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My last post was full of anger and rage, so here's another on to throw on the pile. I don't really do positive.

However, I do try to do positive things. I'm not sure where that puts me on the pessimism/cynicism scale, maybe more cynical than pessimistic.

One of these positive things is working with an animal rescue group. I admit that this was something my wife sort of dragged me into; I doubt I'd be involved if not for her motivation. I'm not a joiner, really. It doesn't come naturally to me. My usual charitable efforts consist of giving money to worthy causes, but I've typically been rather selfish with my personal time. No excuses really, I'm just generally sort of lazy and prone to getting lost in my own brain.

This is further complicated by my issues with dogs. I was raised by a crazy person who (among many other psychological issues) was a pet hoarder. At one point when I was a kid there were three simultaneous litters of puppies along with all of the pound dogs we couldn't properly care for, totaling up to about 40 dogs. Three litters of 8-9 puppies and a dozen full grown dogs. Yeah, forty. It was a pretty unmanageable situation, and it left me with issues.

So let's just say I was a very reluctant animal rescue volunteer to start with. I like animals and all, I just wasn't really mentally equipped to deal with them all that well.

But I got over it. Confront your fears or something.

See, we started with this whole animal rescue thing about three years back after we got our first dog. We got him from a pet store, and found out that yes, he was a puppy mill dog. A little online research lead us to find out that the company that sold him were a bunch of ultra-right wing religious freakshows with seriously questionable ethics and a litany of health code and animal cruelty violations. In other words, raging shitheads. A topic I covered several years back.

So as a form of penance, and because we discovered how fucked up the world of dog breeding and puppy mills is, we started volunteering.

We volunteer for both a local and national breed specific rescue now. And, well, a few things have become apparent to me, during my trials and tribulations as a volunteer. I will list these observations one at a time, with an explanation, for full clarity. I will also word this to be as accusatory and hostile as possible, because quite frankly, you fucks have it coming. So this is my gift to you, dear owners (or potential owners) of pets in America:

TAKE CARE OF YOUR GOD DAMN PETS, ASSHOLES!!

HOLY SHIT! YOU PEOPLE ARE FUCKING INCOMPETENT!! MOST OF YOU SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO CARE FOR A HAMSTER, LET ALONE A DOG OR, HEAVEN FORBID, A CHILD!!!!

That's my opening statement. You lazy bastards sicken me. And now I will go into details why.

