Another lovely, courtesy of Arica's scanner.

More art;

It's nice to not be overwhelmed by disappointments when they happen now. I'm too busy and too reserved to put myself into anything as fully as I once did...but I wish I didn't have to guard myself this way.

I really miss Erica.

Oh, right, I went to Blizzcon! If you don't know or care, Blizzcon is the holy grail of some gaming nerds enthusiasts with the money and social skills to leave the basement once in a while. You have to eat a few thousand Wonka bars to get a ticket, and since neither I nor anyone I know has ever been able to get in, I could hardly resist the chance, even if it was thinly-veiled industry scalping with no goodie bag (the contents of which were selling for more than the tickets).

Unsurprising that this was the largest one yet, with one area each for Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo, plus a main stage for the larger events like the costume contest and the most popular discussions, like raiding in Cataclysm. All of the main lights were off. There were a few smaller displays like concept and fan art, some vendor booths, and a relatively small shopping area where I picked up a plush Murloc for a certain lady friend ----->

(that's the murloc, not the lady friend)

For all the fanfare about the thing, most of it is waiting in line. All the vendors have booth games in various flavors of goofy, with minor prizes like a patch or hat, although some were giving out ingame pets. Starcraft was a lot of fun, too bad the Protoss campaign will be released last, as much as I love the liquor-soaked space cowboys, and took my picture with Kerrigans' un-zerged ass (the only part of her still normal, apparently).

Diablo was fantastically gory and dark. After finding a scantily-clad cult victim in the desert, my "escort" quest lasted about ten seconds before she started barfing many times her body weight in pastel blue goo. I was expecting her to transform into something hideous, but she just exploded instead.

Cataclysm is probably going to get me back into WoW for..what..the fourth time? I'm not sure about some of the new class selections, and goblins were a bit unimpressive...but as much as I hate to admit it, Worgen would make me play Alliance. They, and Gilneas, have a wonderfully gothic design with more regal, Victorian inspirations than the Forsaken. Mostly they're going to be fun to draw for the art exchange.

As if it wasn't summer enough already, my computer can barely contain the Mephistophelean energies required to power it, so it keeps my room warm well into the evening. By warm I mean hot.


Forgot to update on that warcraft pinup I sketched a few months ago.


( cut for full size spacegoats )

Small chance of Comic Con on Sunday...people who know people might find a ticket that fell off a truck.

Still here.

Women are often horrifying.

Thought my medical was complete; it isn't, gotta get an eye exam, which I wouldn't have had the money to take last month anyway, but now there's no openings for two weeks plus change. Cancellation list opening popped up yesterday, but I was at work - ironically enough, the overtime money from that day should exactly cover the cost of the exam.

Mostly I'm just anxious about the four-month lifetime of my conditional employment; if I get the testing completed within that time, there's still the conditions of the money and space being available for new hires...so there's always the dismal prospect of passing all the tests, but budget problems or cuts leaving no room to hire me.

I probably shouldn't have mentioned any of this to Starbucks or Co-op. It seems like it's done nothing but get me in trouble, as far as presumptions of my work ethic or the liability of trusting too much to someone who's potentially going to leave. I know that technically makes business sense, and I'm not really in a position to dictate business to anyone who isn't hiring me for it. I can't really criticize, for lack of authority for it...I do wish I'd be recognized for the intent my work evidences. It gets tiresome, being treated like a child and given no way or goal of proving that you aren't. Should bring this up soon.

Hmm. Interesting points of reading. I have so many things to do and so little to stop me from doing them.

Done with Starbucks. G'bye free coffee. Boo hoo. Not really.
Done with medical and psych exam. Almost turned out to be colorblind. Am not actually colorblind. Also do not believe spirits posess me, nor is anyone trying to poison me, nor do I think all Mexicans are lazy. They asked.
Alliesaurus is really cute and fun to be with and doesn't appear to be crazy yet. Cautious optimism. And smooches. Really good ones.
Warcraft art exchange sketch done. Bwa.

Well, Starbucks has effectively lost its charm. I'm noticing a pattern in my jobs where I feel like I'm doing my work just fine, but not being recognized for it, and those who have a problem with my work don't say so. Eventually I get to the point, like right now, where I start second-guessing whether I'm considered useful, and something that should be a simple job becomes more and more socially difficult because half of my overhead are so feather-triggered and defensive, I feel like I need to do my job AND theirs to keep them from flying off to the manager with stories about me. Either that or I need to get to the manager first and be the one telling the stories. I'm starting to think that I either come off as too aggressive to bargain with, or if there really are that many people in these positions who think that telling stories is more effective than giving an instruction.

