Caught In The Whirlwind
Jason
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Posts by Jason
QotD: What, no horses?
01398 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I am a farmer who raise ducks and cows. The animals have a total of 9
heads and 26 feet. How many ducks and cows do I have?
Submitted by The BlueTie.
Seriously? This is the QoTD? A math problem?
5 ducks and 4 cows.
Come on now vox, you can do better than this.
A Change In Appearances
01398 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Last night I went out and got my hair cut. Normally I wouldn't announce this to the world or anything but I've been trying to grow it out a little bit because I got tired of how I've looked pretty much the same since I started getting haircuts. So I let my hair grow for a couple months until it was a decent length and went in last night to get it cut.
It's not a drastic change, really. Right now anyway. It's just longer than it has been in the past. I think I'd like to go for something just a hair longer than it is right now by the end of it. I've been told I look better with hair that's a little bit longer. I wasn't planning on changing over to the final style yet or anything, I just needed it to be a little more under control.
The title also references a change in the appearance of my apartment too. After my haircut I swung by my friend's apartment and picked up the print for my piece of artwork. It came out amazing. All of the little details from the digital piece are in there and it looks like she did the work by hand on that piece of paper as opposed to doing it digitally and having it printed. I'm very happy with how it turned out. I just need to find a good place to put it. I found something I sorta liked but I think I'm going to move things around a little more. My apartment really needs more room for art type things as I've gotten quite the collection over the past few years.
I also picked up Hannibal (because I finished Red Dragon and Silence Of The Lambs since I last posted a book update…working on it!) while I was out which I'm hoping I enjoy. It seems to be a very love it or hate it kind of book, and I hope I'm in the "love it!" camp.
It's Done! It's Done! It's Done!!!
01400 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Remember that piece of artwork that I mentioned I was having done a few posts back? Well, it has been completed and I'm very very happy with the result. Wassy has outdone herself with this one.
Yep, it's another piece of art of my favorite City of Heroes character, Frost Magus. The way I figure it, you can't have enough! But this time it also includes my main City of Villains character, Dark Frost. Boring story time!
Dark Frost and Frost Magus are the same person, sort of. Dark Frost is a version of Frost Magus from an alternate dimension that was thrown down the path of evil when one important change happened in the timeline of her dimension that didn't happen in the hero Frost's. They both got their powers through a magical spell that backfired, however the difference was that Dark Frost's parents were killed in the accident while Frost Magus' survived. The loss of her parents gradually destabilized Dark Frost and she became cynical and selfish, only caring about herself in an uncaring world, so she thought. She turned to a life of crime to get by. Meanwhile, the hero Frost was using her powers for good.
Dark Frost was eventually sucked into the dimension where the hero Frost resided due to a lab equipment malfunction during an experiment. Not wanting to let the public know about what happened (because otherwise they would have to admit their research is pulling random people from other dimensions into their own…not a very popular thing you can imagine) they threw her into jail and tried to coverup what happened. Eventually Dark Frost escaped with help from Arachnos and ended up in the Rogue Islands, increased her power and proved that she was in fact one of the Destined Ones. All of that last bit is part of the City of Villains storyline.
While she was in the Rogue Islands though, she found out about the existance of the hero Frost. The more she learned, the more resentful and angry she got. Here's another her that got all the good breaks…all the breaks that she (Dark Frost) deserved to have. After she achieved the height of her power she decided that she was strong enough to strike out to Paragon City and meet up with the woman who had (in her view) stolen her real life.
And thats where this piece comes in. After getting Dark Frost to level 50 in game, I thought it would be very cool if there would be a Frost/Dark Frost piece…a sorta good vs evil type thing. I talked to Wassy who agreed to take on the project and off we went. Through discussion, this scene emerged. Dark Frost has planned out this meeting so she's confident that it's happening on her terms, so she appears relaxed on the wall. But she's ready to spring into action if things start going all unpredictable. She had just called out to Frost, making her presence known and Frost is whipping around trying to locate the source of that strangely familiar voice. And her shock is total when it ends up being her own face looking back at her.
I can't say enough good things about how this piece turned out. It's exactly what I was looking for when I thought that a combined piece would be cool, and in fact it exceeded my expectations when I got the final colored version last night (late last night or I would have posted this then). It looks so awesome, like it was a full page ripped straight from a comic book and all of the layers of meaning that I wanted in there are there. It tells a very important piece of the story of these two characters that can't happen in the game and it's also suggestive of a large scale battle soon to come.
I don't even know where to start. All the little details of this piece make it awesome. I especially like the subtle details of the shading in Frost's face and the way her hand is posed. And Dark Frost turned out amazing as well. And the background setting. And the lighting. And the little touches of detail. And the…well…everything. I'm in a very gushy mood right now, I just love it! I can't wait until I get the print. I need to figure out where I'm going to put the print first…I'm running out of wall space here.
Weekend Update: The Dark Knight Edition
01401 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
This weekend was good. Real good. The main thing that happened was I drove out to Rochester (about 2.5 hours away) to go see The Dark Knight at an IMAX theater and also head out to Bugaboo Creek for dinner with some friends.
I'm not going to spoil anything about Dark Knight here since not everyone may have seen it. But I'm going to say that it deserves every single bit of hype it's been getting. I'm not a huge batman fan so I was going into this movie just slightly excited and a little annoyed at how everyone was talking about it. It was starting to feel like I would get tired of the movie before I even saw it. But I forgot all of that about 15 minutes into the movie.
