back then -- check 'em out, Jasmine, that dude MUST be a stoner! -- before long, he soon found himself adopted by a little clique of -- gasp! -- hippies. I must admit their company was a welcome distraction from other crucial plans going on at the time, like oh, deciding whether to mail severed bits of my anatomy to a girl I was still in love with back home, or to just commit gruesome suicide already. Or (if it could be managed) both. Ah, the Good Olde Days! But -- just when it seemed I was going to earn the dual Life Enriching Experiences of a thoroughly THC-saturated brain AND some serious snuggletime with Crumb-styled granola wimmin -- like a fool, like an imbecile, like a DailyKos contributor, I just had to start blabbing to my new 'family' about the recently-announced Macintosh II, and Ayn Rand's whimsy-filled tales of hardassed rapist-anarchist-architects. Whereupon I was summarily ejected from their dank-smelling nest with such force it almost qualified as a Sam Raimi sequence. Oh, later I'd also get an invite from goths, metalheads, computer geeks and 'miscellaneous' -- and their subsequent boot upon confessing complete ignorance of Bauhaus, Burton, BBS's and Beer, respectively. But by then, everybody had so much effin' schoolwork to do that anything resembling a 'social life' was strictly out of the question. (Yes, I'm hella bitter. Dammit, I always wanted to wake up in a pool of my own vomit!)  In other unrelated news, looks like Fidel Castro's finally on the way out. Which would be more significant if his long-overdue departure also meant the death knell for international socialism, once and for all. But like his ideological brother in primitive thuggery disguised as 'popular resistance' wank -- one Yasser Arafat -- his presence isn't really necessary anymore: the damage is already done. Nevertheless, while I sincerely believe the man is a contemptible bastid who should've died in quite messy fashion at the hands of his own people decades ago, I also think it's imperative that America's leaders immediately find out what's medically wrong with the megalomaniacal scumbag, and then invite him into to the US to receive treatment! Oh, the good folks in Miami will howl with indignation -- and they surely have every right to do so. I also rather doubt American doctors will be able to cure the malady presently afflicting the commie coot. But just look what such a pointless gesture accomplishes! In one shot it (1) clearly illustrates capitalism's superiority (obviously Cuba's much-hyped 'free health care' system didn't cut the mustard, eh comrade?), (2) makes our old enemy look like a hypocritical tool, (3) paves the way for improved relations with his successor (and resentful imitators elsewhere) and (4) earns the United States some good PR with the so-called 'international community' -- who regularly fawn over tyrannical dictators like they're freakin' Lindsay Lohan or something. So write your congresscritter today! Tell 'em YOU want Fidel Castro to spend the next ten years alive, healthy and eating large helpings of crow! July 24, 2006Lazy Micro Blog #4 As promised, the Baroness (swoon) and Destro: Polishing? Yup, that's me -- Mr. Double Entendre! (Those reflective and glossy textures sure were a nice change of pace, though. Also turning a Patty Hearst-esque radical terrorist harpy into one of those bubbly intellectual girls that you should've asked out, back in High School.) Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) this comprises the very LAST entry in the sketchbook I bought back in January. And since being without processed tree flesh to scratch upon is just as debilitating as any of the other physical/emotional/mental disorders I'm saddled with... y'all earn a reprieve from the usual textual diarrhea. Or at least for now, anyway. In the meantime, yet another entirely superfluous link to Hondo's Hurricane -- because I said so, dammit. Share and Enjoy™! Or else go stick your head in a pig. Whichever. Also (bonus!) this scan-request of one of my more criminally prosecutable puns. Paired, as the devilish forces of synchronicity would have it, with a freeze-frame from my ever-increasing iPod video hoarding. (I daresay Joe Elliott's notion of 'subtlety' makes mine look positively Victorian.) July 17, 2006Dork Cred™ #3 -- Working Overtime, Fighting Crime If I owned a time machine, going back to February 2006 and nipping in the bud this Internet schtick of posting rambling text coupled WITH sketchbook drawings (and occasional Photoshopped spot illos) would be pretty low on the "Temporal Fixes List". Hell, I might've just excised the whole 'weblog' concept from the time-space continuum altogether. (Or at the very least, that redundant enclave called MySpace. No one would mourn.)Regardless, any Blother delays can be chalked up to that same implied obligation. For -- much like silly 'biorhythm charts' of the Corduroy Era -- my propensity for wordcraft follows a different productivity waveform than the one for imagemongery. (Yes, that'd be it! Summertime meatspace activities? Their subsequent ravaging of one's gastrointestinal system? Simple fargin' laziness? Piffle! It's harmonic convergences, I tells ya!) At any rate, I have been doodling quite a lot, lately. First up today is stubborn clinging to abandoned mid-Eighties toy/toon franchises. Derisively snort if you must; at least I don't have to worry about the likelihood of a filmed version defiling my childhood memories, nyeah:  C'mon. Can anybody seriously deny that Hondo MacLean owned the sweetest wheels in the entire unit? His Not-Ready-For-Hasbro comrades had to contend with ungraceful land-air or (worse yet) land-sea transitions with their boxy conveyances, but not Hurricane/Nightstalker! No, she stayed firmly on the ground, and lifted her vintage chassis a few feet to expose an additional set of wheels and a ludicrous bristling of weaponry. Classy. (And certainly worth enduring goofy Geordi LaForge-styled headgear.) No doubt Mr. M's also enjoying the New York Times' latest unwarranted expose of a certain counterterrorism organization "illegally" operating in the desert Southwest. An article surely replete with engineering schematics of all the group's pseudo-civilian military vehicles, detailed info about its Boulder Hill headquarters, and the home address of the WASP plutocrat who "leads" the "so-called" "Mobile Armored Strike Kommand". Because we certainly wouldn't want the forces of relentless evil to be put at ANY disadvantage, Allah forfend. <rightwing_snark=on> "Hey, well, they're like the Fourth Branch of Government, maaan. Sez so in the Constitution. (Which was made of hemp, by the way -- another fact THEY don't want you to know!) Oh... okay, I'll admit nobody actually elects any of the Times' editors. But we can't begrudge their undemocratic and unaccountable efforts to hold accountable our democratically-elected officials for subverting our democracy with democratically-agreed upon surveillance programs. Yes, even if it means the Times' revelations ultimately benefit unaccountably undemocratic terrorists who love to kill Americans, and, er... uh. Um. Erm. "Well, anyway -- why don't YOU go fight in Iraq, you neo-fascist chickenhawk? AMERICA! Love it? Then LEAVE it! And stop crushing our (patriotic) dissent on the front page of national newspapers!" <rightwing_snark=off> Also caught "Pirates II" at the theatre last night (sorry, just not big on this whole new "Epic Title: Installment" naming convention Peter Jackson's pioneered). I'll only make three non-spoiling observations. One: having enjoyed this flick, its predecessor, "National Treasure", and the afforementioned slick Arthurian retelling, it's clear I'm finally becoming something of a Bruckheimerite. (Kill me!) Two: the folks behind the early-Nineties "Monkey Island" series of adventure games should really talk to their lawyers -- I almost expected the Creepy Voodoo Swamp Gal to send  Coming up next time: four-eyed "spoiled offspring of wealthy European aristocrats" -- and their chrome-domed Significant Others! Can't you just feel the excitement? (Yeah. I can't, either.) June 25, 2006Pontificating Upon A Sketchbook Entry #2 Well, I finally fished, got off the pot, cut bait, what have you -- and jumped back into the Berol Prismacolor fold at last. Yet another ludicrously overexposed PopCult icon this time around -- as I'd lost the previous Ten Ton competitive exercise in  Oh, and in case you're wondering about the Nicholsonian axe, t'was a tip-of-the-hat to the only other Joker drawing I've done, during the height of the (in retrospect, ludicrously undeserved) hype surrounding Tim Burton's 1989 film. While a comparison of the two pieces o'crap may reveal that yours truly's actually devolved in his mad imagesmithin' skillz during the seventeen-year interregnum: believe me when I say that even pushing out a 'greyscale' colored-pencil illustration would've easily consumed a week (or more) back then. The contemporary version, OTOH, took about four hours, total -- and it's in color, Bob-dammit! 'Course, since I was working out directly from the same smallish sketchbook I'd purchased at the start of this blog (which incidentally contains almost every art posted here, along with billowing fleshy oodles of far less accessible/embarrassingly pornographic entries), the impulse to begin filing down every pencil to the thickness of a flea's nostrils and render the whole thing utilizing an electron microscope was almost irresistible. But methinks I did a fair job of avoiding that particular Road to Blindness/Frustration/Insanity -- except in areas like the psychotic clown's face, which needed that bit of 'oomph.' Presumably, if I ever feel the obsessive need to piss away hours getting tiny eye highlights to look just right, I'll simply work on a bigger scale and employ the same medium (in its damnably hard-to-find stick form):  (Man. These suckers saved my life, back in college.) Unfortunately, the all-too-familiar process was not without its innumerable anti-nostalgic harkenings to the Bad Old Days. Grind up several Prismas in a blender, wave the component wood/pigment clumps under my nose, and I'll immediately find myself right back in late adolescence again; building lavish, tearstained pseudoreligious shrines to beloved Hippie Chicks, in another desperate attempt to magically Make Everything Right, Part XVIII:  Y'know, I'm still not sure if that cartoon was meant to be self-denigrating or not. Since 9/11, I've heard that effin' Santayana quote -- "A fanatic is one who redoubles his efforts as he loses sight of his goal" -- more times than I can count (and of course, always directed in a snotty mode towards 'imperial' American efforts to liberalize the Middle East, but never those savages who wear Semtex belts and fly planes into skyscrapers so they can boink houris in the afterlife). And insofar as hopeless romantic yearning's concerned, perhaps I should just accept the label gracefully, and let other people handle the 'deprogramming' side of things when I'm finally arrested for illegally erecting a heroically-proportioned Play-Doh sculpture of My Aphrodite™ in some fashionable city square. (HI, JEN!) June 19, 2006Enter Sandman Just for the record (or podcast? durned anachronisms), yours truly's never been a big fan of the 'horror' genre. Stephen King, to name its most 'commercially accessible' example, is one whose tripewriting I just can NOT digest at all (and that was even before the dorky SOB turned my very name into a tedious running joke for assorted smart-alecky friends' benefit). The same holds true for the Ginsu Enthusiast school of splattery filmmaking -- as typified by Herschell Gordon Lewis and his lurid footstep-followers. Such celluloid carnage does not exactly inspire a sense of "teeth-chattering fear", so much as "a desire to see Hollywood suitcase-nuked, for the sake of greater Western civilization".Tangent time: and what is the freakin' deal with the demographic group Machete Brandishing Psychopath #274 always practices his whittling skills upon? Is it -- as paranoid liberal (a redundancy, I know) pundits claim -- the filmmakers' intention to forge a Clockwork Orange-y association between 'nubile young women' and 'sickening death' in the minds of the audience? (Haw haw! Certainly didn't work in my case! Well, um... unless you count all those times I threw up in abject terror when confronted by pretty girls, back in High School. Oh, okay -- in college. ALL RIGHT DAMMIT, I STILL PUKE TODAY!) Anyhow, in general I find the best spooky-art to be Lovecraft or Matheson's stuff; well-crafted near-literature that's more appropriately categorized as 'dark fantasy' (or even science fiction!) to taste. And having completed this long-winded kvetchfest on aberrant PopCult trends, I now contradict every stinkin' word of it, by offering up a lame doodle of Bruce Campbell's involuntarily chainsaw-wielding character from the "Evil Dead" flicks. Go, hypocrisy, go! (Warning: Sam Raimi-ish cartoonish graphic violence ahead... DEAD ahead! Nyuk.)  