2009's first crapart.

Happy new year, everyone!

And here, have a crappy photo of the first art if the year, drawn at Husks and Alysande’s party. Because I’m a dag like that.

In my defence, the night’s other activities were 500 and Lips…

Mirrored from void-star.net β. Comments are preferred on the original.

(But watch out, citizens, because in 2012…)

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Another one of those wonderfully sporadic and completely boring multi-topic blog updates? Don't mind if I do!

Mail Migration

I'm super-happy with the migration of void-star.net's email to Google Hosted Apps. The POP3 access is great for my laptop, the IMAP is perfect for my iPhone, the spam filters are beautiful for the catch-all address and the mailing lists work better than that bloody perl system that comes with CPanel ever did. In short, it's sweet. I'm not sold on the benefits of the other aspects of Apps (the Docs, Sites et cetera), but the mail is worth it. Even if it does mean Google is archiving all your stuff. Not like it wasn't doing that anyway.

Anyway, if anyone wants a (free) @void-star.net or @furced.net email address, give me a username and an existing email address (to mail your password to), and I'll set you up.

Material Goods

Season's changing, which makes me want to buy clothes. But… from where. I don't shop in stores much any more, but my usual online haunts are failing me. So, readers, where do you shop online?

I also bumped my hand against the back of my chair the other day and accidentally threw my Death Note mug across the room. I have a really bad track record with anime-themed mugs. Upshot: I need a new one. Anyone have any recommendations for something cool?

Plus I need to re-dye my hair and whinge at ~Mat [h] until he buys me some new RAM. Nothing new there.

SharePoint

After my SharePoint training a couple of weeks ago, I went through a fit of insanity and installed WSS 3.0 on my computer at home. For those of you who've never heard of it (which is probably most of you), WSS and it's "big (un-free) brother" MOSS make up Microsoft's CMS system. I guess it's sort of like WordPress on steroids, if WordPress was hideously ugly, aimed at the corporate market and tightly-coupled into Microsoft Office.

I installed it partly as a training exercise, and partly because I thought it's EDMS features would be cool for working on Urban Nordica in that hazy distant future where I get the time and energy to get back to writing. Alas, this was not the be the case. The system is up and working fine locally, but there's some r-tarded going on with its Alternate Access Mappings (Micro-speak for vhosts) and it keeps trying to resolve the external URL to the internal one. Which works great on my local LAN, and not so awesomely from everywhere else in the world. No idea what's going on there.

Oh, and my Office 12's WSS integration support appears to be broken for no reason at all. I ♥ Vista so much, srsly.

World of Warcraft

Shamefully, I started playing WoW again. Mostly at first because I noticed they'd finally released a Hawkstrider PvP mount. Seriously, I'd been saving my tokens up for one of those ever since BC came out and just when I spend them all… So a dozen or so games of WSG later (fuck but I hate WSG), I now have my Black Battlecock. It's awesome. Then I figured that I nearly had enough Honor for a new set of shoulders, and—

Goddamnit! Now I remember why I quit this stupid game!

Seriously, though, I recently heard WoW described (by one of the guys responsible for Warhammer Online, I believe) as a piece of "flawed genius". Which is really pretty well true. There are things I adore in WoW and things I loathe. Unfortunately, all the loves things are mechanically trivial (the art direction, lore and way the devs are constantly upgrading the UI based on player wants), while all the things I loathe have to do with the actual gameplay. And yeah, I'm starting to look forward to Wrath of the Lich King, but it doesn't look like it will be addressing any of the game's systemic flaws. The new quests and new zones will keep me entranced for a while, but as soon as I hit 80 I'm going to quit again. Because I don't grind, and in WoW there's really no point in endgame if you don't. And that's always been my problem with WoW, because I want to love it, but I never feel like I can actually achieve anything worthwhile. I calculate the amount of time it would take to get decent gear or a cool mount or whatever and it just ends up at, "Fuck that shit, I could be writing/drawing/playing other games/gardening/doing housework/sleeping/going to work/cutting my toenails." And the frustration of never achieving a state of satisfaction kills any enjoyment I might have otherwise found in the stuff I have done. Plus I kinda hate group content. Yeah, I know.

