I decided to update my resume over the weekend. Riddle me this: why did I get a ton of calls from insurance recruiters today when the objective section on my resume states “looking for a job to advance my career in management outside of the insurance industry? ” Obviously no one is reading my resume, so what is the point of keeping up with an online one?

Those CGI renders they use on book covers and boxes these days look nowhere near as good as the old style fully painted images they used to use. CG rendered stuff looks too clean and smooth, without the same drama.
Maybe that image is a model that's been painted though? It's too small to tell. In that case I'd applaud them for the effort. It wasn't successful, but having a fully painted up model on the front of the box is a great idea if you do a good job of it. :)

———

I have little inspiraton on the drawing front so I'm ordering some more metal braid for my hussar gear. It's fricken expensive, but a little goes a long way.
I've never been happy with the length of the sleaves on the under jacket (the dolman), and the white part on the cuffs is way too long. So I'm going to try a complicated method of fixing it:
Unpick the white cuffs, cut the lining, stitch in black velvet insersts to lengthen the sleaves, the reatach the cuffs, and use the braid ribbon to cover up all the fixes.
Which should work. The rank on the outfit currently is a Lutenant. WIth the extra strips it'll be a captain.
The over jacket (the pelisse), will stay a lutenant though for a while… The braid is just too expensive now that my bank balance is in recovery mode after the holiday.

I am not too knowledgeable about those online resume sites like Monster and indeed because they pick out keywords from the resume for the job. I spend a lot of time deciding on the format, fonts, and overall design of my resume that digital versions pale in comparison. It puts a greater emphasis on the number of hot words found on the page and less on the overall presentation.

Oz, the descriptions you wrote for your imaginary funerals contain so much potential for art inspiration. Someone could even make a webcomic based on that thread alone, call it “Your Funeral” and illustrate all the many ways people wish to be buried.

===

Hooooooly Scheiße! Last night my ENTIRE facebook newsfeed was overrun with babies. Friends I knew in their younger, past lives are now married and having babies. Random dudes who lived on my dorm floor are posting pictures of their babies getting vaccinated. People from my elementary school are taking pictures holding babies at a baby shower. A married couple, whose wedding I attended, is posting photos with their framed ultrasound photos. A girl who used to go to my church is currently on baby number three. Popular girls from school are taking selfie videos waking up next to their babies. I think facebook is trying to tell me something.

brrr… strange dream..

I dreamt I was talking to a lovely looking woman who showed some interest in me. Then I'm confronted with her father who is armed with a shotgun.

He tells me to get away from her… as far as a number of miles. Then I realize that the number he gave is the entire surface of the Earth.. meaning I can never get that far away. The father then tells me he's going to exercise the right to defend his daughter, shoves the shotgun into my face…

and I wake up just as he pulls the trigger.

That's it. I'm staying away from women. They could be the death of me. T_T

Well at least you don't wake up thashing around in an epic struggle to wrestle the shotgun out of the father's hands, and kicking the wife's sore knee in the process.

In my version also there would have been a deep discussion whereby I prove to the father that staying that far away from his daughter actually means that he intends me to always be by her side. And she then promptly vanishes and the father and I spend the rest of the dream trying to find her. I'm always searching for something I had at the beginning of the dream and then finding I have a pile of useless crap I have to find some way to carry before I leave.

Yup Kawaii, the baby barrage…
And the one place where you'd normally bitch about that sort of thing is exactly the place where you CAN'T. T_T

Social media networks are so dull these days.
They used to be full of people talking about interesting things as well as interesting stuff going on in their own lives. But now the posts have narrowed to a few catagories…
Politics, baby pics, pics with quotes on, pics with jokes on them, “inpsirational quote” (fucking kill me now), posts about rape culture, posts about evil police, posts about gun rights, posts about religion/athiesism, people promoting things (I am guilty of this), and sport.
So booring.
I “unfollowed” most of the most booring people who post that sort of stuff, so now there's almost nothing in my feed.

Posting pictures with a quote or joke or something otherwise bloody anoying printed out in text on it should be a crime.
And “inspirational quotes”… man. The practice of using inspirational quote (and pun/joke) posters, calanders, slogan mugs etc has been a reviled in offices for decades as well as widely satirised and joked about as a really stupid, sad, and depressing thing to do, and yet people have revived the practice on social media.
???? O_o
I think Tumblr is where the apocalypse will start.

