Well, accomplishments for today... Three new comics. Completion of Tron 2.o, come monday I'll write a review to the best of my abilities. Possibly alienating a very good friend and seperating myself forever from someone I thought I would never stop being friends with. Practicing my arnis martial arts till my thumbs blister. Beating mission 2 of F-Zero on Very Hard mode. A fourth and fifth comic still on paper. And the night is still young, it's only 9, and I'm wide awake. I think I'll go out and practice till my blisters break, because I didn't do enough footwork. I really want to box... I don't have a punching bag so I can't practice my boxing against that, maybe one of my friends will be up for some one on one with the gloves on. I've discovered I have a lot of inner agression and frankly I wouldn't mind waking up tomorrow with a million bruises and not being able to breath right for a week. For me that's kindof like prayer. I pray too, but when I pray it isn't this all consuming flame inside of me like these things are, I can leave behind and do something till I break and can't do it anymore. Jumping off a cliff is like prayer, falling out of a tree, a punch in the face, a car wreck. Frankly I'm not stupid enough to pray in the really dangerous ways, of those Ive only done 3 and only one voluntarily. I remember my last car wreck, I was facing the other way before I even knew what was happening, it took forever. When I got out of the car I could barely stand up and I was shaking. I want to not be able to stand up right now. I want to run till my body tingles and I can't breath, I want to fall on the grass and hurt. I want to get lost in the woods and I want to be afraid I'll never go home again. I want to get lost at sea and wreck on a beach. I want to do something thats so consuming that I stop feeling everything else. That's how I want to pray right now.

Wow, 3 days of productivity and I've produced 5 comic strips that have yet to be inked and loaded online. Fair warning they don't all make sense, but they make me laugh and that is what I selfishly consider to be important. Can you blame me? When I'm done with them, probably sometime this weekend I'll post them where you can find them. I think there's like a grand total of 3 people who care that I draw them... and two of them are me. Oh well, I don't have much else to say other than I'm proud of myself....

Well, goodbye Zac. It's been fun, and we'll see you when you get back. We'll poor out a bottle of rum for you. Don't let Star Wars: Galaxies get you kicked out.

My mom told me I need to give her 500 a month to keep the house, I told her yes, but I can't afford that. I barely scrape by as it is with all my other bills, 250 to her, 100 insurance, 100 for the truck, 50 for the cable and often 70 for the cell phone. Which my mother had gotten me to let her get a phone on, but then lied to me and said her sprint contract was 3 year and I was lucky that Verizon let me cancel her and waved the cancelation fee. And I got a comic strip out of listening to their on hold messages. It had one of the most amusing messages I've ever heard and I HAVE to draw a comic about it. So it's the street or poverty in an apartment with no college.

Good news: In the past 2 days I've drawn 3 comics, how cool is that? And tomorrow I could be reviewing Tron 2.o. It's been a genuinely productive week with writing and drawing on a daily basis, I've started exercising and practicing my martial arts. And to top it off I've STILL had time for SWG and Tron. Go figure, right? Not to mention my awesome sunday, I need to live every week like this week.

I think I'll be looking for an apartment soon maybe, honestly my only requirement is that it has cable or dsl internet connection so that i can run my webpage with my work on it.

All I have to say as a self concerned individual who is starting to think that he can't afford to even APPLY at the art institute?

When you're blue
and you don't know where to go to
why dont you go where fasion sits
Puttin' on the Ritz!

What do you know, I actually saw fit to draw two comics that are not yet on my comics page. Frankly I've been lax, cause I have FOUR comics now that I have yet to ink and post. I'm the perfect example of a genetically engineered slacker. A normal human couldn't procrastinate like me if they tried, I'm that good at it. You see this? Why didn't I post this earlier? Ask yourself, how did it take me an hour to write this paragraph? Oh well, I'd change, but there's plenty of time to change later and I don't feel like working on it today.

I started writing a whole new story that I really like that I want to set in a desert with a very strong and tribal theme that I've always wanted to use in a story since I first listened to the Mechwarrior 2 music. There's an unspoken passion in tribalism that maybe I'm imagining, it's one of the things that makes stories like the last of the mohicans good. I really want to work in the theme of history in the land you walk on, only from a different perspective, while in last of the mohicans they spoke of the new world wanding over where they once walked my story will focus on characters striving to remember all of those who have walked before them in everything they do. I thought a post nuclear setting would be good when my friend Jason told me he was making a Fallout comic, and I even considered using the Fallout universe myself, but decided against it in the end. Well, maybe I've decided. I'm very uncertain about these things. Sometimes I feel the only thing missing from books is you can't hear the music the author was hearing when they wrote it.

