in my continuing effort to drawr more, i’m posting my sketches as i go. posting them here is fun, and i wind up with an account of my progress. yesterday sara and i went to the literati cafe so that she could write and i could draw for a while. she took her laptop and i took my brand new inking pens (thank you, Gobble Clause!) to try out. this sketch is what i wound up with after about an hour and a half. i wasn’t trying to accomplish anything in particular, but drawing it was immensely enjoyable. shading got kinda mucky though, and i think i fiddled too much with it. maybe i’ll go and finish it up. not decided. anyway, enjoy! i did.

we lost the tv remote the other day. in searching for it, sara asked me “is the couch hiding any secrets?” which brought a funny image in my mind. i did a quick sketch. it’s not done with coloring, and i think that the couch’s pose needs to be pushed further to really make the joke sing. as it is, it’s not totally apparent what’s going on. but hey! look ma, i’m drawrin’!

me lovey and i decided to have our own kind of Thanksmas this year, to kick off the holiday season and to have a chance to celebrate a christmas for just the two of us (and the dogs). this combats the chaos of seeing two families over christmas vacation. it turned out really nice! i am the proud recipient of a good number of inking pens, a bunch of loopy japanese candy, some nice new boxers, and best of all: one of these. hot damn! works like a charm, too. i be sippin’ on a chilly dew straight from my office. no more of those unhealthy and exhausting trips downstairs.

in other news, doing a little customizing on the site and its bells and whistles. changed the css a little, made the posting area a little wider. wider, so that the WPG2 plugin (that’s the image viewer embedded in the blog) can work its magic and not look dopey. the gallery theme i have installed requires a bit more space left to right, so i had to widen the blog theme’s left-right space too.

i did manage to finish the marquee, but i’m a moron and haven’t printed it yet. i’ll post it once i get a thumbnail up.
in other news, i have been doing a little sketching in photoshop. i feel like i’m supposed to use the brush, but for some reason, using the pencil tool instead feels nicer. i’ll stick with it for now.

good god, i still haven’t finished the marquee. i’m a total slacker.

(AP) Vatican City, Italy — In an announcement yesterday which some pundits are calling “really smooth”, the Etienne Bruvvas have been heralded by his majesty Pope John Paul George Ringo as “the three coolest guys i’ve never met,” and expressed his hope that their recently announced holy pilgramage to Vatican City would result in a new era, whereupon his Holiness would step down and crown the Bruvvas as the new “Pope-y Trifecta”, in charge of taking Catholicism in a new direction. “I hope these guys can fix this shit,” said His Holiness at a recent press conference. “Especially about the part where (the bible) should say ‘celebrate’ instead of ‘celibate’. And let’s get some snatch up in here, yo. I’m old, not dead.” Vatican City continues to make preparations for the arrival of the Bruvvas, who are reportedly arriving sometime “pretty soon for sure.”

my poor old pentium4 – 1.4Ghz with 256MB currently runs about 5 websites with yer standard mySQL/php/etc backend, and doubles as my browser and testbed when my main machine is preoccupied (read: i’m playing world of warcraft). poor thing is choking on swap, but SDRAM is fucking expensive and i’m not about to lay down $300 for the ram. not yet, anyway. so i found out about xfce this morning (thanks, StumbleUpon!). my machine is already happier, and in the process, i learned all the things i ever wanted to about xterm (i had gotten used to the fatness that is konsole).

not much to report. production on A Night at the Museum got really crazy, and the MAME project kind of ground to a halt for a while. the cabinet is in good working condition, people enjoy it, and it’s pretty much rock solid. a nice touch would be if i got up off my lazy ass and finished the marquee for it, and i keep meaning to. maybe i will tonight.

and, like so many other casual blogs, this one doesn’t get updated often enough. “i promise i’ll try harder” is my official campaign pledge. to me, really, because who else reads this thing besides me?