If some of you have been wondering why some of my e-mails go unanswered or later, I think I probably opened them at work and forgot to get back to you. I apologize for this. Work has been kicking my ass lately even though the money has been good.
Here is a brief run-down of the things I accomplished during the months:
(January)
*Took my Fluoroscopic exam as mentioned before. However I wouldn’t get my exam results until mid February witch turned out to be my highest score ever. I got a 92. proves that hard core ass studying for 2 weeks straight will make you a test pro at anything.
*Attended my final FC (Further confusion convention) to hang out with evalion and all his new found dragon/plane bros. The experience was magical and it was a decent send off considering I probably wont be going back to a furr con for many years. FC as a convention is not what it used to be. Gone are the intimate fun times of FC at the double tree in San Jose where the crowds were smaller and less informal. I had to spend 30 or 40$ for a one day pass to a single dragon panel. As a value proposition I couldn’t see where most of that cash went but I digress. We spent most of the time roaming in a pack of people sampling the local cuisine and drawing at the artist lounge. Ive been told that “BLFC” in Reno is the new place to be, but if I have to jump on a plane to do Reno air races or a furr con, I’m probably choosing the Air races.
*Purchased a 3DS finally in hopes I could cash in on cheap used cartridges that I perceived would have gone down in price due to the upcoming launch of the Nintendo switch at the time. My eagerness to get caught up on all the SMT hand-held games blinded me and in the end I ended up spending about 400$ anyway for the unit and 6 games.
*Started and finished “Westworld” thanks in part to Jordan who visited soon after FC. If you haven’t seen the HBO series Westworld, you need to make a point to commit to it. Its very good. Lots of social commentary on the nature of artificial intelligence, game design, and massive multiplayer open world scenarios. It’s some of the best TV since Battlestar Galactica (the newest one).
*Computer sort of took a shit. My HD finally failed on me.. so I was without a means to draw for the week Ingo was down. I managed to have a back-up of everything I deemed important beforehand, But the new OS update meant that Id have to shell out for adobe creative cloud. The loss of the comp added another negative to an already troubled re-visit.
*2nd visit from Ingo J Airplane. Tried to re-capture the magic of last years epic 4rth of July post graduation trip with the guy I love. However things did not go according to plan. In hindsight I should have taken the week off of work so I could have properly toured the bay Area to give him something to do. I suspect he was bored out of his wits waiting for me to return home from a 12 hour day only to find me exhausted and ready for bed. This caused some problems. We will have to have a minor do-over in June.
*Jace introduced me to blueberry dream. I wont even explain what that is.. but Jesus Christ it was powerful. I’ll just cross that off my bucket list…
(February)
*Flew out to Arizona to have a 3-day airplane extravaganza at Pima Aviation museum with Evalion dragon. (For the purpose of the trip I used my own woefully under powered I-phone 4 camera to snap photos of the journey), but they mostly came out unpresentable. So here is a link to the Highlights that Eva snapped with his professional grade camera instead; https://www.dropbox.com/sh/d9qa26ibcb4439e/AADd3KzDkUOXdcq4K5074Sa1a?dl=0 . If you’ve ever been to LA then the closest explanation of Pima I can give you is that it was like March feild but with 100 more planes and some actual budget. We were also greeted to A-10’s, f-16’s, and c-130’s circling and flying in formation every hour on the hour from the Davis-Monthan air force base next to AMARG the boneyard. If you are ever in the Tuscon area do yourself a favor and go take the boneyard tour during the wintertime. Its a super enjoyable ride you will remember hours later when your chowing down on Mexican food around the surrounding town. And don’t forget to visit the Titan Missile museum about 30 miles north. Its the only remaining cold war Titan Missile silo left in the united states and super worth it if you can get on the “Beyond the Blast doors tour”. My biggest regret is that I didn’t take Monday off so I could finish out Sunday chilling with eva’s dragon bros in their huge scalley shrine.
*Started one of my SMT games, (Shin Megami Tensei: Soul hackers) and ended up finishing the game sometime late march. I’m not going to do a full review, but it’ll say this: As much as I anticipated this game 7 years ago, it was probably SMT’s weakest game in the collection that I have played. I powered through it while my online buddies where chowing down on the fillet Mignon that was Horizon zero dawn and Zelda BoTW. The ending did not have a worthy pay-off, the graphics showed their age, The story was generic. It wasn’t a shit game by any means, just mediocre considering the source. If you have personal 5 by now, play that one instead.
*Clued my father in to the fact that I will be leaving California in the coming months. Its going to be a huge gamble…
*Started the Prince Tomcat of Grumman comic. A little sometin sometin to feed my inner perve. The comic itself is off to a good start mostly in part because its a looser, sketchier version of the comic that I work on already. I do this in part by using chibis for all the scenes relating to story, and the full blown detailed bodies and proportions when the sexy time goes down. This is roughly how I can get my fix telling something much more light-hearted. The small perverted audience for this one is decidedly larger as I have seen traffic for the titan site jump up a bit since then.
