The longer I put off updating, the more intimidated I get. And the more I feel the need to sum up all the most recent goings-on in detail that nobody really cares about. So let's just say that everything's coming up Milhouse. OK, so the heat wave rolled into town and one of our air conditioners is off for now because it needs a good cleaning. The house is well insulated enough that this hasn't bothered me all that much.

I HAS A JOB. It's scientific programming that I'm still very much in the process of wrapping my brain around. Money's good, vacation is excellent, and I have my own office with a door. It's small, green, and windowless, but it affords me that privacy and quiet time that I like so much.

Hobby-wise, I've mostly been writing and drawing. Resonance is chugging along - slowly - and I've gotten into Three Kingdoms-era historical research. First off, I was curious about what actually happened way back when. Initial reading required more context, which was like Pringles. Once I popped, I couldn't stop. I also had some ideas for writing about interesting generals in plausibly accurate detail. I don't know of much serious fiction about that era other than Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which skips over a lot and takes liberties with the facts for the sake of a story. Some generals are built up as heroes despite some major real life failings. Others are anywhere from dumbed down to set on fire and chucked out of an airplane with some dynamite strapped to them for good measure. RoTK is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the era. Still, I would like to see more in-depth and realistic looks at the historical figures that intrigue me the most - from underrated talents to men who inspired legends even if the reality does not quite match up. (Guan Yu, I'm looking at you.)

Drawing is just dirt fricking slow, but that's OK. It's productive slow. I'm the sort of person who would rather learn a lot on one long-term project than do a bunch of little ones. So I sketched out two fully armored posed figures and then decided to make a version 2.0 because my line art felt too fussy and stiff. This newer one is going far better. It's taking a while, especially since I kept finding proportion and perspective issues to fix, but a lot of that time was spent figuring out how to represent stuff like soft cloth edges and facial features that seem more realistic than cartoony-symbolic. I've made a bunch of progress in a line art style that feels right to me, so hooray for that. Beards are still danged difficult to draw, but I'm getting better. I hope.

Now that my gym got a set of rings, I've been working on my next holy grail of bodyweight exercises - the muscle-up. Grab the rings. Chin up, pull through, finish on top with your arms straight down at your sides. I can do some ring chins and dips to reasonable depth, but that danged transition is going to take me a while. At least the ring dips are a nice intermediate step to be proud of.

I need to make a happy update post because life is good.

But for now, let's all raise a glass to 4chan. An animal has been rescued, and a psycho-in-training will be in a stadium full of shit very, very soon.

Kenny Glenn, boy genius, got the fantabulous idea to videotape himself abusing the family cat. He posted it to YouTube in apparent hopes of being awarded some Internet prize by other knuckle-dragging cretins like himself. The video got removed - but not before being viewed by thousands of appalled people.

Enter the /b/ channel. Googling and guesswork found Myspace, Facebook, and other profiles with pictures matching the rooms shown in the video. Long story short, the cat was confiscated and the little shit's sad-ass excuse for a parental figure doesn't understand what the big deal is. DURR HURR IT'S JUST A CAT. With such guidance, no wonder little Kenny has zero sense of empathy.

Here's to hoping that the kid gets the book thrown at him and a hefty load of therapy to boot.

Originally found here, which has a news video under the cut. I can't bring myself to watch it.

I'm not dead. Just thirty. It doesn't feel all that different, but it is strange to see the decade number flip. Give me a couple of weeks and I'll be used to it.

Work is going pretty well. I don't mind walking to and from - I like it, actually - but it would suck if it weren't for the cleated overshoes that my mom got me for Christmas. There have been so many cruddy days where I would have been sliding all over the place without those. Even so, sometimes I have to walk in yards and in the street because the sidewalk on a hill is too slippery. Central Pennsylvania winter walks can be like boring Super Mario at times. Uh oh ice slick where's a good place to go into the street yay here's some grass to walk on instead.

I've been working on some more fan art. It's taking forever. I've been really pushing myself with this piece, but I don't think that a general audience is interested in in-depth blather about perspective and line weight and flipping the picture horizontally now and then to make mistakes more obvious. I will say that I found some great stock photo sites for art reference, and the perfect casual cross-legged pose came from a naked guy on the phone. Figure models generally pose nude so you can get the anatomical structure just right. For whatever reason - probably because a common everyday object feels natural to pose with - a bunch of the models on this particular site were sitting with a phone.

