Weeee! Another Quakcast well under way towards completion! The DD team rules!
In that I include everyone who worked on the writing of the sop and all the recorded voices by people and Kroatz for being the guest and researcher on the latest one and the Brilliant and hillarious genius Banes for his editing and acting skills!
You guys are working to make this cool! ^_^

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Soon, soooooon I will get around to getting a nice new fast ultrabook to be my main work PC… But in the mean time, I'm glad to work on my big giant machine with its huge, massive screens. It gives me lots of room to spread out! I was working with my freind on her small business idea last night and she had her nice new pretty and fast laptop along, which was great and faster and smoother than my old monster, but compared to mine, the screen is cramped and limited. And I watched her hunched over that screen on a hinge atached to the keyboard while I'm over here on my big wide desk, slim keyboard in front of my, nice big wirelss mouse, leaning back in my comfy chair, huge 32 inch screen all the way over the other end of my desk and on the other side there's my big 21 inch cintiq monitor, I'm all spread out with lots of room and I love it…

Laptops are great in that they're nice and portable, you're not tied to any one spot ever, they don'y take up much room so you can work in any little possy, but still, there's nothing like being able to be spread out and have lots and lots of juicy space to work in, is there?
I always make sure I have a huge desk to work at and it's as clear as possible with no stored piles of crap, just so that when I DO have stuff to work on I've got acres of room to spread out papers and books and coffee mugs and plates of snaks and whatever else I need. :)

The thing people don't realise about clean desks (both those are are just plain messy and those who are neat freaks) is that the space is clear because it is there to be USED. It's NOT for storage and it's not clear just for looks.

I always have piles of papers and crap all over myself. But I only have my laptop, 6x11 tablet and 21" tv screen I use for computer work. In general I hate working on a computer if I can avoid it. Hence the piles of paper. I'm notorious for keeping 20 million piles of paper to draw on rather than a single sketchbook. I just can't deal with having my wrist hanging off the edge of the book and since I just despise the flat look of computer rendered graphics, it adds up to 10 different projects in various stages of painting, tracing, drawing, etc. all over my desk.

I have a massive desk, but it's probably got a quarter to a third of it's space occupied by various supplies and projects. I just can't help it. It's not even so much that I'm storing stuff, it's all there because I can't be getting up and moving across the room every time I need to switch projects.

My mom is the master of saying exactly the wrong thing.
I stopped wearing my hair in braids or pigtails when I was in grade school because one of my teachers said I looked like Pippi Longstocking, and I was embarassed. Recently I decided to start wearing it in braids again. I went to meet my mom for brunch today and the first thing she said to me was “Hey Pippi”.

Note to ozone: potential title for your future autobiography - “Lots and lots of juicy space”.

Thanks for the kudos…this week's Quackcast has lots of great insights into story and writing from ozone and Kroatz as they uncover the universal story formula. Quite excellent!


HippyVan - Pippy Longstocking is kind of awesome. It's odd, but it's often things we are sensitive about or unhappy with that are the best things about us. Long braids…very nice! Just hearing about them they sound good (not that they would suit me. But on you - probably quite nice).

And Pippy Longstocking could lift a horse up with one arm.

Just sayin'…wear them with pride!

Great… I learn that in Mass Effect 3 my favorite weapon has been… “nerfed”. No laser sight, and its damage has been drastically reduced. I'm hoping that there are ingame mods that will bring back the Phalanx's effectiveness. For some odd reason I prefer using laser sights over crosshairs…

Yeah, so…

Quackcasts are fun. I'm waiting to see what our glorious Banes makes of it. I still think we should just fast forward everything, chipmunk Ozone and all that.