*Spent 6k on 2 root canals that are completely my fault. If you are disgusting like me and want to see what happened to my two teeth: Here and Here.
(March)
*Upgraded my phone hard core. This has more to do with the fact that I can write off part or all of it as a business expense, But I am an apple whore, and I wanted a better camera for those museum trips. I splurged on the I-phone 7 plus. No regrets AT ALLL. though none of that would even be possible had tax day not been as kind as it had been.
*A CPA can save you a lot of money. God damn. I had saved most of my pay thinking uncle Sam was going to bend me over hard. Ive been worried about this since October of last year, thinking they’d try to ding me for 40%. If you are an independent contractor for any reason, don’t do this yourself, hire a tax professional who will tally up all your miles, your phone bills, uniform, repair costs, and materials. Claiming patreon payout as taxable income worked out in my favor as well as I could claim everything related to my art as a business expense. Had I known what I know now, I could have written off a couple of the really expensive dinners at FC as a business expense as well. The money I saved allowed me to absolve myself of the damage my dental bill cost me. Huge relief I tell ya.
*Rediscovered the temptation of ebay: Hobbymaster/Century wings 1/72 die-cast fighter planes. The f-14’s are so detailed… http://www.hobbymaster.com.hk/ http://www.centurywings.com/
*Sold off my star citizen account through a proxy. This one is probably the most unexpected as I was very excited about the game a mere 3 years ago. People thought I’d at-least make porn of the Retalliator heavy bomber since it was my most beloved space boat. But I never got to see it in game. it’s questionable at this point if anyone will ever be able to see it in the grand procedurally generated universe that was so promised 5 years back. When you think about the Hello games fiasco with No man’s Sky, you can at least say confidently that they released their game. I touted this as being the game that would be the “eve-online killer”. But it wasn’t. Because the game is STILL not out yet. The newest mass effect game had a budget of less then half of what Chris Roberts got through crowd funding and they STILL managed to release their game. So what is the problem?
Chris Roberts all you have is a demo that you keep re-skinning and taking peoples money to pay for! Finish your game before the fan base bites you like Ubisoft bit Oculus Rift.
*Started a new SMT 3Ds game called “Shin Megami Tensei IV” This one I will review when I finish as it is a pretty solid, well put together title. A worthy successor of the previous title “SMT: Strange Journey”. More on this later.
(April)
Too early to say.. But I wanna get at-least 3 more pages of atoll lab out the door before month’s end. I have plans to finish SMT IV and get started on Torment: Tides of Numenera. Their wont be any new trips until June, and that makes me sad as fuck. ;/
So I recently beat this game. I might have written about it before somewhere, but the SMT series has a very different take on religion then what you normally always see in the western world. The Christian God and the Devil are depicted as 2 dictators on the wildly opposing scales of morality. The binary of “good and evil” are thrown out the window in favor of the 2 absolutes “law and chaos”. Humans are- for the most part neutral, and cannot survive well in a world of complete law, nor a world of complete chaos. But humans are mostly weak, and will, after being liberated, be doomed to return to worshiping God or the devil eventually. It was revealed in SMT III that their exist a near infinant amount of universes where God and the devil fight over the souls of man. In some worlds, God wins, and in others the devil wins. Those worlds then suffer the consequences until someone (usually a mortal) steps in to shake up the status quo. Other Gods and demons from other religions exist trying to find their place in the realm of man amidst the fallout (usually by helping the one mortal with the power to set the future right again). Anyway, Ive always preferred the idea of law over chaos rather then Good versus evil, because what is Good is largely determined by the majority rule. Morality is then, determined by the majority rulers of the world a given being grows up in. For example, we believe that cannibalism or the act of eating a creature that was intelligent/ sapient ect. to be an evil act. Yet some very old tribes practiced ritualistic cannibalism of fallen warriors, and family members to honor the dead by absorbing the flesh and the memories into their own body. In the SMT world- the game progressively tries to steer you morally in two directions, yet the hardest end game option is usually the neutral human ending (and the ending I had to cheat to get ). You get a 4rth option- the nihilism ending where you choose to end the cycle of war between God and the devil by simply destroying reality with a singularity. That threw me for a loop and I’m glad the option was there. But I decided not to write a review for this one because I am currently in the middle of SMT IV : apocalypse/Final and wanna take in the gestalt of the story surrounding what happened in this version of Tokyo. I can defiantly recommend this game if you like a great story. Although if you were to play anything in the SMT series on handheld, it would have to be the upcoming remake of Shin Megami Tensei: strange journey. A game I found to be phenomenal 5 years ago. Seriously tho– Do play this game. If anything for Kazuma Kaneko’s amazing monster artwork.
