Month: July 2005

OH NOES
So my father called me out of the house today to go look at the back yard. He found this thing sticking out from the grape vines:

It’s a bee nest the size of a soccer ball! (I’m too scared now to take the pictures at the yard) So yea, yet another unusual problem in our house kind of breaks the flow of my rather regular flow of life.

ABOUT WORK
So, AX is officially over, and the UCI Studios Arts office officially hired me as a full time employee for the job that I’ve been working on for the past few months now (on half-time pay). I do get to work at home and have rather flexible hours, so in the short run this life is not bad at all.

ABOUT WOW
In the evenings, I’m throwing myself back into World of Warcraft – since my WoW company is heading into the raid sized end game dungeons that needs a well equipped party of 40. A week was spent pecking at lower level dungeons for bits and pieces of equipment that I need, and now that I’m generally satisfied with what I have, I can take a break and hopefully start something on my own.

WEBCOMICS
recently recommended me to go read Misfile, and after spending an evening to catch up to the storyline, I’m 1) rather happy with the story 2) really pumped up to want to do my own webcomic since the art and story content that I’ve read is rather similar to the kind of things I have in mind.

Now all I need is 1) a decent story and 2) time away from WoW so I can actually do stuff (again).

LIFE IN GENERAL
met and recently at the Nickel arcade with the new ITG2 machine. In the Groove is really nothing like DDR – the songs mostly suck, the dance steps are not meant to be danced, but it is challenging – steps are usually meant to punish you rather than make you feel like you’re dancing. If anything, those who enjoyed the “Max” part of DDR Max would come to appreciate ITG… but it’s certainly not a replacement for DDR.

P*S* I think I’m more receptive about liquor now that I’ve stole a few sips and find out that most mixed drinks taste rather good. I’m still not very into the throwing up part though.

O.O
>.<

PHWComics is awsome~ especially Ravenholm Armory. You just HAVE to see this if you’ve played around with Gary’s Mod for HL2 before.

Also, the Tom Cruise Kills Oprah video is pretty much all I watched as entertainment while I’m working on the furinkazan art project. Somehow seeing a scientologist going nuts keeps me sane. Go figure.

P*S* It shouldn’t be too hard to find the original context of the video, but you know… I think Tom Cruise’s unedited appearance on Oprah is even crazier…

For those who don’t know already, I became a staff member for Anime Expo over the July 4th weekend. Being someone who fondly remembered saying that “Staffers are idiots” in previous cons, I found out this year that con-goers are also idiots. The two statements are not mutually exclusive.

I think I came to that conclusion mostly because I was picky for things out of the norm – those 90% of the people who followed rules and were generally understanding slipped our mind in a heartbeat, while those people who were real assholes would stay in our mind for a long long time. Of course we were far from perfect; I thought that I wasn’t briefed enough about protocols and schedules and deadlines, but we kept ourselves honest and did what we could to help. Out of all the people who we dealt with, only one or two people genuinely thanked us for our efforts; the rest of them were ungrateful, to say the least.

– There’s one artist who, after we explained multiple times that her registration didn’t go through, pretty much stood in one stop and kept complaining; we shoved her from the registration line out to the hall, and there she stood, still unwilling to stop bothering us (or bother the rest of the staff so they in turn bother us).

– One of the artist who didn’t get a table for Artist’s Alley insisted that she should be compensated for the 4000 plus dollars that she “potentially lost” for not getting a table.

– This year, three sides of our art show were not walled, and so there were many, many people who tried to take pictures of the art inside the art show from the outside. We had to fence the art like maniacs despite all the signs around the place that clearly said “NO PICTURES PLEASE”…

– And speaking of signs that got ignored, there’s one person who took his time to look at the sign we had at our entryway that said, “OPENS AT 10AM”. Then this guy turned to one of us and asked, “So does the show open at 10AM?”

– There’s one particular case of camera story that was particularly hard to deal with… basically, the English voice actress for Yomiko Readman really liked the Yomiko model we showcased, and somehow she snuck in a camera in her purse. By the time one of us went over to stop her she had taken one picture already; when we clearly told her to stop she took another. When we start haggling with her she pleaded that as Yomiko’s voice actress she deserved to get that picture… not to mention that she was sort of an important guest for the con. I didn’t know how the story ended; we let the manager take over situation in the end.

Pictures for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it.

My legs are killing me.