Last night was nice, but I don't think it was worth the horrible fucking hangover I've been suffering for most of the day. This is the first New Year's Eve in a long while that I've actually ended up getting wasted on and it ain't a pretty way to be entering a new decade, lemme tell you.

Looking back on it, the 00s sucked in more ways that I care to count, both on a personal level and generally. World politics have been at their most fucked up since the cold war, our planet seems to have started rapidly approaching its best before date and there was a new AIDS every 6 months or so. Music sucked, movies sucked, tv pretty much sucked and literature was downright terrible. If I had to pick one thing that was good about the 00s, it would probably be the advent of broadband Internet. Sure, it's a double edged sword just like any media, but it's still awesome to have the entire world at your fingertips. I don't understand people who don't use it to learn shit.

2010 has the potential to be pretty sweet. Hopefully, this will be the year I finally get my degree and I should be moving into a much nicer flat with a much better location in a couple of months. The thing is in the process of renovation and should be looking tip top pretty soon. As for art school, the way things are looking, it's not going to be possible because apparently having one college degree greatly inhibits your chances of being admitted to a different college the second time around. That is, people with no degree have priority and there's usually just about enough of them in art schools for all the slots to be filled. Which is fair, I guess. Regardless, I have still not given up on trying to pursue a career in art eventually. I'm reasonably satisfied with the progress I've made in the last couple of months and if I continue studying at the same pace, I'm pretty sure I could get decent illustration skills in a couple of years or so.

I'm also thinking about taking up another foreign language, either Italian or polishing up on my German. And it needs a heck of a lot of polishing, that. I figure learning a language is never time wasted, even if the entire world seems to be speaking English nowadays.

All in all, I'm hoping I'll spend the upcoming decade working on fulfilling my potentials as much as possible. I don't think of myself as an extremely gifted individual or anything, but I do think I have some amount of talent in more areas that I've explored so far (which is, like, 2 XD). Of course, getting me a Mr Watson would be kind of sweet, too :-].

Happy 2010, everyone. I hope you'll enjoy whatever it is that you'll be doing.

I have by no means given up on the comic.

It's coming along extremely slow, tho. I'm trying to work out how to draw action poses effectively because lol, mobsters. There's not exactly a lot of panels of people just sitting around discussing the news and shit.

In a way, I'm glad I started drawing it because it gave me tremendous motivation to learn, but on the other hand, it's frustrating because I always know I'll be able to draw better a month from now and I'm just gonna end up redrawing all the previous pages. Like I'm already doing with the ones I uploaded. I absolutely hate the way they look now, except maybe for the color palette.

( working it out )

Also, I've opened another dA account for practice doodles/paintings and stuff. Thinking about closing the other one, it's mostly being watched by people who are just looking out for fanart, and I'm not going to be drawing a lot of that in the future.

I'm starting to think this guy really is the next Freddy Mercury.



Now let's see him grow a mustache and write a rock opera.

( Futurama? )

I'm usually not big on the whole "lol, further stylization of Matt Groening's characters" thing, but what the hell, this was fun. Especially Zapp.

Can't wait for them new Futuramas. For a minute there, it looked as though there would be RAEG because Fox was being a bunch of dicks and not wanting to pay the original cast enough money to come back for season 6, but I hear that's all worked out now. GOOD FOR YOU, my dear underrated cartoon. The world wasn't ready for your awesomeness the first time around.

I temporarily fixed the computer situation (it was the motherboard), but my internet is still shit. Ah, well, have some draw.

( It's supposed to be Lucifer, but if you wanna look at it as garish bondage torture porn, that's fine, too. )

I've never been able to make sense of Christianity. I wish I could, but all I'm getting is a well-meaning message tainted by massive historical and social bias of the period the Bible was written in. Which would be fine, if the church didn't expect me to take everything written therein literally. The Last Temptation of Christ, although a work of fiction ferociously pelted by every Bible-toting bigot at the time did a heck of a lot more to make me understand just why Jesus' sacrifice was something to be revered, than Mel Gibson's shitty snuff movie (which I deeply regret paying to see) ever could.

I am going to take a fucking sledge hammer and beat the shit out of it if it doesn't stop freezing every 5 seconds or so. Surf the web? Freeze. Play music? Freeze. Play video files? Freeze. Work in Photoshop? Freeze and lose everything since the last save, sometimes even corrupting the damn file in the process. Any kind of chat? FREEZE FREEZE FREEZE how dare you have a social life on the interwebz?!

I hate troubleshooting. I fucking hate it with every fiber in my body.

drivers
codecs
system temperature
virus/malware scans
uninstalling everything but the bare minimum of programs needed to run a machine
system restore

I have tried everything I could think of and quite a few things I never would have thought of, all for nothing. And this is practically a new computer, I probably put more money into this shit annually than I do into anything else and it still always, without fail finds a way to fuck with me and ask for MOAR. With my luck with machines and technology, if I ever buy a car, I'll probably be completely broke within a month.

And to top it off, my internet has been acting up for quite a while, too, randomly disconnecting almost as frequently as my computer freezes. HA.

Installing Windows 7 as a last ditch effort. Wish me luck.

