Gonna switch over to a new name this year. When, not sure, but very likely prior to the summer starting. Look out for that.

My fetish: Not having any fetishes.

Your move

Reason is irl happened.

Psych probs give you a feeling of inadequacy, especially when they take so fricking long to resolve and everybody else you know kinda speeds off over the horizon. Half of my friends have kids by now. And two cars.

Meanwhile, I have just been admitted to a protected work establishment to learn how to cope with being around people. My plan was to be a millionaire by now!

Anyways, I -might- revamp the galleries and begin cleaning up as the year ends and I settle into the new workplace. Finally some sort of stability again, eh? Nice.

While that is going on, I will also try to focus on actually producing art again and uploading stuff occasionally.

Also.

There is a possibility that I am going to scrap this page entirely and switch to a new one (ie, clearing out the gallery and moving to a completely new one, here or elsewhere.). So if you're interested at all in watching me upload one picture per year in the future, watch this space.

...you gotta bring patience, though

IG out

This is what I am reading right now.

Oh boy...

I do not know what kind of twisted cognitive dissonance the whole tumblr communist brigade is running on, but even among those you can self proclaimed "Leninists" or even "Stalinists".

The only reason why Stalin is not as denounced as Adolph is because he happened to win the war, and share a table with Churchill, De Gaulle and the american guy.

I think, reading this even more, that even the slightest infringement on our liberties (which are, after all, according to 1920s soviet socialist thinking, only "relative" in their being "rights" anyway) is a little too much.

All that is wrong and can go wrong with human thinking happened at the beginning of the 20th century, and was carried through it with flying banners right up til the end, and in some states (ie North Korea) is still persisting.

The Idea that any Ideology or Belief devalues the life of a fellow human being completely is rubbish.

An interesting book series, and should at least be read at a basic level by anyone interested in freedom and how to loose it.

So I was at the Riding place again today for a lesson, partnering up with Ferdinand who is a pretty Boss dude (Fjord Horse master race all the way baby), when shit started to happen that led to unforeseen consequences.

We had a full blown stampede of loose, scared, confused horses outside the riding hall.

Some self-designated horsewhisperer "my horsey loves me so much and I know it" ponce was down at the large roundpen at the far end of the stables (which is about 200 meters from where the actual sheds are where most horses are kept, with a large open space made up of dirt path and pasture inbetween) with her horse (who she was leasing as a shared horse from the owner.). She left the roundpen, closed it, RELEASED THE HORSE (thinking because the horsey loved her soooo much that they would stay right by her side) and then proceeded to do unrelated things, like cleaning her nose.

The Horse thought otherwise, and ran off. It was getting dark, the path was long and the horse got frightened, and by the end was gallopping full tilt towards the stables and squealing for his or her buddies. This caused concern in the horses under the open sheds, concern turned to fear, and fear rapidly devolved into panic as fifteen scared out of their minds geldings began chaotically tearing up and down their enclosures, and quickly ran -through- their fencing and out into the open. So now there are sixteen scared horses galloping all over the place.

At this point, we decide to get off the lesson horses, because they were pretty upset by the noise of the commotion though unable to see it. While the free horses were collected and the fencing repaired, we just led them in circles and walk off the fear and tension. However, by the end, we and them were pretty jacked up. The Horse I usually ride, Asi, got startled as we continued to ride, leapt up into the air causing his rider to loose her balance. She tried to hold on by his reins, which tore up his mouth, which scared him even more so he twisted enough for her to slip down his butt and inbetween his hind legs. He stumbled, which triggered our own Horses. (Falling Horses in the wild are a -bad- sign, and even the most clear headed Horse will be hard pressed to overcome the urge to get the fuck outta there at that point.)

So now we all were on out of control, scared lesson horses. Thankfully, Ferdi was a cool headed dude and by the time we reached the end of the arena, he was listening to me again and slowing down.

However, since I have no clue how to sit a gallop, the seconds right before he went to trot were a tad intimidating.

So, this teaches us a couple of valuable lessons you should -always- heed when working with Horses.

1: Horses get scared. It is in their nature. You cannot make a horse less scared by restraining them, and you cannot control a Horses response to scary stimuli.

