When I Get Mad (vent art)

This is how I troll people, apparently.
Some self-affirming hack on DeviantART was using a template editor to take artwork from the likes of Genzoman (one of the most recognizable artists on DA apart from SpaceCoyote or JollyJack) and make custom MAGIC: The Gathering cards (complete with a copyright notice attributed to Wizards of the Coast, making the whole "not affiliated" disclaimer more than a little suspect). After calling him out on padding his gallery with 60 of these things, he retorted with the classic, "I'm a fan paying homage." excuse that may have held water if he was just showing a tutorial or a single card as an example (another claim he made in his defense) of using the editor. I pointed out how broken his logic was, and asked why he didn't ask permission of the artists in question if he was so certain his intentions were pure. He proceeded to disable comments on all 60 of those uploads. In the few minutes between when he did that and when he actually took down all the cards, I made this one card-like object in about five minutes with a Sharpie and about half my full attention.
When I came back and saw he'd cleared away his padding, he asked a favor of me, that since I'd trolled him with such animosity (five comments on sixty uploads, one of which was suggesting he make a tutorial is trolling in his mind.) that I do the same for "everyone else" who makes cards as he had done. This makes two very stupid assumptions, that "everyone else" doing something diffuses his own responsibility, and that I haven't already confronted others of his ilk, thus singling him out. Well, when you try and justify your bullshit behavior with weak excuses and broken logic, of course I'm going to respond to tell you how broken and weak said counterpoints are. That's not trolling, that's a discussion. You just refused to realize you had no high ground, that the conversation wasn't going your way, and that on the whole it was about the only attention your gallery was getting.

So Today...

OR: Barnes & Noble, I Am Done With You! 
Tagline: Unfairly, I admit, but done, dammit!  
So, one of my New Year's resolutions was that I wanted to get into tabletop gaming, something I've always skirted the edges of, but never fully dived into apart from some gateway drugs like Hero Quest, Magic: The Gathering, owning a lot of Palladium books (mostly Robotech), & playing a single game of Battletech. To rectify this, I bought the Red Box from Thinkgeek and looked through its materials. Also, for reasons I don't recall at the moment, I wanted to play as a Tiefling. I had an idea for a character, but I didn't have any technical data to play as one. I did a lot of sloppy research and worked out that I was going to need the Essentials Rules Compendium and the Race Handbook for Tieflings. The former is a condensed version of the 4th Edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, the other is basically a magazine (that will become important later). 
I got a coupon from Barnes & Noble or, as I like to call them, Not Borders, and thought this would be the perfect chance to pick them up without waiting for them in the mail & potentially getting burned by finding out they're not what I need after all. I'm normally weary about "in-store pickups" but I've got that kind of luck where I could be after the most obscure thing in the world and get beaten to it by someone more offbeat than I pretend to be. I put in the reserve for the Tiefling race book (the magazine, a point I'll explain in a moment) and waited. This was Friday night, so I didn't get the message until morning. The message said that despite being listed as "in stock" it could not be found and put on reserve. No biggie, I thought; most of the reviews said it was only an art book of sorts. I tried to reserve the Compendium and had better luck. One 30-minute drive and a missed turn later, I got to the store with the coupon in my pocket.
It turns out there was more than one copy of the Compendium in stock, so I didn't have to do the potentially awkward thing of picking up the book at the desk and asking to look through it before purchasing it (that probably happens all the time, but it just feels awkward to reserve something and then DEMAND to inspect it--I'm the sort of guy who will go down the other aisle in a grocery store and double-back to where I need to go rather than simply excuse myself as I squeeze past someone's cart). Anyway, my research revealed the book was a bit vague on how much of a "condensing" of the two aforementioned books it was, with some of the races and player classes being relegated to a pair of companion volumes, which we'll just call Purple and Orange because I don't remember their names and don't feel like looking them up right now. It turns out Tieflings aren't in the Compendium, but in the Purple book. Fine, I thought, but I ended up deciding against getting the book anyway as it didn't really offer me any real information I hadn't already gathered (legitimately, I might add, no piracy or scans or downloads like that).
I should mention now that the Compendium, along with Purple and Orange, are thick paperbacks with very wide spines, distinctly standing out from the other books that usually crowd the gaming section of a bookstore. Meanwhile, the Tiefling race book is a pithy, staple-bound affair that can be fairly easily hidden between two larger books or campaign modules or DM screens or any such shelf-stretchers. As I was looking through the other books, including a Pathfinder book which actually had a lot of cool information about Tieflings I won't bore you with (except to say, they were really neutered between D&D 3.0/.5 and 4th Ed.), I came across the Tiefling race book. Apparently, no one had bothered to look any harder than simply glancing at the spines. I doubt they'd even actually set aside the Compendium, just leaving it there, figuring no one else would pick it up.
After pacing back and forth between there and the Moleskine stand (where they had one pocket-sized watercolor book left that I almost got instead), I resolved, "Screw this crap." and stormed out, even throwing my coupon in the trash outside.
I went next door to the Best Buy to look at laptops, and made an ass of myself as I tried to figure out how Windows 8 is supposed to work. I still can't get around the fact that the "desktop" is an application tile. That's insane, like having to call 411 to get your own number. Plus, is it just me, or are more desktop apps designed like mobile apps in that there's no real way to quit them? If it wasn't for Skype and better hardware compatibility (namely webcams) I wouldn't even be looking at Windows devices. Still, found a really cool Vaio. We'll see what happens there.
Some other crap happened, but it's more minor inconveniences amplified by all preceding events, so I won't go into it here.