I'm also going on the rec-- uh, Blu-Ray DVD, as stating that I just abhor having good dreams. Sure, after yesterday's Beginning of Summer-esque party of sorts (sadly celebrated in lieu of Father's Day), where recreational beverages/iffy consumables were overindulged while slow-baking in the Big Room With The Blue Ceiling (or, as other people call it, 'the outdoors'), any number of nightly subconscious detritus-spawned adventures could be expected. But to date, they've always tended towards two possibilities. I'm either screaming my lungs out at a newly-arrived convention of ravening skeletal undead Shriners, before dying horribly in a catastrophic event culled from recent current events/grim speculative fiction/both. Or else it's a REM-replay of the same stupidly mundane activities that would've occured in a wakened state, anyway. (Oh, maybe a perfunctory surrealistic touch is added 'to spec' here or there, like a computer made of cheese, or yodeling dogs. Big shmeal!) Not upon this occasion, though. Oh no -- THIS time around, after the usual Vaseline-on-camera-lens transition, I arrive in the Land of Nod, rummage through my pocket and -- lo and behold! -- discover the GNP of a Third World nation lying amidst lint and discarded bubble gum wrappers! How'd it get there? More importantly, wouldn't several metric tons of precious metal have ripped the trouser's fabric -- or at the very least, hindered some freedom of movement? Apparently my dream-self doesn't sweat inconsequential details like that. IAE, having just improbably stumbled his way into the elite club of multibillionaires, Sleeping Tom then resolves to go to a store and purchase something truly ambitious with his newfound riches -- say a spool of CD-R discs. Or perhaps even some beef jerky, if the spirit is willing. He climbs into his monster truck (don't ask), and noisily careens unmolested down a familiar suburban boulevard, earning multiple tip-of-the-hats from all those law enforcement officers who've managed to FINALLY clear that particular stretch of its geriatric, Prius-driving Baby Boomers, praise Jeebus! Whereupon, in the parking lot, he just happens to bump into... That Girl. The Muse. The One That Sort Of Got Away, Except You Never Really Possessed Her In The First Place, et cetera, caveat, asterisk. In a normal universe, of course, I could easily estimate Her™ reaction to such a chance reunion: it'd span the gamut between a forced, uncomfortably reluctant acknowledgement... and just plain fleeing in terror. But she would certainly NOT be bubbily smiling, with eyes lit up in full-blown manga style. Nor would she then proceed to enthusiastically cover every square inch of my body with her own, in a scene that'd make the business from "From Here To Eternity" look like an exercise in Victorian standoffishness. But then came a noise from that lesser realm --  Deep sigh. I suppose I should be grateful to Fang. As per his dour, rationalist Russian (Blue) heritage, his incessant feline demands roused me out of a wistful fantasy-world right at the crucial 'foreplay' stage -- leaving much less romantic material to pine over while rubbing out eye boogers and brushing teeth. Nevertheless, if the Guinness World Records had an entry for 'live cat hurling', it would've definitely been broken this past morning. Grey buzz-killing twit. June 14, 2006No Leaf Clover Please note: if you removed the lovely (un)fairer sex and implausible floatcraft from my limited visual vocabulary -- presumably utilizing power tools and a largish soup spoon -- within a week, yours truly would suddenly become the new darling of the Fine Art world, filling galleries with pretentiously-named, sprawling canvases of the splattery incoherence he'd found to replace those forever-lost subjects. (Or perhaps he'd just be cleaning toilets. Same difference.) On the plus side, with a big chunk of logical cerebellum scooped out, one could also probably learn to enjoy Speaking of throttling, I'd truly like to wring the neck of my younger self. Oh, not for his quaintly incessant hand-wringing over matters of zero consequence, like oh terrorist groups and American Balkanization. Nor even for a social cluelessness that'd make Butters look like Tyler Durden. (Though I venture a day in 2K6 footwear would probably shake up his navel-embedded perspective there, what with its marked absence of beloved fathers, proper digestion and general political amiability. (But then, if it meant unloading clips of intellectual ammunition at undead hordes of cartoonish leftists, the fool would probably stick around for that last bit, anyway. And iPods.)) Nope, the offense worthy of near-strangulation was far more prosaic than that... namely, not documenting the arcane process whereby I can add new categories (such as, say, 'BLOG') to the Free Lunch Studios site, without disrupting the consistency of its pseudo-handwritten, horribly dated user interface. So for several hours, I fudged along in Bloatoshop, swapping color palettes, pixel-level drawing and all the rest of that image-processing rot. And does it look right? Hear that hollow echo! Anyhoo, once THAT tiresome business was completed, it later occured to me (after the fact, of course) that I could've simultaneously created graphical links to OTHER sub-headings too, like the Retrovertigo mini-site, or even that curious 'miscellaneous whatevers' page, with all its custom video game mods and emulator-readable Commodore 64 disk images. But that would've assumed some capacity to stop and calmly assess things while in the obsessive throes of single-minded tunnel vision. And that just ain't happenin'. Eh? What's that you say? Redesign the site? BWHAHAHAAoohmigod, I have to wipe my eyes, that's a good one. No. Rest assured, when I finally offer up a complete RNA holo-encoding of my brain for download, it'll still be through a front-end that wouldn't have impressed anybody, even back in 1994. Because, y'know, there's always some die-hard old-schooler out there, running NCSA Mosaic on a 286 -- and dammit, we just CAN'T abandon him! Anyway, I'll probably have more nonsensical ravings as the day grinds on. In the meantime, here's a list of my present piddling collection of music files. Yes, yes, I know that band sucks. But the kiddie-demographicked Raffi stuff is for my baby niece whenever she visits. Really. I'm serious.  Gaaah. And at age 1.75, no fargin' less. It'll be a most sad spectacle indeed when she's teaching me how to use Apple iPhotoshop 23's AI-assisted form rendering features. "...no, no, Uncle Tommy, you gotta insert the neurolink feed into the comm slot behind your ear, NOT in the ear itself! Hold on, I'll get something to stop the bleeding..." June 9, 2006Lazy Micro Blog #3 This is the last one. Honest to... uh, Transgressive Secularity. And nnnnow back to the usual overload of overwrought, pain-wracked verbiage! Sprinkled with a light layer of laughably lame doodles, and that occasional helping of patented snark sauce, of course! Lazy Micro Blog #2 Well, it hasn't made me not want to see it. But don't Decepticons sport RED eyes? Lazy Micro Blog #1 Good riddance. I'll sure miss his funny Iowahawk columns, though... May 29, 2006Abyssal Layer #002 (and counting) Oh, the angst. NOW I fargin' remember precisely why I'd kept away from wielding colored pencils for so long. Because it would mean I'd have to examine -- close-up -- any older artwork I'd accomplished in the past with that particular method, in order to refresh the ol' deteriorating brainpan. And then (of course) their related sketchbooks, chock full of that reckless artistic experimentation so typical of youth. Scanners? We don't need no stinkin' scanners!But noooo; that still isn't enough for you, art-twerp. Through an arcane process of subconscious association, for some imbecilic reason you also need to peruse THEIR accompanying notebooks, and inhale deeply -- yet again! -- the thick, heady vapors of micro-handwritten Byronic pining towards long-estranged let's-just-be-friends (but not really,)...  And then, the hole in the dike is unplugged. Everything comes back with near-photographic clarity. It's not just mere sensory data, though that stuff is surely powerful enough. Mundane household furnishings framing a transcendent smile upon a porcelain face. Winter's icy kiss, descending from a spiderweb of naked branches. The scent of hot glue and sandalwood, and the taste of scotch mingling with orange juice. But what is all that trifle, compared to the long-suppressed tsunami of emotion crashing down? Just memories -- JUST F--KING MEMORIES! WHY WON'T YOU TALK TO ME? WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO? WHEN IS THIS GOING TO END? AARGH! And so it goes. But eventually, you find your way back from the tragic rage/love/hope of that... place. Pulled out of the sweet mire by a newfangled bit of music, or perhaps just the mere spectacle of a wondrous gadget sitting upon your desk; something that defied imagining in earlier times. And if you're really, really lucky, you even have the good sense to steal and carry forward a useful bright, fiery piece of that Lost World along with you, to illuminate and set ablaze its present-day, paler facsimile:  (Not colored pencil, obviously.) Back to Mama Terra (and less pain-soiled concerns): I viddy'd "Spaceballs!" last week; the Mel Brooks controlled-demolition of George "Wattle Man" Lucas' seemingly endlessly repackagable space opera (along with a few other SF franchises for dessert). T'wasn't quite as spit-take-inducing as I'd originally remembered -- but please recall the audience back then was also an entirely different ball o'wax, and MUCH less versed in all the obscure PopCult minutia that gets regularly And lest y'all think I've been slipping in my post-graduate Advanced Dorkiness studies -- sneaking out at night to write tormented poetry at the nearby cemetary, etc. -- here's something else I immediately gleaned from the spoofy film:  Yes, yes, I know. Brown coats, floppy hairdos and somewhat blinkered rugg'individualism do not a shared genetic heritage make. But I venture they probably wouldn't beat each other entirely senseless at the nearest interdimensional-crossover saloon, there. May 25, 2006In The Abyss Ah well. I suppose if there's an upside to these (apparently) weekly spasms of inexplicable physical agony, it's that I nevertheless still have enough control over my ever-diminishing faculties to lamely doodle away, while contemplating the usual relevant Nietzsche quotes and inspirational/overblown 80's power-ballads. Like the past Epyx-inspired abortion, this was yet another one of those 'oh please let me get this infernal notion out of my system already'-credo'd pics. Because Eldritch Subterranean Horrors™ really do need to be dug out of their slime-filled holes, and cast into the withering light of indifferent scrutiny, don'tchaknow: I should say that I think this 'flayer is a considerable improvement over the last one I'd attempted, decades ago. Mostly because his tentacley-menacing presence isn't entirely belied by har-de-har "humorous" dipsomania (wouldn't alcoholic idiocy make 'em doubly dangerous?), or three coats of heavily applied kindergarten-surplus Magic Marker. Likewise, the Otusian-wannabe indigo-hued eeevil elven lass, where appropriate arachno-chaotic iconography was merrily indulged to full effect. But alas, beholding-balls will just never effing look right. Why, the durned beast is too outlandish/ludicrous to begin with; the human mind can't grasp an armored levitating over-oculared balloon as 'real', any more than it can accept the unlikely evolutionary processes that cause dungeons to be filled with giant, transparent flesh-dissolving cubes. Just not happenin'. IAE, now back to my bed-ridden treadmill of pain/anxiety/fun. (And no, "Eye of the Tiger" is NOT the Quintessential Survivor Anthem, dammit. That honor most emphatically goes to "Man Against The World." Best Song EVAR -- and its appeal hasn't even been diluted by years of radio overplay!) May 20, 2006White Dwarf I purely wish I could say I'd relied upon DVD freeze-frames, or consulted any other reference material for this dorky doodle. Unfortunately, Gary Gygax (or more precisely, his stable of deranged illustrators) beat out John Rhys-Davies by about three decades, in inculcating the economy-sized, quasi-Viking lumberjack archetype now echoed here. And The Fairest One Of Them All? Deep sigh. Let's just say if the hubbalicious raven-haired maiden had been a Real Wo-man and not a painted bit of Disney celluloid -- before too long she'd have to get herself a restraining order, to deflect the attentions of a certain hopelessly love-smitten five-year-old boy. Also, let it be known throughout the land that JRD is Da Man. And I don't just mean for his portrayal of archeologist sidekicks, parallel-dimension hoppers, or throwable orc-clobbering midgets. From a couple years ago: read it and weep. I know I'm going to buy the man a Hollywood drink; as it's probable his oh-so-nuanced-and-right-thinking colleagues won't. But then, Davies didn't NEED a pretty face to land his part... which is far more than the guy who played Aragorn can say. And speaking of Mr. Incapable of Seeing Any Parallels Between Tolkien's Masterwork and Recent Current Events:  Oh, the irony (though not quite as ironic as if he'd been Svein the Fawstin-esque Pig Man)! Yes chillun, it's one of those lavish pulp-airbrushy character cards from "Shadowlord!" (exclamation point not optional). This was a somewhat obscure fantasy-themed (and "Krull" inspired? Prob'ly) boardgame yours truly played long, long ago with his brothers. As near as I can recollect, it involved your taking up the mantle as one of the masters of pre-periodic elements (fire, air, earth, water). Then you'd jump into your color-coded spaceship(?) and hop from planet to planet, enlisting worthy heroes, heroines and unlikely talking animal aliens to your noble cause: ridding the 'verse of a marauding gang of eeeeevil black-tokened Shadowlords.For some reason, the other players also had the same exact objective, but the rules explicitly forbid them to do the obvious kick-butt coalition-forming thing. Presumably, endless debates still raged in the Galactic Union as to whether Fire Master was merely taking advantage of the so-called scare-quoted "threat" to unilaterally impose her arrogant pyrophiliac values and flame-broiled junk food upon the rest of the cosmology. Or whether the Shadowlords deserved strongly-worded written petitions (and revoked parking privileges) rather than military force in order to curtail their universal destruction ambitions. IAE, I wonder who the card illustrator was? He/she sure did some damn fine work! May 18, 2006Dork Cred™ #2 -- Brickin' II: Electric Boogaloo Lo, the indescribable joy of being rendered a quivering, invalid fetus for half a week, completely worthless to the world (or more so than usual) upon consumption of the wrongish foodstuff. Aging undependable meatware, as soon as the technology's commercially available, you're effin' history. For I anticipate the imminent bio/nano/cybernetic transcendence with all the sulky-faced eagerness of a nine-year-old waiting for Santa Claus to deliver plastic battery-powered swag on Christmas morn. (And what happens when Mom and Pop -- or the bleeding-edge scientists finally reaching immovable natural boundaries to god-level software design and geneering -- come clean with their spoiled-rotten kid? WAAAAH! It's not fair!)First thing's first. Here's approximately fifty percent of a sketchbook doodle for an imagesmithing Internet forum of sorts (which shall remain nameless), under a discussion thread where the Deeeeep Artiste in question is asked to come up with two words to best describe his or her visual oeuvre, and then post a drawing utilizing such terms. The remaining half-- to be shoehorned later with blasphemous electronic witchery -- is in a Coop-ish, lapdance-smothery vein, and therefore much too embarassing for this site (which is really saying something). Suffice it to say, the first word was 'tech' -- and that I have a real knack for ribald alliteration:  Bonus round! Upon a typically corrupt Zip disk, I recovered a bit from my waning days of overly-greasy greyscale Photoshop colorizin'. Y'see, most of Limbo-dwelling "One Small Step" was accomplished with this (in retrospect, rather exhausting) technique, and while I think this particular piece also rates placement in the 'Artwork' section of Free Lunch, unfortunately the similarly epileptic ink wrangling belongs to somebody else. Ah well... see one Chinese dragon, ya pretty much seen 'em all, right?  