1. First, get your god damn pets spayed or neutered. I can't stress this enough. I direct this mainly at men. Guys, seriously, your dog doesn't give a fuck whether he has his nuts or not. It doesn't affect his manhood in the slightest, because dogs aren't as insecure as you pencil dicked mouth breathers. It will alleviate stress, prevent overpopulation, and make your dog much more pleasant to be around. You know how fucking cranky you get when you haven't gotten laid in a while? That's what intact dogs go through all the time when they're full of raging hormones, times ten. See, they can smell when a female dog is ready to go, and it drives them berserk. No one wants to deal with your untrained and undisciplined dog when he's raging like a horny teenager.
2. This brings me to point two: There is no need for you to breed your dog. Your dog is not that special. There are thousands more like him, and there are plenty of reputable, and also disreputable, breeders out there making sure the dog population remains sustainably high. We really don't need you with your half assed schemes at making a few bucks by selling off poorly socialized puppies to people. For starters, you won't sell all of the puppies, and then you'll be left with several adult dogs you don't want, and eventually I'm going to wind up having to care for them or they're going to get euthanized. This goes ten times over for Pittbulls. If you read this and still feel the need to breed your dog, go punch yourself in the mouth in front of a mirror a few times and just don't fucking do it.
3. That segues nicely into point three: Pittbulls are not the devil. In fact, I generally find that the breed doesn't have a lot of bearing on how nice or mean a dog is. It's all about how well you train it, and how well you treat it. They're sort of like children that way. If you're mean to your child and don't give them any boundaries, they're probably going to grow up to be a stripper and/or a drug addict. Apply the same logic to your dogs. If you happen to be a failure as a human being, do us all a favor and don't get a dog and don't have kids.
4. Take your animals to the vet. Let me clarify: take your animals to the vet, you stupid ass. You know what's fun to watch? And by fun, I mean like trying to watch "Dancer in the Dark" and not kill yourself afterward? Seeing an entire litter of puppies or kittens succumbing to something like Parvo Virus or Feline Distemper. Or watching a dog that's never been treated for heartworm cough up blood because the only treatment for a severe case is to dose him with arsenic to kill the worms, and now the little decaying worm bodies in his blood stream are causing lung embolisms. I imagine it feels a little like snorting a satchel of pop rocks and thumb tacks. There are a ridiculous number of diseases around to just make a dog or cat keel over dead. I see a lot of pricks get the bare minimum legally required rabies vaccine (if that) for their pet and actually decline heart worm tests or any other vaccinations. Another common thing I see is people who get a cat or kitten, assume it's just fine as an indoor cat, and never ever bring it to the vet. Then, several years later, they're shocked when it gets sick and dies and they have to pay through the nose for vet bills. A little prevention goes a long way. And if you're an anti-vaccine nut, I hope you die from whooping cough, and I'd appreciate it if you stop reading my blog, and also wasting the air I need to breath.
5. Train your pet. If you can afford to drop hundreds of dollars on a purebred dog, you can afford some training classes. And for you guys, again, because I see a lot of you imbeciles thinking you know anything beyond how to wipe the drool off your chin: you don't know shit about training dogs. You may think you do, but I'll bet money you probably don't know shit about shit. It's an odd guy thing that a lot of us just assume we're going to be able to train a dog, effortlessly, by sheer virtue of our manliness. If you think this, I have news for you: you're a raging douchebag. I can't tell you how many dogs I see where some slope headed neanderthal declares a dog 'untrainable' because his ham fisted approach that 'worked for my daddy' doesn't do shit, so they just dump it off at the pound to be killed and move on to get another one. Alternately, there's the well intentioned young women who coddle the shit out of their little lap dog and don't understand why it acts out. In both cases, let me say this: Dogs are not toys, they're living critters, they have their own personalities, and they take a little time and effort to work with. There are plenty of trainers available all over who can help you with training. Hell, at least watch some Animal Planet to get some basics, they have a billion dog training shows on. Which leads me to our next point...
6. You are not the dog whisperer. No, really, you're not. I don't care if you watch Cesar Milan 24/7 and buy all of his books and videos and whatever the hell else he sells. Your TV viewing doesn't translate to experience with a dog, and his show is edited to hell for content and an enhanced sense of drama. He also confuses "calm and submissive" with "scared to move" a lot, but that's my own personal thing. He has some good methods, as do most professional trainers, but until you've actually worked with dogs you still don't know shit. Don't try that pinning domination thing unless you actually know what the fuck you're doing, it'll just get you bitten or confuse the hell out of your dog.
7. This next item applies to people trying to get rid of their dogs. Just be honest, we don't want to hear your bullshit excuses. We've heard it all. Seriously, you wouldn't believe the crap that people come up with when they want to get rid of their dog. He smells (yeah, really), he's untrainable (bullshit), he won't stop peeing on things (see training), we're having a family crisis (so bad you can't afford dog food?), we just had a baby and don't have time for him anymore (you should have thought of that before, dimwit), he's too hyper (take the fucking dog for a walk you lazy shit, you could use a few minutes moving around yourself, fatty), I suddenly found out I have allergies (after three years???), he's suddenly turned vicious to our kids (don't let your baby crawl in the dog's food bowl while it's eating, dumbass), the dog bit our son (don't let your kid poke the dog in the eye with a stick for fucks sake), etc, etc... Usually we find out the truth is that the dog has health issues and needs surgery or something, and usually people lie to us about it since they're afraid we won't take the dog in if it needs serious medical intervention. The only really legit excuse I see, and I see it way too much, is that a couple is getting divorced and have to sell the house and neither can find an apartment that allows dogs. I see a lot of people getting laid off and having to leave their home too. It sucks, and I get the feeling a lot of those people didn't try to hard to get a pet friendly place to stay, but at least I can tolerate that one. The ones I love in particular are the fucks who get their house foreclosed on and just leave the animals behind. We see a lot of dogs that are on the brink of starvation because some fucknut packed up and moved and just left their animals in an empty locked house. Which brings us to the next point...
8. Shelter dogs aren't maladjusted terrors. In fact, most of them are pretty well adjusted and love people. Some dogs, like pittbulls, get a bad rap from the news, and we do see an incredible number of them that were bred for fighting or guard duty and have been basically beaten mean. But I've seen plenty of adorably friendly and cuddly Pittbulls too. The thing is, as a rescue group, we don't take in aggressive dogs. We get our dogs from local pounds that euthanize them all after ten days, and most of the ones we take have been just abandoned or dumped somewhere once a family is sick of them. They had a family and were well socialized, maybe with a few training issues, but that's it. People just dispose of them. Maybe I'm a bit of a bleeding heart, but that's kind of fucked up to me.
9. And lastly, No, we will not surgically remove dog nipples. Yes, that's in response to any actual request. I just can't make this shit up. Yes, the dog had puppies once. No, it's not common practice to cut nipples off. I don't care if you're uncomfortable rubbing the dog's belly when it has nipples. Although I guess I can apply this to special perks and treatment some people want from poor animal rescues... Folks, this is a volunteer operation; not a single one of us gets paid for our time. Haggling for spa treatments for your potential adopted pet is just really bad form, since the fifty dollars we'd waste at the groomers could maybe go to pulling another dog from the pound about to be euthanized. Which do you think might be a better thing to do? Jesus christ I really can't get past that nipple removal thing though. Wow. And it wasn't like, one member of the family, the whole clan of them were on board with this whole nipple removal idea. The whole idea that people like that are living and walking around confuses and frightens me.

