I know, I've said it time and again. I'm a terrible artist, my productivity has gone steadily downhill for years ...

Well goddamnit, I'm going to DO something about it! For too long I've coasted on prior skill and knowledge, feeding off my own muscle memory! I've improved in the past four years, sure, but I could be doing so much BETTER. I pay lip service to studying anatomy and whatnot, and that lasts for about two sketches. Drawing becomes harder and harder because I'm atrophying, never taking in any new skills, never sketching just for the sake of sketching.

Uploading to FA is a great experience, but it's very much a hugbox. My skills, my imagination, EVERYTHING has atrophied while I've been here. You know what I did a few days ago? I dragged out a sketchbook. A real, honest-to-god sketchbook. And the last time I had drawn in it was in December of '08. Two sketches. Before that? May of '08. One picture. Then December of '07 ... So I sat down, and I drew. I had nothing in mind. Just figure sketches. And it felt WONDERFUL. I felt better than I had in months. No commitments, no preconceived notions, just ... letting it flow out.

It's been four days since then, and I've managed to draw something every day. It's almost a routine. I'm studying again. I'm ENJOYING this, more than I have in years.

So that's it. This is my ultimatum. I'm not leaving, I'm just ... taking a break. You probably won't even notice, considering I barely upload anyway. I have a few requests I need to finish, and I will, but not now. I need to recharge, recuperate.

See you guys later.

Through a curious turn of events, I stumbled upon MS Paint Adventures last night. Yes, everyone and their parasitic worm has been telling me to read this, but no, OF COURSE I never listen unless I'm the one who's telling me to do things. That would make TOO MUCH SENSE.

Anyway I started reading Homestuck and I guess altogether I've been reading it for about ... nine hours? How is it even possible to have that much content in less than a year. It's just crazy. Wheels within wheels within wheels within ARGH

So I thought I'd take a break and read Problem Sleuth instead but I can't see anything from any of the stories other than Homestuck, except for the text, but what's the fun in that, HAHA DISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS and Homestuck is getting into my brain and if I don't stop I'm going to go insane and start thinking that maybe I'm just dreaming because nothing in real life could be that large and complex

Spoilers ahead.

I started up a new world in DF2010 late on April 1st, and have been playing it pretty much every chance I get since then. So far I've lost one fortress to subterranean horrors, drowned one adventurer in a puddle, retired another adventurer after achieving local fame, and am currently working on a second fortress.

So what's new in DF2010? Well, for whatever reason, I was REALLY looking forward to healthcare. Dwarves no longer just lie in bed and heal a little every season, but instead require dressing, sutures, stints or casts, surgery or even a trip to the traction bench, depending on the severity of the wounds. This also deals with the new material and biology updates. Creatures are no longer a loose collection of "parts", but have actual anatomy. Layers of hair, skin, fat, muscle, nerves and bone all protect internal organs, depending on the internal geography of the creature in question.

Unfortunately, I never had a chance to see this in action during the life of my first fortress. What I DID see, and what I should have REALLY been looking forward to, was the completely reworked underworld. In 40d, underground features were fairly rare. You could dig down only so far from your starting position, and you'd be very lucky to find anything other than rock. In DF2010, you're pretty much guaranteed to find something interesting if you dig deep enough. I assume you can dig as deep as Z-level 0, but I've never actually gotten that far. In my first fortress I got maybe 50 levels down, from a starting position of around Z-level 130, and in the process uncovered three massive caverns, filled with mushrooms, giant spider webs, giant lakes and the denizens of the deep. This was, unfortunately, my downfall. By the time I had hit the third cavern, my fortress was overrun by blind cave ogres. FUN! =D

I did finally get a chance to check out healthcare during my second fortress. A pterosaur titan had paid me a little visit, killing a few straggling workers, before my axedwarves managed to take it down. One of them, though, suffered a deep laceration to her upper right arm. She's unconscious, bleeding, so the others drag her to the hospital. There, she's checked over by a diagnostician and has her wounds cleaned. I also get to see on her health reports page that the cut has penetrated deep into her muscle tissue, severing a few motor nerves. She'll never quite regain full control of her right hand. The bleeding is staunched, she's prescribed sutures and bandages, and gets sent on her merry way.