I HAS A JOB. It's a 3-month deal starting December 1. Hopefully it will lead to something permanent.

I'm all done with my art project. Huzzah. I finished it up with an assortment of techniques from Uncle G-funk's Big Bag of Bullshit. There's some pencil-style shading, some applied textures, some grungy splat paint used to make the helmet metal look more hammered, some regular old "painting", and light and shadow on separate layers so I could mess with it at will.

I have some more fan art ideas in mind, and I'd like to try some styles that won't take me half an eon. Then again, a lot of time was spent fixing perspective mistakes until I eventually wound up redrawing Cao Ren in a pose that was easier for me to make proper sense of. Now that I have a better idea of how to sketch out the structure and guidelines that I should have done way back in the rough drawing phase, I should do better at avoiding those issues in the first place. At least this drawing got better each time I poked at it. Sometimes they just turn into an unsalvageable mess, so you don't even get a project out of learning lessons the hard way. All in all, I'm happy with my work, and more is on the way.

Now to see if I can get NaNoWriMo done this year. I've got a write-a-thon planned for today.

( Contemplative Cao Ren, all textured and such (200K+ PNG) )

Y HELO THAR PRESIDENT OBAMA

CONNECT FOUR

WE WIN

First off, thanks for all the kind comments on the whole unemployment thing. I'm still optimistic. And nocturnal. When I'm left to my own devices, my sleep schedule likes to take weird patterns. Good thing my gym is 24-7 now.

In addition to the obvious resume polishing and sending, I've gotten reacquainted with the awesomeness of drawing. I envy people who produce badass fan art, and only one thing will fix that. Besides, it's good general practice for drawing people, which I never got hardcore into and would like to learn.

Drawn off a Dynasty Warriors cinema screen shot, this took about a week of focus. It was a nightmare of foreshortening, weird perspective tilting, and making smooth curves out of bumpy polygons. Eventually I'd like to add more shading and possibly color, but I want to work on something else for a while.

( Contemplative Cao Ren, inked )

I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, too. My story idea is a silly open-ended premise told in rambling first person. This is going to be fun.

First up - awesome trip to Las Vegas for meanjunglist's wedding. Epic buffets! Blue Man Group! Penn and Teller! Extravagantly decorated hotels and casinos, including replicas of French and Italian streets complete with painted cloud ceilings that tripped me out the first few times I walked through there!

Last weekend - hiking along a Rails to Trails path with Dan and John. The former railway had been converted by an ATV club, and many riders passed us along the way. Our route took us over a railroad bridge quite high above a river. It's safe to walk and drive on, but I couldn't help being unnerved. The bridge is made of wooden planks with some metal grating to the side. The metal grating side has an open waist-high railing. The other has no safety barricade at all. Across the river is I-80 and an interesting view of the (BALLS BALLS) pylons (BALLS) holding up the highway bridges. I have to get the pictures off my camera.

Today - I lost my job, as did some others. It had to do with the economy, not job performance, and I have a stellar reference to anywhere I wish to apply. I have some places to start looking. Something will turn up. But for now I need to decompress.

So we got our 2009 Prius today. Dark gray with coordinating cloth interior. The feature tour took longer than the paperwork. Compared to my venerable old Chevy Cavalier, the Prius is a space shuttle.

It has a big round power button, making me feel like I'm driving seriously upgraded Power Wheels.

It's quiet.

The console is a touch-screen computer with audio and climate controls on the steering wheel. The car automagically maintains the temperature you select and unlocks the doors when your key fob is nearby. I'm not concerned about the integrity of the electronics involved because Toyota has a well-earned reputation for quality. We also have a full 7-year warranty.

The storage space is smartly designed, with a variety of convenient compartments all over the car. Underneath the flat, carpeted trunk floor, you'll find copious utility space for tools and emergency stuff. Up front? A double decker glove compartment, spacious center console with a line in to the stereo (great for stashing my iPod on trips), and even a pocket for sunglasses near the rear view mirror.

It handles responsively and well, similar to the Corollas my parents had when I was first learning to drive. There's a definite learning curve to the interface. I don't always press the Power button authoritatively enough to start the car. The backup camera is awesome, but it feels weird to be looking at the console instead of way over my shoulder. This will all be second nature soon. New owner LOLWUT hasn't worn off yet.

