A merry Christmas in spite of all

[Making-of video]
Pinecone is CC by Menchi

Every year, come December, I do the same thing: I greet or say goodbye to people with a cheerful "Merry Christmas." And every year I find the same sad reality: less and less people correspond. (Two people total gave any sort of answer this year.)

The thing is, they don't say anything at all! They either completely ignore what I said, or are so taken aback by the the unexpected greeting, they can't even utter a grunt in response. Clearly, no one else has wished them any form of happy holidays before me, seeming to support what Bill Watterson wrote 20 or so years ago:

"This season gets less and less merry each year."

Filmed in front of a live audience

…not exactly because it's the season to be jolly.

You probably noticed my new avatar, which I made yesterday. If you saw it used in one of my comments on someone else's old post, you'll be wondering how I managed to use it before creating it. But the interesting thing about this avatar is not that I've been wanting to make it since July, it's that I created it while Livestreaming.

Resorting to image macros

I've always thought image macros were a rather cheap way to convey an idea. After all, you're taking something someone else has made, and merely changing the caption to fit your own devices. Wouldn't it be so much better if people could make their own things from scratch?

However, as a Computer Scientist, I've been taught that things need to be as efficient as possible, and anything unnecessary that gets in the way of that has to go. As a researcher, I've learned that strong emotions are, to put it bluntly, something that literally gets in your blood and has to be used up before you can continue whatever it was you were doing before you felt that way. As someone who writes on the internet, I know that people need to hear from you, and that these are the things they want to hear about. And finally, as an artist, I'm supposed to know that the best way to channel these emotions, is by creating something out of them them.

So yesterday, when I became so-furious-with-myself-I-just-could-have-killed-something at discovering what was wrong with the program I was writing, I made this:

Annoyed kitty image macro copyrighted by thekraidster567 ^{[it is?]}
Text by me

Delicious spam

by Neil Motteram. November 2, 2005; San Francisco, California.

Yesterday I deleted my first Spam comment. When I enabled the possibility to comment anonymously, I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I never thought I'd have to face it this soon.

What's this? An actual blog post?

Preliminary image. Will be finished later

Of course, I've never actually
taken apart a coin, so I don't know if
this is even possible…
Nor do I encourage you to try

For weeks, I haven’t been able to focus on my studies. The fact is, I keep worrying about money. Maybe It’s the fact that my scholarship wasn’t paid for two months. Maybe it’s the fact that three-quarters of the people I went to high school with have graduated from college and I haven’t. Maybe I’ve been reading too much on how people in their thirties and forties who don't have money get money. Maybe I've simply grown too old for the "college" life. Whichever it is, somehow, I can barely complete a simple math problem before my thoughts turn, in some form or another, to money.

The frustrating part is that I already know what I’m going to do for money once I graduate, and I know exactly how I’m going to do it, yet the questions keep coming back, haunting me like some undead monster. I crunch away at them, desperately fixing the numbers which are still vague to me, in hopes that the thoughts will finally go away and leave me alone!

But no luck

Small update: new avatar

Considering I'm in the middle of the "what's been keeping me busy" series, which is basically a long drawn-out apology for not having posted all summer, I thought it would be best to not create another cause to appologise for. Unfortunately, I don't have anything finished I can post yet. I was aiming for a Columbus Day special, but I didn't make it in time.

I did, however, add a new avatar to my collection recently, by making the second panel of Last year's Halloween story into one (shown on the left). I think it's pretty self explanatory: too many times, I've wanted to say something with a shrugging expression; now I can.

I doubt I'll be able to finish anything until the Christmas break, but I do hope I can, at least put one more of the "what's been keeping me busy" series.

As for what I've been doing after the summer break, hey, I have classes!

Fridge Logic

Originally drawn for
I hate long weekends

There are some things that just leave you thinking. Take my Independence day post for example. Very nice, very poetic, but a couple of days after posting it, I started wondering if the clothes I had chosen had other implications.