So, aside from the nipple removal, which I think was a one time incident (I hope), those are the top things I'd like to say to people who have dogs, or want to get dogs, or want to get rid of their dog. Some tidbits apply to cat owners too, because a lot of you suck at caring for your animals too.

Anyway, this rant was brought to you by the nice couple who dropped off T-bone at our place this past weekend and lied to our faces about all of the medical issues he has and the surgeries he needed and why you were giving him up. It was really awesome when he turned purple from overheating and asphyxiation because you said "Oh, he doesn't have any medical issues, he's just a little overheated and makes loud rasping noises!" and then ran out our front door as fast as you could to avoid our questions. The ice baths we gave him after you left kept him from dying, and the vet doesn't think he has any permanent brain damage from chronic over heating, although he's still at risk for tracheal collapse.

You'll be happy to know that the soft palate trim, neuter, vaccinations, heartworm tests, and nasal passage surgery went well, although we think that they two and a half years you decided to not get him treated have probably given him a hernia, so he's still vomiting about fifteen times a day and needs to be on IV fluids so he won't die. I'd like to think that if you can afford a rare thousand dollar purebred puppy you could have afforded some basic medical care, but what do I know. And we know you knew what was wrong with him, since your vet told us all about how they've been pleading with you to get him these surgeries since he was a puppy.

I can't imagine what listening to this dog desperately gasp for air every minute of the past two years must have been like, and can only say go fuck yourselves for not taking proper care of him.

Well, it's been fun, but now I'm going to go drown myself in the toilet to get away from you people.

Holy crap do I hate my current web host.

To be fair, it's not just them specifically, but certain business practicies in general.

See, I wish that companies would put a lot of effort into making a decent service or product, rather than sinking all of their efforts into thwarting people from trying to leave. If you fucking pricks took the team who went out of their way to design a nearly inscrutable and buggy web registration transfer system and applied them to maybe setting up databases and services that didn't suck a camel's nutsack maybe I wouldn't be trying to get as far away from your craptastic company as possible.

Dickheads.

I mean, really, what the fuck can a person do with a 100 meg cap on an SQL database? I had to purge my entire indexing table so that I still have room on this stupid site for everything to keep functioning, and trust me, I don't get a whole hell of a lot of traffic here.

I've run into the same shit with some other crappy companies, like credit card companies, magazines, and pretty much anything that's subscription based. Once again, here's a hint: I feel I need to be redundant and repeat myself: Instead of making it difficult for people to bail on your bullshit and nearly useless service, work on making your stuff suck less.

I've been meaning to do a tremendous number of updates and build a new theme from scratch, but I've been holding off while I get this hosting issue resolved. Hopefully some of this aggravating drek will resolve itself next week, although my entire life thus far has geared me towards anticipating further disappointment and disatisfaction with pretty much any company I deal with.

Which is good, because it means I have the mental fortitude to handle a pretty large truckload of failure from people and businesses I have to deal with.

