Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

My Oculus Rift arrived yesterday and I have no Windows machine to run it with (and they've still not released the Mac SDK). So rather than fall into a pit of despair, let's focus on some recent positives.

Visited my parents in Vancouver two weekends ago. Lounged in my verdant childhood backyard and gobbled a number of fruits and veggies right off the vine. Saw The Book of Mormon. Did a lot of reading.

Our head of Engineering keeps bringing in veggies from his garden, a most kind and appreciated gesture. On a Friday my posse & I made squash/everything/anything cookies. Too much egg resulted in them being more like mini muffins than cookies... but still good! The whole squash that was grated and tossed in did no harm!

Visited Seattle last weekend for a wedding. The planets aligned and my sisters were both in town as well (for their own Washington based weddings to attend). Always disturbing to see which parts of you come from your family, visible in the looks and behaviors of siblings. Weddings that prominently feature Jesus and preach about marriage belonging only to men and women are aaaaaawkward.

I've been carefully grooming a playlist themed on my character Jaya from the 4th Terminus game. Good times, been listening to it a lot. A lot. Have found myself doodling while sitting on airplanes (a disturbingly common occurrence lately) and I've been running through my list of tabletop characters but frequently finding myself back to drawing Jaya.

I've been pushing numbers around at work lately. Wringing my hands frantically wishing load times to be faster. Pulling at my hair trying to extract meaningful information from a pile of logged data. I appreciate the diversity of work for my current team- writing SQL statements, poking at iOS code, still battling JavaScript, and possibly getting better at python (I still hate python)

I saw Snowpiercer in theaters. Twice. Damn fine film. Most excellent. Best thing I've seen in a long while. I felt good while watching it, like someone hitting a hard to reach itch. Have finally escaped my horror shlump of reading material and am back on a good kick of distopian material. Am on book 3 of the Silo series (which starts with Wool). The author, Hugh Howey seems like a cool guy. Finally read Starship Troopers. Am looking forward to the new Mad Max movie coming out in 2015.

My old art blog just passed 10k views.

Orange Monster

It's been a while since I made a monster... Not since March, I believe. They're still on my mind, I've just been so distracted by other things and lacking any good mindless TV to watch while I work.

This fellow is yet another crab-parts monster. Much simpler this time, working on the theory of less is more. The core of this fellow is just foam so he's super light and squishy but not lumpy/shifting. The legs are just basic pipe cleaners I believe. The whole thing was super easy to make.

Unfortunately, I just brought my first crab-parts monster home from work and found his forward leg-claw to be chipped on the tip! Not sure if that's a sign that they will decompose further or just that they're brittle and I'm a clutz... Also not sure how to actually repair it... But the whole monster never really pleased me so not that big of loss... maybe it'll be one of the first monsters I finally throw out....

It's too bad that the only big claws I had all curved in the same direction... too many lefties I guess. Also, one of the claws has a chipped bump. The orange/white color scheme makes it pretty forgivable though. The little fellow looks like a creamsicle! I like the large bulging eyes as well, though I still wonder if I should have put a lid on it.

I enjoy this little guy- the fact he was easy to make helps a lot. The way I sewed down his legs makes him rather floppy and easy to pose/place on things-- they come together so as to lightly "grip" something but can't bend too far back (because the body is in the way) and therefor can stand pretty reliably (though low to the ground).

Because our house is already crawling with my monsters and I like to keep a fresh rotation at work, this fellow is currently listed over at my Etsy shop as Orange Crab Claw Monster. Or you could just ask me for it in person and I'd be happy to give it to you for free. All monsters priced to move!

Tumblr is best thing

I've been fond of Tumblr for some time now, and that fondness has only grown with my usage of it. Started in on a wordy write-up on why I liked Tumblr so much, but I'm not feeling it. Brain is in image mode, not text mode I guess. The above sketch is from a work weeks' worth of morning warm up sketches, drawn while I sipped my tea before leaving the house. All of them are drawn from reference, see the tumblr post for links.

Ask me about it in person some time, I'd love to wave my hands about and rant why Tumblr is so marvelous. I don't think it is the single solution for all Internet things (see, I'm still posting on Blogger), but I find great value in what it provides and no end in sight for the delights found there. Distilled: animated gifs, fan art, community, content creation, reference photos, and simple interactions.

I continue to favor it as a dumping grounds for artwork. Currently the artwork chain goes Tumblr -> Flickr -> Blogger.

Was in Barcelona last week attending a Music Hack Day event for work. There was a minimum team size of 2 so I worked with a Paul fellow on making a web monome (he had a real monome that you could plug in and use with the site) [Github repo][Site]

It's 11:36pm and I haven't been hit with jet lag pains yet... am almost frightened by that. I don't worry about sleeping either since my eyes are already heavy, now as I type...

Game Music

So... I was going to draw tonight... have this great sketch idea of Jaya licking her new arm. But instead I spent... jeeze... the last three? hours manually looking up & constructing the Gaslight playlist in Rdio. There are sooooo many tracks missing, it's a ridiculous tragedy. But even with that, there's still 68 available from all chapters. Good for me to listen to at work. But also a good reminder that keeping ahold of old MP3s has value. Just dug around and made sure I still had all of them on my backup drive... as well as a good handful of session recordings. Hilarious, those.

This was motivated in part because last night I pulled together some album artwork for my 4th Terminus and Midwinter playlists, which I had looked up & built quite some time ago.

There's an Academie of Magic one too, but I don't have artwork yet for it...

Now that I'm listening to the music, all I want to do draw is Lilly and her pretty pretty dresses... covered in mud. Possibly strangling someone. How are all my old sketches (mostly) not online?! Ugh...