@Hippievan: Take it as a compliment! Pippi Longstockings was one of my favourite shows when I was younger :P

Yesterday I helped my grandad move. Man they've got some heavy furniture. Then afterwards we sat down, played some music, drank beer and schnaps, few songs later we had some cognac and straight to bed.
Overall okay saturday night…

Hippie Van wrote:
My mom is the master of saying exactly the wrong thing.
I stopped wearing my hair in braids or pigtails when I was in grade school because one of my teachers said I looked like Pippi Longstocking, and I was embarassed. Recently I decided to start wearing it in braids again. I went to meet my mom for brunch today and the first thing she said to me was “Hey Pippi”.

This is what mothers do. They're supposed to embarrass you because they know you better than you do. It's really creepy.

You see your mother remembers your embarrassment and why you were embarrassed so her remark is possibly based on the following internal dialogue “I thought you were so embarrassed by the pigtail thing and being called Pippi and now you're back to that? You changed you mind? Well let's see…”

“Hey Pippi.” Yup, still embarrassed. So why did she go back to wearing them like that?

My mother used to make the similar remarks when I experimented with long hair a few years ago. She'd remind me of howunkempt I looked and hwo much time I'd spend taking care of long hair and everything else she had told me in high school. And then how I had said I liked having short hair and…. Yeah, pretty much the same as saying “Hey Pippi.”except I'd also getan explanation reminding me of why Ihad abandoneda certain behavior years earlier. And wouldn't you know it, She was right!

Thanks, mom,for reminding me of how stupid I was when younger and how stupid I can still be. And how do you argue with an adorable, little, white haired, cane wielding woman? I have a feeling Betty White took lessons on being feisty and funny from my mother.

I think I just turned this incident into a comedy routine. I should write down all these remarks and try them out at an open mic night.

I don't take crap from my parents about appearance. I love them to bits of course, but I'm happy to tell them where to go when it comes to my personal choice of who I'm friends with, my job, art, clothes and whatever else. And they learned to accept that long ago.
I mean, there was a time when I swanned about everywhere with my hair in thinly plaited braids, and German officer style Jodhpur breaches for trousers, with braces and black army boots… back in the mid 90s for a while.
Wow, hard for even ME to believe.
But their position was that if I wanted to embarrass myself than that was up to me… but apparently I wasn't embarrassed about that at all. ^___^

…Then you get to that nasty stage when you're being the judgemental teasing one to them about personal habits, clothes, their friends… Like Safi in the early series of Absolutely Fabulous :(

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LBA! You don't like flat computer art? Hoe strange, you were so good at it… I find the overly perfected, overly smooth, blended, perfectly highlighted stuff sooooo much worse. That is digital art that is really nasty to see, like a Boris Valejo painting. Digital art tools lend themselves to that dream of “perfection”, similar to painters who use airbrushes or the finicky bastards who oil paint with 2000 transparent layers of expensive medium… THAT is a very bad road to go down since all your hours of honed perfection and excruciating work lead to something that looks as close to revolting as makes no difference. “chocolate box” ick!

Particularly galling when you look at illustration art by a master like Frank Frazetta really closely and see that it's actually extremely rough most of the time, work that's dashed off at speed and then just honed here and there and yet it looks more alive and real and energetic than 1000hr+ smooth airbrushed art.

To that end I attemp to keep my stuff a bit rough these days. If colouring gets too smoothed out and blended I usually scrap it and start again.

I haven't done any non 3d art for ages, I really should when I find the time. Things are still chaotic for me but I'm finding some time for somic stuff. Spent a lot of last night in hospital with my youngest, he has this…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henoch%E2%80%93Sch%C3%B6nlein_purpura
poor lad but at least it isn't meningitis.