Only, like, the best (second) date ever. Damn. I think Miss Am-i-pregnant-bawwww was like...the final karmic straw to see how much I could put up with before life relented and stopped being a douche.

Rescheduled my medical for Monday the 2nd, since last week I was a half-slept mess, and didn't really need 5 hours of turning my head and coughing, followed by work and....work. Yeah. So next week.

I'm not sure how much to write in here anymore, lately I've been thinking of how odd it is that so much of our correspondence is on the internet or in a hard drive, nothing really substantial or physical...I'm thinking I'll be writing more by hand, although it takes forever, I write differently and my penmanship leaves something to be desired.

I really really need a road trip.

Tuesday is my medical. LAPD offered me a job if I pass it and my background checks out. As this becomes more substantial and realistic, it gets progressively weirder to think of myself in uniform.

Yesterday was an...interesting date. Within ten minutes of meeting me, she was crying and worrying aloud that her last date had gotten her pregnant or infected. My better judgment should have called it off there, but I wanted to go hiking after spending the time to clean my car, shave my head, and drive fifty miles, even if it was with someone who doesn't consider shaving, bathing, or wearing date-appropriate clothes to be obligatory. No, I did not see this coming. Fortunately there was enough to talk about that didn't drive me into a murderous rage, (although she did drop a "fucking cops" rant in there, to which i was silent) and she knew before we were done that this was going nowhere. We finished our lunch and I took her back to her car, but not before stopping by a drug store for her to buy a pregnancy test.

Sadly this is pretty much par for the course when it comes to LA girls I meet. I'm starting to think that I either don't pick up on, or don't listen to, the warning signs before I end up spending a day wallowing in their misery.

I'm torn between finding another place deeper in the canyons, or going out towards Pasadena. I have about three months before the managers leave, and this place turns into the gestapo headquarters.

2009? k.

Passed the polygraph, but I'm not so sure about the interview. At least I don't have that domestic abuse/felonies thing hanging over me.

It's absurdly difficult to meet anyone new. Strike that. It's easy to meet new people, it's absurdly difficult to find anyone worth keeping up conversation with, or that shares the interest. Admittedly my most social situations are in Beverly Hills, where I wouldn't want to know most of the people there anyway, or at goth clubs, which is kinda self explanatory. Goth goths are goth.

Hm journaling continues later, people are here and cats are shenaniganating.

I keep intending to write with more prose and less point-by-point detail, but I'm sick and busy so it'll have to wait.

Last of my interviews are this week, I should know if I'm hired by February. Meanwhile the frequency and hotness of the booty factor at my jobs keep me entertained and my bloodlust sated. Please, ladies, one at a time.

Speaking of bloodlust, I kinda miss warcraft. This time last year was the peak of our battlegrounds guild. I don't miss it enough to go back though. That and I'm sure shaman tactics are nowhere near what they were when I rolled Volaju, let alone 29s themselves. I didn't even bother to check if retadins were fixed or not, or if they just rape everything by looking at it the way they did in 60s.

I don't even know how that got past Beta, but that's another story. I mean with rogues I can at least give them credit for being sneaky, hunters for being ritually OP, but retadins? Stun. Die. Stun. Die. O noes I are hit! *bubble* roflololol.

Probably our single best fight (best in terms of skill, not fun, like emote-conversations with a hunter hiding on our roof, or finding that the pally i had on perma-purge was having an explosive fit about me in the forums) was me and Cumber, another 29 sham, and two drae 29 pallies, one holy, one ret. Ret would beat the tar out of people, and if either took too much damage, they just bubbled and reset. Took everything we had but finally just beat the retadin so hard the healer ran out of mana, and after that you could practically see their frustration while they wiggled around in our pair of earthbinds as the team ran caps behind them.

*sigh*

That Rule of Threes thing in an earlier post seems generally applicable to women too.

Attractive, single, sane, pick two.

Nothing particular inspiring the commentary, other than running my hand under the faucet of action-versus-words to see if the tap is still cold. Yep.