Of course, this is Dwarf Fortress, so something completely ludicrous has to happen somewhere, and so it did! While the axedwarf is being treated, there happen to be two other dwarves in the hospital, apparently watching, a mason and a fishery worker. The mason was friends with one of the other dwarves who was torn apart during the attack, and in a fit of miserable rage he snaps and pummels the poor fisher to within an inch of her life. I seriously did not expect her to live. Lacerations everywhere, severe organ damage, both legs and one arm broken ... but she was already in the hospital, and was quickly treated. Now around this time, I had happened to uncover raw adamantine, and was in the process of extracting it into metal strands. Due apparently to the quirks of the new material system, adamantine strands are considered thread, and hospitals will use whatever thread is closest for sutures. So, yeah. This fisher's grievous wounds (including her HEART. Dwarven doctors are hardcore) are being held together with the most valuable substance known to dwarvenkind. She'd better APPRECIATE those stitches, goddamnit. If she, uh. If she ever comes out of her coma. =I

But of course this is the initial release of a major revision, so naturally it's buggy as hell. My first fortress nearly starved to death because dwarves aren't set to haul food in the standing orders by default. Food rots if it's not put into a stockpile, and prepared meals never left the kitchen, so it would all rot away. Also, don't ever tell your kitchens to use booze as an ingredient. They'll just take massive quantities of it and never use it, denying its use to anyone else, even though your stocks screen says you're swimming in it.

As part of a new feature, dwarves will continue working even if they're somewhat hungry or thirsty. This is to alleviate the problem where, for instance, a miner will walk halfway across the map to mine out a few tiles, swing his pick, then decide he's thirsty and head all the way back to the stockpile. This has a few quirks, though. Dwarves view partying as a job, and they're pretty much partying every chance they get. They'll chat and converse and do whatever it is they do until they're all dying of thirst, at which point they'll shuffle together like a hive mind to the stockpile to satiate themselves. This leads to some pathfinding weirdness, which I'll get to later, but mostly this is an annoyance because they view being thirsty or hungry as a mood detriment. My dwarves are right on the verge of snapping from partying so much.

And yeah, pathfinding! Get too many dwarves going through too small an area and you'll get a bizarre traffic jam, dozens of dwarves laying prone in a pile, nothing moving until the guy on top decides to do something, which can take awhile. I've always made all my corridors and doorways at least two tiles wide to alleviate this kind of thing, but it doesn't seem to help here. Any kind of mass dump or hauling order seems to cause this.

And job professions and labor can be a little unclear. Immigrant dwarves will be titled by their highest level skill, but they won't actually have their labor options set to DO it unless it's higher than a certain level. Oh hey, a gem setter just showed up! Let's have him build a jewelry workshop. But oh, no, he's only a DABBLING gem setter, so he won't actually do anything unless we go into his labor options and set it manually.

There are probably dozens more little nitpicks I could write about, but it really doesn't matter. A fix will likely be out soon, and even with the glitches, this is still easily the best game I've ever played. I could play it for ten hours straight and be "wow ... that was really satisfying" afterward. Any other game would leave you feeling drained and hating yourself the next morning.



TL;DR - I rant and rave about Dwarf Fortress because I am a gigantic NERD.

No, seriously. What am I doing? I can't figure it out.

I lead such a boring life that I can't remember what I do from day to day. Maybe I do nothing. There was a book? Some video games? I don't really know.

I guess it's Thursday. There've been a lot of Thursdays lately. It used to be Sunday. I remember Sunday. I remember there BEING a Sunday.

WHAT AM I DOING?

When I was but a lad, I would cheat at video games every chance I got. I had game genies and game sharks for all my stupid little Nintendo consoles with all my stupid little Nintendo games. The first thing I'd do upon discovering some new PC game demo was look online for cheat codes. I'd played one, maybe two "ordinary" games of The Sims. All the rest were bizarre social and architectural experiments using money and item placement cheats. I have a cousin who seems have a new Steam account every other week due to being VAC banned. I look at his activities with a mixture of regret and disdain, but I probably would have done the same when I was his age. I'm just lucky online gaming wasn't as prevalent back then.