These kinds of considerations have long been known in the movie industry, and in 1958, they were given the name "icebox logic" by Alfred Hitchcock. In his own words, it's a scene [that] hits you after you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox. Of course, few people today call it "the icebox", so modern terminology refers to it as "fridge logic".

Indentured Servitude

(Or “What’s been keeping me busy, part 2”)

You may have noticed that, recurrently, the little box in the sidebar titled “My current situation,” not only displays the courses I’m taking, but also a cryptic “indentured to the library.” Today, I want to explain to you what on Earth that means.

When I originally started working for the library, I was given a contract that basically said “I agree to everything I have been told verbally.” I was told that I had to do 6 hours a week (for a dollar each) and that, if I didn’t do all of them, I could always do them next term. I was told that I would be paid per hour worked, and that, for the university’s accounting department, I would count as a TA.

Review: The Paper Wings podcast

Text-only version

Sometime in March, I was pointed to the Paper Wings Podcast. Hosted by Lora Innes and Chris Oatley, The podcast brands itself as “the show for visual storytellers” to “help [them] find the time and energy… to finish their personal project”. However, I didn’t think this was my kind of thing because, at the time, they were focusing on what people should do if they wanted to become full-time illustrators for a major corporation.

In June, I was pointed to it again, so I skeptically returned to the site. This time, their focus was on how to make time when you fell you had none. “This is exactly what I need!” I thought, so I downloaded the podcast. Ironically, I didn’t have time to listen to it until about three weeks later. See, I don’t have a portable mp3 player of any sort (that includes my cell phone, which won’t even let me download new ringtones to complement its default three horrible buzzings) so the only way I would be able to listen to it would be when I had my laptop out. Unfortunately, whenever I have my laptop out I’m writing in it, and I honestly can’t write and listen at the same time.

Community Service

(Or “What’s been keeping me busy, part 1”)

Like many American (and, indeed Pan-American) colleges, mine requires me to do some community service in order to graduate. Apparently this is an alien concept to Europeans so I’ll try to explain it briefly: Basically, I’m required to do work for free “for the benefit of the community”, in hopes that this will motivate me to do stuff for the places where I’ll live “for the benefit of the community”.

Now, before you rain suggestions on me like firefighters or soup kitchens, part of the catch is that the community service can’t be just any old volunteer work; it has to be a “service” registered with the university. There’s a bulletin board with all the options, as well as a web page, and I spent two weeks reading through them all. Turns out, 80% of the options require you to own a car (which, just like 60% of the student population, I don’t).

In Memoriam

To the brave souls who gave their life to save so many others, that fateful Monday, 10 years ago.

The Graduation Countdown

I had it all figured out. I only had Statistics, my thesis, and community service (required by a local law – or was it an ordinance?) and then I could graduate. I would do statistics during the summer of 2010, community service during the summer of 2011, and my thesis throughout the 2011 calendar year. There was plenty of leeway if anything went wrong. The plan was flawless!

…or so I thought.

Lost Etymology

On my twitter account, today's quote of the day reads as follows:

"Truth can be decieving" --John Loeffler

Meaning, "this doesn't necessarily imply what you think it does." Except that that can't possibly be the source.

I Hate Long Weekends!

Originally done out of
Stresssss!

Most people love long weekends; I don't. Long weekends for me are an opportunity; an opportunity I can never use.

It's always the same. I see the long weekend coming up on the calendar, and I start thinking of what I could do with that extra day (or days). Usually I settle on one thing; something that I know I can do in much less than a day, and then start doing it from Friday afteroon.

Except that it never gets done.

God Bless America

— source*

I'm pretty sure I can't be much more explicit than this. Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Associated avatars

*Note: when this was originally posted, the video was an embedded flash player. Now that flash has been discontinued, it has been replaced with a YouTube fan edit

Father's Day Special

Huh, I was so sure I had set this up to be posted automatically on Sunday. C'est la vie.