Starbucks is pretty much what one would expect, my coworkers being the saving grace in the face of what would otherwise be fairly boring. The 10% of the customers that are really nice mostly make up for the 10% that are determined to be unhappy, and the ones that are just creepy and think their $3.50 is buying them espresso shots and an invitation to a birthday party. More inspiration for my book...once there's money for interviews.

Insurance job is similar - good coworkers, very boring work, day's over fairly quick. At least my expenses will be taken care of, and my personal interests will be more focused because of the limited time to pursue them. I'm excited about drawing again and might actually be able to make some money off of it if I play things on my terms.

I think this is the first 20% of a series of things that will accumulate into a total improvement in my life and satisfaction, rather than a single thing out of my control as has usually been the case before. That might also be me attempting to explain why I can't think of the other thing I was meaning to write about.

My LAPD ridealong is a week from tonight...if I die you'll know why.

It's been raining nonstop for a couple hours now, I loves it.

Next week starts my desk job at the insurance company, and this week I started at Starbucks. I considered not mentioning it to people, but what do I care. I like coffee, and it's a job, one that I have at least some personal interest in, and anything to get me through this economy is a welcome opportunity. I actually ran out of places to apply to near my apartment; everyone is either full, or not hiring. Hollywood simply has too many people to support all of them when money is tight and people cut back on their wants. Trickle-down economics sure works in reverse.

I'm actually at a store in Beverly Hills, supposedly one of the busiest, and the most prone to celebrity sightings, so I expect that part to be exceptionally lulzy and provide conversation fodder. At the very least, getting used to talking to people I otherwise can't stand should be a good practice for the PD, assuming I hear back from them by the schedule they advertise.

Also, my relationship with...well, relationships, seems to go something like this;
ME: You know what, fuck a duck, I've had enough of this shit for a while. Life, I ain't playng your games until you stop cheating. Stop sending me the carnival freakshow or I'll just marry my hand when I turn 30.
LIFE: Mmmk. Oh, hey, what's that over there?
ME: I'm not falling for that.
LIFE: Then you'll miss the boobs.
ME: Boobs?? Where??
....
...goddammit.
LIFE: No, Kirk, you can't get away! HAHHHHHhhhhhh

"I look'd round me and made overtures of acquaintance in other places; but soon found that, the business of a printer being generally thought a poor one, I was not to expect money with a wife, unless with such a one as I should not otherwise think agreeable. In the mean time, that hard-to-be-governed passion of youth hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it."

-from Ben Franklin's autobiography. It's always fun to find that your exact predicament has been repeated throughout history (except for the prostitute part...I'm not that bad yet), and usually articulated more concisely and effectively than the muddled thoughts you have on it in the present.

Had an idea for a book, the Book of What Not to Do. Every girl (and some guys) that I know have plenty of stories ranging from stalkers to terrible one-liners, behaviors which despite being transparently ineffective to people like us, are still entertaining. I figure it can be a combination of retardedly funny stories and an insight into why people behave obsessively and/or obliviously to the signs we think we're giving them, how the internet is affecting it, and how to deal with it.

I've had a string of poor luck with new beers. I make a point of trying ones I haven't seen when I'm at TJ's or Ralphs, and I keep picking up cheap, tasteless stuff, like "Simpler Times", which apparently equates simplicity with cardboard. Oh well, it's the kind of beer you buy when you just want to have a beer around, not wax poetic about its quality.

Done with my LAPD applications, passed everything that's passable so far. Now I just wait for them to call me, go to a meet-and-greet (hate that phrase) on thursday, and keep attending CAP, although this will be the second week I weasel out of it, so maybe I should phrase that as "keep intending to attend CAP".

Picked up work, starting in December, doing desk and phones at an insurance company, and also a part-time thing at Starbucks, depending upon if or when they find a store that needs someone with my availability. I figure it'll look good resume-wise, having a service job that I can excel at, to make up for the skeezy jobs I've had in the last year, and also I'll finally get to make coffee professionally rather than just guessing. Not to mention that the background checks will probably kick in just in time for me to have an actual performance record at these places.

Taking a trip to Monterey before work starts, since it's the last time I'll have a chunk of free time for a while. There's also fossils, a girl (who besides being attractive, is pursuing an MA in linguistics, which is what I want) and I haven't been there. It's about as far as Yosemite, but I wanna save that trip for a time when I have someone to take. Most likely moving north of the hills early next year with Dana, it'll be nice having someone around again. I've gotten much too used to living alone and having to drive 20 miles to do anything with someone, and everyone in these apartments is having babies.