In other not so bad news, I passed an exam I was completely sure I was gonna fail, so I guess I can view this perpetual computer angst as a form of payment for that and other little shreds of happiness in my RL life. Mustn't upset the natural balance and have it all work out well for once B|.

Watched Wall-E last night. I'm a Disney classics nostalgic and not a huge fan of CGI, but damn if this movie wasn't a masterpiece in the visual department, and with a gorgeous story to boot. The fact that I have a hard on for robots probably helped, too, but I really did find that rusty little box with arms a lot more sympathetic than most of the cutesy furry characters in recent animated films (at least the ones I've seen). And I've gotta admit, making a movie with no real dialogue in the first 3/4 of it while your target demographic is primarily kids was a pretty ballsy move by Pixar. I'm glad it did as well as it did, both financially and critically.

God, it would be so incredibly awesome to make a Transformers movie with visuals and animation of this quality. Ah, to dream...

In other news, here's a couple more comic-related pics that don't constitute a real update in any way:

http://i28.tinypic.com/288tf10.jpg
http://i35.tinypic.com/2cpvr5w.jpg

The second one was lots of fun to draw. Especially all that hair.

"God, will I ever get a date?"

"NO!"



Japan makes the best toys. Why am I always the last to find out about shit like this?

is here.

?
page 01
page 02
page 03

Criticism gratefully accepted below. Feel free to be harsh where necessary. I can take a pounding just as well as the next guy :V.

Off to the seaside. Brb in 10 days.

Stay well, y'all.

My otherwise boring day just got over 9000 times better.



Not quite as EPIC as The Rude Awakening and Shockwave's Burden, but hey.

I've discovered a new love for tegaki. Amazing how much you can do with so little <3.








First portrait I've drawn that actually turned out right.

drawing animu fanart while you're in the process of trying to learn how to draw properly is a terrible fucking idea. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. Also, this tablet is going to kill whatever minor skillz I had with the good ol' pencil.

Anyway, I got a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain a while ago. I don't deny that it must have some merit, seeing as how it's used as a textbook in art colleges throughout the world, but after reading it, I can safely say that the only useful thing I got out of it was the 'draw what you see, not what you think you see' mantra. The rest was just regurgitating that one sentence on 200+ pages. Andrew Loomis, on the other hand, is still da man and his books provide me with hours of quality learning on a daily bases.

nekkid lady
the fact that the guy whose photo I referenced for this is apparently also a weaboo is a coincidence, I swear.
mini hand study
and this, back on my weaboo-filled DA

In other news, I've started listening to a lot of swing and I think it's becoming a heavy influence on the ideas I have for a comic. If that shit could have a soundtrack, Cherry Poppin Daddies would be it. Now I just need to figure out minor things, like where the hell I wanna go with it, aside from the usual getting pissed/getting into bar fights/getting laid/getting the bad guys cliche. brb in 20 years.

So apparently, I share my birthday with Dante, George Lucas and Tim Roth. Not bad :V.

I turned 25 today. I think that's officially way too old to hold an LJ account filled with stupid shit that screams ronery loser geek louder than a Naruto headband. Sadly, I don't give a shit, so don't expect the spamming to stop anytime soon.

Now excuse me whilst I celebrate the silver jubilee of my life by studying for an exam.

(can you tell I'm feeling really festive today?)

I just watched the 5th episode of Cowboy Bebop. It was so brain-wreckingly EPIC that, had I not known it was only the 5th episode, I would totally have expected it the be the show's finale. And a completely awesome finale at that. It was like Godfather 1 meets Janis Joplin meets Guy Ritchie. EPIC.

WHY HAVE I NOT WATCHED THIS SHOW 376 TIMES BY NOW? AND WHY DO I CURRENTLY NOT HAVE THE TIME TO WATCH IT ALL IN ONE SITTING? AGH.

Ryusaki, srsly, you have to watch this nao. Don't you know too much EVA is bad for you ?

Saw this on arynis's journal and asked her to tag me with a character of her choice. Because all everyone ever seems to do on LJ is memes, and I want to be like all the cool kids 8U. The tag was Lelouch.

1. Do you like this character?

Damn skippy. Everyone is gay for Lelouch.

2. What name/names do you call this character?

Lulu, Failouche, LeDouche

3. What image-color do you associate with this character?

Purple and pink, because of all the FABULOUS~.

4. What image-song do you associate with this character?

Colors. Somehow I associate Colors with everything Code Geass-related.

5. What blood-type do you think this character is?

No idea. I fail to see how someone's blood type can be deduced from their character traits o.0.

6. Of all of the titles that this character appears in, which characters do you like to put this character with?

Shirley, probably. Wouldn't have minded if he ended up with CC, either. Anyone but Kallen, basically.

7. What would you want to say to this character?

Your mom is a bitch. Seriously, dude, stop trying to avenge her.

8. Which do you want to do with this character: Shake hands, hug or kiss?

Go shopping. Or have him do my nails, apparently, he's good at that 8U.

Well, that was fun.

In other news, here's some Lockon, because I totally haven't been fangirling enough over him lately. God, I'm such a pathetic loser.