Regarding the subject header: when perusing the Internet, one of the depressing things you notice rather quickly is that there are communities of people who defiantly clung to ideas you yourself gave up long ago, for one specious reason or another. For example, yours truly just loved playing with Legos -- for the uninitiated cave-dwellers: plastic pegged bricks that you could snap together to form any number of shapes. The original generic five-colored ones were a ubiquitous part of early childhood; regularly I'd pool my (then) meager assortment with that of my neighbor's and we'd indulge our inner Robert Moses, improvising crude cityscapes with the stuff. But the real fun/obsession began when the space-themed sets were introduced! With their complex specialized moving parts (such as gears, hinges, wheels and turntables) and accompanying cutesy little figurines (there were medieval ones too, which came in handy for all manner of role-playing silliness), no longer was one confined to piling up the same rainbow-hued ziggurat arcologies, over and over again. Now, I could engineer devilish machines and functional vehicles, while in the process inventing an entire narrative universe for the perpetually grinning astronauts to live in.  Within each of us, I think, there's a fundamental desire to be a worldbuilding 'god' -- it's the reason why the 'Sim' line of games and DIY software construction set deals such as Neverwinter Nights and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion sell today. By the historical accident of my birth, I was merely stuck with little bits of plastic, instead of zeroes and ones. C'est la vie. So by the time adolescence rolled around, a good-sized trunk in my room contained the component parts of at least two Galaxy Explorers, two Starfleet Voyagers, an Intergalactic Command Base, a Solar Power Transporter, a Robot Command Center, a Space Supply Station, an All-Terrain Vehicle, a Gamma-V Laser Craft, two Walking Astro Grapplers, several dozen smaller sets, and a small army of p-suited smilers. And all of these were mere fodder for plastic Frankensteinian monstrosities of my own creation -- I was certain before long that one of them would gain me eventual employment with the company; why, in a grand fit of delusional presumption, I'd even mailed them off a resume, complete with photographs and instruction booklets! Child labor laws? Whazzat? At this point, it was gently impressed upon me by a friend that such activity, however pleasurable/insane, was unlikely to gain me any measure of future independence, access to higher strata of intellectual accomplishment, or curry favor with the (un)fairer sex. Well, okay, I believe his wake-up-call was more along the lines of "get a frickin' life, Tom!" But the end result was the same. Fearful for what lay ahead, I quickly abandoned that weirdly immature part of my life, and instead concentrated on refining drawing and computer skills -- two other interests of mine that were more likely to find gainful use in the much-vaunted Coming Global Economy.™ And that extra effort did pay off. Certainly my illustrative work improved dramatically once that chronovorous Lego monkey was off my back; within months I'd evolved from a crude, flatly amorphous proto-Japanime style to something that actually resembled the real world. But... did I 'grow up' or just 'sell out?' Twenty-something years on, it's difficult to say. An entire culture of adult Lego enthusiasts -- people much like myself back then, who nevertheless said "phuck off" to their practicalspeaking buddies -- has come into being and flourished since. Most notably this fellow, who'd built Malcolm Reynolds' Serenity to much fanfare last year (though IMHO, his rendition of Robert Heinlein's "Gay Deceiver" is a work of infinitely greater genius). Armed with disposable income of their own, and 21st Century resources, these hobbyists have entire workshops of Lego parts in their cellars, and virtually plan projects on their computers (a la CAD) using open-source LDraw libraries -- which they then exchange and/or collaborate with like-minded others over the 'net. And of course, there's the well-documented influence in the physical sciences, with more than one hardware engineer admitting that tinkering with plastic bricks in his youth set him upon a path which eventually led to MIT, and his present position designing robots for the Pentagon. (Deep sigh. Naturally, those stories are particularly annoying.) IAE, I seem to be fumbling here for one of those smug, easily-summarized 'morals' -- like what you'd hear tacked on to the conclusion of that afforementioned horribly lame 80's cartoon. Just this: don't be quite so hasty to excise things you care about completely from your life, because you'll probably regret it later, when the entire planet gets wrapped in an easily-accessible communications net -- and you discover you really weren't the lone freak after all. Yes, that'll do nicely. And Knowing Is Half The Battle! Et cetera. May 10, 2006Dork Cred™ Sigh. One of the sad things I've come to realize lately is that whenever humanity finally pries its dirt-worshiping tuckus off this miserable mudball and takes to the stars in earnest, the odds that highly unlikely we'll all be doing it in the same beaten, futuristic-practical pressure suits that've been popularized by every skiffy visionary from H.G. Wells to Joss Whedon: My own bet (as Eve McCracken once hinted at) is a magical vat of smart-yogurt that you dunk yourself in like a fleshy Frito, and come out sporting a second self-repairing, vacuum-proof organic 'skin' capable of processing waste, photosynthetically generating oxygen, and all the other tasks associated with living (as opposed to dying) out in The Black. Which I suppose has its own unique/kinky artistic appeal -- picture a naked person covered in a Michelin Man outfit comprised of color-shifting Jell-O! But that's an image that certainly wouldn't associated with the concept of 'space travel.' More like 'scary alternative lifestyles.' (OTOH, the cover would sure sell lots of Popular Science issues.) And -- oh, the ennui -- then there's the radical extropian/transhuman/severed-head-freezing-lunatic choice; saying "adios!" to the present unreliable hardware that's been shaped by millions of years of goofy evolutionary forces -- meat is murder, maaan! -- firing up a bunch of handy microscopic robots that've been lying around eating the linoleum, and becoming an intelligent gaseous entity, instead. Presumably this process would also give one the added 'bonus' ability to live forever -- which is something the advertising executives at Fog You! Inc. would quickly discover isn't an easily salable feature at all. Yours truly certainly knows he's not cut out for immortality; while the first couple of centuries would undoubtedly be a hoot, somehow I suspect that creepy sense of 'deja vu' would become stronger and more pronounced, until finally I feel like a volitionless puppet-rat on a treadmill (or something), performing the same silly airplane jumps sans parachute and bedding the same large stadiums full of eager women over and over again. Or perhaps I'd just whilst away eternity watching blandly moralistic 80's cartoons on my brand newly-purchased video iPod: 
Presumptuous/Delusional Observation #1
Man. I'm beginning to think Coop is my long-lost Okie Satanist older brother, wild evil crazy prototype Lore to my boring wussy crippleware Data, or something.First, note the obvious illustrationist-guy connection, in which he readily pounds the suck-tacular yours truly into a bloody smear (of course, a crayon-brandishing orangutan could do much the same). Scope his similarly held zaftig-unconventional notions of feminine beauty (Jeebus on a minibike, Ruth is too hubba-transcendent for words, she even wears green and purple combos, for cryin' out loud!) Check out his proud flaunting of the libertarian/Heinleiner/SF dork colors, last week. And finally (today!) see how he holds his writing implements. Which, as anyone who knows me will attest, is also one of MY And hell, if I could ever grow a beard without involuntarily scratching my face off, we'd even kinda look the same, too! (Gotta get me to California!) May 8, 2006This Is Such A Pity Back again. And you'll surely regret it.For some reason, I'm disinclined towards this whole breezy school of three-sentence blogging about what I consumed for breakfast, the silly things my cats did today, and other incredibly mundane personal trivia. Yes, yes, you quickly finagle yourself more frequent updates that way. But in the process I'd venture you'll also drive away a good portion of the Real Content™-seeking audience before too long with breathless tales of toenail clippings -- leaving behind a sticky, geeky residue of obsessed fetishistic loons who'll then openly inquire how it was humanly possible for Kendra Wyatt to live through a two-kiloton nuclear explosion, expound upon scientifically rigorous organ-cloning techniques, etc. On the other hand, virtually none of this same clique, upon viewing this sketch, would proclaim "hey, isn't that Vanessa Warfield's Manta in the background?" Because there are theoretical limits to dorkitude (and knowledge about old non-Hasbro toy cartoons easily surpasses them):  Speaking of total lifelessness, this week, on a whimsy-filled lark/nostalgic fit of despondency, I visited an old local role-playing supply store for the first time in something like two decades -- and wouldn't ya know it hasn't changed a single iota. Same shelves of luridly illustrated supplements, hostile painted-pewter infestations safely walled off behind glass... and dice. Lots of dice. That's the only gaming implement whose future is assured, methinks. The gamemaster's screen may've been replaced by a laptop's LCD, the rulebooks/modules now a folder full of easily-referenced PDF files... hell, even players themselves may be monitor/camera combos, teleconferencing their moves from some far-flung section of the globe. But when the game is afoot, every participant ultimately wants those polyhedronic shapers of fate in their hands. Relinquish that sacred right, and we all might as well be singing hymns to Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei in our People's Jumpsuits, dammit. IAE, I'd been meaning to pick up the Serenity/Firefly (Serenifly? Gotta consolidate that franchise) themed game, not so much for its unique play value ("...I'll use my +6 Witty Rejoinder against the slavering Reaver horde!"), but personal interest in the RPG 'industry' side of things. Unfortunately, they were out of copies. Which, like my previous trips to Compleat Strategist, then meant I'd be indulging my inner hoardy nine-year-old, and buying ittle-bitty miniatures instead. And then -- har -- vainly attempting to paint them. Because, y'know, if there's ANY useless, unproductive activity out there guaranteed to foster eventual blindness, Tom Gordon just has to sign on as a lifetime member! Cthulhu help me when nanotech becomes the hobbyist's 21st Century equivalent of building model trains: "...tunneling electron microscopes? Who needs 'em? I'll just squint really, really hard!" Incidentially, why doesn't Serenity (the ship, not the goofy transcendental state) have any weapons about her creaky flank? I mean, if you're alone out in The Black, hauling crates of undoubtedly valuable cargo, while roving bands of insane rapist-cannibals are on the loose, wouldn't investing in SOME measure of self-defense be a Darn Good Idea? Oh, who am I kidding? That question will be answered to exhaustion inside five years when convention halls are jam-packed with pimply young men sulking in brown coats and hawking poster-sized four-color-process cutaways of every square meter of Malcolm Reynolds' bucket o'bolts. Because Serenifly/Fireity really IS the new Trek now -- and that's not necessarily a good thing. And on the subject of Mal:  Yep. This is about as pathetically far as I've gotten (and likely to get) on the afforehyped pic, in case any of y'all were wondering. Caricaturing/portraiture has never been my strong suit (just ask an unfortunate lass I was gaga over in high school), and Nathan Fillion is one of those unique class of rugged heroic-archetype actors who NEVER looks the same twice. I mean, one picosecond he's the living embodiment of an Ayn Rand supercapitalisthero, the next he's a boyish Michael J. Fox, and the one following he's Huey maglefargin' Lewis. At this Zemeckisian rate, maybe he'll transmogrify into Crispin Glover or Flea next -- the important point is, as Embittered Snotty Rant time: a downside to being one of those Reich-Wing Apologists For Oily Imperialistic Genocidal American Hegemony (as my "friends" and "family" affectionately call me) is that every day, some seditious item or another still manages to pierce through my thick shell of fear/intolerance/ignorance/blind authority worship, and impart an oh-so-fleeting glimpse of True Political Enlightenment. For instance, one of the above "others" recently described the September 11th But alas, I got to think about it (always a bad thing for a redneck thug like yours truly) and the comparison actually began to make sense! Why, in one instance, we have a group of people lobbying to make charitable services less a province of distant alphabet soup government agencies, and more the responsibility of local community organizations -- thus leaving thousands of trapped unfortunates the choice between going on Food Stamps, or eating someplace where there's a non-urine-submerged crucifix in plain sight. And in the other, we have a group of people hijacking a few jumbo jets, and crashing them into skyscrapers -- thus leaving thousands of trapped unfortunates the choice between being burned alive, or splattered against the pavement below. Yes, the parallels were so plainly evident that before long, I started to question ALL my premises. Why, maybe an image of Mohammed really IS hate speech, deserving of censorship and/or death! Perhaps natural disasters CAN be miraculously turned away if the United States (but not China) signs the proper worthless transnational petition! And maybe humanity's irresponsible burning of hydrocarbons really IS contributing to the Martian polar ice cap's meltdown! (Darn you Pathfinder! Darn you to HECKFIRE!) Yet before I could load up my web browser and join those all-knowing, obscenity-flinging ranks of Patriotic