2: You do not let a Horse run free when it is outside of an enclosure, and/or far away from points of draw. Latter are anything the Horse is attracted to more than you, the Rider: Food, Pasturemates, more interesting Objects/People.

3: Your Horse is not a Human. They do not love you. They are not able to physically force positive and active thought through instinctual gut-feel type urges and their emotions. They do not plan ahead. They do not remember things unless memories are triggered. They will seek comfort in any way possible, and not consider anything that might happen along the way of attaining it. The person who caused this ignored all of these things, and it was only luck that we didn´t end up with injured horses or people, or at worst bad enough injuries to cause fatalities among the equine friends and long hospital stays for the people.

But, again, Kudos to my lesson Horse. Not only will he teach me how to be a leader (he walks off on people who do not have the balls and wisdom to guide him.), but he also taught me that my reflexes are good enough to catch myself when a horse bolts with only mild forewarning, and that I can stay on despite not knowing how to sit a gallop on an out of a horse bolting out of control at a pretty nice speed.

Suffice to say, the owner of the place was furious, and her yelling at the culprit lifelong horsewhisperer person was audible across the whole stables.

In short, exciting and very educating day, though I think we all could´ve done without all the commotion and excitement, and had a neat riding lesson instead.

Every time I am working, I get unhappier with whatever I am doing with every pen or brushstroke. Sometimes I wish there was a way to just shut off any emotion, presuppositions, expectations and standards until the piece is positively finished.

Sometimes I want to start smashing things, but I am too polite to do that. The doctor tells me internalizing all this will make it worse. Maybe I should pick up a violent hobby to compensate?

The only way to get good at art is to practice it daily. As it is, I barely am collecting the strength to do something once a month. As it is, I am -way- behind what I should be able to do. Which makes me even more disappointed and angry.

That being said.

I have started to read art relevant literature again. Right now it´s an ages old book explaining how to read art, written around 1950 ish.

Now, nothing is in the way of a bright future. 2012 was turbulent, 2013 will be the year mankind makes world peace, sends humans to mars, a lander to europa, aids, cancer and psych disorders wholesale are cured, everybody finds their soulmate and life partner, and everyone will be happy forever after!

At least, that´s what I got planned.

Well that was the most boring apocalypse ever.

I am -so- going to have one.

When the planet NIBIMURR arrives and the nephilim furries will liberate furrykind from the oppression of 4channers, trolls, griefers, disappointed parents and oppressive governments, we will dance in the streets, yiff in the townhalls, have get-togethers in the churches, fursuit down the boulevards, and replace the content of the national galleries with extra-grade prints of our favourite furry artists.

We will drink cider and sing and dance and the nazis, conservatives, furry haters, westboro baptists church (unless they (which is likely) have been raptured too), police and your dad will cry and wail at our feet as we march victoriously into a glorious dawn.

And Earth shall be renamed...

PLANET FURKIN

And our allies from the planet NIBIMURR will give us space technology and we will start to conquer the universe and finally discover the genetic technology to turn us all into biologically correct anthropomorphic foxes, horses and squirrels!

It will be glorious!

I cannot wait, friends! Can you?

So this thing seems to be taking off quite dramatically. Has anybody around here played it?

Maybe we can get something like a furry survivors alliance going. :P

If you don´t know what it is, you are missing out on the hype: www.dayzmod.com

The best game in the world finally gets the attention it deserves. I am happy.

You wouldn´t believe how difficult this is if you spent your entire life as an "artist" only doing b/w and linearts.

The more I paint, the more of my inadequacies pop up, and it´s hard to summon the determination to overcome the obstacles. Painting is more than just slapping colours on, erasing a bit and slapping on more: it´s subtle. So much unlike that what I´m used to, namely sketching with pencils and quill.

So, this is difficult, yet, it is a pretty amazing skill once you´ve got it down. There are a lot of great people around that I´m drawing inspiration from, be it from technique and style to subject matter.

It´s difficult to keep going, but I´ll try to keep at it, and do more traditional work to get the basics down. Might even find me some place in the City to do life drawing again. Do more paintwork in the flesh, too. Do more quick speed and mood paintings to learn how to correctly select colours to produce lighting, depth and feel of a scene.

That, and anatomy. I hope I´ll be able to keep going: last time I was this motivated is years ago now, and I´m slowly realizing how much I´ve slacked in the past years.