So far - A++++ WOULD BUY AGAIN.

The toy in question is a Wacom Intuos3 6"x8" graphics tablet. I'd had a Graphire years ago and buried it somewhere after switching to Linux and not wishing to bother with getting it up and running. I've been doing enough regular hobby work that a mouse isn't great for, like cutting character pictures out of their background, to justify the purchase. I also thought the tablet would help me get back into drawing practice.

Oh, did it ever.

I set up the buttons as fox-orian's awesome guide suggests. As a refresher, I finished extracting a picture that I'd been slaving over with the silly mouse. Then I got to sketching. Of course, Cao Ren has to have the squarest head on the planet and facial proportions different from the rules of thumb on tutorial websites, and he's always wearing a helmet. It took me at least two hours just to make the basic guidelines for his face. I went through the initial phases without using guides so I could get practice eyeballing. After dropping test guides that verified that my lines were straight and correctly marked, I figured I had enough practice and I'd earned Git-R-Done(tm) privilege. It was like getting to a new platform in the pirate ship in Gex and having the game put up a ladder for you so you don't have to start all over from the beginning if you die.

Sketching face structure on the computer is more encouraging than practicing in a sketchbook because it's easy to make an actual project out of the structure you worked so hard to get right. There's something to be said for quick repeated studies of shape and shadow and whatnot, and I've done some of those on pencil and paper as well. BUT I WANNA HAS PERTY PITCHERS

First I must has break and food. I've been staring at Photoshop all evening.

Work gym pull weeds poke at writing practice piano. Hang out with friends. Play video games.

I should at least post stupid videos or weird news or something.

I put up another chapter of Resonance. (If you like Silent Hill and haven't checked out my story, please take a look.) The next few are going to take some time. Though I have them planned and I've become more efficient at editing rough ideas into reasonably polished prose, I'm intimidated at the thought of getting them just right.

Also in-progress - the Warriors Orochi chaos mode FAQ. Now that's going to take me a while because it involves writing out analysis and strategies for all 79 characters in the game. We have most of the material assembled, but organization and editing is a pain. At least it will be epic when complete. Our (well, mostly calbee219's) no-pickup solo run tier list is the bomb, yo.

I have to get back to SW2 because I said I'd help with the tiers for that game. I haven't even unlocked chaos mode in that, much less acquired the skills and setup to play character at their best. I'll get there eventually. Heck, I started Warriors Orochi on easy just to mess around, and look where it got me.

I finished my skirt pattern. *cue Zelda opening the chest music interrupted by GUTSMAN'S ASS* Since then, I've been much more interested in writing than pattern-making. Eh, I just roll with whatever I want to do.

Yay Ernie and Thar coming up this week. Yay beer fest. BALLS BALLS PYLONS BALLS.

I like my job. I really do. When it's good, which is most of the time, it's like building nifty stuff out of Legos.

This past week, I've been fishing for the Legos one at a time in a sandbox that an entire preschool class peed in. With bare feet and concrete gloves.

The upside is that I'm learning more about Tomcat Java application architecture than I ever thought I'd need. The downside is that Googling for answers is like reading hieroglyphics. I'm absorbing a lot more than I realize, but it's still hella draining. At least I haven't been a total slouch with creativity, as I'll demonstrate a bit later.

After 12 years and 100,000 miles, we're retiring My Very First Car(tm) in favor of a Prius. We handed over a deposit, picked a trim line, and specified some color preferences. When the next shipment comes in, we'll get hooked up with whatever fits our request. My 1996 Chevy Cavalier behaved quite well over the years, requiring nothing outside of routine maintenance and stuff going south near the end of the life span you could expect for it. Still, with creakiness and assorted minor things that could use fixing and the gasoline supply reminding me all too much of what happened in the '70s, we figured it was time for a change.

The TV altar is here. It looks most excellent. We put the shelf in crooked by accident, so I'll take pictures after it's fixed.

I'm now updating Resonance on Fiction Press, so READ MAH STOREH PLZ.

It sucks to have cosplay motivation dependent on convention plans. On one hand, it makes sense to prioritize hobbies and all. However, it means that if no plans come about, stuff never gets done. Having run out of steam on writing and various other creative endeavors, I decided to fix that.