Good night, and good luck.

Qupid Qonnections OR: Stupid Cupid

HAPPY INDUSTRIALIZED EXCHANGE OF TOKEN AFFECTIONS DAY! 

PSYSTAR: WRAITH SYMPHONY

Released as RABID RALPH'S ROCKET RHAPSODY in the US with terrible, terrible box art not unlike the image above because we're uncultured swines like that. 
Anyway, just something I farted out in GIMP in ten minutes—including a bathroom break—after watching that Futurama episode where the Martian doomsday rocket leaves earth, cutting a lovely blue streak against an orange, cloudy sky. 

Also, someone somewhere posted this diatribe (against a gradient background they probably labored over for hours) about how science has ruined their imagination, making them second guess and scrutinize every piece of fantasy art they either come across or make. To that person, I offer this image and these words:  SUPERNOVAS TURN OXYGEN INTO GOLD. That fantastic enough for you? 

Fun with NASA

SENTRY

ALTAR

Just mucking about with some NASA photos, taking full advantage of the public domain status of most of their images.

KNOWS BOTH PEACE AND PAIN

Meant as an establishing shot for the previous comic, this ended up getting not only its own piece, but a second panel. In fact, these were going to be two separate images, but they really work best as a graphic match. Very fun to make, lots of micro-managing different layers and transparencies. Got into a groove and put the whole thing together in a day, with about a previous day of off-and-on sketching ideas and concepts, most of which didn't work out.

THAT WHICH NEVER LIVED

The first, and very small, chapter to a much longer work I've been hacking away at the past few weeks. It's very prototypical right now, and this is meant to work as a fairly standalone piece anyway, so don't hold your breath. Even if the next part is a "sequel" it'll focus on the forces (right now I'm sticking with the name Guardians--not the owls or the holidays, not half as cool, anyway) that brought this megalithic watchtower down and gave it the resolve to rise from the ashes to kick technophobic ass.

Point-and-Click for Dummies

Some people get nostalgic when they have to use pen & paper when playing a videogame, whether it's to make your own map or work out a puzzle or even just write down the solution. There was a lot of genuine excitement when the developers of Grimrock included a printable PDF of custom graph paper for people to use in lieu of the game's built-in map function. I even remember the original MYST coming with a blank notebook. If I think further back, I remember someone at a neighbor's house handing me a memo pad when I sat down to play one of the Carmen Sandiego games to work out the clues. 

I'm not a very smart person. I'm really not. 

I was a "B" student through most of middle school, high school, and the entirety of college. That may sound like a decent achievement, but it was arduous and painful. I was in Honors Algebra I in high school, and I would often be at my desk, my forehead pressed against the paper (as if trying to will the answers into existence) in tears. I'd stare at a jar of broken pencils, trying to keep things in perspective and not let it all get to me. The reasons why I struggled so much are many and varied, much of it owed to the kinds of mixed signals parents often unknowingly send to their kids when it comes to expectations. In short, unless I was told so, I wasn't allowed to be okay with anything. If I was too calm about something, I'd be chastised for not taking things seriously. If I beat myself up about something, I'd be told to calm down and keep things in perspective. There was no middle ground, the choices being to either make mountains out of molehills or get them made for me. Failure was almost always chalked up to simply not trying hard enough or wanting to win enough. 