Ah, sorry for being a grumpbum. :P
Booring social networks are a good thing. I'll make me stay away from them and draw more instead. :)

Grumpbum? No way. You are being HONEST! My newsfeed also had an onslaught of those horrible self-help images of a combination of a generic sunset/forest/rainbow/waterfall and some overused quotation about heartbreak, getting over a hurdle, and life. At first I thought I had subscribed to some inspirational quote page, but it turned out to be reposts by a friend subscribed to an inspirational quote page. I am not a fan of those that I went through a similar “unfollowing” spree so my newsfeed would be free of spoon-fed positivity.

I would not mind the exact opposite, like a post of an anti-positive image used to conteract the fake-happy ones. I feel like most of the inspirational quotes are used to make the poster look like a carefree, positive individual. But in reality, the personality type of the person who post those types of images could not be further removed from the message they are spreading.

ozoneocean wrote:
Booring social networks are a good thing.

That's a meaningful pun. Boring social networks full of boors. Mindless shit boring into my brain. Oh yeah.

And then there's the fact that nearly all veteran model-builders are certified right-wingers. Great kits but the politics is right out of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. And all that animal rescue stuff. Yes people are cruel to animals but try posting anything about human cruelty and suddenly you're a hate-monger.

ozoneocean wrote:
Posting pictures with a quote or joke or something otherwise bloody anoying printed out in text on it should be a crime.
And “inspirational quotes”… man. The practice of using inspirational quote (and pun/joke) posters, calanders, slogan mugs etc has been a reviled in offices for decades as well as widely satirised and joked about as a really stupid, sad, and depressing thing to do, and yet people have revived the practice on social media.
???? O_o
I think Tumblr is where the apocalypse will start.

Ugh,amen. Facebook has some of the best toy communities ever so I can deal with the slew of controversial shit people post, but when I had a tumblr it was literally russian roulette with who I clicked the ‘follow’ button for.
Only thing i really see in toy communities is bitching about hasbro and this image which i find pretty infuriating.

Like, boys actually feel insecure they dont look like he-man? He-man takes up half the boys toy section? He-man hasn't been relevant for a decade and got some direct to subscription toyline that no child can afford. Also he-man has superpowers, barbie is some chick who is like an astronaut fashion designer billionaire.
They're both by mattel though so maybe they should both eat a dick.

ozoneocean wrote:
Politics, baby pics, pics with quotes on, pics with jokes on them, “inpsirational quote” (fucking kill me now), posts about rape culture, posts about evil police, posts about gun rights, posts about religion/athiesism, people promoting things (I am guilty of this), and sport.
So booring.

I love politics, but generally I try to keep that stuff off of facebook. I don't have any good logical reason for doing so, but I find it annoying when other people post about their ideological views it so I don't.
Inspirational quotes drive me especially crazy, though. The people I've known in my own life who love those are always either troubled or just not very bright. Now I (totally unfairly) assume that this is true of all my facebook friends who post quotes.

skullbie wrote:
Ugh,amen. Facebook has some of the best toy communities ever so I can deal with the slew of controversial shit people post, but when I had a tumblr it was literally russian roulette with who I clicked the ‘follow’ button for.

tumblr is definitely the worst for that. tbh I tend to treat it mainly as a source for pictures of handsome men, so the ones I follow don't generally have ranting/controversies. But I recently had to unfollow one because the girl who ran it kept posting about having broken up with her boyfriend. I mean that sucks for her, but why would someone assume that the people following a fan page they run care about their personal lives?

I feel as though I need to separate my actual-bad-things-happening post from my one about social media…

Apparently my uncle was at a concert recently and began having a seizure out of the blue, possibly due to withdrawal. He's now blind in one eye. Otherwise he's fine (or the same as usual) I guess, but he's having a hard time getting around. He's been an alcoholic for 20+ years and my whole life, a phone call about him has meant some kind of terrible news. It really sucks having someone like that in your life who you can't do anything for.