I officially got back to work on Zhu Rong. When I left off, I had marked the bottom of the skirt. I still had to finalize that bottom line and move the darts up to the waist. Tonight, I finished the rough cut of the skirt pattern. Expect a picture of said pattern after I finish tracing it.

Chester still doesn't understand the principle of "no, it is not helpful for you to get into pins and assorted tape scraps, so I have to work with the door shut".

And I just dug up my quilt fabric. Without any concrete plans for group sewing, I hadn't bothered to wash it. If I wash the fabric, perhaps I can work on the quilt incrementally if weekends continue to be busy.

aitai was up last weekend and we had a fricking awesome time. Hooray for late night walks, cookies, and brand new fandom-related inside jokes as always. Exit Only signs will never be the same again.

When you keep your back yard mowed, exercising in it is quite nice. I'm thinking of getting some portable gymnastic rings to do pull-ups and dips using my basement's exposed ceiling I-beam. My gym is going 24-7 next week, which is also awesome. I love to exercise at weird hours, and it's nice to be able to work late without worrying about making it to the gym.

Lately, my main creative interest has been writing. I made a weapon upgrading FAQ for Warriors Orochi 2. That inspired me to overhaul my early guides that I hadn't touched in over six years. I cleaned up my Addams Family and Goonies II walkthroughs this week. Now I'm working on my Addams Family house map. It looks infinitely better now.

I also have some in-progress horror for the curious. Some of you have seen this link already, but I never posted it to the internets. (Hi, Mom!) It's non-gory psychological stuff, probably more spooky than outright scary at this point in the tale. If anybody is interested, I can update whenever I add more to this document. I have a much longer draft that I'm taking this material from.

Resonance (Public Beta)

Time for another round of Cao Ren vs. the forces of chaos mode. His -ex specials are broken as hell and way too much fun to spam. Fear the Final Atomic Mega Buster and the Rockman Uppercut. I managed to one-shot the big bad boss man, too.

Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin w/Cao Ren - SW 8 - no-pickup solo chaos run

So I scanned in the character cards from the Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin Premium Box.

All 91 of them.

I cleaned up assorted inevitable scanning weirdness as well as I could. The card corners are slightly bent from the packaging, and that scans as an obvious white line. The Photoshop clone tool is my new best friend.

I've been on a DDR 5th Mix kick for this entire past week, hence the music selection. For some reason, it makes both work and card cleanup go much faster. It's also perfect for the sunshiney weather.

Gentlemen, behold! Corn! Uh, I mean cards.

Though I'm not a fan of excessive sun or heat, there's something amazingly cheerful about the first hot, bright days of the year.

The Orochi sequel is here. I'll eventually post detailed thoughts on the game engine tweaks and character updates. For now, let's just say that Cao Ren got equipped with a win button. His spread shot Mega Buster barrage special is just ridiculously awesome. Apart from Rockman, my other current favorite assclowns are Musashi Miyamoto (pretty good huh?) and Xu Huang (he's GRRRREAT!) There are some new characters that I've unlocked, but none of them have really grabbed me yet.

The difficulty seems to have gone down, which annoys me. I'm all for making games accessible to newcomers, but I don't like losing my optional challenges. Dynasty Warriors 5 struck an excellent balance. If all you wanted to do was unlock all the characters and go through their storylines, you could play on Easy. You had to go to higher difficulties for better weapons and items, but those weren't necessary for a complete newbie who just wanted to mess around. Chaos mode was truly tough and totally optional, even for completionists. Every single item in the game could be unlocked without any chaos gameplay at all. Warriors Orochi was similar. You didn't have to play on chaos, and it was difficult to get into.

On the other hand, Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin forces you to complete battles on all difficulties to unlock certain stuff. That's probably why they nerfed chaos. I really wish they would have kept it optional instead of something else to grind. This is the one series I like playing at a high level. Can nobody provide me with a decent challenge?

Last weekend, my mom and I went to Selinsgrove for local beer and assorted wandering around. I had some powerful sour cherry + tripel concoction. Good stuff. Selinsgrove has a few interesting stores, like the place where I bought some paper made of recycled elephant poop. One of these weekends, I must return with j00licious to check out the quilt and yarn store and assorted thrift shops.

Speaking of quilts, I will finish that one I bought material for two years ago. RLY.