Dissenters that Thomas Jefferson always talked about, a song burst forth from a nearby radio. It was the triumphant strains of "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus! The timeless anthem of my people! And, thankfully, the spell was broken. Now I'm back in the fold again, safely comforted by all the Federally Centralized national news outlets running nothing but positive stories out from Iraq, ingratiating "Bush is the best President EVAR" puff pieces, and televised executions of leftist Hollywood celebrities. Yepperoonies. For Little Eichmanns like myself, life here in America is right jolly good! (And so endeth my sarcasm-athon. "Don't push me, and I won't push you.") April 20, 2006We're All In This Together! Guess I should probably blog, as at present, I've absolutely nothing worthwhile to say. And if that WERE the case, then I'd be too flustered with emotion/enthusiasm to arrange alphanumerics in a reasonably coherent manner. Or, worse yet, scratch out another curiously-proportioned Gordonian femme to the sudden interest of precisely three or four of y'all. Ya just can't win: (Yes, you're welcome.) So. This week I've been taking up a near-permanent residence at the local Department of Motor Vehicles, in a silly attempt to actually -- chortle, snort -- transfer the registration of my father's motorized box without becoming an unpaid full-time lawyer in the process. Ah, the hubris of fading youth! And as I'm setting upon a bench hewn from the hardest, densest wood imaginable, weighed down with a ream of photocopies/printed PDFs/forms and watching a sextet of oversized vintage late-seventies science fiction television show red LED lights tick through queue numbers with all the rapidity of a Galapagos tortoise's copulation cycle, at any moment I keep expecting to hear Michael Kamen's typewriter-clacky theme from "Brazil" suddenly samba forth from the nearby speakers. (And were I one of the upper-echalon DMV civilservantthings, I'd authorize precisely that, in place of the usual inane Muzak. Hey -- at least the hapless American citizen-units waiting for Big Mommy to Officially Approve their operation of overpriced go-karts would know my people/whatevers have a sense of humor. Not a readily accessible one, admittedly.) Anyway, between this week's Adventures in Needless Bureaucracy and, uh, last week's Adventures in Needless Bureaucracy (taxes), I've been more than a little grumpy. Dammit, if America must insist upon following "the rest of the world" over the precipice of pinheaded socialism, at least gimme an opportunity to earmark all these extorted fees and fines toward more worthwhile objectives. More sincerely dead terrorists, and their host theocratic governments shattered? Sure! Nanotech research, and anything else that'll bring the Singularity just that month or two closer? Take me, I'm yours! But noooo, instead we get infinitely lame nonessentials like protecting the stagnant marshy habitat of the Imperiled Spotted Lousewart, and the ad nauseam recognition that July is Left-Handed Inuit Librarians Without Tonsils Month. Gah... where's the fun in that? Oh, and it appears I was hopelessly optimistic in my previous assessment of snot-nosed American irreverence, there... especially towards the Religion Of Peace™ Whose Lotus Blossoms Contemplating Followers Will Nevertheless Kill You If You Dare Make An Image Of The Prophet (or anybody ELSE for that matter, if you really want to get down to bloody-minded, cave-dwelling Koranic literalism). Ho hum. I guess the best thing that can be said about this nauseating spectacle of Comedhimmi Central doing the ol' EuroWussy Shuffle is that (just like the Isaac Hayes/Scientology fracas) Trey Parker and Matt Stone still come out of it looking like Real American Heroes yet again. They certainly didn't make the mandated 'sensitivity' censorship easy for the leftist network honchos -- within the span of one minute CC was forced to justify 'blacking out' an image of Mohammed while simultaneously approving an image of Jesus pooping on the American flag and Dubya. The mask of Hollywood's hypocrisy and phony 'bravery' is finally off at last, methinks... hell, even the Other Side has come to appreciate the irony! (I'd fly that airline, yessir. Come to think of it, I'll happily confess a desire to visit Dubai someday; it's clearly becoming an futuristic Arabian version of Coruscant, eager for Western tourism. Why, they're even building a spaceport, for Secularity's sake!) April 8, 2006Deus Patefactum It was the AC adapter, after all. Insert heaping sigh of relief.Hm. Guess I should probably make a few notes here, having reached one of those rare life moments where there's just an empty, monotonous plateau before you that really frickin' needs to be blasted past at a noisy 120 MPH, blown up with HE, turned into an EnormoMart (hi Elaine!) or something. Or to use another half-baked incoherently pseudo-intellectual analogy: like that numbed pins-and-needles sensation one gets in one or more limbs when sleeping in an unnatural position. Come morning you'll wake up, and perform a frenetic, vaguely zombie-esque dance comprised of entirely unplanned and perfunctory motions to get those creaky bits working again. And in such a capacity this  Trying to recollect: did the Gods have any involvement with melting Icarus' wings (and his subsequent fatal belly-flop into the ocean)? Don't think so; I distinctly remember he'd disobeyed daddy's clearly-specified Standard Operating Procedure, while Athene (Daedalus' NASCAR sponsor-of-sorts) was just tickled pink over his latest arrogant scientific enterprise. But then my obsessive fascination with all things relating to the Greco-Roman pantheon peaked around the time Harry Hamlin was fighting two-headed Harryhausenian dogs and oversized stop-motion'd scorpions. Mph. Okay -- that's not entirely true. When the Internet sprang onto the scene, like everybody else I sprained my brain exhaustively overbrowsing every subject that interested me, from the Austrian School of economics to Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere. And I just know there's a Olympian Mythos tome somewhere in the ol' critical mass-reaching bookcase, there... because once in a turquoise moon/overly-testosteroney haze, I'll pry it out of its dusty vise and read about Pygmalion's strangely erotic 'DIY' exploits again, drooling all the way: "...eh wot? Club scenes? Believing some Oprah-extruded 'soulmates' rot? Pretending to care about wussbag liberal causes, and being caught dead at places like Bed, Bath And Beyond?! Screw that! If I want a woman, I'll make 'er meself, Zeusdammit!" Ayup. Always dug them old-timey polytheo religions. They've got the all the appeal of the World Wrestling Federation circa 1985 or 1999, combined with crazed visuals you'd get from George Lucas if he'd been force-fed LSD for six consecutive months. Unceasing sex and violence! Incest, cannibalism and vomiting! Valiant heroes and grotesque monsters! Snake hair, elephant heads and women with multiple arms! Great stuff:  Most importantly, the immortal puppetmasters themselves were like overgrown overpowered humans, weighed down with their own petty jealousies and neuroses; their dirtbound supplicants could relate to them at the most fundamental level, and even MOCK them on occasion (so long as they didn't too get carried away). And, as Pygmalion's story illustrates, such collections of deities wanted to be immortalized throughout the ages, via the arts. The same men who dared sculpt Aphrodite, or Bubastis, or Shiva were undoubtedly considered divine themselves, by dint of their ability to make such fuzzy entities REAL and TANGIBLE, here upon this earth. And just look at the results: the rich civilizations built by worshipers who were inspired by their gods' "physical" artistic presence! I'm sure y'all know where I'm going with this... April 2, 2006Help, help, I'm being repressed! Another day, another exercise in continuing artistic mediocrity/fetishistic attachment to borderline-Rubenesque body types. Y'know, every 80's-weaned PopCult pundit keeps predicting the retro-return of fake-chromed oversized audio devices loudly blaring bad poetry on America's urban boulevards (AKA ghetto blasters) Real Soon Now -- and I just have to laugh. Those humungothings are not just hideously ugly and expensive devourers of D-cells, guaranteed to earn you a shiv in the kidneys on the subway -- they were also margleflippin' HEAVY. In an era where you can fit the entire collected work of any soundsmith on a keychain-sized device, who in their right mind would prefer burdening themselves with a monotone-voiced Cybertron monstrosity over the lightweight convenience of an iPod? (Well -- complete morons Obligatory whiny gripe city: while I'll ignore discussion of a dozen brand-new leeches of monthly capital that have miraculously appeared out of thin air ever since my father's estate was settled, this past abysmal week was still one for the Ledgers of Bovine Crap. Firstly, the ol' treasonous digestive system decided to once again vie for the imminent circus freakshow there, and turn itself inside-out like an old sock puppet. Oh joy, oh bliss. Then, my afforementioned new/olde WallStreet laptop stopped recognizing that it was plugged in anymore -- quickly resulting in a drained battery and an unusable expensive paperweight in place of the Whimsical Portable Computing Experience yours truly had become quite happily addicted to. Grrrr. Anyway, ordered a replacement AC adapter online, which IMHO is almost certainly not going to solve the problem. No, THAT task will surely require dragging the damned contraption into the Eastern Megalopolis, or else shipping it to Fruit Cult's Cupertino HQ for overly-soldery repair work. And, in time, recieving a bill whose final estimated total will exceed my original 'maximum bid' on eBay, squared... But the final injustice? Against all logic, or even a vague sense that Bad Things Are Clearly Afoot, watching this piece of heavy-handed drivel. Ah yes. I most eagerly await the Wachowski Bros. equally 'faithful' adaptation of "Watchmen". Perhaps they'll deftly replace Nixon with GWB, change New Age-y Ozymandias into a biblethumping oil executive, cleverly alter his nefarious scheme to Unite The World into something involving phony Islamic terrorism -- why, it's just like 9/11! -- and otherwise retool everything else in the original story in order to accommodate their own paranoid-masturbatory political world-view that only finds its startlingly original expression in such brutally suppressed underground venues as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, and the BBC, every single effin' day of the week. (Gosh darn it, where's them dissent-crushing jack-booted stormtroopers of the Neocon Hate Axis™ when you need 'em?) Oh, and a future Christer-dominated Britain... *snicker* Yeah, that's a reeeeal good one, there. Never mind that with the recent Jyllands-Posten cartoon riots, the demographically-threatened natives of Multiculti Europe pretty much set themselves up to be prison playthings of violent Allah-boys for the next couple of decades (with a few select American volunteers right behind them). Just out of curiosity, which religious group has the greatest potential for instituting a theocratic government day after tomorrow: one whose ranks are on the decline, and who's mocked 24-7 by the intellectual vanguards of your secular-but-rudderless culture? Or one with a burgeoning, zealous membership inclined towards enshrining religious law, BAMN? And for whose benefit -- in a slavish pursuit of 'sensitivity' -- you're already imposing censorship? The same frackin' gang of unreconstructed kneelers that HAS at least one (real-world!) theocracy to its credit? Wake UP, you dhimmi dummies! Speaking of "Watchmen," methinks the events of the past five years have pretty much invalidated Ozzy's drug-induced thesis, there. I mean, a massive attack in New York City, finally compelling the great nations of the world to set aside their myriad of piddling differences and make common military cause against a malevolent, shared enemy? Get real! March 26, 2006Shiny Unhappy People And the needle swings back to 'manic' once again. Yay! Just in time, too -- as the Internet was beginning to suffer a massive shortage of badly-rendered, anatomically-distorted six-limbed alien things! Ah so. I finally broke down and rented "Serenity". Which -- to draw an analogy for those wholly unfamiliar with Firefly's appeal -- is a bit like digging out old letters from somebody you were once madly, hopelessly in love with long ago... and reading them while staring into his/her candlelit portrait. In other words, a curious form of self-torture.  