I bring this up because I gave Machinarium a try. It's a point-and-click adventure game where you solve puzzles to get past certain obstacles and progress farther in the story. You'll gather items, talk to people (robots), you'll move things around, you'll read little schematics or symbols. The game is broken up into individual screens (sometimes two or more) of either a single room or series of rooms, each one a puzzle unto itself, with one rarely carrying over into the other. I solved the first one easy enough, but the second one resulted in me doing a search for a solution. At first, my reaction was "well, duh." but then I stopped and asked, "Well, how would I have known I could do that?" Often the solutions in these games come as a result of getting mad and clicking on anything and everything, eventually discovering the solution completely by accident. This was not a good start. 

The next puzzle involved flipping a series of switches to lower a beam to climb on. I kept trying to work out how the symbols on the switches corresponded to actions, eventually working something out that only really held up about one in every five times. I should have felt proud for solving it without the walkthrough, but I wasn't. 

To its credit, Machinarium will hold your hand on occasion, but it does so in a novel way I've never really seen before. In the upper right corner of the screen are two icons, one a question mark that isn't selectable (how this is made otherwise is never all that clear) showing a simple illustration of what should be done in order to progress. The other icon is for a notebook with a curious electronic lock. In fact, it's less a lock and more of a minigame. You suddenly get to play as a small, flying key shooting at spiders while scrolling left to right until you reach the keyhole at the end of the stage. If you complete this scrolling shooter (my favorite videogame genre, by the way), you get a rather beautifully illustrated set of storyboards revealing the solution to the screen's puzzle. In other words, it gives you the answer, but it makes you work for it. It's very novel. 

The detail of these answers varies at times, often only telling you that something is a puzzle, but not actually showing you how to solve the sliding block or red wire/black wire problem, leaving that up to you. This is where I start to develop a complex and almost abusive relationship with the game; I should be having fun, I enjoy taking on a challenge, I know there's no real pressure, and I know there's no one around to point and laugh when I need to take a few extra steps than most. So, why does the idea of getting out pen & paper feel so defeating? There was a puzzle I absolutely couldn't figure out. It was like that wolf-chicken-feed puzzle but with way more flora and fauna. The shmup hint book gave me the solution, but instead of writing it down, I tried memorizing it, even checking back every few steps. It didn't work. I started to get up to get some scratch paper and a pen, only to feel very depressed. 

I turned off the game, resolving to just come back later. Unfortunately, like I said, giving up (even briefly, with resolve to return, and after trying my best) doesn't sit well with me. It brings back a painful memory, a fight I had with someone. Someone has a go at you in frustration, and says something hurtful. The memory itself is really nothing special, certainly nothing traumatic, but it's one of those lingering echoes that comes back to haunt you at the worst possible time. A harmless little remark over a game of chess or basketball or Mario suddenly becomes this metaphor for your whole life (even though the person who made this remark is barely older than you). Worse is when someone else comes along to tell the self-appointed life coach to back off, only to turn the mess into a full-on battle of the wills. Doors get slammed, chess pieces get picked up, power buttons get pressed, apologies are made, and you try not to go to bed angry. 

Machinarium is a game that makes me very sad, but not for the reasons it probably wants me to be. 

Let That Donut Be On Your Head

My little nod to The Spoony One:
In doing research for tabletop games, I came upon Noah Antwiler's episode of Counter Monkey discussing the logistics of confronting The Lady of Pain. In explaining exactly what Planescape is, how it works (or doesn't work, depending on your understanding of physics), and why one should fear the aforementioned lady, he analogized the City of Doors (Sigil) as a donut atop an asymptote overlooking a giant pizza. Well, I'd been making pizzas left and right the past few weeks (the one pictured's toppings include green olives and golden tomatoes, if you're curious), so I picked up a box of cake donuts, and started snapping. The comic panels came a bit later, as I was working on my writing project at the time, but the story was more or less always there.