Aw, poor guy! That doesn't look fun at all. I hope he gets well soon. :]

So at work there's some canvases hanging up, done during school by the daughter of the boss. (University level, not gradeschool!) They're neat kind of layered decoupage things. I puzzled out how they were made and a couple weeks ago made a couple small attempts, one of which turned out almost just right. So today I bought more art supplies and I'll do a big one! But I'm really worried I didn't buy enough paint, or I'll mess it up somehow, or it will look dumb when it's made full size. I'm too used to “undo.” :[

I wasn't going to start on it til next week originally, but I think I'm really going to need to distract myself this week until ME3 arrives on Friday…

ozoneocean wrote:
LBA! You don't like flat computer art? Hoe strange, you were so good at it… I find the overly perfected, overly smooth, blended, perfectly highlighted stuff sooooo much worse. That is digital art that is really nasty to see, like a Boris Valejo painting. Digital art tools lend themselves to that dream of “perfection”, similar to painters who use airbrushes or the finicky bastards who oil paint with 2000 transparent layers of expensive medium… THAT is a very bad road to go down since all your hours of honed perfection and excruciating work lead to something that looks as close to revolting as makes no difference. “chocolate box” ick!

Particularly galling when you look at illustration art by a master like Frank Frazetta really closely and see that it's actually extremely rough most of the time, work that's dashed off at speed and then just honed here and there and yet it looks more alive and real and energetic than 1000hr+ smooth airbrushed art.

To that end I attemp to keep my stuff a bit rough these days. If colouring gets too smoothed out and blended I usually scrap it and start again.

Actually, the stuff that's like Murakami's Superflat style is the only stuff I like. You essentially just described what I hate so much. I don't see the value that so many people place on hyper realistic and photo-illustrations. I just don't understand the need for it when it's going to look so similar to photographic work, but that's what the advertising industry, and by extension the rest of the design industry, is obsessed with.

My real beef with the “flatness” of digital art, is that no matter how many textures you add to it, no matter how loose your brush strokes, there's no real physical depth to the image, and I can pick that out in a heartbeat. So I hate the artwork that tries to ignore that fact instead of embracing it. If you're working in a flat medium like screen-printing or digital art it's usually best to acknowledge how the media works and go with. Not that there aren't exemptions. I'm a total sucker for the artwork of Mike Mitchell. Conversely I could care less about Gary Taxali's illustrations. I've actually been obsessively redoing the same illustration of three birds stuck in an ice cream cone trying to find a good medium between ultra-flat and overworked.

ozoneocean wrote:
To that end I attemp to keep my stuff a bit rough these days. If colouring gets too smoothed out and blended I usually scrap it and start again.

I agree with your analysis back there to the nth degree - so much so I've scrapped absolutely everything. I failed on the starting again tho' - I'll probably follow Skool's example and go decoupage instead.

@ Scarf - Oh behave! Your stuff is bed-wettingly brilliant!
Your Emilly England art makes me cringe internally at my own artistic inadequacy.

@lba - I get what you mean about owning the medium… but not depth. All 2D media is equal really when it comes to what you can do with it. Even actual physical texture can be replicated across the board, for anything- make chalk pastels look like layered oils? Can do. :)
And so on.

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Check out these cool photos!
http://vintagemeohmy.com/?p=2065
Those are mugshots by the Sydney police of Aussie gangsters during the 1920s. Pretty amazing stuff.

Banes said:
And Pippy Longstocking could lift a horse up with one arm.

This makes me feel better. I never watched Pippi Longstocking so I just knew she was a goofy-looking cartoon character.

@Bravo: That's a nice theory, but I don't think that's it. Later during my brunch my mom started mocking my older sister for how bad her teeth used to be, which is a sore point. It was her birthday so maybe she was just celebrating with a few put-downs.

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It's so strange watching people who I knew in middle and high school growing up via facebook. I just saw a picture of one guy who I was very good friends with for a time in middle school - in the photo he's wearing an oversized hockey jersey and baseball cap and is holding a beer. I think he works in an auto shop now.
When I knew him he was winning science fairs left and right and we used to go kayaking together. He seems happy and productive which is what really matters, but it's interesting to see the turns that people take in life. Some people seem to do exactly what you expect and others - not so much. I imagine these sorts of surprises will become more and more common as I get older.