Two tones of good

I've just finished two books, both of which I deeply loved. They both feature strong women. Romance, to some degree, is touched upon in both. The nature of a successful relationship as well. Mystery, intrigue, action. Good books, I'd recommend all to read both though they are deeply different. It amuses me to say of both "This is what a fabulous female character is like. Why can't more characters be written like this?This shows the workings of an excellent relationship. Behold and take note! Study it!"

For one of these I say it with an ernest, honest tone. Heartfelt, friendly, wistful. Possibly a little teary eyed. That book would be Valor and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal (book 4 of 5 in the Glamorist Histories series)

The other I say with a smirk. With a grin and a wink. With the same tone that I confess my love of Cerci from Game of Thrones with and declare Silence of the Lambs to be the most romantic film ever. That book would be Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

Look away to avoid potential spoilers after the picture of Jane.

Jane of Valor and Vanity is so fucking sensible, it hurts. She's plane looking and normal. Times get tough, things get complicated, mistakes are made, but she keeps a level head. She does the things that need to be done, even when they're hard-- which frequently means emotionally hard rather than physically hard. She talks about issues, rather than letting them fester. Reading all of Jane's stories makes me happy, I'll probably cry after the next book comes out- I don't want it all to end. I wish I could have read this series when I was younger- here is an admirable but relatable character that strives to do the right thing and is a good, believable role model.

Amy's mind is amazing. The cadence, the logic, the poetry of her thoughts are seductive. Reading Gillian Flynn's writing was like drinking hot chocolate. How can you not love this: "... [we] fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the over attention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them" I itch to include a couple other quotes (oh Kindle highlights, how I love you!) but they'd be too spoiler-y... Amy's planning and commitment is admirable. She is without a doubt strong. She knows what she wants and she takes great efforts to obtain it. I wish I could be as strong and powerful as Amy.

Jane is the person I actually want to be, in real life. Amy is the person I like to imagine being, the ideal role-play character I wish I could play.

I wish all books I read starred such fully formed and compelling female leads.

(p.s. - I also just finished Ready Player One which I wish I had in book form so that I could throw it across the fucking room in rage. Reads like a Young Adult novel- which is fine, I read lots of those- but I wasn't expecting that and in the end all the "lessons" and "morals" and "take aways" from the story are shit/non-existant. At the end of it all the young white boy "wins" the love of the young white girl. She's just sitting there at the end, like some prize. Nothing challenging happened, there was no self reflection or growth. Waste of my time, I regret reading it)

Dreams

Nobody really want's to hear someone else's dream recollection. But I drew some pictures for mine! So maybe that makes this blog post ever so slightly less horrible...

I've been having several bad dreams recently. Cannibalism, not cool. Anyway, this one starts off and I'm somewhere and I notice there's these little creatures. They're almost cute, but a touch too disturbing. They're made up of a normal animal and where that animal's head should be, there's the torso of another animal. Not a graceful gryphon like transition... sort of a cut off & this other thing stuck on look.

In particular there's a rat with a rabbit top and a rabbit with a tiny adorable black kitten top.

The kitten is hungry. There's this... deer thing laying there. It's basically a deer but has a long chicken like neck that's mostly plucked. I try and convince the kitten to eat it-- it tentatively takes a bite of the animal's neck-- but it's a no go. I understand that if the deer-thing was dead the cute kitten would be able to eat it.

I go out looking for knives to kill the deer-thing with. Nothing I find is large enough or sharp enough to do the deed. I start to get squeamish. I contemplate looking up online where one cuts a deer's throat. Is it up high? At the base? In the end I acknowledge the fact that even if I had a knife, I probably wouldn't kill the deer-thing. Also, I think the deer thing has a human face now (curse you, Midwinter!).

I contemplate never eating red meat again.

I wake up

A couple more sketches can be found over on my Tumblr...

March marched by...

Sheesh, March 26th already? And only 55 minutes of it left... Been a busy month. First I went to Iceland. But only for three and a half days. Then I came back. My summary: "Imagine Hawaii. Then take a butter knife and scrape off all the dirt and plants and stuff. Then cover it with snow. That's what I felt Iceland looked like."

I switched teams at work. I am now officially on the API team at Rdio. My brain already feels happier. Am still learning what this new position means for me overall, but at least I'm getting the chance to learn iOS and Android. And writing in so many different languages that are NOT JavaScript. My brain! My brain, it rejoices!

Then I went to Lumi Island for a weekend with Adam (and Adam's friend & his girlfriend). It's always sad visiting Seattle when there's good weather because I get all sad about having left... No Internet access while out there so I brought some yarn.

Now I'm hanging out at home while Adam is in Seattle for a bit. Realized that I, an oh-shit-how-is-this-possible 30 year old, am still scared of the dark and monsters in the dark at times... There was a possum outside last night upsetting the cat who upset me and everything was horrible. And I was scared of the dark. Luckily I have a machete so I could take some comfort in that... Duck does not have a machete and expressed his upset by vomiting. A lot. A little bit on my craft supplies in the TV room that are strewn about. There are few joys when the boyfriend is absent, but craft supplies EVERYWHERE is definitely one of them. (until cat vomit) On a whim, I bought an Oculus Rift dev kit what will ship "some time around July". Am excited.

Another Academie of Magic session took place- in particular my character Olivia's finale. Tears, destruction, guilt, regret, wrath. Just how I like my character arcs to end. Really wish I had a sketch ready to post from that session... Spent this evening cleaning up my basement craft-room & finishing up new green monster instead... So many interest, so little time!

Soon I will fly to Illinois for a long weekend to represent Rdio at HackIllinois.

Clearly I need to post more frequently to avoid these types of long list-y posts.... I apologize.