Which segues me into Starcraft. I bought Starcraft pretty much the day it came out. I awaited with eager anticipation the release of Brood War. I LOVED that game. I loved the ambiance, the story. One thing I didn't like, though, was skirmishes against the computer. See, I was terrible at Starcraft, mostly because I cheated. Voraciously. I'd cheat my way through the single player campaigns, built custom maps that pitted my powerful forces against a swarm of weak enemies. I never even tried multiplayer, and skirmishes against the computer were difficult because, if I recall correctly, cheats applied to everyone on the map.

The computer terrified me. I'd get a sizable force going in my base, only to discover that the computer had seized control of the entire map. I could never get my head around expanding. Hell, I could never get my head around building more than a small handful of workers, or more than one barracks, or hotkeying a comsat station ... I was so used to cheating my way through single player that I couldn't adapt against an actual opponent (or playing another race, ha. I stuck exclusively to Terran).

And ... that just kind of carried over. I eventually learned to actually PLAY games, and even got good at other RTSs, but Starcraft always kind of haunted me. So when I heard about the Starcraft 2 beta opt-in, I kind of panicked. Oh wow, that looks really fun, but they're sticking to the same mechanics, and I'm just not fast enough, and I suck at Starcraft anyway, etc etc.

So I picked up the original again, and played through single player. And got good at it. And then I played a skirmish, and got my ass kicked. So I watched the replay, learned from my mistakes, played it again and won. I play another skirmish, macro up my economy, nearly fall to an attacking force at my back door, but hold it off and eventually prevail. I play more single player campaigns. I systematically expand across the entire map while keeping up a strong economy, guarding my bases, harassing the enemy workers and attacking with a diverse range of units. I AM READY.

So I opt-in to the beta. FAR TOO LATE. And hope that a new wave of invites happens soon. Hoh hum.



TL;DR: WINNERS DON'T DO DRUGS CHEAT, and I rant about Starcraft for some reason.

I've been on an Angband bender for the past few days. Probably will continue being on an Angband bender for the next few days. Or weeks. Or if when I die.

At this point it's almost a rite of passage. Y'know, pick it up every year or so. Play for a few weeks straight. This time it's straight-up vanilla Angband, no variants. I ... I know I can beat it ... someday ... it's been eight years ... eight years exactly, in fact, since I picked up ZAngbandTK. All those many years ...

I was looking at the leaderboards. There was a kid there. 11 years old. Been playing since he was eight. Beat Morgoth. He won. He won. He's just a kid, right? It should be simple, shouldn't it? ANYBODY CAN DO IT, CAN'T THEY??!

Gametap added Far Cry 2 last week. I'd been looking forward to it. It's one of those games that I've looked forward to playing, but not so much that I'd actually buy it. And Gametap mentioned they were eventually adding it, like, a year ago, so I've just been patiently waiting ever since. I'm already paying ten bucks a month for it, might as well use it.

Anyway. Pretty much all of the reviews I've read have said the same thing. Achingly beautiful world, wonderfully immersive game mechanics, but oh god there's a guard post every 100 meters and I'm sick of every person in the world trying to kill me. And that's more or less how I felt, too. The world around you looks so real, you can almost SMELL it. I almost wished there was an option to remove everyone else in the world so I could just explore. And yes, I was getting sick of the constant guard posts. I was getting sick of how these guys would hound me to their dying breath. How much are these fools getting paid, anyway? Dude, whatever it is, it's not worth it.

And that was when I realized I was doing it all wrong. The early parts of the game taught me how to scope out an area first and approach things with tact. I realized I should be doing this with the guard posts as well. It's much more interesting to hop out of your jeep beforehand, find a nice vantage point, and silently take out everyone you can from afar. It took LONGER, yeah, but it was more fun. Silently skulking around in the tall grass, firing off a shot, running off to a new position, sniping the guys who ran out to where you used to be, picking off the scragglers silently with your machete ...

And it was THEN, after I had turned the game into a psychotic murdering simulator, that I was struck with a profound truth.

There are no "good guys" in this game.

Think about that for a minute. When I first started playing, I was struck with the similarities to another game with similar mechanics, Just Cause. In Just Cause you're a suave CIA agent or something who is working to overthrow a corrupt dictator and liberate the populace. You're the good guy, the citizens are good guys, the dictator is evil and the people that work for him are evil. Simple. Black and white.