Sorry to hear that Hippie. The people around an alcoholic tend to suffer as much or more than the alcoholic themselves and from victims I've known it's worse than heroin addiction in most cases. To watch someone go through that is hard and there's nothing you can do - to live with them is the hardest.
Having said that, I do like a drink. It's a fine line.

—

Tumblr seems to suffer more from the whole reblog pointless crap mania than anywhere else and it's users do seem the most prone to endlessly droning on about their terrible lives. This doesn't seem to stop them from constantly sharing their angry opinions on how everyone else should be living their lives though. Irony is not a thing on tumblr it seems.

“Tumblr” is something my dryer does. Anything said there would be of the same substance as the stuff stuck in the lint trap of my dryer. Worthless fluff that is annoying and blows everywhere.

Skulbie wrote

maybe they should both eat a dick.

Hahaha, here here!
Yeah, HeMan is a bit of a false equivilence there. Barbie is an icon, HeMan is just one of a number of licenced toys in a range, desiged to make money from a cartoon. Not even action-man or gi joe stand up to barbie and her toy dominance.

—–

It's a truisim that people who post inspirational quotes about positive life affirming stuff are extremely depressed and deeply sad.

—–

That's sad Hippie. There's usually one of those in every family I think. Interestingly Bjork's Army Of Me was written about her brother who was one of those problem relations.
I hope your uncle gets better somewhat if he can, or at least finds a new equilibrium.
…I like that concept: equilibrium.

Sounds like a great name for a tumblr. You could post random images with completely unrelated motivational text. I'll reblog them daily.

—

Great news! I passed the insanely long online webpage analyst's entrance exam! Soon I'll be a nameless cog in the all conquering search engine mothership machine. Pan Galactic gargle Blasters are on me!

Oh, great. I was given a warning by my supervisor. Apparently there's a guy roaming my area. He talks like a sailor is mentally unstable… and is armed with a knife. He's been known to be prone to random violence and doesn't care if he's not allowed to enter my compound… he'll just enter anyway.

Luckily I was able to find batteries and an LED bulb for my six cell Maglight. If push comes to shove, disarming him shouldn't be too much of a problem. I'd rather avoid bashing him in the head. Better to have him run away intact than having to answer for his injuries.

Yeah… can't believe I live in a country where you can go to hard prison just for defending yourself…

AGH, I did something super embarassing. I was looking up the other groups members for an upcoming project in one of my classes on facebook, and I guess somehow sent one of them a friend request without meaning to. Just so happens it's the really cute guy in the group, and I didn't notice until he accepted it just now. So now I have to friend everyone in that group so he thinks I'm just super sociable/loose with my facebook friends and not just some weirdo. D:

Scarf… You're working for Gooooogle? A Hitchhikcer's Guide To The Googlecy?

—

Hippie, that is hillarious :)

—-

Yay, I am finally back to my usual amount of exerisise again! I stopped when I was on my holiday and dreaded what that'd do to me when I came back, especially with all that good food… like 4 good meals a day at least. But I was in better shape when I came back then when I left!
When I got back though I just selpt and slept for most of the week, when not at work. But that's over now.
I'm glad. After my last long four week holiday in the US in 2011 I didn't get back into regular exercise again for forever!

I always think of a tumblr as a short fat glass you drink whisky from.

—

Some other films I saw while away: American Husstle and Grudge Match.
Niether were as good as I expected.

The best thing about American Hustle was the 1970s setting, which was cool, also Badly Cooper's acting and his character were quite good, same with Amy Adams, she was great! The story was a bit flat though…
The whole thing was brought down by Christian Bale. He was terrible. He wore an obvious fat suit for the whole movie, it was like a couple of cushions strapped to his stomach. And his character was more like a caracature, like a funny voice and nothing else. Bad performance!
Michael Palin did a better fat, cigar smoking American character of that type in the Meaing of Life.

Grudge Match was LAME. The best bits were Kim Bassinger playing a granny (a real mindfuck after growing up with her sexy ‘80s and ’90s stuff), and Deniro gave a good performance, plus he had a pretty decent character to work with.
Stalone had a shitty Mary Sue character though and the whole film was based around it- him being the good guy with his own little good guy issues to sort out. UGH!
I was expecting a light comedy that cleverly leveraged the legacy of Rocky and Raging Bull in some smart way. Maybe it did? I haven't watched any of those films all the way through because boxing bores the crap out of me.
Either way, Grudgematch was a dull Mary Sue pile of turds.

