personal
Hops and Hockey?? Madness!
Thursday night I had the pleasure of being a guest on a new podcast, Hops and Hockey with Dyke and Yannik. It was started by two friends of mine in a flash of brilliance, combining their own personal interests and expertise to share their views on two of life’s greatest pleasures. Each week they review the current events in the world of hockey, start some lively discussion with their “no buddy” guests, make predictions, and enjoy and rate three delicious brews.
I don’t have much in the way of hockey experience so my involvement in the project has been to draw things for the web site, t-shirts, logos, and miscellaneous doodles. It’s been quite a bit of fun so far and feels like a practice run for my dream of being a graphic designer for a brewery. I don’t know how often I’ll be a guest but I sat in for their second episode, which covered NHL agitators (A.K.A. douchebags and griefers) and three offerings from Sierra Nevada (their Torpedo IPA, Celebration Ale, and Kellerweis Hefewiezen). Apparently I have much to learn about the zen of using Skype, because my mic was very quiet and I kept dropping out at random intervals. I still think I managed to ruin things a bit, to my own standards at least, and having a justifiable reason to try three new beers over the course of a couple hours was greatly appreciated. I had fun with it and it sounds like Dyke and Yannik are too so if you want to check them out, head to their site or look them up on iTunes.
Ah, I almost forgot to to include a wallpaper that I made for the podcast. It’s available in two resolutions, 1920×1080 (widescreen) and 1600×1200 (fullscreen). As I mentioned, tooling around with this sort of imagery has been great, so expect to see more of my H&H stuff both up here and on their main site.
I am alive!
I am eating pizza, I am drinking soda and I am alive! For the past week I have been out of commission due to some withering disease imported from the dank depths of western Pennsylvania. However, the downtime has been put to excellent use in that I have officially become the Greatest Pokemon Trainer Ever. I bested each of the 8 gym leaders, shut down Team Rocket, captured Pokemon that were deemed legendary and even those that were extinct, then went on to smack down the so-called Elite Four and my long-time rival, Toolie. Just a typical day as Bamf, the spunky kid from Pallet Town who just can’t be beat.
I couldn’t help but notice that I beat the game as I was falling asleep last night and this morning I feel better than I have all week. Could there be something to the medicinal effects of a good triumph-over-all-and-win-the-game adventure? Even if there isn’t, it’s a hell of a way to waste 30-50 hours when you can’t get out of bed.
Who Watches the Watchmen?
Hurm.
Went to the midnight showing of Watchmen. My thoughts: (1) The fight scenes were WAY overdone. I thought that the point of the movie was that these people weren’t superheroes and yet whenever they got down to business, people started flying through the air with the greatest of ease. (2) Excessive gore. I l like blood and guts as much as the next guy but some of the stuff in this movie was BRUTAL. I thought Doc Manhattan vaporized people, not turned them inside out and strung their organs across the ceiling. Or if you want to establish that Dan and Laurie have still got their superhero chops, enough to take down a large group of muggers, show them doing their karate and stuff but I don’t need to see them stabbing people in the neck and crippling their limbs. (3) WTF music. A lot of the songs seemed kinda fitting but the way they were tossed into the film, which was basically just to blast the song at full volume with no concern for background sounds or even if the song was appropriate for the scene, was ridiculous.
Now reading this, you might assume that I didn’t actually enjoy the movie and that is because you couldn’t see the rapture written across my face as I sat there for almost three hours watching one of my favorite comic series come to life on the big screen. Sure it wasn’t a perfect adaptation of the original but I know better than to look for that in a comic book movie. Despite all of its shortcomings, Watchmen was an experience to see and I count it as an overall success.
Just added the Artwork page
I’ve finally added in a gallery plugin so I can start uploading my artwork. For now, I created galleries for doodles and some of the 3D stuff that I have been getting into recently. Now I just need to dig into my old archives of scanned documents and pull out the rest of the pieces… This ought to be fun.
New things!
So as you can see, I’ve finally made a layout that is Teapot Robot-ish. I’m pretty satisfied with it for now so my next step is to throw some content up here. What I need most is a script or Wordpress plugin that will let me organize and display images (photographs and artwork). If anyone has suggestions, leave a comment.
The end is nigh
I’m rapidly approaching the so-called “end” of my masters thesis and, oddly enough, it reminds me of how it all began. Once I finally managed to choose a research area, my first step towards a degree was to immerse myself completely in any academic literature that could possibly relate to my thesis. You’d be surprised how enlightening that can be. If you can manage to fill your head with the vast range of research topics and concerns that are centered on virtual communities, fan culture, and gaming (and I would say that I only managed to cram maybe a third of it into my noggin before risking full mental failure), the possibilities for research can seem endless. So, yes, it’s all very enlightening… which only serves to make it even more intimidating. I mean, when faced with the scope of what has already been researched and then being expected to come up with something that is new, interesting and, above all, important, what is a person to do? Well if one were to go by my own experiences the answer would be to play a lot of World of Warcraft, go out drinking on a regular basis, take up a sport for the first time since middle school, and generally do things that don’t advance a degree for as long as possible until confronted with a “Do this or perish” ultimatum by one’s very indulgent but ultimately scary-when-provoked advisor.
And this is a good thing! Though my inital reason for writing this has long since escaped me, I wanted to say that as I slowly finish writing my thesis I’ve found myself back in that place where I get to see all of academia spread out before me, a big wide landscape of possibilities, directions, and futures. It’s still intimidating on the best of days (and you don’t want to see me on the worst) but…
I think I like it.
Let’s get this party started…
As fun and interesting as that initial “Hello, World!” post was, I think it’s time for me to start filling this site with… something. Just what that “something” will be is still a bit up in the air but my hope is to use this blog to blab about my personal interests, academic stuff that I’m working on, and all of the doodles & artwork that find their way out of my head.