At this point, I´d like to thank everyone who supported me, be it here, or the IRCs I frequent. It means a lot to me, even though if it doesn´t seem that way, what with my lack of keeping up with comments and such.

Anyways, expect more bad colour paintings to crop up here over the coming weeks.

Oh and btw, the new Arma 3 website has been rolled out. www.arma3.com if you want to check it out. :( Can´t help fanboying all over it, so I need to force it down your throat even here. Oh well.

Cheerio

Riv

The original Operation Flashpoint is no more. The game is now Called Arma:Cold War Assault, at patch version 1.99.

When was the last time you´ve seen a company put out an official patch, ten years after release?

Also, BIS now has three more games in the works. Arma 3, Take on Helicopters and Carrier Command:Gaea Mission.

Especially the latter I´m interested in, since I´ve been a fan of the 90s remake of battlezone, and a friend of mine who played the original Carrier Command says it´s a little like that.

I´m most looking forward to Arma 3 and Carrier Command.

As for my art, I´ve run into a complete block. I´ve even got a psychologist on hand now to help me out of it, but with no success so far.

I tell you. Psychological disabillities suck. major. arse.

Can´t I be normal?

Okay, disclaimer first. I am not affiliated with Bohemia Interactive Studios in any way, shape or form. I just love their shit, yo. Now sit down, have a coke, and enjoy. Or maybe look at my pictures and comment and fav. Or something.

Now...

Let me tell you a Story. It´s a wonderful story, a story of magic and tension, of terror and exhilaration, a story of victory and of defeat. It´s a story about the best game in the world, and it begins in the year 1998.

Back then, the founders of Czech based game development stuio Bohemia Interactive Studios (BIS for short) showed the tech demo of their Poseidon engine, which would become known as Real Virtuality. This was a very simple demo, showing off the graphical capabilities first and foremost. It can be downloaded for free here: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Poseidon . It was the founding of one of the greatest game series ever, and one of the most successful despite being one of the lesser known games. In 2001, BIS released their first game based on Real Virtuality.

Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis.

We (Dad and I) bought the game upon the day of its release, after having played the (amazing) demo for the months before. OFP was a game like no other before, and did what many others had strived for but failed. An open world, near free-roaming battlefield simulator, allowing for a vast number of AI units interacting with each other on huge Islands, fighting across hillsides, forests, towns, rivers and seas. The game encompassed more than 40 vehicles, and hundreds of soldiers and civilians in four factions. It shipped with the most powerful ingame mission editor of its time, and the campaign delivered one of the most intense gameplay experiences I have encountered to date. From its looks, animations, feel, music and the way the missions were designed, every bit fell into place.
However, like any game, it wasn´t without flaws. Upon release, OFP was riddled with all sorts of glitches and bugs (I fondly remember the completely black forests that appeared at around patch 1.06 or so, rendering everything dark even when using NV goggles, making the night fighting experience even more intense.) Back then, I didn´t notice the bugs, or even experienced them as a part of the game.
There were other, deliberate gameplay choices, which were challenging to grasp at first. Firstly, if an enemy saw you, and you didn´t get into cover quick, you died. Enemies were not only able to remember where you moved and tracked you, trying to flank and surround your, they also were able to snipe you with AK 47s across 500 meters. You could only take one hit, two if you were lucky, three if the enemy was aiming REALLY badly. Missions took very long, so dying was BAD, and you had to move with extreme care to avoid having to re-do the entire mission. You only got one save per mission, on ALL difficulty settings. You couldn´t move while reloading. There were no close combat attacks. It was a bitch.
Not only were these basic gameplay choices challenging, but the game was also extremely demanding on your hardware. With about 200 units on the battlefield and a view distance of 1500 meters, my computer (An one year old Intel dualcore coupled with a GTX260) struggles to top 20 fps. Imagine how well it ran back in 2001. :P
At no point in time, OFP was an easy game to play: but it was also a game I could never stop to play.