Still, we'll always have Diablo III…

Work

HP Service Manager 7 is a hulking pile of fail. Srsly.

Obligitory Crap Art

Finally, some art. This is all Zenntheartof: Smallville, because that's what I've been doodling most of lately. I need to learn not to draw right in the inside margin of my notebook, too.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Apparently the other day I decided that I wasn't part of enough fads and, hey, wouldn't it be cool to finally check out this "second life" thing everyone keeps talking about on the news. Just for the purposes of mocking, of course. And to put together a Loki avatar, because that shit is bananas. Or something.

It was kinda an idle idea until I realised that SL apparently does have a Mac client (I was for some reason under the impression that they didn't), which kinda cinched it for me. So I download a client and roll myself a login; Loki Seid. For those of you who haven't touched the thing before, all SL characters have a first and last name, the last of which is picked off a default list. My original choice (Loki Lax) was taken, and nothing else sounded good, so in the end I picked 'Seid' because it's actually a type of northern European witchcraft (seiðr). As far as I know, seid is about the only unmanly activity Loki doesn't get up to in the Sagas, but he does mock Odin for his use of it in Lokasenna.¹

So anyway, I land on the orientation island and spend the next hour or so trying to get used to the controls. They're… not intuitive to someone who's come from playing WASD-mouse games (no mouse turning, WTF?), and I haven't yet been able to find the keybinding options. It took me about three days to find the 'jump' (R) and 'crouch' (C) keys, which are pretty instrumental in flying if you don't want to just have to drop out of mid air in order to land. Okay, you can't die or anything, but you do look (and feel) like a total dork. It also took me several days to figure out how to detach the camera from your character to enable free-looking, and I still haven't figured out the key for it (in the end, I found these little HUD windows in the menu that control directions).

So the keys suck.

I'm one of those people who always spends hours at the character create screen getting everything just so, so that part of SL at least was fun. As far as I've yet to ascertain, the entire game is about avatar customization, or at the very least getting more money so you can get more items to get more avatar customization.

So I do my little tutorials and get my 'key' to the game proper and spend some more time collecting crap from the free shop on Help Island 2. Which is fun enough, but I'm soon done with it and… then what?

Teleporting into a couple of the "Popular Places" in my Search window, one thing becomes immediately apparent; the entire realm is one big shopping mall. Skins, hair, clothes, eyeballs, shoes and stranger thing all clamouring for my attention on wall-to-wall billboards down every street and every strip mall. And here's where SL hits its second problem. All this content is user-created, right? Which means it's only streamed to your computer when you walk near it. The end result is something like walking through a street made entirely of slow-loading webpages. Forget checking out the other people; by the time your client gets around to filling in their positions with default grey placeholder mannequins they'll've already moved on.

I'm sure there are some beautiful visuals in this game somewhere. I mean, people are clever when you give them pretty much free reign to create their own world. But damned if I could find anything worth exploring in between the endless strip malls trying to sell me, for the most part, sex.

And me, of course, bank balance zero.

The main currency in Second Life is the Linden dollar. Since you can both buy and sell this on the open market for real-world cash (as opposed to more traditional MMOs where the currency market is decidedly black) it has an exchange rate and, consequently, Second Life has a GDP. The last estimate was something like half a billion US dollars. And growing.

Making money has never been a main skill of mine, so I resigned myself to a second life of poverty pretty early on. Don't believe any of the hype around being able to make SL your really-real world job. Like real life, the place is a pyramid scheme and you're not any more likely to make it big there than you are here; especially this late in the metaphorical day. Still, even running on empty you can find stuff if you look; malls and shops deliberately targeted at new players that either give items away free or sell them for the nominal cost of L$1. Not counting upload money, I've spent exactly L$1 on my avatar, and that was for the hair prim.² So it's not all bad news.