Dude, if you didn't say they were criminals, I would have no idea. They look exactly like the kind of photos modern day hipsters are always trying to reinvent. I'd just assume they were some modern day folks in period costume with a modernist photographer taking photos of them.

On the texture thing, I know almost any media can immitate another, but I just don't get why anyone would go through the extra effort. I guess I just see it as a case of why use chalk pastels to immitate oil paint, when oil paint does such a good job of immitating itself? It's something I probably picked up going to school for a graphic design specific degree, this fascination with efficiency. Or it could just be one of those strange American habits I have.

Hippy- it's amazing how things change after school. Back when I was in highschool myself, I was dead set on going to West Point for college and making a career of the army. Then I hit my senior year and all of a sudden found myself applying for art schools to get a degree in illustration. All the stuff that made sense in highschool became moot the moment I was told I finally was going to pick where I wanted to go. All my careful deliberation got chucked right out the window and I ended up going to art school on impluse.

Well… gonna have fun playing Mass Effect 3 tonight… after I tie up a few more loose ends in Mass Effect 2. There's no instruction booklet in this thing. Either it's mispackaged or Bioware put the tutorial in the game…

edit: I'll say one thing about this game. Bioware didnt' disappoint. :)

And now I've got a disturbingly hot reporter onboard the Normandy… I think…

lba wrote:
Dude, if you didn't say they were criminals, I would have no idea. They look exactly like the kind of photos modern day hipsters are always trying to reinvent. I'd just assume they were some modern day folks in period costume with a modernist photographer taking photos of them.

Am I the only one getting tired of the term “hipster”? No offense, lba.

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I just managed to lose a pearl on my bathroom floor. It fell off my earring and now it's nowhere to be found. Well done, me.

Saw a performance of TeZukA last night, a modern dance interpretation of the life of Osamu Tezuzka, the creator of Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, etc. It was interesting to see manga pages (both translated into English and untranslated, reversed to read left to right when reversed, and sometimes reversed when untranslated) used as both backdrop, illustraitive point, and even interactive action.
The first half was great, with the highlight being a fight scene between two dangers than (almost) matched comic FX projected onto a white screen behind then, so when one punched or kicked the otehr there was a corresponding comic-book effect behind them.
Also, a live action Astro Boy dancer, complete with oversized red boots and tight, tight black short, shorts) was rather fun.
The second half dragged a bit for me, and got away from what it was supposedly about, leaving the manga behind and getting into tagents around calligraphy, microbes and dancers painting each other. It was very well staged, and the score was great, but the storytelling element was lacking for me.
I wonder how many of the audience will go out and buy some manga afterwards?

ozoneocean wrote:
@ Scarf - Oh behave! Your stuff is bed-wettingly brilliant!
Your Emilly England art makes me cringe internally at my own artistic inadequacy.

I could look at yours and say the same thing - I've certainly thought it on many occasions! Other people's stuff always looks better (the good stuff), especially as it pops up on your monitor fully formed, while your own has to be dragged out of your soul, kicking and screaming and refusing to dress appropriately.
—
Spring greens for dinner: I thought “okay, it's not spring yet, but these probably came over by plane yesterday, from some springy part of the globe, right?”. In truth, they sported the leathery green texture of last spring's greens. I would liken the experience to chewing on a Victorian book jacket.

Hippie Van wrote:
Am I the only one getting tired of the term “hipster”? No offense, lba.

None take. It's a term that even kind of grates on me from time to time, but I have yet to come up with a better one to describe the individuals in question. I think it's going to stick around with us for a while for better or worse.


It's finally almost spring here. I love the winter, but gah! do I hate that nasty, wet, ugly time in between the two seasons. Too cold and muddy to do anything active, to warm and gross to do anything with snow. But now it's getting past that, which means I might actually get to spend some time outdoors at some point.

@Scarf - you flatter me. But I actually use your style on Emily England as a gold standard that I try to work towards. Honestly. I may be flattering you by saying that openly, but that has been part of my thought process on most of my art of late.