This daily does of cynicism has been brought to you courtesy of 1and1 internet host, Sirius/XM satellite radio, and Hartford Toyota. May you all rot in hell for sucking. Oh yeah, and IE7: you suck too. And Apple; you also suck. I like the iPhone 4 a lot, and I don't give a fuck that it can lose some signal if you poke the proverbial soft spot in its proverbial malformed infantile skull, but you're still raging assholes for scaming people with that fucked up signal algorithm all these years and trying to kill off flash and lying about the real motives behind it. Oh, and people who develope fully flash based websites: You're fucking clueless. Flash was never intended for such a fucktarded usage. Way to break browsing continuity, douchebags.

Who else can I rant about?

Ok, soft targets now. Democrats: go fuck yourselves. Republicans: go fuck yourselves, twice. Teapartiers: first go fuck yourselves, then kill yourselves. Glenn Beck: I hope you go blind, you pasty faced mutant. Mainstream Media: you suck, and you're spineless; Rolling Stone magazine owned your worthless asses. Fox News: you suck, you're completely fucking delusional, and like it or not you tools are mainstream media, you fucks just cater to the lowest common denominator of media consumers.

Hmm... who am I forgetting?

Well, lots of people and companies and such. I think that's good enough for now though.

ETA: Almost forgot, Andrew Breitbart is a true scumbag. I hope he gets raped in prison some day for his lies and scams. There are enough problems in this country without schmucks like him manufacturing fake racial tension.

...

Oh yeah, the picture! I dunno, I was trying something new with perspective and mashing different cultural style elements together. I think it's actually a pretty shit pose now that I look at it a few weeks after drawing it, but the character has potential.

I'm being oppressed at work again.

Not even one tenth as bad as my previous job, but still, I naturally rebel at idiotic and pointless attempts to control employees.

In my previous job, the people running the place were unfathomably clueless and corrupt morons. You couldn't kick over a stack of papers rotting in a cubicle without finding some example of corporate malfeasance, cronyism, and blatant multi-million dollar conflicts of interest.

And that company was actually one of the less corrupt ones I know of. Our direct competitors were ten times worse. The turn over rate and company hopping in the insurance industry resembles the stereotype of an inbred southern town where everyone marries their first cousin, so it's easy to get a lot of dirt on the corporate culture of the competitors.

The experience jaded me quite heavily towards corporations and corporate structures in general. There's nothing in this world that's so shitty it can't be made worse by organizing a committee of MBAs to try and fix it.

So I was delighted to wind up working for a small, non-public company not long after being laid off from the old shithole. I actually still like it here quite a bit.

But some rules are stupid.

For example, our new No Personal Laptop rule. It's not even a rule, per se, but more of a directive from the executives and upper management that they don't want personal computers on the property. It's a security risk, they say.

Which is ironic, because I use my personal lap top to log in to work every afternoon.

For those who don't know, I use my tablet PC to make pretty much all of my art. So during the day, when things are slow, I would often whip up a quick sketch to keep my easily bored and understimulated brain from getting me into trouble (see my previous entry about stupid decisions).

This kind of puts a cramp on my style. It's not a really big deal, which is why I categorize this under the "whining" category. It just means I have to go back to a good old fashioned sketchbook and scan stuff in later.

I realized how deep I am into the digital art thing when I reflexively tried to hit the 'undo' hotkey on my mechanical pencil. Oops.

The other irritant is that it cuts my web browsing down a lot. I jailbroke my iPhone and turned it into a modem, so I used my laptop for all web browsing, avoiding any use of corporate resources for cruising the interwebs.

Logically speaking, telling me I can't use my laptop at work is actually a bigger security risk than letting me have it, but I don't think that my explaining this in short sentences to the policy makers here will really fly, or be good for my continuous long term employment efforts.

Well, at least they let me use my phone. Which is practically a computer in its own right, and capable of just as much mischeif in the wrong hands as a laptop...

Ok, I'm going to stop complaining before I irritate myself into trouble.

I have come to the inescapable conclusion that I'm stupid.

When I was in school, I was one of those kids that never did any homework but aced tests without trying, and people used to be shocked how well I did on standardized tests and told me I had enormous potential, and how smart I was.

But they were wrong; I was a god damn moron. Just completely fucking retarded when it came to pretty much anything but taking tests.