Avatar Story: Winter's End (Part 1)

⇤ Origins | ⇦ Previous | Text-only version | Latest ↠

Seeing as it's already June, I really should shed those winter clothes, shouldn't I? But to do that, I need to finish telling the Winter story, so let's get this show on the road.

Avatar Story – Winter's End Part 1: Gift Horse

This was supposed to go up on the day of the Epiphany (January 6)

Stresssss!

I haven’t felt stress –at all– for a very,very long time.

Review: Chim Chum and the Portly Samurai

Now that I’ve told you How I started reading webcomics, I can start doing reviews of the webcomics I read. I’m going to start with Adrian Ropp’s hilarious comic:

Why?


Why, you ask? Oh, uh… no reason.

3 new avatars

Take a good look at this image. Okay, I know there's not much to look at, but try to guess what it reminds you of. I'll give you a hint: it's something on this blog.

Now a Deviant

"Hey Diddle Diddle (because, let's face it, if a cat was given a fiddle, this is probably what he'd do with it)" was the first (and up to now, only) thing I drew specifically with the purpose of uploading it to DeviantArt.

So, yeah, I've created a DeviantArt account. When I started this blog, I was focused on telling two stories: the avatar story and the (as of yet unbegun) Jane's story. Every drawing I made, was a means unto that end. I was trying to work professionally; keeping to the clean, computer-made look. Whenever I did draw something on paper, it was as reference for when I "inked" it later on the computer, as happened with Jane.

But Christmas changed that.

After 22 years, I finally saw it

Text-only version

On Sunday, I finally saw Don Bluth's All Dogs Go To Heaven (henceforth ADG2H, because I'm in a bit of a rush). I had never seen it before: whenever it was in stores, I never had the money, and on TV they only ever showed All Dogs Go To Heaven 2^*. Since I "got" the jokes in ADG2H 2, I had, until now, considered my knowledge of that part of pop culture complete. After all, you're supposed to know what the first movie is about to "get" the second one, right?

But recently, Rick Griffin started a story arc explicitly referencing ADG2H on his webcomic Housepets!. Of course, there were many things I didn't get.

A watch from Heaven, WTF?

One year online

Text-only version

So this is it. Today this blog is officially one year old. Time to see what I've accomplished. Time to see where I'm headed.

…Time to do an insufferably cute drawing … and explain it.

What I gave my mother for Mother's Day

Text-only version

So, yeah, I sketched this in pencil, colored it on the computer, printed it, and gave it to my mother. It was wonderful to hear her laughter echoing through the house!

Taming the tweeter

Some of you have noticed that I've created a Twitter account. It's really nothing too elaborate; I mainly made it to be able to reply to tweets (up to now, I've been following several accounts by searching for the username every odd day). I did set up two "services": a "quote of the day" and a "twitter feed"

Say "bye-bye" to the "topics" page

I've decided to take the topics listing off of the page listing at the top.

About "text-only version"s

I've recently gone through all my old posts making sure the ones that can't have the alt text put as mouse-over text (mainly because if you put your mouse over them, that would get in the way of reading the speech bubbles) have a link to let you see the alt text through Google's wonderful text-only caching. These are seen as a link to the "text-only version" at the top-right of the post.

But why? Why did you do that?

Well, I thought it was funny

No artist's notes for this one. It just came to me and I drew it.

What's with the package?

Today is my birthday.

The Web Standards

Two weeks ago, I got a commission to design a website.
What? you do that too?
Oh, hush up.

I learned to do web pages back in the year 2000, when everyone thought frames and Flash™ would rule the web. The only other widely-known method to structure a web page was putting all the text in a table, and using its columns to put your stuff where you wanted it to be.

In January 2009, in one of my courses, we were assigned to create a website as part of a project, and asked to make sure the website was compliant with the web standards. This was the first time I had ever heard there was such a thing!