From 2001 to 2005, it was virtually the only game I played. The biggest reason for this was the community: In its glory days, OFP had thousands of people modding and building missions, with hundreds, if not thousands of addons being produced, several dozen large mods ranging from depictions of modern militaries to vampire hunting modifications: there even were a Lego and a GI Joe modification. No day would pass without new toys to play with being released, or new missions coming out to test your abillities. Some of these missions are among the best gaming experiences to be had in any game I think, and provided you own a copy of Operation Flashpoint, you can get them for free.

Then, something bad happened (well, sort of, we can´t really tell. Probably it was good, even.) Codemasters, the publisher of OFP, and BIS parted ways, with BIS retaining the rights to the story and game engine, while Codemasters kept the Operation Flashpoint brand. No further OFP game would be released by the original makers: Operation Flashpoint 2 was abandoned halfway into development.
BIS turned to a new project, the successor to the original Operation Flashpoint, in a way, but not really.

Armed Assault.

Arma was, to sum it up in one sentence, a catastrophe. I did not get the game at release, but even when I got the gold edition (which was version 1.08 or something like that already) it was a bugfest galore. None of the tame, gameplay altering bugs you found in Operation Flashpoint, like the black forest or occasionally failing trigger. Instead, the performance was astrocious, and the game had memory leaks all over the place, resulting in frequent crashes, which coupled with a sub-par campaign, which was a severe case of the "nice concept, executed badly" syndrome.
To that you could add the AI, which hadn´t improved (partially even degraded) over OFP, an unlock-based default mission system, and all the old OFP glitches like AI warping trough walls, shooting trough buildings, helicopters crashing and trucks falling off the streets or flipping over rocks. It was a badly executed game, that highlighted everything that was bad about OFP by carrying it forward into the next generation, adding nothing on top apart from improved animations, a new lighting engine capable of rendering dynamic shadows, and bumpmaps.

And it did tremendous damage to the community.

Even after three years, Arma´s community was nowhere as large as it had been for OFP after the same time: not only had a lot of people looked over the game because it wasn´t called OFP anymore, but those who bought it found themselves dealing with a trainwreck, and many left in alienation and disappointment.

Arma wasn´t all bad, though, obviously. It´s a BIS game, which means it´s awesome by default. The music was awesome, the island was beautiful, and the mission editor was essentially the same as in OFP, adding a handful of new, useful commands for mission editors to use. It added the armory, which allowed players to test equipment and score points to unlock more advanced gear. And now, after patch 1.16, the game runs smoothly, even with large numbers of Units, and can pull off a tremendous show. But after pulling all factors together, it wasn´t near Operation Flashpoint: the King still reigned supreme.

In 2009, BIS announced "Game 2". Codemasters were openly working on a "successor" to OFP, called Dragon Rising at the time, putting on a bit of pressure to make this one count. The rivalery between the two camps was severe, leading to a few flamewars as both games went trough their development cycles. Arma 2 was released in march 2009, half a year before Dragon Rising.
While to me, it worked from the beginning, to most people, it came across as another failiure. Bad performance, frequent crashes and buggy Missions ruined the experience for many: it was obvious that towards the end, the game had been rushed. For what reasons, we don´t know, but it´s certainly clear that it damage again. But it wasn´t quite as bad as Arma had been.

Not even close. Arma 2 is fantastic. Taking place in the fictional post-soviet republic of Chernarus, it offers a beautifully modelled battlescape, extremely ambitious missions in the campaign, a vast array of realistically modelled Units in four factions, pitching the USMC against Chernarussian Nationalist and Communist Insurgents, and in case the player makes things go awry, the might of the Russian Federal Army.
Arma 2 not only improved in the fidelity departement, with a new post processing system and another revamped animation system, it now also allowed the player to reload while walking/running, vault over obstacles and added a completely new AI system.
This AI goes actually down to controlling every bug, bird and beast that crosses your screen with their own AI routines. Like in OFP, tides, stars, the times of sunset and sundown as well as weather effects were modelled, allowing navigation using the stars at night, and checking time by the position of the sun in the sky. The new AI was not only capable of all things it had done in OFP, it now moved in pairs covering each other, exploited cover, laid down suppressive fire and attempted to overwhelm their opposition trough fire and maneuver. They now recognized killzones and tried to avoid them, and for the first time in a Flashpoint game, were able to effectively fight in urban environments.

