It's been a long time since I updated this...I've got a lot of art to update. I've done a lot of kimekomi and a lot of pencil drawing that I'll throw up as I have the time. For those of you who have me on your fave lists, I'm sorry for the thousand adds at the same time. Hope to be on here again soon!

Like the Baron Harkonnen in the 1970's Dune, I'm ALIVVVE
And it's been like a year since I posted on here.
In fact, I just got through doing my taxes...Again. Not much has happened in the last year. Oh yeah. I got a boyfriend. That's why I've been neglecting my former concubines...the internets and art projects. And I'm still working on Expansion packs. I work on a game that's actually good. I can say that.
Anyway, now for some random links to wierdness.
Anyway, I'm listening to the new Harvey Danger album, which kicks ASS, and can be obtained at their site for free.
Harvey Danger!
[link]
My favourite band for snarky smartass lyrics. They had a hit which was popular when I was in high school called Flagpole Sitta...."Paranoia, paranoia everyone is comming to get me, just say you never have met me..." Yeah. You know it.
Tudor Bonnets!
[link]
OOOH. I'm going to make my own tudor gabled headdress so I can dress up like Catherine of Aragon! I'm not even into rennaisance faires. Does the fact that I think this is awesome mark me as a dork?
Sadism
[link]
The most sadistic mario level ever. I like the part where he goes down the pipe.
MEATS!
[link]
I'm in this group where we eat cheap vietnamese food and japanese candies with provocative names and then draw pictures that don't make all that much sense. I'm one of two people who doesn't do anime here. Although everyone who does do anime in this group does it really well. Prepare to be bewildered and frightened. Some of this is NSFW.
And last but not least:
Regular Gonzales
[link]
One of my coworkers made this album in a month. I think that every single nerd can relate to the song "Everything I know about Vikings." Instant classic.

PS. It occurred to me that either there's a bug on this page or my HTML knowledge is horribly outdated. Maybe both. So I've given the full urls above if the links don't work.

Working, as I do, as a programmer at a game company, I get to spend all day every day with geeks. (I guess that I, too am a geek, though about different things than your average geek. ([link])) I was sitting at my desk when one of the programmers sitting next to me found a stupid mistake and started singing "I am so smart. S-M-R-T"
Being a smartass, I piped up with: "You spelled that wrong!"
The entire row of cubes went silent. The guy on my right was looking at me like I was from Mars.
The first guy finally says: "That was from the Simpsons."
"Well, EXCUSE ME. I've only seen about 800 of the million Simpsons episodes."
And it has occured to me that even though nerds come in all shapes, colours and backgrounds, they are united by a base of common knowledge which is expressed via In-Jokes. If you make a joke on one of these topics, you can be part of the club.
So, In the spirit of Sei Shonagon ([link]) who liked to write lists of trivial but entertaining things (her list of "things that are cute" is pretty universal, even today), I present to you: List of In-Joke topics among geeks. Specifically, the species found in the game industry.

-Simpsons
-Star Wars
-Ninjas vs Pirates.
-Corrolary to pirates: Monkey Island
(Am I the ONLY person out there who thought this game was stupid? ANYBODY? ANYBODY ELSE?)
-The Big Lebowski
-Linux
-Programming Jokes (obviously)
-Cthulhu (Cthulhu is pretty sweet. I'll admit)
-Monty Python. Monty Python & the Holy Grail seems to be the fave.
-Tongue in Cheek Fantasy Movies:
-----Princess Bride
-----Labyrinth
-Internet Phenomena Jokes
-----"I'm the Juggernaut, Bitch!"
-----Snakes on a Plane
-----Strongbad. (See Monkey Island Comment)
-Fight Club
-Lord of the Rings (See programming jokes comment.)
-Wrath of Khan ("Khaaaannnnn")
-Superheroes, but only some:
-----Spiderman
-----X Men
-Family Guy*
-Star Trek, more specifically the quote "Make it So"*
-The occasional l33tspeak. (My all time fave is "WTFPWN")
-Southpark ("They took eer jahbs!")



Expect this list to get longer as I think about it.

*Yay, hot community lovin'!

So I just got through paying my taxes, and guess what?! I paid close to 40% of my income all together in taxes, being single, and not owning a house
So...isn't our big misslve against (sorta)socialist economies (ie. a lot of europe) that they pay a through the nose in income tax?
I don't even get universal healthcare or the prospect of a decent social security cheque when I'm a geriatric! What's the deal with that?
I guess all this money goes towards neat, expensive things, which only indirectly benefit myself.
Eh, I can't complain too much. You get used to getting the money taken out of your paycheck, so when you get your tax return it's like WOW! FREE MONEY!
Maybe I'll invest that in a car so I can take advantage of the roads that apparently soak up a good percent of my income.
Speaking of things that my tax dollars are paying for instead of universal healthcare...