So, to continue with my string of grouchy posts, the art industry sucks.

There's a maxim or rule or something we learned at Otis about how there's three desirable factors in any project; getting it done fast, getting it done well(or high quality), and getting it done cheap. However, you can only pick two of those things - the third will necessarily be the reverse...just business. Likewise, for me, I had three desirables in my career; fair pay (meaning pay proportional to the amount and difficulty of the work), a good working environment, and a sense of accomplishment. In the last three years of work, I've been lucky to have even one of these things in any given job.

There's a book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, that talks about how the common difficulty with drawing for many children stems from the stimulation of the left-brain in pursuit of necessary skills like writing and reading, at the expense of right-brain functions like drawing. Anyone can draw, anyone can look at a piece of art and tell that something is or isn't "right" with it, but they can't necessarily tell you why, because their right-brain skills are undeveloped. Nevertheless, there's a sense of "I could do that if I really tried", and the truth is that they can. I think this leads to the attitudes I've experienced, that art is a "playtime" career. Without explicitly saying so, many employers who aren't artists themselves apparently think there's nothing to it...it's the same as asking your friend to draw Darth Vader in the margins of your notebook. Nearly everyone I freelanced for got all wide-eyed and quiet when I started talking about the rigors of the industry and the sort of things to anticipate that they'd never even heard of. Didn't get me higher pay, though.

Honestly I can't blame them. I didn't really work as hard at Otis as I could have, and I knew it at the time too. Even going into school, I had doubts about this as a career. Why was I doing it? Would it contribute something worthwhile? How could I compare this to a civil service job and tell myself it was worthwhile? I was never a gungho artist like many of my contemporaries whose work I admire, and it seems to come to them as easily as writing does to me. As I was originally interested in art as a more multi-media sort of facet of my creativities and interests, I really shouldn't be ignoring my other abilities in favor of my least-developed one. Most of the historical figures I admired were multi-talented people who included drawing and writing among many other pursuits.

As it stands, I have WAY more fun drawing for myself; I just don't draw well enough, or fast enough, to be able to draw other people's stuff for money. Doesn't help that the economy is trashed, and the available positions are going to people with years of experience, for $10 an hour. Maybe I went to the wrong school, or went too soon. Guess I'll never know, because I really have no intention of jumping back onto the freeway to get hit by cars over and over as I skirt the line between poverty and self-respect.

Anyway I'm getting back into linguistics, although that's going to require a Master's, which can't start any sooner than 2010. I'd like to end up doing work for the State, Justice or Defense Department. In the meantime I'm about halfway through the application process for the LAPD. More on that later. Hopefully I can pick up something secretarial, or at Starbucks, before the end of the month, because I ain't got no money.

I find very little humor in the coincidence of my camera's memory card disappearing sometime after having a chat with a certain girl who seems unable to separate her emotions from her responsibilities at work. And here I thought I'd had the last word. I mean, if I'm going to be demonized, I like to at least earn it...then again, a freshly-baked college kitten like herself tends to be too self-absorbed to notice the harbingers of my displeasure.

Speaking of X chromosomes, I continue to boggle at my tendancy to attract women who either burst into conniptions, or unexpectedly decide to spend a very long time practicing their impression of a tree stump.

"I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a $10 trillion debt in a Republican administration? How have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration? If we're talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party at the time had been representing," Palin said in a story published Sunday.

No, really?
This woman is such a mystery to me. She IS capable of intelligent discourse, and she obvious has a grasp on sentiments and motivations other than her own and that of her constituency...which is why it's all the more confusing that she seems to have done nothing but pander to her stereotypes and read her teleprompter lines through the entirety of the campaign. Just like with the Democrats in 2004, this campaign's Republicans couldn't choose between the party core and the 20-40% swing voters that actually decide the elections. I would've voted for McCain in the primaries in 2000, and it's disheartening to see how weak he became after he decided to play the game and please everyone who asked of him. Barring a disastrous Obama presidency, the Bush administrations are going to leave a mark that's pretty long-lasting if the implications Palin suggested are true, and I suspect they are. Oh well. Bull Moose in '12.

(Oh and girls are pretty and I like dates and stuff 'specially when they're shy cuz we get along and talk about weird things like vampires and nuclear war and tim burton. kbye)