The Japan relief effort

Text-only version

To make things simpler

Text-only version

Hamelin's motto

Seal of Hamelin, depicting a grindstone.
Around the top, in German, is written
"Independent City of Hamelin."
Around the bottom, in Latin,
"Never dispute people who
study rodents."

I still remember when I discovered that Hamelin was real. I always thought the name had been invented for the Pied Piper fable, since it seemed like little more than random consonants.

Formally the große selbständige Stad das Hameln (or Greater Independent City of Hamelin) the town has actually founded way back in the 9^th century! The tale of the Pied Piper arose as an explanation for why, in 1284, the town had no children.

The people of Hamelin have taken the story of the Pied Piper to heart, and it has permeated every aspect of the city. Indeed, the entire economy of the city is based around tourism of people who come to see the place where the legend was born. Attempts were made to industrialize the city in the 1940s and 50s, but they all failed. This is actually what has allowed the city to stay preserved in its 13^th century state!

Perhaps the most visible influence is in the city's motto: Nunquam disputus rodentologist; commonly translated from Latin as "Don't argue with one who knows his rodents," showing that the people who wrote it didn't quite get the lesson from the Pied Piper's tale.

Though it's pretty handy for me, isn't it? After all, what I've done on this blog has made a rodentologist.

Ye Irish facepalm

St. Patrick's Day ended, and I was unable to make the last image for my St. Patrick's avatar. My schedule, my sleep debt, my phone, and certain callers all got together and "decided" to make this impossible.

St. Patrick's day avatars

Text-only version

Usually, this kind of joke would be explained by me saving over an old file, but that's not the case.

How I started reading webcomics

Yes, that's supposed to be me at that age.
Wasn't I cute?
No?
Okay, I suck at drawing children.

In About my display picture, I noted that I started reading webcomics in 2008. Those of you who read webcomics or know me from commenting on them are probably wondering how I could have lived before discovering them. Those of you who don't, are probably wondering how I got sucked into such a big and convoluted world.

To answer these questions we must go way, way back; back to when I was 10 years old.

Happy St. Patrick's day

Text-only version

Today, I'm commemorating St. Patrick's day with a strip from Tracy Butler's excellent comic Lackadaisy.

Modification to legal info

Just a brief note to say I modified the Privacy Policy and other legal info page.

Condolences

The earthquake caused an
explosion at an oil
refinery in the outskirts
of Tokyo. Photo by Craford
for Wikinews.

I just found out about the disaster in Japan, and would like to express my condolences to those there, or who know people there.

I don't have anything prepared for this (how could anyone anticipate this?) I feel stupid now for having invested so much effort on dedicating the day to something that happened nearly a decade ago.

In Memoriam

A los hombres y mujeres caídos en sus trabajos aquel jueves, siete años atrás.
(To the men and women lost at their jobs on that fateful Thursday, seven years ago).

Now we have Ads

Text-only version

The Leibovitz photos

Leibovitz sits in front of one of
her most famous creations

Annie Leibovitz made headlines last Friday with her awesome series of photographs of famous Disney films with live actors and actresses.

Leibovitz has been in the "too awesome for words" photography business since she got her degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and had already done a series of photographs in 2007 as part of the extended celebration of Disneyland's 50^th anniversary called "Year of a Million Dreams"*. So, the photos are basically really expensive advertisements that we've already seen before

This begs the question, why is this news?

Containing Awesomeness

The last line of my post from yesterday, states that you can't contain awesomeness. After a good night's sleep, this was the first image that the phrase brought to mind:

"Ha, ha. Very funny. And the meaning is…?"
Good question. If Bolt = awesomeness (which he indisputably does) I guess it means that you can contain awesomeness; it's just that, it will find a way out into the world anyway… somehow… even if it is by chance.

The Legend of Zelda: 25 years pushing the envelope

Detail of Ag+'s tribute to Zelda's 25^th
anniversary, drawn on the day of
the anniversary.
Full image | Making-of video.
(More information below.)