Far Cry 2, on the other hand, is nothing but greys. You're sent in to assassinate this guy known as the Jackal who's supplying weapons for a civil war in some small African nation. So you're the good guy and he's the bad guy, right? At first, yeah, it seems that way, but then you catch malaria, fail to kill the Jackal, and now you're stuck in this terrible little hell hole of a country, and you need to work with the two fighting factions so you can find the Jackal and kill him and get out, but then you realize that the two factions are EXACTLY THE SAME, both of them claiming to fight for the people after overthrowing the king, but ... but there are NO PEOPLE LEFT, because they've all fled, because the fighting has gotten so bad, and there's nothing left but mercenaries, and then you hear propaganda on the radio from one of the factions telling the people to fight for their freedom, but that's what the other guys are saying too, but there's NOBODY LEFT because they're either dead or gone, and these two factions are fighting for NOTHING, and and and ...

... and YOU!! You play right into it! You've got to kill the Jackal so that he can't supply weapons, but to survive you've got to buy the weapons he supplies, and you're working for both of the factions, and you're killing the soldiers and mercenaries and making things worse just so you can get out of there, and ...

It's all very bleak.

So that's my take on it. People seem to often complain about game plots, how they're cookie-cutter, or how the choices you make are either sickeningly good or chaotically evil. I'm surprised more people don't mention Far Cry 2. I dunno, maybe I just haven't played many recent shooters. Maybe they're all shades of grey. But this one is just ... so subtle about it. You just start off, thinking you're the good guy killing the bad guy, but then after awhile you realize there ARE no good guys, no bad guys, everyone is working to profit off of everyone else ...



tl;dr - Far Cry 2 is awesome and I don't care what anyone else thinks.

I was 15 in 1999. My parents had enrolled me in a driver's ed class that spring. I was one of those weird kids that really didn't want to drive at all, but I guess it wasn't like I had much of a choice. Looking back, I realize that my life was kind of miserable. Homeschooled, socially awkward, no online life, pretty much only had one real friend. I tended to have the house to myself during the day. I'd spend it playing Descent and avoiding schoolwork. I've always been a procrastinator, but especially so back then.

The only bright spot, in retrospect, was the fact that I had taken up drawing the year before. The only reason I can remember most of this is because I still have sketches relating to events.

Ten years ago today, I spent the afternoon watching celebrations from around the world. Some TV station was cutting to live feeds every hour as midnight stalked its way across the globe. I don't actually remember watching anything here. I don't know if the countdown with the elevator on the Space Needle was started fairly recently, but I think we had to watch a replay of the countdown in New York for some reason. Incidentally, I'm not holding my breath for anything spectacular tonight. The last few shows in Seattle have been really lackluster.

A few months later, in May of 2000, I registered for an account on Side7. That was the first time I'd posted my work online, and it's where I met some of my oldest and closest friends. Since then, I've been able to divide my life into two sections: pre-Side7 and post-Side7. Drawing and having an online life with which to display my work has given me something to live for. Maybe I would have become wildly successful elsewhere in life if I hadn't become a furfag, but that's conjecture. It may be sad and stupid at times, but it's better than what I had. So thanks, everyone.

So I've been playing Dwarf Fortress pretty much to the exclusion of everything else, including sleep, so it must be STORY TIME!

So I've got two squads, one full of axedwarves and another full of marksdwarves. The axedwarves are mostly champions, so I wasn't expecting much resistance when I'm notified of a goblin siege. And indeed, everything's going great until this Fist of the North Star marksgoblin comes out of nowhere and takes down three axelords and injures three others before he goes down.

Now, a little while later, I'm mopping up the mess, recruiting some new soldiers to replace the fallen, when I get notified that a bronze colossus is lumbering towards me. Oh, well, great. Grab what's left of my axedwarves, and ... what? I can't select them? Oh, their leader is sick in bed with a pierced shoulder, and all the recruits are just huddled around him. In fact, EVERY axedwarf who isn't a recruit is in bed recuperating. Where'd my marksdwarves go? Oh, they're still in the tower, forgot to tell them to stand down. Good, they can shoot it from there. Just a little closer, little closer ...

BUT NO! They decide, as a unified hivemind, to go on break and sleep ALL AT ONCE, evacuating the tower. So I ready the ballista I've got situated in a little building in front of the entrance to the courtyard, which of course misses spectacularly, and the siege engineer gets spooked and runs off before he can get another shot off.