Tron 2.o IS the best game I've played this year. Nothing short of stunning, when it's not frustrating anyway. The problem comes from some very steep dificulty that comes out of nowhere in the gameplay, even on easy. And not frustrating because you arent good enough, it feels frustrating because at times it is just random and when you play you need to do something different and it will kill you if you take too long. It ends up being fun though, the jumping puzzles are even more natural than the ones in half life and even feel like you could play through the game without half of them if you dont feel like exploring, but JEEZ if you want this game so bad why don't you want to explore?

Meanwhile I've been compulsively singing Puttin' on the Ritz.

If you're blue and you don't know,
Where to go to, why don't you go,
Where fashion sits?
Puttin' On The Ritz.
Different types, who wear a day,
Co-pants with stripes, and cut away,
Coat, perfect fits?
Puttin' On The Ritz.

Dressed up like a million dollar trooper,
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper.
Super-duper!

Come, let's mix where Rockerfellas,
Walk with sticks, or umbrellas,
In their mitts.
Puttin' On The Ritz.
Spangled gowns upon a beauty of hand-me-downs, on clown and cutie,
All misfits.
Puttin' On The Ritz.

Have you seen the well to do?
Up and down Park Avenue?
On that famous thoroughfare,
With their noses in the air?
High hats and arrowed collars,
Wide spats and fifteen dollars.
Spending every dime,
For a wonderful time!

Tips his hat just like an English chappie,
To a lady with the wealthy happy.
Very Snappy!

You'll declare it's simply topping,
To be there, and hear them swapping,
Smart titbits.
Puttin' On The Ritz.
Puttin' On The Ritz.
Puttin' On The Ritz!!

It's a pretty good day. Ive been playing a ton of Tron 2.o and I am thoroughly impressed. The game has aesthetic beauty, the feel of the movie, and evolved gameplay that feels somewhere between Deus Ex and half life. It's not quite as good as either one, it lacks the pure action of half life and the intense narative of Deus Ex, but on its own it achieves its' own greatness.

I tried reading another book by Robert Anton Wilson, I can't help that I think the guys' writing just sucks. I know his work is well loved, and has inspired some inherently good things. But when I read his writing I'm left with something very disjointed and superficial and I just can't appreciate something with that little real substance that's that gratuitous. And Schrodinger's Cat isn't any better, well not a lot better. Anyway, so I quit reading it after about 30 minutes and said I can write better than that. And I started trying, but frankly I can't write nearly as MUCH as that. I just don't have the focus, I really need to develope it. And it makes me sick every time I look at the list of things that I started writing got maybe a chapter or two of and just never touched again, it's like my art and it makes me sick with myself. I hope no one reads this but I'm pretty sure someone will, my best hope is to update again and just hope no one looks through my archive.

I got rid of my broken bed last night, my mom found someone who wanted it and so I moved it there and after work I'm going there to put it together cause we forgot the bolts and screws. Cest' la vie. Soon I'll have a comfortable couch to sleep on, not that I wasn't sleeping on it already, now it will just be in my room. I just started feeling really bad again... post and publish.

Well, I called it, friday night rocked hard, a grand total of some eleven odd guests were there all at one time, there was Super Smash bros. and there was battlegrounds, but by saturday there was nothing but Star Wars Galaxies... the hamburgers were amazing and so were the hotdogs and grilling them was fun. I feel really sick inside though, saturday, amid all the fun a whole bunch of personal shit hit the fan for me. I found out that two of the friends I know and generally consider to be healthy people were real dumbasses, and went and smoked weed with some of the guests who are not regulars at my residence, ditching real tobacco in my wastebasket for my mother to find. It felt kinda like betrayal and I am pissed at both of them. I found out right after the burgers are done so after the delicious chewing and savoring the flavor mine didn't sit well. Then later that day something really awesome happened during the downtime, Gabby got back from camp and was online. I had company so I didn't have much time, or even the emotional capacity, to stay online and talk to her much longer than to find out that she had met a great guy at camp. I don't know if they started getting serious at camp, or if it's still a good friends but maybe hope for more thing, or if he had just asked her out. She was very sketchy about it, I'm pretty happy for her, she hasn't had a whole lot of people in her life for about a year or so now. Well, I got Tron 2.0 when we went to get Joe his copy of Galaxies... which in retrospect made me feel like crap. I have more important stuff to do that game. It's days like this I'm tempted to swear off gaming. Even if the things I want to do are just other hobbies.