This is not the typical “Oh, I wish I could draw like that” post. Sure, Ag+’s work is too awesome for words and sure, I probably wouldn’t be able to draw like that (even if I had all the fancy tools ’e did), but the main body of this post will be dedicated to The Legend of Zelda; the reason why he did such a prodigious piece.
"What? But this is not a gaming blog!"
But that doesn't take away the merits of the series, nor of researching its history, so hush.

Origins

In 1983, Nintendo put all its cards on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES); confident that, if things didn’t go well, they could always sell it in the U.S. After all, Americans will buy anything, right?

Nineteen Eighty-Four saw the Great Video Game Crash. Americans had suddenly decided that all home consoles were equally bad. Plus, Apple was releasing its Macintosh that year: an affordable computer that was an actual computer –not a dial-up terminal– which you could actually use to make things; a computer where the floppy drive was not a separate box! If you could have that, why waste money on a limmited machine that could only run half a dozen games? The fact that American video-game companies were full of litigation costs to the can’t-afford-making-anything-new level, didn’t help matters (after all, Americans will also sue over any little thing).

So how does a big, video-game giant like Nintendo deal with a crisis like this?

The new Frenzy

(The title is obviously a reference to The Ophiuchus frenzy.)

Wednesday, February 16, 2011. 2:41 PM. The Computer Science student lounge.

A group of students are trying to make sense of the instructions to a Computer Networks exercise, when one of the guys' cell phones vibrates. The guy reaches for his cell phone and reads the text message.

"Hey," he announces, "you remember how the professor was saying there weren't enough IP addresses; that one day when our computers would try to connect to the Internet, they wouldn't be able to?"
"Yeah?" answers one of the girls, who had obviously heard the professor say that a million times.
"Well, it's happened. Just now. The professor says, 'do not turn your computers off' … they may not be able to connect afterwards."

"Preposterous," I thought. I immediately input "IP addresses" into Google news. I got only two results: a report from Cornell and business news. It obviously was the former, which had been published exactly two hours and one minute previously –while we had all been eating lunch.

Christmas story: Epilogue

This one was supposed to go up on Holy Innocents Day at the latest… which explains the coat in my apology, but not the pendant.

⇤ Origins | ⇦ Previous | Text-only version | Next ⇨ | Latest ↠

The Ophiuchus frenzy also got to me

I wrote the following on January 14. I didn't post it back then because I felt the need to apologize first.

I really hope I don't need
to explain why I put this
image here.

So, I was in the student lounge Friday morning, January 14, 10 a.m., when I overheard one guy tell another,
"Yo, you know what your sign is?"
"Duh, I do."
"Well, what is it?"
"Scorpio."
"Not anymore."
"Whaddaya men 'not any more'?"
"Your birthday's is November 30, right? The International Astronomy thingy is saying your sign's now Ophiuchus"
"What the hell is that?"


I immediately Googled "Zodiac" and saw the news story, already dead and buried by then, unfold before my eyes.

Pro Crass Ti Nation (or, the stealthy joke you probably missed)

In panels 8 and 9 of my apology, Jane comes in to whack me with a book.

"I can see that. The question is 'why?'"
Well, she's an avid reader and the rolling pin was not at hand.
"What? No! I mean why does she– You did that on purpose, didn't you?"

The thing is, having decided she was going to hit me with a book, for it to really look like a book it had to have a title, and a back-cover description. The first thing that came to mind was calling it "Light readings: an anthology." This thought lasted about five seconds, when I thought that it would be infinitely more funny if she would chatize me for not focussing on my work if the book were titled "Procrastination."

New Avatars

I've made a set of avatars to go along with the apology which I'm now using when commenting. (That is, avatars using the new winter coat I designed.) Of course, they also go with the subsequent, prequelling explanations. Read those last three words again; they make all the sense in the world.

What doesn't make sense is where I show him carrying the torch. It doesn't make sense because he dropped it when he had to run off at the start of the Christmas Story. However, until I get around to making new ones, this will be what I'll be using.

An apology

Text-only version