I can avoid some of the blame for my gross incompetence by the fact that I was raised by a certifiable lunatic, so I didn't develop too many life skills that would have helped me get through life. I mean, I didn't learn to properly wipe my own ass until the summer after 8th grade (hint: keep wiping until the paper comes out clean, even if it takes and entire fucking roll to get there).

Anyway, enough about my childhood traumas. We all had them, blah blah blah, woe is me, waaaaah, etc. Here's how I realized that I must be stupid.

When I was 19, I was fresh from a brutal clusterfuck of a year long enlistment in the military, honorably discharged but even more psychologically screwed up than when I went in. I had a doctor. Went in for a sinus infection once, and she asked my age. I told her I was nineteen, and she said "Ohhhh, just a baby" all condescending like. It really pissed me off. I knew I was 19, but I had already been through quite a lot of shit in my life, and this bitch was barely out of residency, so who was she to call me a baby. Yeah, I know she was just joking around, but I was an uptight touchy prick back then. Anyway, here's the problem: she was right.

When I turned 20, not much happened. I looked back on my last year of teenage life, and realized I had made a lot of stupid decisions. Not life altering ones, just a string of dumb decisions and misconceptions about stuff. So my 20 year old self concluded that my 19 year old self was a dumbass.

I turned 21, and saw the string of stupid decisions I had made when I was 20, and thought "Wow, that was retarded. I'm so much wiser now than I was back then."

I turned 22, looked back on my 21st year of life, took inventory of all of my fuckups, and thought "well, I wasn't as moronic as I was when I was 19 or 20, but I was still pretty ignorant and foolish. I'm in a much better place now.

I turned 23, took stock of my array of personal failures, and thought "well, it wasn't as bad as 21 or 22, but still pretty bad. I'm doing much better now.

I turned 24, asessed my level of fail from age 23, and then I started to, shall we say, notice a distinct pattern. I'm hoping you can spot it too.

So now I'm well into my 30's, and this pattern has predictably replicated itself each and every year since. I look back on the previous year, and think "what the fuck did I do all that for". I mean, now and then I manage to do something that doesn't suck, so it's not all bad, but there's plenty of stupid mixed in there.

So 32 is creeping up on me rather quickly now, and I suspect that I will look back on my 31st year of life and think "wow, that was dumb."

The only logical conclusion here is that I will consistently do stupid thing throughout my entire life, but won't realize it until much later. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

I will admit that as I get older, I have managed to improve my stupid to reasonable ratio every year, but it's such a small incremental improvement that I'd have to be 150 years old before I stopped being a dolt. And I suspect this improvement rate isn't linear, so I'm doomed to suffer at my own hands for... well, the rest of my life.

Depressing, but at least I'm aware of what the future holds for me: A string of bad decisions punctuated by occassional successes.

...

Is that too dark a note to end an entry on? Ah, fuck it, good enough for today.

Not really sure what to say about this that hasn't already been said.

I guess I'm getting old enough that this type of grotesque corporate negligence doesn't shock me in the slightest. I've worked for huge companies before in the insurance industry, and the catastrophic clusterfuck of bureaucracy and red tape and insular political backstabbing made me want to throw up more or less every day. I had to stop reading Dilbert comics because they were too painfully similar to real life.

And that was just some shitty paper pushing company that doesn't really have anything to do with natural resources (other than consuming them at alarming rates) or people's lives or the environment. All they did was push money around and fuck themselves and their clients over in the stock market like every other clueless investment 'expert'.

So I guess the thought of a huge company like BP cutting corners and unleashing an environmental catastrophe through sheer negligence and stupidity doesn't surprise me. Not even a little bit. Actually, I'm surprised that this hasn't happened sooner and more frequently. Sort of like car accidents; I've been in a few, and now that I've been driving for almost fifteen years I'm actually amazed that I make it to work most days.

I generally try to avoid political and religious stuff on my blog since I eased up on my youthful militant anger that was spawned by a sudden realization that people are often quite horrible. But I'm not sure if there's a point in bothering anymore. Do I want to avoid offending people and keep my opinions to myself, or just let it all hang out? I don't really want to alienate people, but I'm also not a fan of censorship. I also don't like preachers, whether they're preaching religion or politics or patriotism or whatever brand of unthinking dogma they want to force other people to adhere to. It's pretty easy to turn into one of those tools, and the first step is opening your mouth too much.