***VOTING in the CALIFORNIA GUBERNATORIAL (Based entirely on two campaign ads, one of which pisses me off slightly less)***

I used to think Californians were the zenith of stupid for electing Arnie. He never has acted like he has much of a clue in politics (or anything, really, though part of that might just be the accent), and for God's sake...he played CONAN.
But, God help me, I'm going to vote for him in the next election if it comes down to Arnie versus Westley. Westley suffers from the same overload of liberal saccharine that John Edwards did. "Oooooh. I taught at stanford, and touched was touched by my students through education."
Yeah. I know Ivy League Professors. He lectured a room of 300 students twice a week and looked like he'd rather be smeared with honey and burried in an anthill.
His ads claim he sued dubya over offshore drilling. All this says to me is that Westley is yet another litigation-happy Californian. Californians like suing more than people in third-world countries like soccer. Pointless litigation is the state passtime, but that's another rave.
Also, from his TV ads, his platform seems to be "I'll deliver the moon for free." Always a bad sign.
So, in the end, you have the choice of an a) proven bastard with lovable accent or b) tree-hugging-litigation-loving bastard pretending not to be a bastard.
Who would you choose?

I'm not talking about the kind of pirate that has nerds saying "arrr" faster than you can quote Monty Python's Holy Grail. No, I'm talking about the only sort of pirate that still has a shred of dignity: the media pirate.
About a month ago, I was cleaning out my closet when I found a folder full of movies that I'd burnt to CD in college. And I thought: "You know what? I don't need this anymore." And I threw the whole thing away. Looking through it, I realized that I owned most of the movies on DVD now, and the ones I didn't I'd just watched once and never intended to watch again, anyway. Slowly, surely, I've started to become an upstanding member of the digital community. When my ipod decided that it hated me and wanted to delete all my songs, I didn't bother finding them again on bit torrent. I just popped up itunes and bought the ones I'd enjoyed the most.
Don't get me wrong. I've been pirating since I owned a computer. My first experience was in sixth grade, trying to copy "Lemmings" from a disk that my friend had loaned me to my hard drive. I looked over my shoulder nervously for the rest of the day, just knowing that the FBI knew what I was doing and was going to break down the door and drag me off in chains like the dirty pirate I was. I remember furiously trying to drag audio file icons off of a cd onto my parents' Windows 3.1 desktop.
"Why the hell isn't this copying!"
"Maybe I should try it again. Drag. Drop."
"DAMMIT, I still have to have the cd in to listen!"
But, I've started to notice a trend in my own piracy: the pirated media somehow feels cheap. I didn't do anything to get it, so what should I care if I accidentally delete it? I didn't pay anything for this game...why should I bother to spend a lot of time playing it. These movies are silver CDs that say "Staples". It's not like I can display them proudly on my shelf or anything.
I also noticed that the sort of movies I downloaded were, for the most part, not movies that were really worth owning. I knew they were poor quality, and they weren't good enough for me to care that they were poor quality. I pirated stuff like "Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke" and "Event Horizon". I didn't pirate anything that would have been amazing and worth the money to be seen in the theatre, and stuff I pirated that I liked, I ended up buying.
This all leads to the conclusion that if there are other people like me, there are plenty of casual pirates who would be willing to buy movies, music, and games, if media was produced that was compelling enough to warrant being seen on the big-screen, played in surround sound, or displaying proudly in the box on your shelf. People buy stuff that is original, that stands out in their minds. They pirate things they view as "easy come, easy go."
People pirate media that they think is disposable. Stop creating disposable media, cookie cutter games, movies that lose nothing in low res (because there's nothing to lose), cds with one good song, and people will fork over their fifteen, thirty or fifty dollars for your product.

So now that I've confessed to my former life of sin, I'm sure that there is a record exec slinking in the shadows like Snideley Whiplash, ready to sue me for all I'm worth, and all the time, sermonizing about the set-hand who died from starvation last year because of my filthy ways, and of the orphan boom-boy who died, cold in the street because he couldn't afford a coat. Because of piracy.
I have no sympathy for Music, Film, and Game Companies when it comes to piracy. Sure, my views have changed a little because I've grown up, and also because I know how much work goes into producing even the crappiest of media But companies need to stop treating the symptoms and treat the cause of piracy, which is high prices, and content that people view as disposable.
The year there are no sequels of dramatizations of seventies tv shows is the year piracy gets blown out of the water.
And it'll also be a cold day in hell.