Arma 2 also carries some features over from VBS, the military training simulations adapted for, among others, the USMC, the US Army, the Austrialian Army, as well as other Armed Forces, from Operation Flashpoint and ArmA (VBS1 and VBS2, respectively): while most of these are currently non-functional or only half implemented, chances are Arma 2 will, trough patches and addons, receive a functional 3D real time editor in the future, a backpack system, further improved AI, realistic thermal vision, as well as correctly simulated modern battlefield toys such as UAVs. Right now, of these, the real time editor is implemented but only accessible trough a key combo.

Impressing in its features already, and taking off smoother than its predecessor, Arma 2 drew the attention of the community anew. Obviously being slower than for OFP, because the Addons are more complex to make nowadays, it still resulted in a large array of new material being released in short order: Whole new Islands, Units, Effects and even some full modifications are in the making or are already released, providing tons of content to enhance the game. The flashpoint spirit, the community effort, can be felt to come back to life.

I think at this point it´s pretty clear that I am a raving fanboy of this game series. I love all three of these games, despite their flaws: I can understand why people don´t try the game long enough to start loving it, but I don´t understand people who try it and then don´t love it. Arma 2 is by far not as hard as Operation Flashpoint was: the AI is less able to hit you, they do not shoot trough walls anymore, and rarely ever clip trough them. Tanks are now virtually blind (as they should be), and your teammates are much more capable than before. Enemy bullets still remain deadly, and the pace of the game is relatively slow, but it still remains one of the most immersive, and intense, battlefield experiences you can have in a PC. It´s not over the top hollywood action like MW2 or OF:DR, but instead it´s slow paced, grinding, picking up the pace when the combat gets close up and personal.

And if that bores you, place yourself as a cow, attach a rocket launcher to your back and run trough a horde of enemies to see how long you survive.
Or have a race against your friends across chernarus, build a castle and defend it from an onslaught of zombies... and if current community made content bores you, learn the BiScript language, and start building things of your own.

The beautiful thing about OFP was that, back in 1997, when it was first devised, it was fully intended to be moddeable: BIS provides all modding tools necessary to bring everything the players want into the game: and today, even a few of the greater mods who have worked on other games before are turning to the true Operation Flashpoint 2, to work with what it has to provide. Among others, the project reality mod, previously famous for their Battlefield 2 modification.

ANd if that´s not enough, BIS will probably continue to add new content to the game as they patch and improve it: 1.05 added a new campaign and a beautifully modelled AH-64D to the game. Today, a company like EA or Ubisoft would´ve probably charged at least 15 dollars for that, to download this extra content as DLC.

For this kind of thing I love BIS, and because of what the game has to offer, I love Arma 2.

It´s just a pity that most people will turn the game down over the many small problems it has. :V But I guess that is why I write blatant advertisement thingies such as this. Addendum: I am in no way affiliated with BIS. But I think that a company like them is fully deserving of my support. Unlike, say... uuh... Codemasters. Or Activision. Or EA. Or sub-companies of these. Like IW.

OFP is cheap nowadays: the GOTY version is the one to get. Arma can also be had for cheap. It´s called Arma:Combat Operations in the US. Arma 2 costs about 16 to 30 bucks, depending on where you buy it. Also, I´m totally not doing this because I, like, need more people to play this game with. And I´m totally not desperate either. Wink wink wink.

Websites of interest:

www.Armaholic.com
www.ofpec.com
www.ofpr.info
www.armedassault.info
http://ttp2.dslyecxi.com/
www.realitymod.com
http://ace.dev-heaven.net/wagn/Documentation
http://forums.bistudio.com/index.php
www.arma2.com

Also, other game developers worthy of my support are the following:

http://www.ice-pick.com/index_eng.htm (The Void, Pathologic)
http://www.frictionalgames.com/site/ (Penumbra Trilogy)
http://tale-of-tales.com/ (The Graveyard, The Path)

And the guys who did Commander Keen. Srsly.

It´s surprisingly widespread "knowledge" that 911 was an inside job, executed by a select caste of profiteurs, using assets of the US Government to make it work. There is a lot of, so called, evidence presented in films such as "loose change", which claims to prove that various things about the attacks are pointing towards the whole thing having been an inside job.

If you are blessed with such a mediocre IQ as I am, and don´t know what is actually going on, this evidence can be pretty convincing. I know, because at a point, it nearly got me.