Jason called again this weekend, last time he called was the weekend of my first blog post. That guy has got a knack for calling when I have 10 people at my house and at least 3 vying for my attention because we're on the same team in battlegrounds or we're trying to hunt in galaxies or we need to move the frontline up in DoD (which somewhat surprisingly got no play whatsoever this weekend) and maybe someone needs to know where the food is and someone is just trying to talk to me and I'm trying to pay attention to the phone. Eveything outside oft he phone blends together and is possible, add the phone in and you have a natural skill to block out the rest of the world while you communicate and its like havock, no one knows if youre talking to the phone or them, though we did get a little bit of good talking in about comics.

Then everything broke up and went home about 2 a.m. and I kept on till 4 and woke up at 10 and played Tron till it was time to go to my dad's house at 3:30 where I spent some quality time with his cat while I talked with him. If it hadn't been for the kitty in my lap... sigh... sometimes you just feel bad and you can't put why into words. After talking with my dad about school and college we went to go see Pirates of the Caribbean, the best movie of the summer if you haven't seen it yet. I hope to god they don't make a sequel. It was great fun and I started to feel better, both my dad and his lovely wife Mary Ellen enjoyed the movie and afterward they treated me to one of the best restaurants I've been to in a [i]very[/i] long time, H.B.'s Japanese Steak house. It's of the variety where you get to watch the chef prepare your meal for you at a table of like 3 or four tables and they do all sorts of fun things like juggling spinning eggs on their spatulla and setting fire to hot table surface or making a fire spewing volcano out of a stack of grilling onions. The food melted in my mouth and when I looked at the prices on the menu I realized I could afford to go there on my own even as the food was not overly expensive but rather extremely fair despite the service. While we were there my dad talked to me some more about school... and then later when we got home too. It's a subject that tears me up inside. I don't know what I want to do and that worries me because I feel like I should be doing something not just for a hobby.

Partly I really love where I am in life, I am very happy. Maybe I'm too comfortable and I need to shake up my life a little bit. I don't know and frankly... it's not easy to think about let alone talk about because of the great difficulty of communicating one's thoughts.

I probably have a lot more to say, but I'm not going to, it hurts to share and I've shared the equivilent of a knife to my abdomen here. I'm depressed and I feel like crap. I'll try to write tomorrow.

Today the LAN party begins, Mike and Zac are bringing their machines over for one last lan before Zac head off to college. He'll do awesome there, we all know he will and this will be our last goodbye, along with hotdogs and hamburgers grilled outside on my personal grill. Hell, maybe I'll splurge and make some of my kick ass fajitas. Chris is expected to spend some time there hanging out with us and gaming, as well as Joe, Jackson, Justin and maybe a few people might show up on the fly. All in all this weekend looks really promising for a ton of fun. Big surprise for this week: SWG looks like the game that will get the most play as at least 3 of us have accounts and characters on the same server and perhaps a fourth will join by this evening or saturday. That will be a first MMORPG to be game of honor at a LAN for me. Naturally other games on the agenda will include The Battle Grounds, a revolutionary war mod for half life staring one shot weapons with 40 second reloads, Day of Defeat, a past favorite and most played game in our LAN history Day of Defeat will recieve very little play, but i would not be surprised if it got a small chunk of play time, and last but not least a small list of GameCube and XBox games both multiplayer and singleplayer.

After playing the Demo for Tron 2.o a few weeks ago it became apparent that I need to purchase this game when it lands in stores this monday. Games that are as fun as that demo are pretty rare.

In other news, last night I was able to download and watch the full Deus Ex: Invisible War intro movie. How do I want this game, let me count the ways.... the video by itself, minus all previous knowledge of the game offers about a million reasons, it is going to be AWESOME. Maybe more action oriented than Deus Ex while being less so at the same time. I have untold fondness for the original work by Warren Spector, primary influence on other titles which have had me blowing hot air for hours on their merrit such as System Shock 2. This is one of my heroes, and the Looking Glass logo will be sorely missed at the beginning of his games, but life will go on and his games will continue to be some of the most enjoyable you can ever play, past and present. It is a shame it has been pushed back to a December release date, but you know what? I don't mind, there's enough games coming out to keep me entertained and happy until then.

Wednesday is here, and last night I bought my first pet on Star Wars: Galaxies, a nice peko that's at least as big as me. Well, that's no acomplishment, heck a tall jawa has me beat. Aside from that, not much has changed. I'm working on a comic book story line, that's been fun. And I need to work on my comic strip. I feel like I've been abandoning everything important to me lately. I did a lot of stuff and now, nothing but Star Wars: Galaxies till 4 every morning. Gabby has been gone to camp since sunday and I didn't get to say goodbye to her, I'm really missing her company. Here's a list of things I've started and havent done anything on in a month:

1) Programming my version of minesweeper
2) The Story of Edward
3) Applying to the art institute
4) Reading Dante's Divine Comedy: The Inferno (a decent book, but a dense read)
5) Inking 2 comic strips already drawn
6) Drawing new strips
7) Drawing a comic book
8) Playing a clan game of Battlegrounds
9) Updating my blog daily
10) The list has got to end somewhere....