So I briefly consider raising the bridge on the moat before the bronze colossus can get to it, but then he just goes and rips off the hatch cover I've got over the secret entrance I've been using for my axedwarves. Wow, ok, note to self: pave over that. So he's skulking around the underground tunnels, punting dwarves left and right, and oh no the tunnels come up right near the bedrooms, and THERE HE IS, spreading doom and destruction everywhere!

Now, an aside: I never put much thought into the fortress guard. I never bothered equipping them with weapons, and pretty much told them to just wrestle any miscreants they find into submission. I've always just thought of them as glorified rent-a-cops. Well, the colossus happens to run into one, and this "glorified rent-a-cop" LEAPS onto this giant metal abomination and WRESTLES IT TO THE GROUND AND SYSTEMATICALLY BREAKS ITS LIMBS ONE BY ONE. These guys apparently spend any time they're not eating or sleeping beating each other into submission as training.

Just then one of my marksdwarves wanders by and tries to help, having "conveniently" forgotten to stock up on bolts, but no, the credit for this one goes to Dastot Ishlumdakost, her first kill. Other people may have to WORK UP to something like that, maybe kill a few dozen goblins first at least, but Dastot? Fuck that! Her first kill was a bronze colossus, WITH HER BARE HANDS.

And then I notice that nearly every single one of the fortress guards are legendary wrestlers. I don't even NEED a military. Anything comes through the front door and these guys will be all over it like flies on stink.



Anyway, uhm. I love this game. =I

I'll try to stop doing that.

Who was it that posted that Yerf site rip?  sulacoyote? Yeeaaahh. Like, a month ago. I just now got around to unrar'ing it and checking it out. I was never a part of Yerf, but it still feels like it was a part of me. Ok, that was corny, but. I dunno. The art, the technical aspect of art, wasn't as good as a lot of stuff I see today, but it always seemed to have more personality. You see very little in the way of digital work circa 2002. The vast majority of colored pictures seems to be made of markers and colored pencils. You'd get pictures that were based off real events, or conversations, or stories the artist had made up. Stuff from art lessons, stuff doodled in class ... and it's not like you don't get that kind of aesthetic anymore, it's just ... it gets drowned out, especially here. I'm especially guilty of it myself. Yerf was a big part of my inspiration and motivation as a young artist. I wanted to be like the artists showcased there. I'd come up with stupid characters and have them act out any random thought that passed through my head, and I'd strive to improve.

And ... I kind of lost that. You can still see elements of that mindset in my early uploads here. Drawing stuff just for the sake of drawing it. And then I discover that I have an audience for my weird stuff, and ... and ... I devolve into rhetoric. How many times have I had this rant? How many times have I decried my lack of progress, my lack of uploads? There was a time when I could honestly say that I uploaded less than 5% of the stuff I draw. Now, it's more like 85%. I just don't draw for fun anymore. I want to, I DESPERATELY want to, but it just doesn't come naturally.

I felt that spark, that DRIVE, when looking through the Yerf archives, if only for a moment. I just wish I could harness it.

TL;DR - whine whine whine.

I guess I was overly negative with my last journal. That seems to be a theme with reviews of this game.

My complaints earlier were fairly minor, but they're the kind of things that can mar a mediocre game. And that's the thing ... Borderlands IS mediocre, at least at first. THAT has to be my main complaint, now that I've played it more. I can overlook all (most) of its quibbling faults now, because it eventually turns from a mediocre game to a fantastic game ... it just takes a very, very long time to do so.

I'm a level 29 soldier, I've been playing for two days, and I feel that I've only recently begun to feel in tune with the way the game plays. I think this is partly the fault of the weapons system. It's not until the early 20s that you start encountering the really interesting guns ... elemental effects, accurate scopes, bizarre variants, etc.

It could also be in part due to my personal skill as a player. I didn't realize until just recently that most of the guns don't use hitscan hit detection. Different weapons have different projectile speeds, and need to be led accordingly. Once you realize this, you can begin to craft your weapon loadout to prepare for different situations. For instance, I have an accurate assault rifle with a scope and a small clip that fires in bursts to attack enemies from a distance. Its bullets travel slowly but pack a punch, so it's good for sniping before enemies notice you. If I'm being chased, I switch to another assault rifle that features a large clip, high rate of fire and fast projectile speed.