Oh, it was surely nice to discover that Reavers really DO resemble George Romero-esque space zombies rather than just crazy standard-issue human beans. T'was hella grand to see what'd been addling River Tam all this time, witness the highfalutin' doctor and cute prairie-gal engineer finally together at last, and be able to guffaw over snarky Joss Whedon one-liners once again... even if only for a couple of hours. But damn it, all of these plot developments should've had the privilege of unraveling slowly over at least one additional season. Wonder if Book knows if there's also a 'special hell' for visionless media executives who choose to stamp out greatness, and replace it with this femtosecond's reigning reality-themed twaddle? Anyway, I only mention this here-and-now because my wistful observation of the movie has apparently stoked the Gordonian creative fires, there -- I suspect I'll be uploading a Firefly-themed piece of "art" before too long. And -- as my caricaturing proficency only barely approaches that of Calvin the Counterfeiter -- god help us all. (Oh, all right... Realistic Artistic Assessment Time: I'm fairly certain I can nail down most the female crew members, and Jayne the Classically Square-Jawed Rogue, and prob'ly Wash too. But distinguishing Mal's features from Simon's is just gonna be a gorram pain in the patookus. OTOH, Serenity should be lots of fun to draw -- I just love the design of that ship) Other news: the new/olde Wallstreet laptop's of mine's still taking some getting used to. It's fine and dandy for browsing and retrogaming and digesting assorted documents. But when it all comes back to Basic Productivity 101, there's much to be desired. For one thing -- the unit's surprisingly heavy, and the temperature of its bottom regularly approaches that of a medium-sized oven. As I'm one of those mindless twits who foolishly believed the term 'laptop' implied performance of computing tasks with the machine sitting in one's LAP -- no doubt I'll be rendered sterile and/or plagued with inexplicable charlie-horses for the rest of my life, before long. Another incessant whiney gripe is the keyboard itself -- it's set so far back that I usually have to impersonate Quasimodo to see whatever it is I'm typing. And the keys themselves have the tactile quality of your average late-seventies Speak & Spell -- I suspect if I even look at one of them cross-eyed, it'll break off. On the plus side: wireless fargin' Internet. Love it, love it, love it. The first time I fired the WiFi modem up and felched packets of laughably frivolous content from the ether, for a very brief moment I experienced a pale ghost of the same 'whole new world opening up before my eyes' rush/wonder that'd hit me back in 1995, during my initiation to the Web. Of course, this present-day realization ("hey look, no cables necessary!") was but a mere feather being brushed against my cheek compared to that previous Sledgehammer of Readily Accessible Global Communications Lashing Together The Great Human Database At Last (And Free Pr0n Too), coming down upon my overwhelmed cranium and spewing a grey tapioca-like substance outta my ears. Alas. We take so much for granted, nowadays... March 8, 2006Games People Play Hooray! My very first posting from the new (old) laptop. As you can see from that previous photo of feline sleep-imperialists (just try moving Buster out of that chair without bleeding profusely), last week I bought a "WallStreet" G3 PowerBook on eBay for a scant hundred greenbacks. A most excellent transaction, as the owner had lovingly souped up the RAM, processor, harddrive -- and sweetened the deal further with a removable pocket-sized Zip and wireless modem. It'll be lots of fun trying that last out at the local Starbuck's, since the entire world of wi-fi's still a new one on me. Should also mention the computer's roughly equivalent to a Swiss Army knife, sporting more comm ports than I'll probably ever need -- while still being fully compatable with ALL my existing laughably obsolescent software/hardware. Heck, the darned thing even dual-boots between OS 9 and OS X! Go, tech-hoarding nerdery, go!Speaking of pocket-protecting dorkitude, here's a drawing that was always 'on the tip of my tongue' (so to speak) for decades, but never found an proper avenue until I visited a local GamePlace chain, uneasily stepped around bug-eyed teenagers noisily perforating anime-themed eldritch horrors on XThings and PlayCubes, and encountered one of those all-in-one "classic gaming" joystick units:  Dalek-esque automatons bubbling and shooting lightning bolts! A lone agent, running and leaping back and forth with a curious fluidity (almost as if his component animated sprites had found previous use in a sports-themed video game)! World-saving puzzle clues, inexplicably placed in such unlikely locations as bathtubs, long-necked lamps and something that resembled Robby the Robot's amputated head! Such was "Impossible Mission" (AKA "Jumpman on Steroids").  Great Zeus, I freakin' loved Epyx. When the Free Lunch Studios site was first... uh, 'established,' I proudly featured a downloadable WAV of Elvin's menacing introduction to set the audience-alienating 'mood' (which continues to this very day). Somewhat presumptuous, considering the "content" then was little more than a grey-hued collection of mercifully long-dead links -- but there you have it. And NBC should really be providing that company's programmers a subsidy/stipend, for having grabbed a generation of sports-loathing computer enthusiasts years ago, and turned 'em to future Olympics afficionados. Watching all the snowy drama couple weeks ago also got me thinking about the team Epyx would've brought to Torino. They were a major competitive force at one time, don'tcha know. See, in "Winter Games" et al, you'd always get to choose what nation your electronic alter-ego gets to perform triple lutzes for (I always picked Canada, not out of any sense of American self-loathing, but because their SID-ified national anthem sounded the best). And among this selection of assorted people's republics and oversocialized banana states was a strange new kingdom called "Epyx." Really. With its own Rodin flag and everything!  Where was it located? (One contemplates a self-contained arcology, rife with high-speed lifts and lots of badly-placed ventilation shafts maximizing the chances of an Epyxian citizen "accidentially" plummeting to his death.) What kind of government did it have? (Given the Thinker symbology, evidently some rule by smarty-pants know-it-all intellectuals -- commie communist, of course.) Did they have voting privileges in the UN? (Seems likely, if they're rubbing elbows with Norway at the Games.) And -- most importantly of all -- did they sign the Kyoto accords? (Feh.) I jest, of course. Yet just imagine how much fun it would be if companies and corporations were able to compete for gold medals, just like their terrritorial counterparts. Oh, probably not in THE Olympics, proper; leftist Tranzies all over the globe would scream "blasphemy!" upon hearing that... almost as quickly as they kowtow to newly-fabricated Islamic prohibitions-of-the-moment. But the megacorps could create their own competing version -- call it the "Trade Games" or something -- with the same unusual sports, host cities, quasi-religious torch-toting pomp and ceremony, et cetera. To quote Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne, it'd sure be "damn good television." And just THINK of the great public-relations value (to say nothing of the advertising/economic boon!) such an event would provide to the participants. When people think of "the business world", they usually envision Evil White Men in suits and ties, frolicking decadently in piles of gold like Scrooge McDuck, Well, with the Trade Games, a company could put forth an recognizable identity before the world; complete with their own unique flags, anthems, uniforms, and so on. And the colorful athletes themselves would represent a much-needed image change from the bloated top-hat 'n monocled caricature that has been with us for far too long, there. So! Who's up for watching a white-knuckled curling match between McDonald's and Halliburton? (crickets, chirping) Erm. Guess it's Totally Brilliant Ideas like this, that explain why I make pretty pictures for (not even remotely) a living. March 4, 2006Geekier Than Thou (I hate my cats.) So it appears John Varley cancelled I-CON 25 -- damn. Probably just as well, as his most unprecedented appearance there would've been the Mother of All Arguments convincing me to attend. Oh, I'll probably still go anyway -- if for no other reason than this'd be the first where I actually have something resembling 'money' to spend (on worthless plastic bric-a-brac, undoubtedly). And besides, rubbing elbows with the likes of Spider Robinson, Rowena Morrill and Charles Stross' nothing to shrug at, either. So we'll see. One of the things that truly annoys me about cons, though (besides not getting credited whenever I win program cover-art competitions) is that there's no social 'crossover,' for lack of a better word. I've been to at least eight or nine of these things since 1987, and I can't tell you how many times I've attempted to strike up a friendly conversation with a complete stranger/fellow fandividual -- and gotten little more a cold stare and even colder shoulder for the trouble. Cheeses cripes, one would think that at a rare gathering of science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts, there'd be SOME vague sense of 'outsider/outcast' comradery -- much more so than say, at the local mall in Podunk, USA. But of course, it's the same old story; even on alleged 'friendly ground,' safely removed from the pigskin-throwing jocks and water-cooler mundanes and avid "Everybody Loves Raymond" watchers, fen nevertheless still huddle together into obscure, narrow little cliques amidst a larger 'fringe' subculture. Unless you're an obsessive "Doctor Who" completist -- we don't want your kind here! Eh? You play D20 role-playing games, but not GURPS? Scram -- we don't want your kind here! Hey, those your drawings? Lemme take a look -- WHA? Where's the required oversized Bambi eyes and nonexistent nose? Get lost -- we don't want your kind here! And so it goes. I don't know.. maybe it's just because people already come to these things in a socially pre-damaged state there, where years of mockery by soi-disant "normal folk" have formed a hard chitinous shell that no one -- save those elite few who ALSO love to write Harry Potter-themed fanfic, paint miniatures, etc -- can penetrate. (Or maybe I'm deluding myself, and they all really ARE Comic Book Guy-type priques.) IAE, it's just sad. And come Sunday afternoon -- when the dealers have packed up and the displays torn down and the "normal folk" have taken back the campus from the invading armies of weirdos -- it becomes a regular source of aching, hopeless depression for me. Because if there's ONE thing I've been sorely looking for all my life, it's a 'scene.' March 2, 2006Gooey GUI Ah yes, that obligatory early March snow, a presumed death knell for a Geriatric Personification of Winter. I swear, if I hear one more person belching "in like a lion, out like a lamb", that repeat-o-bot individual's gonna quickly find their nice pretty dental work rather nastily mucked up with a handful of gravel-laced frozen slush. Or (better yet) be wholly cast off kicking and screaming into one of my typical mediocre sketchbook entries, and forced to fend for themselves against a hungry Somewhat Chartreuse Great Worm: And why DO they always collect virgins? I mean, I can see why THAT would matter to Sir Testosterone, Square Jawed Sword Toting Adventurer, who's anxious to rid the town of its overly-scaly pyromajestic scourge. But why would the DRAGON care? (Somehow, I suspect Phil Foglio probably has a warped theory about that. I dare not inquire further.) Anyway, among lots of other things, I've recently been trying my hand at (badly) making OS X icons using (duh) Iconographer. Unfortunately, with Apple's Aqua-themed design paradigm firmly embedded in place -- decreeing that all digital iconography bobbing in nausea-inducing Dock waves must either be miniature photographs/3D-modeled symbols, or else something that looks like a translucent stylized Gummi Bear -- making 'em's a far more labor-intensive task than my 256-color, System 7 whimsy-filled heyday's offerings:  And as it's virtually a requirement now that any graphickal work be done up in Adobe Photoshop (so as to get achieve them primo masking/translucency effects), with that imagesmith's juggernaut at one's disposal, it would also appear that the era of cleverly wrangling limited ResEdit palettes into dithered checkerboards, and all the other pointless skills associated with 'pixel art' are finally numbered. "Hooray! The creator now has total freedom!" Well, yeah, but... y'all can call me an aging, reactionary dinosaur if you want -- I think there's also something to be said for the invention and ingenuity that -- cruel contradiction of contradictions! -- only comes through when there are boundaries (within limits) in place. After all, you can get pretty darned creative with your Crayolas, if you're forced to color inside the lines. Heck, just look at all the wonderful music that came from arranging eight simple Oppressively Arrogant and Eurocentric notes. And the Internet is just filled to overflowing with assorted clever 'mods' of games thrown together with 'construction set' style tools. Et cetera. "Today's news flash: Tom Gordon calls for the wholesale suppression of artistic liberty! Is he a brownshirted fascist? An uptight, born-again Christer? Or just another sellout to the top-hatted Corporate-Industrial Plutocracy?" Oh, for the love of -- never mind. Fine! Enjoy your effin' splatter canvases with their pretentious titles, and that occasional knuckling under to bug-eyed demands of Islamodorks. See if I care! February 28, 2006Skinny Tuesday of the Fruit Cult (Man. That sounds like a terrible D&D module. But would Erol Otus still do the art for it? Probably.)So. To sum it all up, we've got a media-tailored Intel Mac Mini, the afforementioned dumb ol' ghetto blaster (well, more or less), and some ludicrously overpriced leather iPod cases. Nelson Muntz, do you have anything to say? Anyway, I'm wholly relieved. If Apple had introduced a tablet computer, it'd undoubtedly be utilizing Intel's processors. Which means with the rather small library of OS X software I've acquired in less than a year, I'd be living in a lame emulation world. And with my vastly larger library of 'legacy' OS 9 (and below) apps -- well, who the smeg knows? Can Rosetta run Classic? And can that version of Classic run the specific release of Power64 I feel most closely approximates the Commodore audio-visual experience? One emulator running inside another emulator running inside another emulator? Somehow, I doubt it. Also, since there's no Hollywood aspect-ratio video iPod (yet), this means the time I've just urinated away tediously cropping down/encoding eight or nine widescreen movies wasn't wasted, after all! (Whoo-hoo! Go, disembodied ears, noses and limbs! Who cares if Short Round's in the foreground but we hear Indy's voice? 