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I spent all night getting the design of a commercial website for a friend jusssssssst right. It's work purely as a favour because I want to help her out. That's what it takes to get me into web design again, hahahaha! I get offered cash all the time and all the time I refuse point blank, but to help someone out; SURE!


I don't think it's because I'm a lovely angelic generous soul though. I think it's because I have to care about that sort of work to want to do it. Money doesn't make me care- Not that I don't care about money, but for the amount you'd have to offer me to make me care you'd be WAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY better off getting a pro to do it who specialises in it and is up with the latest coding styles and trends.

BUT, after my all nighter I got two hours sleep, and now I'm at the day job. I had 3 hours sleep yesterday night, then a two hour sleep yesterday afternoon. I am Eff you see kaid.
Co-workers commented that I looked like I've been out all night drinking. My eyes are sore, my hair is nasty, my face is bristly, I feel like all my clothes are untucked and inside out.

When I get home and have a nap I have to write up tomorrow's feature, do the script for this week's soap, then do some more web design! gah! Paid this time. I got the email request from a previous employer after I'd finished doing the favour work, and since I was already doing web stuff I thought “why not?”
It's a basic copy and paste job anyway, nothing too serious.

You should have gotten more guest feature writters, Oz. Let me know if I can help out again at any time. I just can't help at the end of March though.

Got that 16 page paper to organize. I'm working on it with 3 other people, so my commitment is only 4 pages. But I'm also the one in charge of getting the bitch put together. We are doing a paper on the ethics of Google's new privacy policy. My specific part of the paper is over the policy itself and international reactioins to it.

Hippie Van wrote:
@Bravo: That's a nice theory, but I don't think that's it. Later during my brunch my mom started mocking my older sister for how bad her teeth used to be, which is a sore point. It was her birthday so maybe she was just celebrating with a few put-downs.

Respond with “I” statements and establishing boundries and eventually mom will have to find a new game to play. It works. Then there's being completely unfazed by such childish behavior and expressing that you find the behavior unacceptable and childish. My father was like that and I turned the tables and he never dared do anythingagain because he knew I wouldn't let him get away with it. It was amazing how much praise he gave to my siblings and I when we weren't around but in front of us it was always a put-down. I established with him how he should behave if he wanted me around.Then there was being stuck in a car with him and my brother for six hours. They kept playing the same games and I had to finally step in and stop them bothandset up propercommunication instead of put-downs and game-playing.

Yuck, edited out a pile of psychobabble crap out of that. All I know is it works. People are who they are and you set up how you interact with them and make sure they obey the rules you set up. Anyone who's tried it is amazed at how it works. One would almost think that all that clinical therapist social worker crap actually works.

Now if it could get my set furnished I'd be happy. I built the set but have no idea how to furnish it. I want to do something completely unexpected like lace curtains and ornate gilded fairy tale furniture in an alien spaceship. But how to get everything to fall together before I run out of buffer.

Hey folks. I'm back and I'll have a comic up in the coming months. I've actually put heart and mind into this project so it should be decent this time.

Welcome back! Ironscarf, Iba, and now you :)

I love seeing the return of those that I remember from my first DD weeks

huh, in the end the top drawer might return ;)

TD will probably never return. Not without our resident troll and pain-in-the-butt at large LeFarce or his gang. The kids who made it so volatile and wild like /b/ have probably all moved on to greener/more disturbing pastures. Or at least I would think they have. As entertaining as it was from time to time, I don't get the impression that most folks want the forum's most active section being the junk drawer. I could be wrong though.

I think it's finally time for me to update my profile avatar. I don't know what to yet, but my current one is a bit out of date, considering I'm not likely to ever return to last words. Any ideas or thoughts? I'm thinking something slightly off-colour would be in order, but I'm just drawing a complete blank on what to replace it with.

Is it really wise to invoke the spectre of the upper sliding storage compartment?

Historical Avatar Collectors Series no.27