That being said, people with strong opinions are interesting. Even if they make an ass of themselves they're entertaining to watch at least.

I figure if I draw something cool with every blog post I can probably get away with a lot of opinionated ranting.

So let's start off with a good, soft target: Conspiracy Theorists.

This is a pretty easy one: If you're a conspiracy theorist, shut the fuck up. You're an idiot. I don't mean day to day conspiracies about corporate and government espionage or negligence or human rights violations. We all know that shit happens. I mean the big retarded stuff, like alien abductions, that 9/11 was a government cover up, that global warming is a 'new world order' plot, or that the government blew up the BP oil rig on purpose. Yeah, that's right, that's the latest conspiracy theory nonsense I've had the misfortune to stumble across. It's sort of like when your cat shits outside of the litterbox and you step on it with bare feet early in the morning before you've even gotten your contact lenses in.

I subscribe to a few rules in life that generally seem to get me through each day without accidentally committing suicide or fucking my life up: Occam's Razor (Look it up), The Golden Rule (you oughta know that one), If it sounds too good to be true it is, Don't walk down stairs with your hands in your pockets, and one of my favorites: Heinlein's Razor.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".

Pretty simple. Granted, there's a follow up line that sometimes gets ommitted that reads "But don't ever rule out malice", so I suppose those conspiracy theory douchebags can get a little bit of credit there, but frankly, successful grand consipiracies are so god damn uncommon simple because people can be really god damn stupid.

As a species we're pretty good at building stuff and figuring things out, but only every now and then. When you get down to it we're just horny bipedal apes trying to outfuck the other apes in whatever way we can manage. Cynical, sure, but I feel the need to call it like I see it. It seems to be isolated instances of cooperation, hard work, and inspiration that get our species ahead, but 90% of the time we're just kind of taking up space and screwing everything up. I find that little 10% pretty magical and awesome, so maybe I'm not a complete cynic... Maybe a 90% cynic. Yeah, that sounds good.

Where was I? Oh yeah, BP and conspiracy theorists: both of you can go fuck yourselves. That about sums it up.

... with my web host. Yep, it's that time. My current web host no longer meets my needs, so adios, you bastards, I'm starting the process of switching over.

It may take me a bit of time to get everything transferred, so updates here may wind up being even less frequent than their already glacial pace before.

In other news, Look! A Cyclopean Zombie Cybernetic Steam Gorilla! I named him Steve (No relation to anyone living, dead, or related to me, it just seemed appropriate). He's been subbed to Mojizu and should be up for voting in a few weeks, if anyone's interested. I still don't have a good handle on the blender brush in Photoshop CS5, but I practiced a bit more with this guy.

Other than that, not much. My job has banned the use of personal laptops in the office, which makes a lot of sense considering that most of us who have them use them to log in to work remotely. Bloody brilliant. I have a real sense of contempt for senseless rules and regulations that do nothing but appease people who are in a position of power but don't really know what they're doing. However, I have a sense of love for my biweekly paycheck, or more specifically the food and shelter it buys me, so unlike my last emplyment venue I will not be fighting the man on this one. My wife might kill me if I did too, so that adds double motivation to lay low. I still get some good drawing time in during lunch though, so that's all well and good. I've also brought a good old paper sketch book in to do sketches and concept work when things are boring and slow... which they are... oh how horribly so...

Oh yeah, and I now have a SHED! YEAH! A MOTHER FUCKING SHED!! I'm so domestic now. Well, I needed a shed to move a bunch of the lawn and garden crap that's invading my workshop in the garage out. This'll give me both space to work on sculptures and other projects when it's warm, and a spot to park our vehicles when it gets cold again.

Hmm... what else have we done... well, we got a car (a new prius) which is cool, we've trapped and spayed two feral cats this year with the animal rescue... socialized and placed four of six wild kittens with new homes... and failed at gardening once again. Awesome.

Ok, enough mundane details; I'll have more wild and weird pics for everyone later.

Page ten, done! New techniques, plenty of real life hold ups, as usual, but I keep on grinding away at these. Finally past the intro silliness; the real story line picks up next.

Click the picture to see the comic! ^___^

***This is what paying attention to commercials can do to you***

I don't wind up watching many commercials. I have a DVR that my cable company was nice enough to give me, so I can generally avoid them.