'Pan and scan' is for imagination-less wussies!) February 26, 2006Gimme that sweet, sweet Kool-Aid Well! Isn't it high time corporate America acknowledge its higher social responsibilities, meekly appease progressive crusades-of-the-millisecond with lots of freely squandered public-relations moolah -- and finally rehabilitate the Horde? By Gruumsh, affirmative action for orcs NOW! (Heh heh. I kinda dig how he's only capable of holding the attache case with his overly-plump index fingers. A contemptably pale shade of Dave Trampier's infinitely superior "Wormy" strip, there -- apparently they can't pick their noses either!) Oh, Steve Jobs, you loathesome harlot. Once again, yours truly's made another pilgrimage to BestBuy, and wistfully fondled the video iPod that would've surely been his RIGHT NOW! TODAY! Were it not for yet another one of Turtleneck Boy's damnable near-monthly Apple tech announcements -- this latest burlesque revue taking place on February 28th! "Fun new products." The mind boggles. Yahtzees, even. Will it finally be that neo-Newton PDA I've ached for since the Days of Flannel? A clipboard-sized tablet computer enabled with patented 15-point gestural sensitivity that not only retains the aspect ratio of film for wholly legit audio-visual playback, but also runs OS X (albeit Intel-flavored)? Or will it be, as many suspect, that afforementioned conventional 'Pod, fitted with a vanilla touchscreen in place of the click wheel? Or will it just be a dumb ol' ghetto blaster? Nobody knows. And nobody will know -- and so I can't buy a smegging thing -- until Fat Tuesday rolls around in all her lascivious, billowing-mammed glory! And WHY is that, you ask? Well, because this sorry cyber-linked world is STILL overflowing with lifeless dork-tards (Hooray! Most gratuitously hyper-linked post EVAR! And -- since they cover the entire gamut between Regrettably Obscure Lavishly Illustrated RPG Nostalgia, Drool Inducing Futuretech and Even More Drool Inducing Cute Zaftig Wimmin -- a fairly decent summation of my demented web-browsing tastes, to boot!) America under the Crescent? Nah (Sorry, goofed the posting chronology -- blanking Blogger!) One of the biggest problems, I think, with the present War on (Pretty Much Islamofascist) Terror is that the American public generally doesn't have a handle upon what the dire consequences of 'failure' would be. If after less than five years, the destruction of the World Trade Center has already been written off by over 50% of the populace as one of those regrettable comeuppances that just happens sometimes -- but detaining terrorists and illegally tapping their phone lines, now THERE'S something to get worked up over! -- somehow I don't think painting a scary picture of an besieged Northern Ireland-esque United States rife with arbitrary bombings, restrictive checkpoints and travel permits, or an ex-secular geriatric Europe making her violent transition towards sharia, is going to make a whit of difference, there. Likewise, any attempt to clumsily retrofit old Cold War-era nightmare 'occupation' scenarios. One of the things that made hella grim speculative novels such as "Warday" or a television specatacle like "Amerika" so compelling/traumatizing circa 1987 was their plausibility. While it's easy to laugh about such things now, the Soviet Union nevertheless was an 800-ton elephantine threat back then, with its own most formidable military, gigatons of nuclear warheads at the Politburo's disposal, and -- most importantly -- a coherent framing ideology, being exported abroad. Oh, everybody, even Gorbachev, still knew the USSR was on its last legs economically -- thanks Marxism! But NOBODY knew in what form the eventual 'death' might take. A mutual nuke swap meet, or a desperate ploy to cripple the US with an EMP and seize her rich farmland was just as believable a prospect as the (mostly) peaceful disintegration that eventually occured. The suicide cult of modern fundamentalist Islam, however, is nothing BUT ideology. (At least for now, and I have little doubt America and Israel intend it to stay that way, by any means necessary.) Oh, its killbot followers can (and do) have the capacity to blow up buildings, slaughter scores of innocent civilians, and regularly parrot Democratic Party talking points on television like a enturbaned Cobra Commander. But in America at least, such psychotic tactics have only compelled us to take off the kid gloves, and begin laying the smackdown in earnest. And while our weak-kneed lamestream media entities may regularly capitulate to such intimidation tactics under the all-encompassing cloak of 'tolerance,' outside the hermetically sealed inner sanctums of newsrooms and college campuses, such twaddle is meaningless. The Idea is everything. And if you approached the average Joe Blow on the streets of Anytown, USA and calmly explained to him the terms of his dhimmitude, even if he owned a Prius and subscribed to The Nation, he'd still growl "oh yeah, buddy? Up yours." No. American culture and her people are consistently saturated with the tropes of irreverence and defiant individualism. We're deeply suspicious of authority -- especially religious authority -- and alternatively revel in/bar-brawl over our wide specturm of differences. This affectation is a nation's curse (in that we can't be of a single laser-focussed mind when confronting an obvious malevolence like Islamofascism). But it also means we won't readily kneel to any Man With A Plan. So. In 2040, what banner will the Land of the Free slouch under?  If you said 'A' (and recognize that's intended to be the Milky Way galaxy's several billion stars), you're both an insane optimist and somebody I'd probably like to know. Oh, I'll gladly admit it's a possibility, especially if we do build that Big Cyber Brain and bootstrap ourselves into space-faring transcendence. But why would a godlike posthuman care about the colors of ants? 'B' is safe, boring and the most likely of the bunch. Heck, at this ever-stagnant point, I can't even make provisions for a minor change in the number of states anymore. Absorbing Canada (for instance) would not significantly alter circumstances for either nation -- but you'd have half the planet screaming bloody murder over Arrogant Yankee Imperialism anyhoo. And while I don't like 'D,' unless Bruce Willis gets his overly colorful/lame drill jocks hustling towards civilization-killing Apophis ASAP, it's far more probable than The United Planets of America. But that remaining design? Forget it. I have. (Besides, Malaysia would complain.) February 24, 2006No God Button for you, Evil Empire! Honest to Lolth, I just don't get this whole Drow-equates-to-hotness thing. While one of my previous entries attests to the inherent appeal of blueberry-colored elves, surely this additional penchant of theirs -- worshiping hideous spiders with gruesome human sacrifice beneath the darkest, foulest bowels of the earth -- has to make even the biggest drool-chinned fanboy hesitate? Right? RIGHT?! Oh lord, and I just observed "Real Genius" on cable, for the first time since the Great Pog Ascendency. Yes chillun, cue up the relevant synthy Tears For Fears soundtrack entry, and let your mind drift back to those hazy, halcyon daze when every Hollywood geeky intellectual was required by Congressional law to either pass through an Oppenheimer/Einstein Pacifism Generator™, or else be summarily endowed with the social acumen of your typical caged ejaculate-flinging simian.  Hey, remember the film's incarnation of "Operation Crossbow?" Ain't it just OH so interesting to note what was considered obviously self-evident back in 1985? "By gum, Laszlo -- you mean the eeeevil Pentagon's planning to put our six-megawatt laser into lower Earth orbit? Which'll then be used to transform assorted anti-American black hats into harmless smoldering piles of ash, on a precision, individual basis?" For shame! Let's stop 'em! And make the world safe for 'collateral damage' and accidential civilian death once again! Go team! Ah yes. One is also tempted to visualize an alternative timeline where Mitch and Chris' feebly mustachioed attempt to infiltrate the Air Force base fails, and their vigilant death-dealing Eye in the Sky is left free to endlessly circle the globe, vaping baddies with impunity. Somehow, I believe such noteworthy folks as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden probably wouldn't be major players in that particular universe... But don't you know, everybody wants to rule the world! And surely there can be NOTHING worse than a space-based Pax Americana, right? Right? RIGHT?! February 23, 2006L.O.L. Of course, I've known this for at least three years now, but just in case all y'all haven't gotten the message yet...COX AND FORKUM FREAKIN' RULE. (Oh, and avoid having any liquid in your mouth when you click the link, BTW. Unless you're one of those dhimmi apologists who've recently come to the oh-so-enlightened conclusion that free speech and artistic freedom should be restricted (and Western culture altered) to accommodate the fascistic demands of violent Islamic scum inhalers.) February 17, 2006Joining Dem Pod People Most strange. After uncounted years of scrawling plain ol' vanilla line art (as mandated by the colorization demands of Adobe Bloatoshop), you'd think one's innate crosshatching ability would've eventually degraded to the abyssal level of one Jim "Garfield" Davis -- or even Aaron "Unfunny Lefttard Drivel" McGruder: El wrongo! In other (horribly mundane) news, I believe at long last I've finally discovered the solution to all my (Of course, there's admittedly a few minor side effects to my ingenious remedy -- like malnutrition, and, er, um, uh... eventual death. But I'll make sure the marketing department puts that on a warning label somewhere. Really!) Oh yeah -- regrettably, after a recent visit to BestBuy (where yours truly covered over the Apple products table with drool) it also appears I'll be heartily guzzling the Jobsian Kool-Aid and purchasing an iPod very, very soon. Oh, it was bad enough, knowing I could carry my entire musical collection and any number of photos inside an oh-so-stylish tiny obsidian LCD-fitted widget. But dammit, having the thing being able to play back video content too was the final straw that broke the camel jockey's back out on a limb (or something). Modern codecs being what they are, even if I opted for the cheaper 30-gigabyte version and filled it up with the 1600+ songs in my laughably unsophisticated collection, it still means there's plenty of room left over for at least a dozen feature-length films ripped with HandBrake and/or iSquint, and Ghu knows how many And yet... and yet... I just know if I just hold out for a few more months, the crazy Fruit Cult will surely introduce something at least 40% niftier for the same frickin' price. Most likely a revised design that turns the entire front of the device into a baby-PDA letterboxed touchscreen display - clearly the logical next step for the product. Curse these aging flakey Silicon Valley wunderkinds, and their turtleneck sweaters! In any event, I'm hella glad I'm a shameless free market-loving capitalist running dog/sentence type. Because even that tiresome person who proudly wears Che Guevara t-shirts, toddles around in a Priusian fauxmobile festooned with I-hate-Bush stickers and regularly shrieks in womanly hysteria about soi-disant 'consumerist excess' over the latest batch of non-animal tested, organically-grown and utterly indigestable soy shite would have most considerable difficulty resisting such an all-in-one media item as this. (Or at least, I hope so. For the sake of continued humanity.) February 14, 2006Pontificating Upon A Sketchbook Entry #1 One of the big science-fictional genres that came to prominence during the Cold War (besides the chillingly implausible scenarios of Commie America) were post-apocalyptic yarns. Of course, this dates waaaay back when 'stopping nuclear proliferation' was the paramount concern of The Left. Mass destruction, they'd proclaim in their usual cannabis-induced state of enlightenment, was just around the corner for all of us, so long as a handful of relatively sane nations had access to Da Bomb. Thankfully, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Unhinged Towelheaded Mass Murdering Theocrats, these toking Cassandrae came to (what little remains of) their senses, and now wisely regard such hyped-up we'll-all-be-nuked-unless-we-do-something terrorporn rhetoric as little more than a manipulative tool wielded by evil imperialist neoconservatives, eager to keep America foisting McDonald's hamburgers upon the innocently innocent people of the Middle East. (Noam Chomsky said so!)Ahem. Anyway, after the US and USSR'nt theoretically emptied their silos at each other, what would remain would be small packets of survivors, living in a Hobbesian (not the tiger) state of neo-medievalist anarchy. Some of these lucky radiation-proof folks would give themselves goofy mohawks, don S&M gear and become psychopathic bandits, while others would resourcefully rebuild some semblance of civilization with artifacts left over from the previous age. And foremost among this indispensible hardware would be... the automobile!  Thus, the post-apoc variant I was most enthralled with was that represented by the "Mad Max" films and a couple of role-playing games -- where the miraculously traffic-free highways became battlefields, and "the right-of-way belonged to the biggest guns." Mostly because I just loved this idea of mundane cars receiving a lethal Swiss Army knife treatment -- witness autocentric franchises like "M.A.S.K." and "The Transformers" as the purest of crack cocaine. And while at the time, there was no disputing my peacenik Baby Boomer elders predicting Real Soon Now that warmongering senile dolt Reagan was going to reach down to pick up a pen he'd dropped like a typical dumb Republican and accidentally push The Button under his desk and so cover the planet's surface in radioactive fire unless we signed some meaningless arms-limitation treaty ASAP -- there was still a secret hope that somehow, some way, yours truly would survive through that atomic holocaust, and before long find himself making antibiotics deliveries behind the wheel of a battle-scarred Chevrolet outfitted with flamethrowers and machine guns. Such was my woefully misspent youth... Eh wot? Valentine's Day? Who gives a shit about Valentine's Day? Not me not me not me! There REALLY needs to be a 'bah, humbug' equivalent for this accursed holiday which we depressed/lovelorn/cynical types can use to bring everybody else down from their Happy Magic Love Rainbow™, maaaaan. Feh, bunkum! February 13, 2006Moping In A Winter Wonderland Manual labor is teh suxX0r.So. Should I gripe over the fact that -- here and now, in two thousand six A.D. -- there isn't a handy fusion-powered Black & Decker widebeam laser on hand to quickly vaporize away heavy strataform layers of snow currently piled high onto the driveway? Or perhaps a bit of whining about the outrage of even having a 'driveway' at all -- we're still barbarically crawling along the ground, like motorized, wheeled worms? Hello: freakin' stratomobiles, people! Oh, wait a minute -- I know. Hey! Where's that planet-wrapping weather-control network those science fiction snake-oil salesmen promised me? By gum, this snowstorm certainly wasn't on this week's Meteorological Itinerary! Wahhh! I'll sue!  