I never thought my laziness throughout high school would cost me anything other than admission to the most elite schools. Turns out, the lack of academic scholarships I would have gotten had I bothered to care has cost me a little over $80,000 dollars (and growing!) worth of college loan debt. It might as well be $800k, as, at this point, it's barely even real money. How did this happen so suddenly? All for the shiny useless bachelor's degree I was conned into believing I needed to get the kind of job that would pay back all that debt and thus render it a moot point. Forgive me if I'm being too melodramatic, but the higher education system has become the hottest new scam. At least Nigerian princes would have only my life savings (about $12), instead of sentencing me to a life of low thermostat settings, printing in low dpi grayscale, and cavalcade of never-ending interest-only payments.

If some obscenely rich benefactor out there has been waiting for the very moment I hit financial rock bottom to scoop me up and make everything alright, stay tuned - it may not be that far off.

First, a gratz to trifles. Babby has arrived, predictably composed of equal parts dashing and cunning. I fear the day that child challenges me to a game of Calvinball.




I'm still alive, though that fact may not be immediately evident to anyone who has seen me lately. Things in life are slow, time-consuming, and boring. That having been said, I've been working nearly full-time at my new job and I'm starting to settle into it nicely. I get to pick my own hours from what is available, so I can take a break if I feel my sanity hat starting to slip a little. I'm still working on various projects as a creative outlet (including the comic - currently trying to draw entirely in vector graphics), but the one that has taken up the most time by far is my first ever video game. Yes it's a silly, rough, and even somewhat pointless flash game (Actionscript 2.0 - yes, I know it's outdated), but it's mine and I'm proud of it even if it does suck. Besides, now I know a lot of the things I want to avoid for my future projects (focus on code or assets and get someone else to focus on the other, mostly).

I haven't been watching the news - I stopped because I was still looking for work and the news was a fabulous demotivator. Now that I'm sort of working and sort of job searching for something more permanent, I can't decide if I'm ready to dive into the mess that is being informed of humanity's constant embarrassments. I'm becoming terribly less confident in our collective cultural intelligence, although I reckon that may be a direct function of my getting older, so I have begun attempted mitigation of snobbery by listening to Lady Gaga (we'll see). Who knows? In a week, I may be fully prepared to partake in the viewing of a cinematic motion picture.

I dearly love Boston. It has MicroCenter, a robust public transit system, Amanda Fucking Palmer, and comic book shops galore. Yet I still feel very out of place here, and oddly, I feel like most people in the area feel similarly. Or mayhap I am projecting? In any case, meeting people post-college in a city is damn hard. And I don't mean relationships, I mean just people. I've usually picked up a few compatriots by now, but nearly a year in and I still find myself not partying nearly enough to fulfill the expected quota of someone who is enjoying the last few peak years of their life.

A 19th Century Zombie vs. Non Sequitur Archetypes is nearly finished, and after a bit of bug squashing and polishing, it will be done and posted here. Beyond that, I'm looking to learn about physics incorporation for my next (and hopefully much more thought out) project.

( Click through to see the comic. )

I wanted to play with a cartoony style this time - it worked well enough, though I need to try differentiating more between characters. Have a few more comic ideas/scripts written up, but since I've started working, I'm not sure when I'll get to them.

For some quick background on this comic, see The Money Meltdown or the Planet Money. There's some good stuff there. It may not make the feeling of crappyness go away, but at least it will be a better informed crappyness.

So yeah, I totally just got 2 years of free hosting/unlimited bandwidth + 1 Free Domain registration with Dreamhost because they're taking in Geocities refugees (if you haven't heard, Geocities is finally being put to rest). I popped in my old therandomwebsite account, and now it looks that I'm golden. This is great timing as my current hosting plan is set to expire soon.

Hmm, now what to do with it?

Oh man, so many ideas...

Note: This is cute - my server's name is "exodus"

( Click through to see the comic. )

I'm becoming happier and happier with how these strips are turning out. I still have a ways to go technically speaking (arg, proportions), but its becoming simpler and quicker for me to execute an idea. This one is almost entirely drawn by hand with a little help from vector tracing in the second and third panels.

So this comic is, for those shockingly not already in the know, in reference to xkcd, only the single most brilliant webcomic ever. Its brilliance is so awesome in fact, women swoon at the mere mention of its creator (hence today's comic). And yes, that genetic synthesis technology is real, albeit somewhat exaggerated (see: the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition).

(I know the formatting on this looks gross in LJ. I'll try to fix it when I have a chance.)

( Click through to see the comic. )

If you don't know what the above strip is about, then clearly you have not heard about this.

The English Major in me wants to be appalled by this... amalgamation of Jane Austen's most well known novel and the roaming hoards of the damned, but the rest of me tells that part of me to shut up, giddy with excitement. I have yet to pick up a copy of PaPaZ for myself, but I'm sure its terrific. It's certainly no easy task to modulate a proper balance between pre-Victorian romance and flesh eating monsters - the fact that someone attempted it at all has earned my undying respect for humanity.

As for the strip, I cheated a little, augmenting some panels with vector graphics, but its mostly hand drawn (mostly because I forgot to draw some things and I didn't want to go back in and rescan). I'm still bouncing between GIMP, Inkscape, and Illustrator, but I have a better sense of what kind of files I'll want for a particular project, so the process should become a little bit more straightforward next time.

(And yes I know that the Left 4 Dead Smoker has boils on its face - I didn't realize it until the comic was almost finished. I'm calling it my own artistic interpretation.)

( Click through to see the comic. )

So this is part of a series of comics I've been toying with - nothing too serious, but I like the media form and have been wanting to experiment with it for a while. Of course, I can't draw terribly well, which is why this one is completely drawn in Illustrator by hand/mouse (ugh). I've been playing with different styles as well, and my next comic is almost finished (it's hand drawn with pencil and scanned in, but I haven't decided whether to trace it with vector graphics or not yet) with a third script written up already. I'm not looking to stick to a schedule or anything - just want to see where this takes me.

The New York Times recently published a story about a newly developed Chinese anti-censorship meme designed to thwart government censors. Basically, the "Grass-Mud Horse" is a new alpaca-like hero whose name in written form, is completely benign, but in spoken form, sounds very close to "Fuck your mother". Sort of like the classic Simpsons prank-call from "Ivanna Amanda Hugginkiss". The meme further references the habitat encroaching behavior of the "river crab" - a reference to "harmonization" (the euphemistic word the Chinese government uses to describe its censorship activities).

While the story is great and interesting in itself, what I really find amusing is the irony of the NYT censoring the translation of "Grass-Mud Horse" in a story about censorship. You may not want to hear/read "fuck your mother", but the purpose and strength of the message is somewhat diminished if you don't know its actual meaning.

So for today, a cheerful grin to the ingenuity of the Chinese population, and a dismayed-avoidance-of-eye-contact with our news outlets.


my original source