And on a completely random note - duck and cover. I HAS FANFICTION.NET ACCOUNT. My goofy ideas might be sporadic and far between, but it's nice to keep them organized. Thus far, I posted an updated draft of Orochi Party Time. There are some new scenes, so check it out if you liked what I posted here earlier. As far as non-doofy writing is concerned, I'm still hammering away at that and working on getting the in-progress cohesive stuff into an easily shared form.

I've poked at forum sig banners in the past. Lately I've really gotten back into it, making some new banners and tutorials to go along with them. Check them out if you're interested.

Lu Meng - Misty Moon (stock manipulation)



Cao Ren - Heavy Metal Matador (C4D composition)



House redecoration is moving along again. I realized that part of the issue is that we need specific pieces of furniture to take care of eyesores like the Plastic Crates 'n Floor storage solution for our TiVo and various consoles. We bought a corner TV stand. Ogre is amused by the terminology thereof because our TV won't actually be sitting on it. Let's just call it a TV altar. It has to be built, so it won't be here for a couple of months.

I did ten chin-ups without letting go of the bar. Way back when I first did ten in a single workout, I felt like Wonder Woman. Needless to say, this is epic.

As to work apeshittery - long story short, we kicked ass and life is good.

As to assorted Koei game fandom - the Warriors Orochi sequel is out in Japan. Various online friends have been posting videos. I can't take it any more. I bought the treasure box with shiny awesome character cards and all. We will get the game to work somehow, even if we have to replace our cranky PS2, and the cards will be scanned for the enjoyment of all. So I'll miss out on the amusement value of the corny crossover dialog, but the essentials are easy enough to understand with a translation FAQ.

Let's all rickroll ourselves! Who wants to get...

Flickrolled!

Rock and/or rolled!

Renrolled!

Bah. Need to get assorted hobby-type stuff into some sort of generally interesting form. Need to get back to redecorating the house. Need some free time focus other than OMG Warriors Orochi OMG the sequel is coming out OMG LOL they nerfed the ridiculously broken spammable charge attacks. I did start on DW6 super happy fun time chaos mode insanity. Maybe I'll bother making videos, maybe I won't. In any case, it's still a fun game to pick up and play when I feel like busting stuff up.

But I did something awesome today. Without letting go of the bar - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, NINE chin-ups! Ha ha ha. That's a new PR. I haven't been super hardcore about working out. Recent work insanity makes it difficult to do that. So yeah, pleasant surprise. I also squatted 150 pounds, which is within farting distance of my PR.

Yep. Got it upon release last week. It really does feel next-gen. Battlefields are vast and well-populated. Bases seem more naturally integrated into the stage. You have to bust down doors to get into some of the bases, and they tend to look like regular forts and castle areas instead of arbitrary constructions. Castle sieges can't be circumvented by taking down one measly peon with "Defense Captain" over his head. Instead, you guard your siege setup and wait for your dudes to put up ladders. Then you climb up, smash the defense weaponry on the castle wall, and jump down and wreak some havoc.

The piles of people on the battlefield are more interactive than ever before. Your allies do the Spartan cheer when you kick some ass. Sometimes you'll wind up dueling enemy officers within a wide circle of peons. Banner-toting groups will dispense power-ups to fighters on their side.

Too bad that horses are random and getting one of the unique uber horses involves a lot of luck, but I can deal with the pretty good ones I found. Weapons are random, too. At least there's an easy way to farm those if you have an uber character.

Battles tend to take longer than they did in DW5. That's good for a more epic, involved feeling, bad when you aren't feeling very patient, really bad when they take a while for stupid and tedious reasons. Fan Castle has you swimming around playing officer whack-a-mole. And some of the officers will totally ignore you and make a beeline for your commander, so you have to chase them even more if they get away from you. At least there are plenty of fun battles that I like to replay.

bitis_gabonica will be happy to know that Sima Yi lost his nasal voice.

Zhang He talks about a hint of beauty every time he defeats an officer. He says that bases need redecorating. And he sounds like Yoshimoto Imagawa. I always got a kick out of his vain theatrics, but man, this is getting old fast.

Cao Ren is now known as Lunchbox. Giant fork + lots of metal = you do the math. He's still hella fun to play.

Lu Xun is Peter Pan, right down to the flying jump kick after battle.

( OMG SPOILER!11eleventy )