So, in other news I'm getting really good at making these blog entries really long if you havent noticed. On the other hand, I have made some minor accomplishments. I played Elite Force II hardcore and then reviewed it in good time, now I should really do the same for Lionheart and Galaxies. Ive been exercising on a daily basis and I've been spending time with friends, maybe if i cut that down I might do more, or I might just cut down on that and end up doing nothing at all.

Funny how things work out since last I wrote here. Lionheart turned out to be a real disapointment. Beyond the excellent character creation system with shades of fallout there wasn't much there. The game played for the large part like baldur's gate, of which I am not overly fond for it's stress on combat over role playing and story line. If I wanted a hack and slash I would buy, and have baught, a first person shooter or any other shooter, like the excellent Elite Force II from Activision developed by Ritual entertainment, who like Black Isle may one day get the D&D license and make a game that totally alienates it's hard core shooter fans and satisfys the audience who loved Black Isle to death before Baldur's Gate, and now just buys their games out of pity with a weak hope in their heart that they'll make another real RPG that gives you the true multitude of answers to every problem with real quests that are far more than fetch this or kill so-and-so, and then everyone will be happy. On the otherhand, I picked up Star Wars: Galaxies because a friend had it and agreed to play Planescape: Torment, from the glory days of Black Isle, should I buy and play with him. Go figure, this game is GOOD. It's been nothing but fun since I started creating my character. Maybe it's just having a real life friend to run around the Star Wars' universe with shooting things, but this is on my list of 1 or 2 massively multiplayer online role playing games. Wel, till next time.

I am a consumer whore. I just finished Elite Force II last night and this morning, I have a copy of Lionheart in my hands. I suppose that isn't totally rampant consumerism, I mean, can you call an affinitely for literature rampant consumerism? Role-playing games can be an aquired taste and this one has a little bit of history. It uses the same system that the developers, Black Isle, basically made up on short notice after having a falling out with Stever Jackson Games over the use of the GURPS role playing system for the game Fallout. What do you know it's an ancient classic now that any gamer worth their salt will tell you is worth digging up and playing, hacked together system or no. What they'll also tell you is that the system itself was pretty fun, and it's been put to good use here. So much for getting my life back after Elite Force II... oh well, at least I'll have that reviewed later today or tomorrow.

Promises, promises, so I promised I would put up a new post on monday. Well I have news, monday has come and gone and it should be quite apparant that I lied. It's not that I meant to, it's just that I'm not very good at keeping promises. Like the ones I make to myself. I.E. "I will fill out the application for the art institute of houston by this tuesday at the latest." Yeah, I blew that one too. I was all hyped after an interview last week where I really impressed a recruiter who I'm pretty sure is paid to be impressed. For all my artwork I dont have the 10 little required pieces they wanted. 3 landscape, 3 full figure, 3 still life, at best i have 2 still life and 2 landscape... Full figure you say? Maybe you've never seen my artwork, I just can't draw a person, I start and I end up with something thats not really twisted but is very expressive of an idea.... usually the idea is "look, I got bored". It's 150 just to apply... what type of rip is that. So the self doubt sets in and I don't want to apply till I'm finished with my portfolio. No biggie right? That's the same reason I didn't apply last year, so what have I done in the meantime? Well, for one I started drawing a comic strip, I've been learning to program in java, which I've also started to slack at, I wrote my own version of minesweeper from scratch and I've been practicing my photoshop skills. I've gained a lot of weight and lost a little of it. Other than that? Not much. It's really depressing and it makes me question what I'll do when I'm actually in the school working for a grade spending money, maybe wasting it. It's scary. Maybe I should just go to community college. Who knows. So a lot has happened this week, or rather, a lot hasn't happened that should have... there's still 3 days left, maybe it still will. PvP Online has had a really great story going lately, I recommend you go check it out, back up a week and read it from the begining. Well, till next time.

This marks the end of an exemplary weekednd of fun and gamming with a good many of my best friends 3 days of LAN, with grilled food, sausage dogs, hamburgers, chips, movies and burning up from exhaustion at 4am. We found a way to set up a server and name it so that friends can play who are at the LAN and find us online and join over the internet for a fun time i was starting to think i would never have again. I haven't spent hardly any time with the people who are important to me online, and I miss them, but this weekend I really had to give my local friends priority and it was worth it, it's been the best time i've had in months. Odds are I'll post again tomorrow and even daily for a few weeks if it's interesting, but I never stick with anything for very long. Hello strangers who are reading this, hello friends, thanks for reading.