–I remember now why it seemed so bad! It wasn't just that Stalon was a Mary Sue, it was that the film seemed like it was written by a 14 year old. It was extremely stupid stuff… It may have worked as a bunch of lame skits on Youtube enacted by some callow teens but to have mature actors speaking those lines was embarrasing.

ozoneocean wrote:
Scarf… You're working for Gooooogle? A Hitchhikcer's Guide To The Googlecy?

I've already signed extensive non-disclosure agreements and there's more to come, so I can't confirm or deny that fact. If anyone asks, you haven't seen me, I wasn't here and I definitely had nothing to do with it.

—

Though not as essential as a good whisky glass, tumblr does have it's uses. I've got a character to draw of black/japanese heritage and obviously I want to get the right look. Not the easiest combination to find, but I succesfully located her on tumblr.

She's no social justice warrior though. Broke my firefox with her porn gifs!

Ironscarf wrote:
Great news! I passed the insanely long online webpage analyst's entrance exam! Soon I'll be a nameless cog in the all conquering search engine mothership machine. Pan Galactic gargle Blasters are on me!

Congratulations! Is it bing….? I searched for dog videos once months ago on their video service. It was not pretty. It was not what i wanted.
——-
I have these new chickens who i did an experiment on. When they were babies i did not touch them even once since i'd already played with the previous batch of chickens. They are waaaay too friendly, they constantly examine my feet for things to peck and are always around me. It's funny because as soon as one pecks me the big head honcho chicken storms over and scares them off. It's great.
Pretty great.
….I need a life.

Skullbie wrote:
I have these new chickens who i did an experiment on.
Pretty great.
….I need a life.

Animal husbandry was once considered a proud profession and fulfilling life. Your experience would be the height of intelligent conversation at county market day.

Think about it this way, you're doing valuable research about pre-modern agricultural lifestyles.

Skullbie wrote:

Congratulations! Is it bing….? I searched for dog videos once months ago on their video service. It was not pretty. It was not what i wanted.

Thanks! Haha! no it's the other one. Dog video - risky! It's so easy to let your guard down and be caught out. I was looking for a circuit diagram for a sixties guitar effect box called a Foxy Lady Fuzz. There were versions with two controls on the front and versions with three. I typed Foxy Lady Two Knob.

D:

Ironscarf - You're working for duckduckgo? Sweet!

Bing video is the KING of porn finders.

ozoneocean wrote:
Bing video is the KING of porn finders.

Yeah, they'll index anything. It's almost as if microsoft has no soul.

There was a streaker at a rugby game somewhere in Britain over the weekend: a totally naked man with a pipe in his mouth who tackled one of the players to the ground…
Ironscarf???!!!!

His sporting prowess was much greater than mine! A fine tackle and judging by the pipe, definitely an Awfully Decent Fellow. I can't understand why the whole thing descended into a punch upthough. Pipe envy on the part of some players?

Banes exclaimed:
Ironscarf - You're working for duckduckgo? Sweet!

We have our own search engine now?

TECH SUPPORT RANT

There is a problem with technical support offered by Internet service providers. After an excruciating 40 hours without a stable Internet connection in my house, I decided to take the matter into my own hands. I have just spent the last hour and a half on hold by various tech support networks from the cable company. After having to answer a series of security questions, they finally said they were unable to assist me and transferred me to the next representative. I was eventually connected to a tech support operator of my router company and he told me that my router was out of date, the warranty was expired and that he would have to charge me. FORGET THAT!!

I kindly declined the offer, hung up, made some last minute attempts to call my computer savvy friends and then it hit me. YouTube. I did a simple YouTube search for router tech solutions and a four minute video came up explaining how to secure the network. It showed a visual step-by-step procedure on how to secure my router and after the video was over, all my technical difficulties were an afterthought.

I still do not understand how companies need to charge the end users of their own faulty products when there are nice individuals on YouTube willing to do a walkthrough for free.