Meh. Must be the only person alive who complains about the future in the past tense. IAE, I wonder at what cynical turning-point in my wretched life the prospect of such a historic blizzard stopped being a cause for dancing-in-the-streets celebration and started becoming something vaguely resembling 'a nuisance.' Why, once upon a time I'd utilize the temporary liberty from school-mandated stupidity to recreate epic Hoth scenes, indulge my inner prepubescent Michelangelo upon the tabula rasa of the front yard, and otherwise commence construction of the Mother of All Ice Fortresses in preparation for the neighborhood-wide slushball war ahead! And now all I think about is all the necessary pain-in-the-patookus shoveling to be done, and how dangerous the roads may be. Deep sigh. Adulthood can be hella lame, sometimes. February 12, 2006Fishing The Memory Hole Gah. Since New York is presently being transformed into a snow-encased wasteland, I've been forced to drudge through several non-essential compu-tasks, until that significant risk of power outages has passed. So instead of his daily suds-filled Photoshop bath, your truly's robotically pulling music off of a warbly eighteen-year-old audio cassette, and encoding its component tunes as MP3s. Oh, a most tedious job to say the least, but it's cheaper than the alternative: plunking down fifty to a hundred dollars for the apparently uber-rare compact disc. Yup, for some reason, Michael Kamen's transcendent soundtrack to "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" is nearly impossible to locate in that digital format. As a result, you probably won't see any of its tracks amidst the file-sharing, uh, 'services.' Heck, even the increasingly nifty iTunes Music Store doesn't host the album -- a shame, as it's without a doubt one the finest movie scores ever written. Go for baroque!Sigh. Such translation difficulties make me wonder what other wondrous creative gems aren't being scanned into the Great Database, there. For instance, fully half of the tomes sitting on my bookshelf are obscure, out-of-print novels and non-fictional works -- stuff that in all likelihood won't ever be printed again. Likewise, many are also mass-marketed (read low quality) paperbacks that're three, four decades old -- in some cases, the pages are actually beginning to yellow over, fall out and crumble. So nothing would give me greater pleasure than being able to wave some lasery optical character-recognizing widget over these deteriorating kilopages, transmogrify the entire lot into hypertext and pipe 'em all into a readily-accessible 21st Century electronic medium for all freakin' eternity. But ye gods --even if I could convert my entire library in such a user-friendly fashion (as opposed to off-the-shelf OCR gimcrackery available today whose monotonous workflow/performance makes the prospect of encoding audio cassettes look like an amphetemine-fueled sexual marathon), well, so what? That's still just a microscopic millionth of a percent, zealously preserved by a single And (for that matter) what about old magazines? Or short-lived comic books and one-season television sitcoms? This is ultimately the chief drawback with an imminent permaculture; somebody still has to actually say "I think this is worth saving," take active steps to archive the work and then upload it to the Overmind Whatever. Or else it is -- save that occasional cross-referenced Usenet discussion or three -- gone forever. And... well, being a few steps removed from Complete Obscurity meself -- I just don't like the thought of that. Dagnabbit, who's to say a nondescript episode of a nearly-forgotten game show won't contain something of value for future generations? Maybe they'll all be artificially immortal, and thus starved for any entertainment (however inane) that temporarily distracts them from contemplating the boredom-filled millennia ahead. Or perhaps aliens'll need it to better acclimatize themselves to human culture. You just don't know! February 10, 2006Tis a silly place <neocon_embitterment=on>"...Tango Charlie, I repeat: forget securing the power stations and public utilities! Station your troops around museums instead! Dammit, the populace can go without heat and food and clean water for months -- but Lord knows, without Culture, they'll surely die a slow, horrible death!"  <neocon_embitterment=off> La de dah. Watched "King Arthur" last night, one of this apparently newfangled genre of historical film epics that aspire to "tell the real story behind the mythology" without needing to introduce supernatural elements such as gods, monsters, or metallic beeping owls. It's a great, entertaining and unusually philosophical flick -- though in the future, perhaps somebody should inform the studio's marketing department that "From The Producer of Pearl Harbor" may not be the gold-seal-of-approval, deal-clinching ringing endorsement they think it is. Besides, if there's any of the film's creative team who should really be plugged, it's clearly David Franzoni, the screenwriter. As evidenced in his previous work, he's one of those rare birds currently scribing in Hollywood who've somehow retained a Classical eye for history, and a clear admiration of the greatness-potentiality rife throughout Western civilization. Haven't checked the database as to whether Franzoni was also involved with the recent (equally mind-blowing) HBO series "Rome," but the themes running through that Milius-helmed teledrama seem to parallel his own somewhat wistful celluloid depictions of Decadenceville. Maybe they'll sign him on for next season, when teenaged Octavian/Augustus is handed the imperial reins of power (a far more fascinating personage than Caesar, in my opine). IAE, the rationalization in "King Arthur" is carefully built upon a skeleton of historically-recorded events. Arthur and his knights are duly re-casted as nomadic Eastern European mercenaries ('Sarmatians' to be precise) bonded to Rome and serving the waning empire's outpost on the British isle, while Merlin and Guinevere're wild native Picts who've been waging guerrilla war against the Romans for centuries. With that curious framing in mind, some people will immediately carry away with them a revised vision of Camelot as an interesting synthesis forged between three juxtaposing cultures. Others of a less intellectual bent will only take a vision of a divinely azure-hued Keira Knightley, gleefully beating down Saxon scum:  C'est la vie! February 9, 2006Moose Drool, Incorporated Whelp, I think I've finally got the blog template markup about where I want it now -- IE, consistent with the rest of Free Lunch site and its horribly antiquated web design paradigm, circa 1999 or so. As tempting as it is to go the CSS route and whimsically redress the entire kit n'caboodle as easily as a Winamp skin, I nevertheless remain a member of the Lowest Common Denominator school when it comes to HTML jockeying. Darn it, I like the the fact that the site looks exactly the same in a ten-year-old copy of Netscape 2.0 as it does in the version of Safari which shipped with OS X Tiger. For a number of reasons, but mostly because yours truly's a backward retard.So the only bit I'm cringing about now is the fact that a third party -- Blogger -- is ultimately the engine driving the thing. I would've much rather have installed MovableType or WordPress, and got that working on an entirely independent basis -- DIY, maaaaan. But Earthlink won't relinquish that level of control to me, and I'm just not enthusiastic enough this issue where switching ISPs is a consideration. Ah well... Speaking of OS X, nothing would give me greater pleasure presently than locating the repeating 'brushed metal' PNG texture that the Finder utilizes for its menus, dialog boxes, what have you -- and replacing that accursed graphic with something, ANYTHING else. It just reminds me of the stainless steel furnishings you'd find in your typical morgue or surgeon's hangout. Mark my words, in twenty years we'll all be chuckling over that particular ghastly GUI selection the same way we presently giggle over ubiquitous faux-wood grain surfaces used during the 1970's:  Yup, my favorite was the pseudo-oaken trim on the Atari 2600. While I can (sort of) understand the manufacturer's choice -- they clearly wanted to make the unit's appearance 'compatible' with the conservative interior design of your typical household living room, and so not alienate a large section of their potential market share -- there was also that little matter of two rubbery joysticks with the bright flourescent red buttons, snaking out and (quite literally) tripping up pipe-smoking, "Saturday Evening Post"-reading Dad with their undomesticated space-agey future shocking. To say nothing of the new bleeps and fart noises regularly blaring from the television's speaker. By gum, what kind of warped music is this? Is THIS all what we can expect from the 'world of tomorrow'?  Naturally, beauty is in the eye of the Beholder. (Or perhaps it was just a disintegration spell.) February 7, 2006Dare To Be Gutless Whoops! Back to the horribly mundane realm of mind-numbingly boring kvetching once again!Ugh... my marglefargin' stomach. Every day I wake up and it's writhing like a cobra on meth. The censored unprintable thing's been giving me nothing but great unwanted heaps o'trouble ever since Dad died. Oh, I've already consulted superspecialized gastro-wrangling medicos, who've gleefully run me through with all sorts of expensive state-of-the-art equipment (though I missed out on gargling the swallowable camera -- drat) and they ultimately came up with a Big Fat Zero. Deep sigh. More likely than not it's probably all psychysoma... psychasoom... uh, in my head. But for Cthulhu's overly tentacled sake, I've been through FAR more stressful periods in my life, while devouring the worst food humanly imaginable -- you got ramen in my Hot Pockets! -- and agonizing nonsense like this never occured before. Or maybe -- just maybe -- I'm just getting old. (Blasphemy!) One thing's for sure. When the Singularity hits (it has to, it JUST has to! the fool proclaimed in blind, religious fervor), I'll gladly upload the choicier parts of my worthless brainpan to the hungry eschaton, in exchange for some good food-processing nanobots to replace the faulty gullet inflicted upon me by that syphilitic whore, Mother Nature. And then maybe I'll tear out the toilet from the bathroom, and extend the bathtub into a vague photo-developing trough! While grossly belching away like a Burping Construction Set! Yay, futuretech! There goes my hero... Ye gods. When I grow up, I SO want to be Coop. It'll probably never happen though, as I'm clearly far too bashful/lame to paint the ludicrously oversized artistic equivalent of a lapdance smothering, without passing out from the sheer embarassment of it all. (Kinda wish he hadn't cropped her face though.) Incidentially, don't you wonder what gallery patrons say, whenever they see such (quite literally) in-your-face work as this? I mean, do they pontificate haughtily about the surface texture of the paint strokes, the cultural subtext inherent in early-80's commercial artifacts, and their subsequent impact on race, class and gender? Or do they simply stick out their tongue, make the Devil's sign with their fingers, and shout "WHOA! WHATTA FREAKIN' SET!!!" February 6, 2006Pining for Nerd-dom Me figure a good recurring schtick for the Blother ("the Blother?" What am I, Lileks?) is to include a JPEG-destroyed sketch with each entry, whenever possible. (Like the Drawing of the Week feature, Tom? Shut up! Shut up!) So rather than making a fool of myself by vomiting about subjects where it's clear my ignorance is nearly matched by my incoherence, I can occasionally fall back to Pretentious Artist mode instead. Or at least until my reserve of non-underclothed mega-jugged Frazettan-rumped wimmin scratchings is spent. Anyhoo, this time around, it's a preliminary doodle for my "Fafhrd & Grey Mouser" illustrot, dashed off using one of them infectious black-and-white MacPaint wannabes: (Neologism Alert #2! 'Illustrot' -- an illustration marked by the telltale putrid stench of creative decay) Gahh. Sometimes I wish there was a mechanism in place whereby a person could immediately 'reformat' one's knowledge of any given subject, and restart the entire educational process again from scratch without requiring a blinkered process of 'unlearning.' (Okay okay, I suppose pickling your brain in alcohol or some other mind-altering substance might do the trick -- but I'd much rather take my chances with a bit o'rigorous technological know-how.) The reason: programming. My erudition in this subject has been chaotic, to say the least. I started writing digibrain instructions circa 1982, after devouring an introduction to BASIC (yum!) Of course, it sort of helps if you actually fargin' OWN a computer when you're writing computer programs. Instead of, say, scrawling them out beforehand on stacks of looseleaf paper, signing up to use a TRS-80 whose librarian overlords have decreed a  The first entry was a Timex-Sinclair 1000, a low-budget deal sporting a bubble-membrane keyboard, memory approximately the size of a gnat's turd, the complete inability to store programs on audio cassettes (despite what the manual vainly professed) and a curious electrical glitch which caused the unit to completely lose power (and that program you'd spent the past 30 minutes on) if it wasn't precisely oriented with the center of the Earth, Orion in the sky, or quite possibly a Californian starlet's menstruation cycle. But a few agonized years later came the Mother of All Compu-Upgrades -- the Commie 64 -- and at long last I was in business! Quite literally!  Or not. Electronic Arts had little to fear, there. Oh, the C-64 was a GREAT programming platform -- particularly when you've spent the previous 3+ years attempting to mold a BASIC masterpiece on unreliable/unavailable machines with NO storage capacity to speak of. Just the fact that I didn't have to write everything from scratch anymore came as a great shock -- no, I could run out, buy a "floppy disk" and "save" whatever I wanted on 'em! Regardless of whether they were finished or not! Of course, there were other things you could store on a Commodore 64 floppy disk, too -- as I found out elbowing through the seedy Darwinian corridors of junior high, where a brisk trade in pirated vidgames had transmogrified it into something akin to a kiddie pork-bellies trading pit. Before long, that masochistic enthusiasm once cradled for pecking in badly-parsed Sysiphian subroutines was quickly replaced by a frenzied motion of manic hustling, disk-hoarding and gameplaying. This is not to say my compu-creative fires were completely doused, however; instead they found alternative avenues through such user-friendly utilities as GameMaker, Flexidraw, Movie Maker and Adventure Construction Set -- those few commercially-purchased exceptions amidst my great heaps of illicit IntProp-violating ferro-magnetic loot. (Coincidence? Don't think so...)  