But, every once in a while I do actually watch a show when it's airing, and then I have to sit through the commercials. Normally I just tune them out, as we all do, but the other day I sat and really paid attention to them for some idiotic reason.

Commercials are fucking horrible. It's not just the shitty products they're trying to push off on gullible little consumers, it's how they're presented. I mean, the products are terrible, no doubt, but the fake, trite way in which the announcers try to sway your opinion in a 30 second spot is chilling in the same way that a kind and polite serial killer/rapist is. It's just bloody well wrong on all levels.

I know that there's almost an art to this whole process, of getting people to buy shit through advertising, but it's an evil art, sort of like calling upon the powers of the great cthulhu to spread madness throughout the lands. I know people are gullible, and our brains are wired to make us stupid and susceptible to certain types of arguments, but knowing that wouldn't you want to, you know, not be an evil douchebag and leave people alone? It seems to me that the entire purpose of commercials is to infect your brain with inane jingles and catch phrases, like some horrid auditory plague, so that when you see their products that vile little saccharine blight of information that's wormed its way into your deep memory comes rushing back to the forefront unbidden.

Like McDonalds: "I'm Lovin' It" preceded by a brainless little "bada-bababaaaaa". That pops into my mind when I see McDonalds shit uncontrollably. I can't help it. And I don't even see all that many commercials, the shit just sticks there, like a shotgun of putrid memes that waste the activity of precious braincells.

There are plenty more. Like GEICO, the mother of all overzealous ad campaigners. I figure those fucks could discount every policy holder of theirs fifty bucks a month for the staggering amount of fucking advertising they buy. I mean, how many companies do you know that have like, five different simultaneous ad campaigns going on? I mean, really, how good can their fucking service be if they spend half of their budget on shitty caveman and lizard ads.

And speaking of which, one of these days I hope the caveman snaps, grills up the gecko over an open fire and sucks the marrow out of his bones. Then he can track down some of those idiots with the piles of Viagra and Ciais who are always inexplicably hanging out on the beach in separate bathtubs, murder them, and steal their boner meds. Then he can swallow two entire bottles of the erection stuff, and then track down that bitch Flo from the Progressive insurance commercials and bash her over the head with a club and go completely retro back to his roots and drag her off to a cave where he'll have his way with her using his new ten foot erection. And maybe he can curb stomp the Walmart smiley face, shatter the blue K-mart enema bulb looking thing, and brain a couple of walmart greeters on the way there, and perhaps stab Ronald McDonald and the Burger King through the heart with a wooden spear. AT THE SAME TIME. Then it can end with him falling in battle as the Capital One vikings come to steal Flo from him so THEY can rape the shit out of her, but then caveman and his giant cock fight them off but succumbs to wounds inflicted by the viking interlopers, and everyone winds up dead, raped, eaten, or broken.

Man, wouldn't that be awesome?

...

Holy shit I'm getting worked up just thinking about all of the gray matter I've wasted storing this useless god damn information. I think you get my point, I'm going to go sit in a corner quietly for a while.

Well, this was a change of pace... I'm submitting a piece of art to a gallery show, and I decided that I needed to make something, well, more substantial than a lame digital print, so it was time to go digging in the basement and dig out the old painting and drawing supplies.

Naturally, I've waited till the last second, so this had to be started and finished tonight and shipped tomorrow. Yeehaw.

This is a mix of 17 year old gouache paint and good old India ink with a dip pen for the lines. I also slopped around odd things like using the bottom rim of a soda cup to muck the paints up, dashed salt on the texture it, and blotted things with paper towels. I also used some colored pencils, decided they sucked, started using watercolor pencils, and realized they suck too, and ten year old micron pens for touch up, but they also suck. I even tried some oil pastels, but that was another bucket of suck.

It's only 11 x 8.5; took me around three hours and change to whip up.

In the end over 90% of this is gouache and India ink.

Did I mention I haven't touched a dip pen or watercolors in almost ten years? Yeah, a little bit of relearning stuff here.

Interestingly the tools I used to be most comfortable with before I went 99.9% digital no longer feel 'right' to me; colored pencils, microns, rapidographs, and pastels.

Stuff I never felt good with, namely the dip pens and watercolor type paints now feel very natural; I think a big part of it is how my digital work has evolved. I think I both draw and color in photoshop using techniques that are very amenable to watercolors and old style pens.