Heath Ledger's Joker also deserves every bit of praise that's being placed upon it. He wasn't a guy playing the joker…he was the joker. End of story. His performance stole the show and I'm still kinda speechless after seeing it. I had no idea he could totally transform himself like that.
Go see it. Even if you are very "eh" about batman. It's just…good.
Dinner after was good too, although the service was very slow and I was threatened with the horror of having somebody tell them it was my birthday and then the waiters would come over and make me kiss this moose puppet thing. The friends in question were Jay and Wassy, along with another individual I met in college and his housemate. It was fun hanging out with them since we don't usually hang out in person like that.
Sunday was spent hanging out and playing City of Heroes for a good portion of time due to a crazy long thing I said I would do that ended up taking about 7 hours. Fun!
QotW: My Commute
01403 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
How do you travel to and from work – personal vehicle, bus, subway/train, pedal
power? What does it cost you per week in gas or fares?
Submitted by Jan.
I live relatively close to work. I drive my Nissan Rogue which averages around 25.1mpg and my commute is 7.5 miles.
So, calculating that out, a 1 way trip is roughly .2988 gallons of gas. 2 way trip is .5976 gallons. At a price of about $4.15/gallon, that means I pay $1.24 for a one way trip, $2.48 per day, and for a week I pay about $12.40.
My Wallet Grew Legs
01406 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
If you happened to glance at my twitter box a little further down the page (or right next to…or above depending on when you read this) you may have noticed that I have misplaced my wallet.
I'm fairly certain that it's in my apartment somewhere. Last friday I was sitting at my desk and I took it out of my pocket because it's uncomfortable to sit on sometimes. And I put it…somewhere. Now I can't find it. I checked all the usual spots (and the unusual ones…going through the garbage, not fun) with no luck, so I'm chalking it up as a loss right now.
I called up and reported my cards as lost last night. Everything except two of them which I had out of my wallet for one reason or another, so at least I have access to my bank account and a credit card. Now I need to wait the 4 weeks it'll take the state to send me a new drivers license. Sigh. Hopefully it arrives before the state fair. Or I stumble upon my wallet by then.
I'm also in the market for a thin wallet of some kind. Bah, this is really annoying.
News & Politics QotW: Offshore Drilling
01407 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
President Bush lifted an executive order banning offshore oil drilling on Monday. Do you think this is a good solution to the high prices Americans are paying for gasoline?
No. No it's not. There's a sizable portion of Americans who think that we can all get cheaper gas if we tap our oil reserves. There's also a sizable portion of Americans who don't realize that any oil that we can produce is going to be a small drop in the bucket of what we consume. We can't meet our daily consumption with our untapped reserves. We're not sitting on some goldmine of oil here.
Sure, the prices might drop a bit…but not much, not enough. The only way out of this mess is to cut back on consumption, not increase production. Increasing production is only treating the symptom, not the disease. I don't have a huge problem with offshore drilling, but the minute they lift the ban on drilling in alaska…ugh.
It just bothers me that people think that we can rely on domestic oil and cut down on imports. They seem to think it's some conspiracy that we have all this oil and it would change the world if we would use it. But that's just short term thinking, and shoddy short term thinking at that. It's just the typical perceived easy way out that the masses tend to favor that got us into this in the first place.
Very Excited
01407 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I'm in a very excited mood right now. A couple weeks ago…or maybe it was a month. I've lost track of time since then, I had approached my friend Wassy about doing a commission for me. The basic premise is that I have two characters in City of Heroes (well more than two, but these are the only two that matter here), one a hero and the other a villain. The villain is an alternate reality version of the hero that got all the hard breaks making her a little crazy and moving her down a different path. So through a discussion with my friend, it was decided that the villain would be hunting the hero and this piece would be the exact moment where the hero learns of the villains existance (by being confronted by her near a park)
My excitement level has grown over the time since this was hashed out as she gradually had time to start working on the poses and the detailed penciles for both characters individually. But last night she did the background and put it all together and my excitement level shot through the roof. She nailed exactly what I wanted the piece to be. I was grinning like an idiot for at least a half hour after I opened the e-mail attachment.
I don't want to show it because it's still a work in progress and all that, but you can bet I'll show it off here when it's all done. Which shouldn't be too much longer now…
Wheee!
[50 in 365] Book 6: Lifting Shadows
01407 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I've been really lax in posting books for a while I'm actually reading book 8 right now (no way in hell am I going to get to 50) so I'll be trying to catch up when I can.
This one is also going to be a weird one. The book is…
Lifting Shadows
by Rich Wilson
Lifting Shadows is the authorized biography of the band Dream Theater. If you recall, I picked it up at the Progressive Nation show in Albany and had it all signed and such. The book was really interesting. I thought I knew a lot about the history of the band but there was several periods of the time where I was really surprised about what was going on. It shocked me to learn how close they were to breaking up and calling it quits a few times.
My one complaint about this book is that the author uses the word "Ironically" a lot. As in, everything is ironic. Everything. I'm usually not terribly annoyed by bad grammar or something like that, as long as it's not horrible. But this crossed the threshold into obnoxious territory. I also started to get annoyed by how the author would describe the various albums, adding his own commentary to the descriptions of the tracks. I already know what the music sounds like…and I really don't care if the author thinks that a certain track is a classic or not. I'm reading it for the band…not the author.
Of course this one is weird because a) it's so limited in scope and b) even if you were interested it's going to be practically impossible for you to get a copy at this point. It's just a really good read for anybody who's a fan of Dream Theater, or even somebody who's heard of them and wants to look inside the way a band develops long term over a span of 20 years.
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