However, if you do the research (way overused term in my opinion. Everybody talks about everybody else "not doing the research".) you will find that most of these arguments are pretty much nonsense. Because I am unarticulate and mushy-brained, I´ll leave pointing out the details to more able people.

I´ll just link one video here, because I am like that: on WTC7 WHICH ABSOLUTELY PROVES THAT IT WAS AN INSIDE JOB AND BUSH PERSONALLY FLEW THE PLANES http://www.youtube.com/user/dprjone...../0/QilSHm0Luj4

Discuss :V

I usually don´t post journals, and actually, I pretty much never type anything on here, be it comments or what have you. I apologize for that, I seem to be not the kind of person for that. I read all your comments, though, and they´re much appreciated, even if I don´t reply.

Now that that is out of the way...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ik4f1dRbP8

Tea Party People

I´m from Germany, so my perspective of the US is already skewed. To me, it went from the Cowboy Country Freedom Disney Dreamland of my childhood to a crazy, religious, militaristic country with a broken industry, outdated economic philosophy and dysfunctional education system over the course of the Bush years. Before that I was a child and didn´t really bother with politics.

This Video sort of makes it look even more crazy, and it´s outrageous. Here you have the country that´s based on the single greatest Idea in political terms that anybody could´ve had, a completely secular nation basing itself on equality and freedom, which rose from a rebellious backwater to the economically and scientifically most powerful force in the world... and then you get these medieval, witch-hunt esque pictures. I realize that something in the "you have to manage every challenge in life yourself" is part of the much referenced american dream, however, especially in todays world, this kind of outlook on the world is as far removed from reality as the communist Idea is now.

Stupid fringe groups wouldn´t really be a problem, though, if they would just be that. Unfortunately, many more things play into this: one of the, at least to me, hinge points of this whole farce is the 911 truther movement. Russian friends of me are very big on conspiracy theories, so I had the dubious honour of watching pretty much every piece of interpretative documentary work Alex Jones ever concocted: I´ve to admit it was pushing the right buttons for me, and up to a point I actually bought a lot of it.
That there are a lot of open questions regarding 911 may be true, however, that doesn´t really matter in the light of what kind of agenda MOST of this movement seems to be about. It´s a -bad- mix of religiosity, misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted science, misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted economics, politics and philosophy, fear mongering and psych-ops.

What they (911ers) and a large part, if not all of, the tea party movement come across as is as people who, come hell or high water, want to keep the government out of their affairs.

Unfortunately, no state can work without governance, and the state is the people. How deeply intertwined government is with your daily lives is something you may not realize, but once you begin to strip government away, it will become glaringly obvious. I don´t know to which degree public services such as electricity, water, gas, roads and rail are privatized in the US, but in Germany, the Government ensures that roads are in shape, that the railway system is working (even though it does not posess the actual railroad companies anymore), that the electricity network is up to standards (even though that does not belong to them either), that people´s pensions get paid, that hospitals are in shape, that schools are supplied and equipped and checked for being up to date in their methods and standards, they subsidise cultural and economical ventures, they make sure that people get jobs and can keep them, they organize relationships with foreign countries, forge alliances and ensure peace, they organize ALL security services (Army, Police, etc.)... the list goes on and on.

A LOT of this cannot EVER be organized by decentralized citizens, because then you get chaos.

On the topic of our society needing systems to ensure everybody can live life with dignity: this is essentially what the health care bill in the US is about. A friend of mine ran around with a hernia for several months because he couldn´t afford the doctor.
In Germany, people are forced to insure themselves, and they get supported if they cannot afford basic insurance: this also means the same illness would have been fixed immediately, AT ZERO COST for the affected, because the insurance would´ve paid the hospital bills.

It´s a question of humane and moral treatment, and care for each other, and not a question of "who wants it needs to work for it." That, by default, leaves everybody with a grave illness shit out of luck: instead of doing the moral thing, these teaparty nutters see fit to mock the affected.

There are some obvious issues with such a healthcare system, however, and that is that nobody can afford it. Especially with less children being born, and with the populaces average age getting higher every decade, western nations are faced with a problem. Here in germany, adopting a system such as the US has NOW (before the healthcare bill) is being debated, because it saves the state a lot of money. Deciding this kind of thing on the basis of money is wrong, though, in my humble opinion. Both ethically and morally.

