Autumn in Maryland

Autumn is definitely my favorite season of the year, I was a bit hesitant about it this year because Winter, Spring, and then Summer seemed so awesome but late September and October so far have really sealed the deal. Of course now it's gotten to the point where it's starting to get "OMFG Cold" by most MD resident's standards, it's fine because we all started complaining about the cold a month ago when it was actually super nice out.

And now something that I did back in May/June and am just now getting around to:

A blogger that I know through RPG blogging, Darvin, posted this "Random Music Album Cover meme" back in May and I thought it was a very interesting idea so I did it back then, and with my typical lazy nature I didn't post it but the results amused me so much I had to save them in my e-mail somewhere. So I present to you now, the results and the instructions for the meme! I'd love to see others if you do it for yourself.

1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random... Read More”
or click en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations"
or click www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

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I think the fact that my random wikipedia page ended up being "Fecal Fat Test" was amazing, and knew that I had to post this sooner or later. The absolutely stunning photo, which I unfortunately had to Photoshop the word "Fecal" onto was found randomly on Flickr and belongs entirely to Flickr user jennyBunz, I hope she doesn't mind because that photo would actually makes a really kickass album cover!

Other news: updated my slow as hell progress through Wheel of Time book 4, from 31% to 37% complete. The group just got into the Aeil Wastes so now I'll probably pick up the speed and hopefully be finished the book before the end of the year. Yes, again, I read incredibly and horrifyingly slow. I know this.

Also a week ago I posted a quick photoshop sketch I did on Parallax Perspectives, and I hope to be doing at least one of those a week as I start picking up more freelance art jobs that require me to keep in practice.

Random Thoughts

Now that my hair has gotten longer, it's horribly apparent how much hair I lose every time I take a shower or brush my hair. I can't help but feel like after a few days, or at most a few months, of this practice I could easily go bald. Warning: this could easily be the most boring thing in the world to some of you, but these are some of the randomly stupid things I think about in life.

Looking at the actual numbers is interesting, or maybe I just have some bizarre (diagnosable) part-time obsession with math. The average human head, at least scientists believe, has between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on it. What's surprising is that some claim the color of hair determines how many there are, that blondes have more hairs than brunettes and so on. So let's look at how much hair I lose on the average day. During a shower I'd venture a guess that I end up losing about 20-30 hairs, but let's take that to an extreme and say 50 a day, plus brushing I'll go way out on a limb and say that I end up pulling out ~100 hairs in any given day.

If this is the case, and I think the actual number is much smaller, then it would take me 1,250 days to pull out all of my hair. That's 3.43 years! Considering my hair is about down to my shoulders now, and I've been letting it grow for under two years still, I don't think I'm at much risk of going bald with my regular day-to-day practices! I'm quite relieved by this, and honestly I expected (and hoped) to find out just as much, but really when you see how freaking much hair comes off of my head you have to be amazed that I'm not bald already! (I have had a widow's peak since I was a baby, however)

For Funsies

D&D Home Page - What Monster Are You? - D&D Compendium

Puppy Pictures

Some of you may not know yet, but Becky and I got a puppy (my first ever!) back in mid-march and I can't believe it's been 2 months already. I'll be uploading a bunch of photos of her, and more of the cats, as regularly as I can. You can see them here: Freyja's Flickr Set

She's now 4 1/2 months old, we stopped counting in weeks pretty quickly because it's an archaic practice that dog owners seem to be obsessed with. If you're not going to count in weeks their whole life, why not stop after 2-3 months? Once the weeks exceed 15 and the months are finally to a significant digit (2+) you should switch over. Why? Because when you say your puppy is 23 weeks old, no one REALLY knows exactly how old that is without doing math first. Said math is inaccurate also, as a month varies in the number of weeks it contains.

Josh said yesterday that my math discussions clearly define me as a huge nerd. I think he's right...

Other news, I'm attempting some motivation to get myself drawing regularly again. Parallax Perspectives had a great boost back in Feb/March thanks to an RPG blogging friend (Chgowiz), but I let him down and that died out. There must be some way to prevent this revival/death cycle my drawing seems to be in.

Oh also, you may notice on the right, I finally decided to join Twitter. My soul hasn't died yet, and it's actually a pretty fun thing to use. I do actually have a whole different set of problems with it than I thought I would, but I'll go into those later.

Readings

You might notice the new reading progress bar I added on the right side, this is to aid my effort to read more. I'm currently 177ish pages through the 981 page long Shadows Rising, the 4th book in the Wheel of Time series. It's funny, but four books into a series is more than I've ever read, and I have no doubts that WoT will be one of the few long series of books that I ever read. The only other one I've read more than 3 books of is Dune, which I liked all 4 of the books that I read in that series too. Right now the progress bar is a % out of 100, but if I can figure out how to make it pages/total pages I will change it to that because then I don't have to do any math to get the %!

Is that a new level of lazy?

Phrases that Make Me Want to Kill Babies

The radio is perhaps the main offender when it comes to these, but no form of media is truly innocent of these crimes:

"Now more than ever..." - $%$!#%balls$&$#! Any ad you hear on the radio has essentially been saying this to you for your whole life, but now it has added meaning because people are taking it seriously and thinking that it's true. No, not true, I'm sure there's some point in the past or future where you have/will need a sweet deal on MORE than you do right now.

"Unprecedented economic times." - BS. It's a "recession", there are tons of precedents for it. Granted this one may be more global than the last couple have been, but any previous recession still counts as a precedent for this one. It's not like we are completely clueless as to why the stock market and housing markets are down, WE KNOW.

"Change. (the believable kind)" - A great presidential slogan dragged into the desert, blindfolded, eviscerated, and abused for all kinds of foul purposes. I don't think Obama or his speech writers at any point considered getting a hamburger for $.99 instead of $3 was the change they were attempting to get. Then again we can't know for sure, because said change was never specified.

On a side note, I -do- condone puns made with the slogan in relation to monetary change. Then again I condone pretty much all puns.

Motivation

I feel wholly unmotivated to actually get off my ass and do the things I really want to do. I slump through and sometimes get something done here or there, but it's rare and mostly uninspired. The worst part of this is that I can't explain it to myself, or to anyone else. I don't know what's in the way of me moving forward with art, writing, and all of the other things that make up the humongous list of goals I write for myself some evenings and weekends.

I always assume it's videogames getting in the way, because I do spend a fair amount of time playing them, or even other gaming, but in the last two weeks I haven't played videogames very much at all and other gaming is pretty much limited to D&D which happens every other week. I do end up reading / planning for D&D with a lot of my spare time, but it's not that I'm forgoing doing other things to work on D&D stuff, it's more that I do D&D stuff because I'm not doing anything else.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Shock therapy, less caffiene, MORE caffiene, sex drugs and rock'n'roll? I'm going to think on it this evening and see if I can figure some part of it or maybe even try to get through it somehow.

Movie update

Just realized I should update on this:

Wanted - 2 stars

Big old pile of crap in our opinion. :)

I'm writing more discussing this on Critical Hits, but I'll probably post even more spoileriffic stuff here after I do that, to really get into the nitty gritty between comic vs. movie and why a movie that people who didn't read the comic might like but those that did read the comic will cry themselves to sleep about it.