But yeah, overall, I'd say the game's main problem is that it just takes things too slow. It doles out features at a snails pace. You don't get skill points until level 5, you don't get class mods until you get through all of Fyrestone, you don't get the ability to fast travel until etc etc.

I've heard you can eventually start picking up parts to customize your vehicles, but I've yet to come across a quest that enables it. It's a little staggering to think that I've been playing this game for two solid days and there are still gameplay elements I don't have access to yet. I'd hate to start a new character and have to go through everything again just to get to the good parts.




But uhm. It's a really terribly awesome game. Really.

... It ... needs a lot of work. It's been out for, what, 28 hours? Yeah, but no, this needs to be patched, like, seriously.

So yeah, everyone's going on about how, for a co-op game, it's impossibly difficult to actually get a game going. Like, crashing your computer when trying to view online games, needing to forward like a dozen ports to host a game, and then STILL NOT BEING ABLE TO HOST A GAME ...

Plus, it's most definitely a console port. Awkward menu controls, restrictive field of view, almost no video options other than brightness and resolution.

But besides all that, there seems to be a lot of glitches involving skills. Like, one class mod will grant me a +2 to team ammo regeneration. That works fine. But another one granting +8 personal combat rifle ammo regeneration? Worthless. Doesn't work at all. Or hey, how about the overload skill? Makes my bullet magazines bigger. That 29-round rifle magazine is 34 rounds now! Until I check my map or inventory. Then it's 29 again. Where did the five extra bullets go?

I mean, don't get me wrong, it's STUPID fun, it just ... it needs a lot of work. Yeah. =I

I was never really that good with managing layers in the first place. When I began to learn Painter, I mostly abandoned them altogether. An average "finished" picture of mine will consist of a background layer, a character color layer, and an ink layer, plus maybe a fourth on top of all that for special effects or post-processing.

And, y'know, that'd be fine, except I'm not that great with Painter either.

So what are your favorite Photoshop/GIMP tutorials? What helped you to really learn their intricacies? I'm atrophying here and I need to work out.

BOY HOWDY, don't you hate it when you plan on drawing all day, and then you get really sick on some bad egg salad, and then you go into a coma for several hours, and then you just waste time online because you feel like shit, and then you check Gametap and OH HEY they added Trine might as well try that out and then suddenly it's 12:30 AM and you need to go to bed?

And then you make a journal about it and become filled with self-loathing?

HATE when that happens.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=N0DGHOCW

Man, you find the coolest stuff on Lulz sometimes.

Is it wrong that I'm really liking this stuff? Not as fond memories, but as actual music? I've had L'Esprit de Paris on an endless loop for like half an hour. It's so CATCHY!

No, not emotional, financial or psychological help! I need ANATOMICAL help! I can't draw arms! Hands too, but mostly arms!

I've gone through more anatomy books than I can recall, but I can't seem to get it through my thick head! I can fake it for a while, but then everything starts to look lumpy and misshapen!

I know roughly how LONG to make each segment, but the finer points of shoulder rotation, elbow placement and forearm shape elude me! What mental tricks/brute force do YOU, the audience at home, use to remember and visualize this stuff? Is there a really awesome guide for drawing arms out there somewhere? Or am I just being lazy and not studying properly?

So Tazel and I wander over to the theater to see 9 and it starts out REALLY COOL but then right before it gets interesting it ends. Seriously, I think it was just over an hour long.

Also, it made no sense in a particularly unique way, in that I don't really care at all. In fact, it didn't make much of an impression, period.

ALSO, the theater raised their prices and I got sick on Crazy Core Skittles. So fuck them! >=C

I bought Saints Row 2 yesterday since it was like five bucks on Direct2Drive.

I'm playing as a fat black woman with a beehive hairdo and lycra pants who enjoys ripping fire hydrants out of the ground with her bare hands and hurling people off of bridges.

This is the best game EVER MADE.

So, I've got an MP3 player. A cheap, shitty little thing. I've been adding music to it by using it as a USB drive and just copying files over. Today, I was trying to add an audio version of The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells, but I'm having a hard time getting the files in order. My player will only list songs as sorted by their date modified, and they're all out of order.

So I figure, well crap, I guess I'll have to just sync this thing up with Windows Media Player.