Excellent little experience in tight deadlines and going back to try old techniques again. Wish me luck getting this fucker shipped on time tomorrow...

eta: forgot to put in the link to the show I'm entering for: Drawgasm

Well, our big epic tag sale is done with, and I have my garage back. I've been bitching about this for a while, but now that it's over this is the last you'll hear of it for a while.

The tag sale is a fund raiser for a local animal rescue that rescues dogs from various pounds and animal control centers in the state that kill animals after often as little as ten days. We're 100% volunteer based, and we only have a small facility for about ten dogs at a time, so funds are always tight. These big donation based tag sales are pretty much our best money maker.

So this crazy tag sale went on for two days, in my front yard, with my wife, myself, and several other volunteers helping to run the whole thing. Now, I could go on about all the junk we had and how much stuff there was, but I can sum it up in one quick sentence: We sold four thousand dollars worth of junk. FOUR THOUSAND. Keep in mind that a lot of the junk we had we were selling for fifty cents or a buck, and people were making extra little donations here and there for different stuff to help our group out, but at the least 3700 of that came from sales.

That is a truly staggering amount of stuff. And there was hardly an item we sold that I hadn't moved at least once or twice.

So what I'm trying to say is that I hurt all over, as if I had been in a bad bar fight or spent a weekend running for my life from angry bears. But it was for a good cause, and everything went really well. Or rather, it mostly went really well...

Occasionally I come across people, mainly online, who bitch and moan about animal rescue stuff, and how we shouldn't waste one cent on animals when there are people in need. But this tag sale illustrated to me exactly why I prefer doing charity work for animal oriented organization instead of thing for people. Now don't get me wrong; I donate to humanitarian causes as well, but the majority of what I do for charity work is for animals.

On the second day of the tag sale a guy shows up with his wife, and starts haggling like crazy for every item. Haggling is an interesting cultural phenomenon I've noticed, in that Americans really don't do it. We're just not into it, and it comes across as rude and cheap to most average Americans. I don't know why, that's just sort of how things go. I don't know why Icelanders are insulted by tipping or why other countries think you're a sucker for not haggling over stuff, it's just how the cultures evolved. But anyway, this dude was an immigrant from either Haiti or some French speaking African country, and he was all about haggling.

Well, sort of.

I'm the guy that usually winds up haggling during our tag sale events. I'm not really a people person, but I can certainly fake it for a good cause and get shit done to move the junk off of my yard (double motivation). I get that haggling is a cultural difference, so it doesn't bother me, even while some of my fellow volunteers are really annoyed by it.

But this fucking guy and his wife were using it to run a scam. They'd split up, pester a person to knock an already absurdly low price down to something like a dollar for a 27 inch TV (I'm not exaggerating), get rejected, and then switch places and bring the item up to the person running the cashbox and claim that one of us had let them have it for pretty much nothing. On top of this the guy was a rude prick, yelling from across the yard when one of us was helping another customer and acting mad when we didn't immediately leave them to help him. He and his wife tried the price swap lie scam five or six times until we caught on, and then we basically stopped haggling and told him either pay five bucks for a TV or put it back and leave.

So, of course, five minutes later, his wife is bitching us out for not selling a DVD player for 2 dollars instead of four, when one of the other volunteers catches him with his car on the curb loading everything he could grab into the back of his car. Four TV's, a couple of VCR's, radios, and anything else electronic he could grab. We realized pretty quick that his wife was just running interference while he stole the entire electronics table's worth of stuff. Naturally he said that he had paid one of the other volunteers for the stuff, but we knew he was full of shit. They had a little game of pretending not to know English when confronted about their theft or lies on the prices of things, but spoke it just fine when it came time to argue over a twenty five cent price difference.

The president of the rescue, a woman to be feared when you invoke her wrath, bitched the guy out and got most of the shit back. We didn't call the cops on them, and I'm sure they made off with a pile of free shit that they stole in the end, even after getting himt o unload the extra TVs. In hind sight, I don't know if we should have or not. I'm not real good when confronted by truly shitty human behavior, but I see it often enough that I should be, although what I usually see is blatant racism. That's another post for another time though. Whether our decision was right or not, I'm sure as shit not letting that guy back on my property.

But back on my original point, people wonder why other people help animals rather than other people. I figure those people just haven't met enough other people yet to get it.