The maze was a pain, but still really fun to draw, even if it completely ignores many of the basics of perspective. On the other hand, I was really, really unhappy with how my Lady of Pain turned out. There's a reason I don't draw people, even people with masks; the proportions never look right to me, and it's really hard to make a feminine face without resorting to full, pouty lips or simply drawing the face in profile. Anyway, the other character is a stick figure, so let it be known I'll always play to my strengths whenever I can, for better or for worse.

A Christian Atheist and a Communist Republican walk into a bar...

Recently, Leland Yee told the San Francisco Chronicle that gamers had absolutely no credibility in any and all discussions regarding the regulation of the sale of videogames. This is akin to saying women have no say in healthcare discussions regarding birth control. As controversial as that statement may be, something a little more absurd came up in the comments to this particular article on Kotaku, from a user by the name of MassIdiocy:

For those who haven't read the gist of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association check it out at oyez.com. To be entirely honest, I sort of agree with Leland Yee and here's why: There's absolutely nothing unconstitutional about banning video games. Allow me to explain.
The 1st Amendment protects people's right to free speech for purposes of political dissent. It doesn't protect "smut" or violent media. For those commentors out their that believe SCotUS is infallible I'd suggest looking at some of their old decisions: What the Court thinks is "Unconsitutional" has been wildly different depending on who was presiding. If we accept that the Court is always right we have to accept decisions like Dredd Scott and Plessy as legitimate in their time, right?
I'm a gamer and ardent libertarian but the decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association doesn't make any sense (I think Thomas' dissent has it right). If we want to say that California has the right to pass legislation legalizing marijuana, it should also have the right to pass legislation to band (sic) the sale of games to minors.
I know that young, digitally-minded types get up-in-arms over content restriction but it is our duty as citizens to also understand the founding principles of our Constitution and apply them consistent with their intent. When Leland Yee says, "gamers have no credibility in this argument" I can't help but wonder if this is what he's talking about.

I may be a political moron, but I have a fairly good idea as to what being a libertarian entails. In broad terms, the party shares a number of core beliefs with the political philosophy of objectivism. I consider myself an objectivist in many ways, namely in my support of artists' rights, including the notion that they be allowed to take as many creative risks as possible, regardless of social norms or arbitrary authorities, allowing the lasseiz faire school of capitalism to leave matters with the power of the consumers and their dollar votes. To that end, the very idea of a game being banned or even restricted outside of a voluntary self-regulating system such as the ESRB, is all but the very definition of unconstitutional.

Mass idiocy is working under the premise that the first amendment ONLY protects political speech. This premise is sound if one has no idea how to interpret conjunctions in a sentence. The first amendment is a list of items, separated by semicolons (to distinguish from the commas in the items in the sequence), wherein each item can stand alone in the absence of others.

Freedom of Religion.
Freedom of Speech.
Freedom of the Press.
Freedom to Peaceably Assemble.
Freedom to Petition the Government.

These are not all the same thing, though they are linked by all having to do with self-expression in a verbal context. To his credit, though, he does bring up a point in one of his replies that the amendments of the constitution neither exist in nor were created in a vacuum. Interpretation of laws often has a lot to do with the political climate and public opinion. Once upon a time, it was the opinion of the people, and by extent those they'd voted into power, that the sale of alcohol should be prohibited. I think we all know how well that ended up. The point is though that laws are generally designed to be vague and open to interpretation, that they might adapt more easily to changing times. The right of people to own guns was meant to empower people to form militias against invading foreign armies back in the early days of the United States, but now can mean protection from any threat to one's home or person, nationality of the assailant notwithstanding.
Similarly, the founding fathers had no concept of the internet, but that doesn't mean the web is an exception anymore than television, radio, motion pictures, or any other form of mass communication that didn't exist in 1792.
This is all old hat and Government 101. The debate about what the government can or cannot do can go on for hours because of several factors. At the end of the day, the biggest issue most people, myself included, are taking with MassIdiocy is that he's saying the government has the right to ban videogames by way of legislation and regulation, all under the banner of him being a libertarian. Libertarians believe people should self-regulate on all but a few matters instead of relying on muscle from the government to protect them. Restricting free trade of items sold to consumers by private enterprises by way of majority votes and court rulings is a complete contradiction to that philosophy, simple as that.