So I start up WMP and it's like LET ME ADD ALL YOUR MUSIC TO YOUR MP3 PLAYER! =D and then proceeds to do so, without really asking me first. Fortunately I only have a few random songs in my My Music folder, so it doesn't do much.

See, that's another thing. I pretty much eschew the My Documents folder and its ilk. I keep my art, music and videos in my own folders. Why? I don't know. It would make my life easier. Every program assumes I keep everything in My Documents, and when prompted to open a file always starts there.

I just ... I don't know. I just do it to be contrary. It annoys me how Windows assumes I keep stuff there, and that annoyance FEEDS ME.

But anyway! WMP gets my audio book files all nice and organized, then tries to add my My Music stuff AGAIN, and I have to stop it, and then I notice it's put everything into two nice little annoying subfolders on my player, and I'm like, damnit, quit holding my hand! Stop ASSUMING. Do I really need a "music" folder on my MP3 player? Especially when what I just added ISN'T MUSIC AT ALL?

I don't know. I just ... I don't know!!

I am a terrible person.

Ok so me and  tazel were eating at Wendy's, right? And there's this girl that works there, and like, EVERYONE was hitting on her, and this old Mexican dude was trying to get her to give him a free milkshake and it's like he WON'T SHUT UP he's all like "SENORITA! SENORITA!" and then another guy who worked there was hitting on her as she left and then he starts TALKING to us and he's WEIRD, like, going on about how hot all the other employees are, and he's saying he's like half oriental and doing this weird Chinese impersonation and it's like what's going on!? Am I in a fever dream? Wendy's has always been so BENIGN!

Also, Tazel showed me his con' sketchbooks that he's been collecting over the years. It was surreal, seeing actual pencil and ink drawings from artists I've admired for years. I need to get out more. Maybe go to a con'. Maybe. I dunno.

Social skills ... atrophying!

Look at it. Look how SMUG it is. Thinks it's so much better than me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAACa4yb8Do

Man, y'know, I used to do shit like this when I was a kid. Drag out the shoulder-mounted camcorder and record myself playing stupid games, all badly framed and whatnot. It's a compulsion, y'know? I had a cassette recorder, too, and I made a dozen tapes of myself being an asshole.

But I was lucky! I didn't have the internet! My embarrassments were only tolerated by a few close and long-suffering friends! KIDS THESE DAYS! Uploading shit to YouTube! Letting the world see what little bastards they are! No sense of SHAME!

I don't know what I'm complaining about. Oh god, I'm turning into a crazy old man!

So I guess  eviscerator tagged me or something so uhm.

Eight things about blah blah blah whatever, you know the drill.

1) I knew I'd done this thing before, so I delayed for several days while halfheartedly searching for the last iteration, so I didn't repeat myself.

2) When I was about 4 or 5, my grandma bought me a little book on cartooning. It was a reprint of something that looked like it was from the '40s. At the time, I thought it was a load of crap, or words to that effect. Ten years later, that very same book was what started me out in drawing. So, uh. Yeah. You're dead now, but thanks.

3) I've had asthma since I was about 4 or 5, as well. COINCIDENCE? Well, no. Hey kids! Chronic diseases are FUN! And you know what's even funner? Ordering your medications from Switzerland because the country you live in is a capitalistic wasteland! =D

4) What? No, I'm not bitter.

5) Firefox didn't underline "funner" on point number 3. I was under the impression that it wasn't a word.

6) I keep taking on commissions for some stupid reason. I really don't want to. I've neglected to write any of them down. Probably forgotten half of them. I guess if you really want a picture you can bug me incessantly. That's probably the best way to get me to do anything.

7) I hate MMOs, yet will gladly grind away forever in any given single-player RPG. I just bought Diablo 2 last week for reasons I can't fully comprehend. Whyyyyy.

8) I'm depressed and tired of writing this. I'm going back to bed. Wake me up when Borderlands comes out.

Ok, so I've got several people asking me if I'm taking commissions ever since I uploaded that medic pic. So am I?

Short answer: Uhm, well, I dunno.

Long answer: Uhm, well, crap, I dunno.

For a little while there, I thought, "Hey, this was easy! Maybe I could do a run of spray commissions!" And then I thought "WAIT NO you're too apathetic to do anything!"

So uhm.

=<