Plus, if your country can´t afford it, you can always print more money. Obama´s already had mr. Bernanke magically summon more than 700 billion, out of literally thin air. So why not another few hundred billion to get people in the US decent healthcare? As long as they manage to keep people using the currency, no harm done.

I sort of diverged from the original idea I had about this post, which was having a rant about these tea party asshoes.

But I guess I can´t really be arsed to fuzz myself up about the peasantry mucking up while there are more urgent matters to think about.

Oh, and don´t get me started on Zeitgeist. There´s a whole ´nother rant in there.

Blah

Waaagh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW34.....eature=related

When was the last time a westerner got a Song like this written about him, for getting shot in the back while being on the run?

-

Exactly.

F´n Depressing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

People aren´t appreciating the gravity of our presence here. Or the gravity of anything, at that.

Have you ever looked up at the sun and felt its warmth on your skin, and noticed how it feels exactly the same (at least on a hot summer´s day) when you hold your body close to a campfire?

And then you realize that this thing is over 93 million miles (~149 million kilometers. Edited this to be correct, thx for pointing it out) + - a few thousand depending on the time of the year (since Earth´s orbit isn´t a perfect circle, but slightly eliptical.), and it still is hot enough to make life pretty uncomfortable in places.
Or just about right on a small fraction of the planet.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped.....ohkohimage.gif

It might seem slightly arrogant to claim this, but I really like to think of the sun as -our- sun. And contrary to so many other things, the sun is actually reliable. It won´t go away any time soon, and it is absolutely, positively impossible for us to switch it off. We may be able to block it, but that won´t make it disappear.

This is where the "gravity" comes in. The sun, it seems, isn´t average. A vast amount of stars out there are more massive than the sun, indicating that we are living in the spring of the universe, by stroke of luck (but not chance. I think we -had- to happen, simply because the Universe is so large), and most stars of equal dimensions as the sun are binary systems, with two stars orbiting each other around a common center of mass.

If we would live in such a system, our planet would look slightly different.

There´s other reasons why I think we are sort of special. We are the first species on earth who evolved the right tools to not only conciously reflect on ourselves, our thoughts and our actions, we also have developed external tools with which we were able to manipulate our environment exceptionally well. Can you say "opposing thumbs"?
Because of this, we, and not Dolphins or Elephants, have become the most successful species on this planet to date. However...

A common misconception among people is that we, "humans" are somehow really different from "animals". I think, after all, we are all still carbon based lifeforms, and we are all half-evolved in one way or the other. Homo Sapiens Sapiens, thus, is still a primate, no matter how able our logical thought process or how advanced our technology.
This fact has, and still is, giving us some trouble. If ID would actually be true, God should be fired for developing these knee joints. They wear out too quickly, for one, and parts of it are easily dislocated or otherwise damaged. On the whole, our bodies are sort of a compromise: what has made us so great is our abillity to think big.
At this point, I´d like to point to something which, I believe, Carl Sagan said. We are a way for the Universe to know itself. On Winchell Chung´s Rocket page, there´s a note that says that Earth, trough us, has in effect developed a neural system. We are not only concious in ourselves as individuals, but as a whole we form the planets conciousness, and for the first time, Earth is able to anticipate disaster coming from space, and work to defend itself. That is provided that this neural system doesn´t self-combust and destroy itself and the rest of all life with it.

Which brings me to misanthropism.

I´ve learned a lot about this kind of stuff in the past two years or so, and it has begun to arouse my interest greatly. One thing I notice more and more, in that, especially around furry pages (for some odd reason), is that misanthropism is sort of a subdued norm.
That can range from simple acceptance of common evils, to outright advocating them, such as the call for eradicating the human species from the face of the earth because "they upset the natural balance".

For one thing, there is no such thing as a "natural balance". Nature is, by nature (ouch), unstable, otherwise everything would be static, and we wouldn´t need evolution. If you are saying there is a natural balance to be upset, you might as well say that some god designed everything and our choice to disobey him has upset his precious design, so we must go.