Yet such stuff, however convenient, just wasn't PROGRAMMING any longer. No more wreaking havoc POKEing and PEEKing eldritch registers, no more arranging charset pictures on graph paper, and no more complicated mathematical dancing to make pretty music pipe from the speaker. From that point on, yours truly's always worked with proxies and scripts and object-oriented thutunthp. HyperTalk. AppleScript. Lingo. C with prefabricated graphics-manipulating libraries. VisualBasic. Et cet. Feel those neurons atrophying yet, l4merd3wd? Ah well. I suppose it's for the best. Life is certainly short enough... and while brandishing the most fundamental tools can offer one unprecendented levels of power/control, ultimately in the end they ALSO consume that most precious of commodities: time. (The only exception to this may be nauseatingly long-winded blogs.) February 5, 2006Somewhere in the 21st Century And so I pull back from the terrifying panorama of Geopolitick -- with all its grim implications for the future -- to my own safe little world of not-quite-blasphemous picture-making again. Just a tiny bit from my sketchbook: Gah. If I had a nickel for every time I've drawn somebody wearing futuristic armor and toting some MagLev flechette/handheld minigun variant... I'd... uh, have a whole stinkin' lot of nickels. And since Blogger's image embedding doesn't work on my geriatric web-browsing computer of choice, I'm also forced to relegate myself to HTML image tags and Old Skool uploading. We hates this, my precious! We hates it for ever! More PopCult detritus: just watched "The Battle of Brazil" today, encoded somewhere amidst the production-end making-of DVD for that particular two-decade-old dystopian flick. It's funny: my first exposure was the Eeeeevil Diluted Corporate Sid Sheinberg "Love Conquers All" edit, which aired on television -- and nevertheless I loved it to pieces, inexplicable chronological gaps and all. But when I witnessed the True Uncommercial Artistic Vision™ a few months later, at I-CON VIII, I found Terry Gilliam's version both inferior and horribly repellent -- 'omg WTF' as the monosyllabic instant messaging Gen Z'ers would have it. If The Bureaucratic State ultimately wins in the end (as the conclusion clearly indicates), then what's the frickin' point of the film at all -- "keep your nose down, and be a good citizen-unit"? Great. In any eventuality, the documentary goes into Gilliam's well-publicized tangle with the American distributor of the film -- and the deck is VERY clearly stacked beforehand in the director's favor, most notably by never even showing the face of the video-game 'boss' villain of the entire fracas, Sheinberg. Instead, tape recordings of an old interview are played back against a black screen with white lettering -- Sid's the voice of Faceless Corporate America, don'tcha know -- while Gilliam recieves flattering lighting and intimate closeups, where he can make the most asinine proclamations and still look like some kind of Randian heroic figure. Yet even as The Deep Artiste's slinging the usual revolutionary blather about Sticking It To The Man, Mannnn and Creative Freedom Running Free On The Streets Of Hollywood, for me what ultimately sticks in the end is Sheinberg's well-reasoned (if badly presented) assessment of the original product. He sounds for all the world like a well-versed 'fanboy' anxious to make a more accessible film, and most certainly not a soulless beancounting suit at all. Witness his response to Gilliam's mechanizations with a Los Angeles critic's guild (who openly proclaim "making a difference" as their primary motivation towards supporting the original edit, not its artistic merit), and how keenly he discerns "Brazil" being a story of an oppressive State, NOT what Gilliam's public-relations mythologists would have written, afterward. Ah well, One blasphemy deserves another. I'd venture Monty Python afficionados will be a right jolly murderous bunch in a few hundred years or so. Oh -- one other thing I'd gleaned from the DVD -- according the original script and its Prime Minister character, the 'terrorists' in the world of "Brazil" had actually been completely destroyed decades ago by the government -- and that the current rash of bombings were simply being kept up in-house in order to 'keep the economy going'. I merely cite this to contradict Gilliam's recent idiocy to the effect that post-September 11th America is equivalent to the society portrayed in "Brazil." If there's something the world isn't short of right now, it's homicidal whackjobs anxious to deliberately expend their explosives on unarmed civilians, dammit. Cower On Your Knees, Men of the West! A couple years ago, a friend and I were driving about town, talking up a storm. He'd come out from California to attend some familial ceremony, and had a couple extra days to kick around and squander upon the usual needless leisure activities. Anyway, at one point we'd passed a movie theater showing "The Passion of the Christ," which had just premiered a few days earlier. Almost immediately this galling sight set my buddy off into a tiresome anti-Christian ranting mode -- where he invoked everyone from the Spanish Inquisitors to Jerry Falwell as proof of the religion's illegitimacy, and broadly proclaimed anyone who actually believed the events described in the movie as rudderless sheep, too stupid to live. So to speak. I said nothing, as I hadn't seen the film, wasn't particularly in a mood to argue with someone whose convictions were so clearly fixed and reinforced with concrete, and had assorted counterexamples -- from a brilliant Mennonite suitemate at Pratt to friendly-yet-devout relatives -- on the brain. Besides, there's a somewhat masturbatory air one affects when railing against them evil 'n vicious fundie Jesusland types. Their hyperbolic pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding, such a Brave Voice of Rational Reason secretly knows a platoon of stone-brandishing jackbooted thugs with becrucifixed helmets won't be showing up to drag them out of their houses for their oh-so-irreverent blandishments anytime soon. Hell, in US culture, mocking them ign'rant Christers is practically a national pastime -- the fact that there've been at least three consecutive December 25ths now where public debate about the holiday's legitimacy have been called into question without mass death says FAR more about the tolerance levels of Christians than any of Bill Maher's self-aggrandizing fantasies. But of course, mocking ANOTHER religion -- one whose similarly fundamental believers actually took it upon themselves to slaughter several thousand Americans not so long ago -- requires a bit more intestinal fortitude, there. So when my companion started in on his desire to make a "Passion"-inverting movie, where every 'brave' and 'independent-minded' idea stolen from the pages of Garth Ennis' "Preacher" was explored in loving cinematic detail -- Jesus slept with whores! Ha! Choke on that, narrowminded Biblethumpers! -- I chimed in. "Hey, how about making a movie about the life of Mohammed, too? There's lots of saucy scandalous material to be found there, as well." Then, he turned to look at me, with a contortion of disbelief on his countenance, and replied, "What do you think I am -- suicidal?" Indeed. And so here we are today, faced with the curious spectacle of a Transnationally Multicultural Secular Europe, wondering what the hell to do about the bloodthirsty hordes of frothing Islamofascist Orcs from England to Indonesia, now openly calling for genocidal war... over a few cartoons. Will their leaders 'suicidally' stand for the Western traditions of free speech and artistic freedom in the face of such a murderous theocratic mob? Or will they meekly penalize the offending And if my friend's cowardice is any indication -- are WE here in America very far behind them? February 2, 2006Neologisms R suxX0r!!!!1111 Yes, I do believe I've just created one with my very first File Transfer Protocol-based post! Blog + blather = blother! (Also 'bother' as well -- as posting anything via FTP will certainly be a considerable 'blother' to me! While practically nobody will 'blother' reading this 'blother.'Oh, blother! January 29, 2006Tools of the Trade Yammer, yammer, yammer...So I purchased a new sketchbook a week after the new year began. Slowly but surely it's filling up in its own somewhat unique way -- not necessarily the content per se (which for the most part is comprised of the usual overdeveloped overupholstered doxies smiling for the drooling artist, while proudly holding aloft their newly-liberated largish gauzy slings), but the medium in which they're actually being rendered. Essentially I'm doing pencil drawings and inking them with -- oh, sweet Jeebus -- a frickin' Bic ball-point pen. Well, whaddya want from me? Dammit, I've never been one of those 'artist's materials' enthusiasts, who can rattle off the precise caliber of his Rapidograph or brush and cite to seven decimal places the pigment mix ratio of his palette (whose complement of colors are no doubt organized along some efficent scientific concepts like those of Frank Reilly's). Oh, I have absolutely nothing against such people -- indeed, more power to 'em -- the arena we call 'art' today has been conspicuously devoid of some measure of scientific rigor for decades, now. I'll certainly take one (or even a third) of these methodical types over a hundred of the idiotic Pollockoid I'm-splattering-what-I-feel school, any day of the fargin' week. But for yours truly... well, it's just a needlessly bureaucratic process. Better to get the Muse's recommendations on paper first, and then drag the whole thing kicking and screaming into Photoshop later, where it can be manipulated to my icy rock heart substitute's content. Pure aesthetic sacriliege, I know... Returning for a very brief moment to Joel Stein again, I was less puzzled by his imbecilic statements (great Ghu, a LEFTIST, openly rooting for American defeat? Shocking! Shocking I say!) than by the collective conservative reaction, afterward. I believe most of my fellow travellers got about as far as Stein's opening declaration "I don't support the troops," saw that all-too-familiar Red Haze, and then without a moment's pause Unleashed The Kraken, so to speak. The fact that this columnist was also exposing the hypocrisy of his Benedict Arnold-esque peers never really registered, I fear. Which is a shame. In the crucial battle that's also raging on the American home front, I would much rather deal with an honest (and honestly contemptible) Michael Moore type -- who hates this country and thinks we deserved 9/11 and regards the Islamofascist Jihad as some kind of glorious rebellion against the West's barbaric traditions of freedom, democracy, capitalism and peaceful coexistence between diverse peoples -- than a mushmouthed fencestraddling "moderate" weathervane like John Kerry, whose platform morphs with each election cycle. Clarity is foo! January 28, 2006Bats and Moonbats Erm. So. Now that I've gotten that all-essential First Blog Entry out of the way, what next on my long slippery slope towards a complete and total lack of enthusiasm (imposed in no small part by a self-imposed restriction about publicly discussing such highly personal/embarassing subject matter as my fetishistic attraction to pleasantly double-chinned females)?Musick, I s'pose. MySpace's whole Java-based album-selection gizmo was a new one on me, as in most cases I'd think nobody would give a rabid dingo's kidneys what batch of noise I was listening while scrawling the usual dense prose rife with assorted pop-cultural detritus and/or rightwingneoconimperialist sentiment. But yes, my little droogies, the "Batman Begins" soundtrack HAS recieved 'major rotation' in the Gordon dojo/cubicle/hole-in-the-wall. (Assuming your average flash-based MP3 player is really just a Victorian assemblage of whirring gears and moving parts, of course. Maybe this'll actually happen when some jihadist scumtard detonates an EMP device -- forcibly ushering in a necessary second era of (nano-scale) mechanical computing... hey, well, there's ALWAYS a silver lining, isn't there?) In particular, the track "Molossus" -- whose first two minutes should be placed alongside Thus Spake Zarathrusa and TESB's Imperial March as film-music milestones. Yes, yes, yes -- you can also hear it in the film approximately when a cowled growling Christian Bale decides to whimsically Evel Knieval his paramilitary SUV off a parking garage (right after crushing a few Priusian fauxmobiles, heh heh). But that crazed rampup by Zimmer and Howard's platoon of overly-caffeinated violinists is just a wee bit lost amidst the Dark Knight lighting off that Big Effing JATO unit. Oh, loved Chris Nolan's shades-of-80's-Hasbro "Tumbler", BTW. I read somewhere in one of those innumerable bikini babe-covered gearhead periodicals that he actually toiled upon that sucker for over a year in his garage, Coop-like, before filming. Hmm. Maybe yours truly should also start honing his near-nonexistent skillz in Manly Automotive Mechanics. It certainly helped THOSE clowns become better artists. Here I come, (insert corporate regional car-parts franchise here)! In other Olde Newse, Joel Stein is indeed a traitorous fargin' tewl. But at least he's an HONEST one -- unlike the rest of his closeted Grim Milestone-invoking, blood-dancing colleagues. Dennis Prager would certainly pat this 'humorist' on the shoulder, and say "you done good, kid." (Just before he mucked up his pretty-boy dental work with a handy two-by-four, that is. For those American Quislings who're actively working to make Osama's Caliphate a reality, there are very low tolerance limits.) January 26, 2006One small step... And so Tom has at last signed onto the latest Electronic Fad Of The Picosecond. Yes, hopefully PT Barnum's ghost won't laugh TOO loud, there. Between THIS redundant thingumbob, 10+ years of art filling my remaining EarthSpringMindLink website space, a moldering Xanga blog and (of course) my usual blundering meanderings amongst the Meatsphere and its complement of perplexing fleshlings, it's a wonder I can even find time to sleep anymore. Or even, Cthulhu forbid, DRAW.Ah well. Still, I remain convinced the constantly-updating likes of Lileks, et al are not in fact human beings at all, but complex simulacrums (simulacrii?) generated by the increasingly self-aware distributed consciousness of the Internet. The god-AI's goal? Why, to transform its' vast global base of organic operators into obsessed content-production droids, of course! With their faces forever locked into that overwhelming world described by their CRT screens/LCD displays/holographic generators/whatever, they'll never notice the gentle coup d'etat perpetrated by the Machines, maaaaaan. In any event -- the first step is always the hardest. |
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