The worst part is realizing that there’s absolutely nothing you can do to change anything.

The only thing to do now is create memories of better times.

Anyone have any fun plans this weekend?

Social commentary goes here.

I can’t stop fucking with things. Just spent about an hour setting up my tumblr layout for something I’m not even going to really use that much.

One of my earliest OCs from when I first started drawing. Redesigning her in Adobe Illustrator. Quitting for now since I probably don’t know enough about real anatomy to make this look how I want yet. Vector is really good for coming back to something later to make changes if you want.

For interest, here’s the preliminary sketch I did on paper before transferring. Illustrator really makes a difference.

She’s standing beside another one of my favorite OCs, the puppet Magpie, who was created by an insane reverend to teach children about religion. Never mind that according to the scriptures artificial beings have no soul.

Dreamed I was living in a flooded city. Houses and buildings all half submerged; people tried to stay in the upper levels where it was somewhat dry but that wasn’t always an option. There was a small island some miles away, and the people from it considered themselves the last bastion of society, protecting the world from the degeneracy of eating fish; so they would periodically raid the city, killing any of the inhabitants they found. There were also pirates, like the somali kind, that would periodically come in, but they were more harmless. They were searching the ruins for anything useful, but we’d already picked over it really well and taken everything.

It was often necessary to hide in under the water, with a thin piece of medical tubing used as a snorkel. The raiders had no idea how many of us there really were, beleiving us to be a small population in the tens… we were actually in the thousands. A curious and weird girl from the island ended up staying with my group, and when we hid under the water, she talked incessantly about what a turn-on it was what we were doing. No idea why, but she threatened to give away our position.

During a salvage operation once I ran across a hornet’s nest in an old apiary. Nobody had ever seen bees, and so thought they were some kind of magic evil creature.

I snuck onto the island near the end of the dream, and in a place that looked like a college campus, buildings with nothing but windows and manicured gardens, the leader of the island dwellers, dressed in a suit and tie, explained the hatred of us… All we had to eat was fish, he reasoned, so we must be evil hateful creatures. Fish is full of toxins he said. He had a bunch of sardines laid out on a plate… “can you IMAGINE eating this? I mean seriously! This is just awful guys! Just awful!” He picked up a fork with a little chunk of fish on the end… “This is just bad guys!” and he kicked the table over, breaking the plate of sardines on the floor. Everyone then started smashing things, a revelry of anger.

VOX is the player I’ve been looking for. It mimics all the best features of the golden age of MP3 players… Very simple ad-hoc playlist creation, a neat interface, audio plug-ins, sits in the corner of your screen unobtrusively. This is the player for people who actually DO things on their computer.

I’ve been following it since early alpha, and I have to say the improvements they introduced in their beta version just beat the shit out of iTunes.

iTunes has always been a sore place for me anyway. Besides being big and ugly, it restricts how you can do things. Sure, you can make playlists, sure you can search your music like it’s an enterprise database. But it lacks real integration with any workflow outside itself. Under its purview, you will think the iTunes way, you will not leave the apple walled garden. Party mix is all you really need. What made this all the more frustrating that starting in 2006 up until now, nobody ever seemed interested in working on an alternative. iTunes was good enough. Even asking about it, you’d just get a kind of puzzled response, “wha… why u no thnak auple 4 itoones?”

Never mind that it’s a corporate fucking wasteland, every interface element designed to shepherd you over to the iTunes store to spend ever more money on stupid teenybopper shit you’ll grow to hate in a week.

I remember the late ’90s, when Nullsoft was still an independent company. I was still a kid back then, barely a decade of experience behind me. I remember checking Winamp.com regularly for new stuff; it simply burgeoned with user-generated media-convergent creativity. MP3s from indie artists, plugins, skins, visualizations were on offer every day, for free, from people who were just doing what they felt like. This was the only time probably in human history that programmers seemed cool. As if they’d go on tour to promote their new incremental version, having to hire goons to stand between them and the throngs of groupies. It’s hilarious to think about it now, but software seemed like something important. It seemed like a way someone could define themselves, just as legitimately as any other art.

My parents weren’t Mac people, so I didn’t know about Audion, but as far as I’ve read the story was the same with it.

Winamp went on to get bought out by AOL, and while they’ve kept the core of the player intact, it hasn’t aged well. More importantly, it lost its spirit, and nobody with the same panache ever came along to take up the mantle. VOX isn’t there yet, and maybe they’re not trying to be. It’s probably impossible to ever reclaim those glory days. But the people at Coppertino must have come up at the same time I did, must be chasing the same nostalgia.

Pastel on colored art paper

Colored pencil. In progress.

This will be a notes post for a short story I’m writing. To be updated sporadically.

“I’ve never stuck around for this part,” he said, looking through me as dying guys often do. “This feeling… I feel so warm.”
“So, is this it for you?” I asked “is this your last body?”
He focused on me for a second, “That’s right colonel. It looks like you got me for real this time, ” he trailed off.
“For the last time, I’m not a colonel!” I growled at him, and brought my fist down on his neck in anger, but it was too late. His body rebounded like a punched log. He lay there, in the shattered rebar and concrete, now a part of the rubble. They say the light leaves your eyes when you die, but that’s far to kind a way to describe it. What really happens is your muscles all relax, your body no longer driven as a slave to the mind. All recognition and cogniscience gone forever. Your eyes become glassy, and I could smell the faint odor of feces.
So this is what a dead lockstep looks like, I thought to myself. They always ran after you killed one or two of their clones, the cowards. Called it a “tactical retreat.” But this Emery. He came at me with everything he had. He didn’t fear death. He was already dead the moment he set foot on he battlefield. The rest was just deciding how much damage he did before he dropped.
I stooped down, embraced his corpse and cried like a faggot. Because what I was seeing was far too beautiful to happen to scum like him. As far back as I can remember, I could never die before setting foot on the battlefield.