On the other hand, we will never reach actual greatness if we, as a species on the whole, don´t stop these self-destructive trains of thought. On an evolutionary timescale, we have existed for a mere two or three seconds. On a astronomical timescale, we don´t really exist yet at all. Not having gods, people say, makes life pointless: I beg to differ.

We have a point, if not several. One: We are the point, and our existence. Two: Learning. We have a responsibillity as sentient, self-aware creatures, and that is to learn about the Universe, and how it works. If only so we can find awesome things to marvel at simply because they please our sense of aesthetics.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album.....2a/xlarge_web/

And if those are not enough, you can always make points up.

Oh, and also, I´m advocating putting a new "timeframe" inbetween "evening" and "night", which should be called "Galaxy rise", at the time when the sky becomes dark enough to see the band of the milky way with the naked eye. It´s very exciting to think about that there´s 400 billion stars out there, waiting to be visited. Possibly, some may harbour other self-aware beings, some of them might be out to kill us, but I think if we manage to survive ourselves, there will be nothing, short of the universe physically switching itself off from one day to the other, which can stop us.

Emphasis on "if we manage to survive ourselves".

Hope this was -somehow- worth your while.

Cheers

The probably most hilarious flat-on-face-drop release of this quartal was, until MW2 possibly succeeds it in magnitude of failiure, Operation Flashpoint:Dragon Rising, which I will from here on call Dragon Rising because it doesn´t deserve the name Flashpoint at all.

I´ve been with the original OFP since the release of the Demo in 2001, and I´ve played the game up until 2007, when various things forced me away from it.

Dragon Rising has been sort of my pet peeve, ever since they started actually releasing "ingame" material, and not just a peeve in the negative sense of it, but actually a good one due to the entertainment value of the Codemasters forum.

I´ve played DR, and found that it was sort of a run-n-gun among the hills kind of game, where you only got shot when you stayed put, and where the AI´s stupidity and the mediocrity of the graphics played hand in hand to create an experience more reminiscent of Delta Force than OFP. While I absolutely loathe the gameplay, the bad animations, the mediocre or sometimes bad textures, the overboarding HDR and Postprocessing, the apparently lazy makeup of the game itself, I absolutely love the graphic design of the game.

From the style they went with the bobbing and position of the gun, and the use of dof in that field, to the way the menus are designed, the use of typo and the use of contrast and colour (or rather, the absence of it) troughout the whole game, from the dev videos to the ingame symbols is something A CERTAIN OTHER GAME COULD NEED A SLICE OF OR TWO. I´m looking at you, Arma2.

Because of this, I´ve fired up Arma 2, and took some screenshots, and then went on to PHOTOSHOP the hell out of them, compiling parts of various screenshots I took to some interesting composites, which I will expand upon with some interface Ideas of mine in the future, quite possibly.

Pics here: ->

http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/6131/armadr.jpg

http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/.....14/armadr2.jpg

Also, go BIS

I have the update speed rivalling a tectonic plate in slowness.

Apologies to everybody who wrote, commented, etc. here, I´m just not able to get myself around to keep up it seems. x_x

I -might- upload more in the near future, but heh... I said that before :p

Yeeeeah, on my quest for (while I fail at becoming the greatest general artist ever) becoming the most famous furry artist ever (Gallery at the tate modern and stuff) I have received some major setbacks by my greatest adversary: lack of skill and his companion: artblock.

:D But listening to 2Sense motivated me again, so here I am, in ur base, paintin ur wallz.

Cheerio-ho and halo thar again

AWESOME

The one and a half people who MIGHT have been watching this irregularily since it has been created might´ve found my upload speed has crept to zero :O

Cause my scanners DEAD ;_; FLAMES, KABOOM, HOUSE BURNT DOWN, WORLD ENDED... not quite as critical, but you get the idea.

Anyway....

might get a new one soon. :O

So, if you like anything in here, come back in two years time or so, I might´ve uploaded something new by then :p

Cheers

Waaagh

Aw yeah, so here I am, opening a new Gallery, entering territory I've never really entered before to do stuff I've never dared to do before... not on Paper, anyway.

First batch of Pics is up, and hopefully I can recalibrate the direction the Gallery is going into later. You can never have too much bare fur, but you can for sure get your gallery unbalanced as hell if you do the same stuff over and over again.

So here I am. :D