My main trickle of income thus far? Camping. I'm not entirely sure of the economics of it, but in almost every large mall and club you'll be able to find camping spots; usually dance pads or chairs, but I've seen some slightly cleverer things like a gallows and a janitorial mop. Basically, you stick your character on the spot and just… walk away. You'll get paid out in Linden for the length of time spent idling; the usual rate is about L$1 per 10 minutes.

Yeah, that's right; SL pays you to AFK. Anyone I've ever played Furc with will know why that makes me lulz.

Of course, unless you've got an army of bots, you're not going to get rich camping. Idling for a whole day on your average L$1/10 will net you L$144, which is just slightly less than your average low-priced piece of clothing. Idling for a week is worth L$1,008 which starts to sound promising (the "weekly stipend" for paid users is L$300) until you realise two things.

One: SL logs you out after thirty minutes of inactivity. Of course, this isn't the end of the world. You can buy "anti-idle" balls; scripts you can equip on your character which will prevent them from idling out. I've seen these sell for several hundred Linden, but the good news for the terminally poor is that you can, in fact, turn the idle timer off in the client. Yeah. It's something like Ctrl+Shift+D to bring up the 'Advanced' toolbar menu, then from there to the Character sub-menu which contains the option. Hurdle one, overcome!

Two: The idling spots themselves will kick you off after a certain length of time; usually after 60 or, more generously, 80 minutes. So much for earning while I work (L$48). I've seen some camp-spots that don't seem to do this, but never unoccupied ones.

I'm still looking; let me know if you find a place.

About a day after starting my depressing new second life, I remembered that the reason I signed up in the first place was to see if I could pull off a Loki avatar. Now, Loki has a pretty distinctive look and I eventually found a hair prim that was the right sort of shape if not quite the right colour. But a skin? Forgeddaboutit.

Then I remember, Shit. I'm an artist. Surely they're not that hard to make…

And as it turns out, no; they're not. I had to eek out the specifics but here's the deal; a full-body 'painted' skin in SL is achieved by making up three texture files – head, torso and legs – then applying them to your character's base skin in the slots allocated for tattoos in the UI. A thoughtful user named Robin Wood has provided a highly detailed template for the relevant textures, and from there it's just a matter of whipping out your airbrush and getting spraying.

The funny thing? I've decided that I actually quite like texturing. This is literally my first go at it, ever, but after a couple of hours (all spent camping, of course) I'd thrown together a face skin I could totally live with (with one abortive attempt at eyebrows). A few more hours and I had a half-serviceable torso. And, okay, I need to work on my shading a little more but still… not bad for a first go 'round.

But don't think that making your own skins is all a free ride on the cool train. Uploading a file costs L$10 – hence the idling – and as much faith I have in me being extremely awesome, I've had two goes on the head and I'm going to need at least one more on the torso, plus the legs. So it's not all fun and games. You can sort of preview your work in the upload window, but – with skins at least – it's tinted weird and of course you're just looking at your body part in isolation. I'm sure there's a better way of doing this, but it probably involves something like Lightwave and, well, to be honest I just haven't looked into it that much.

Still, I think I've found my new hobby. I can get Loki's skin, eyes, boots and a basic corset-dress outfit down before I have to start looking into prims (and, ergo, 3D modelling).

Should keep me busy for a little while, at least.

1. Boring cultural note: Practising seid was considered "women's work". A male practitioner opened himself up to accusations of ergi ("unmanliness") which was fightin' words Back in the Day. ^
2. It's the SL equivalent of a wig. The native hair system is pretty weak, so most hair you see is actually a separate object (a 'prim') attached to the character's head. This allows for not just more detail and styling, but also ragdolling. Everyone loves ragdolling. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Because Corner/Nordica totally needs more fanservice.

This is Lain, the 'human' guise of Loki, though he's looking a little bit wild here. Sketched during the last half-hour of work today and speed-coloured in PhotoShop. Because I can.

Also! Check it out; it's the JLA jumper (minus some members) I found in the mall a couple of weeks ago!

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Last week's work sketches? Sure, why not. Only two this week, apparently I had less meetings.

1. Loki and Nekro. They were originally next to the D.O.A. 'Choose' logo, and Miriah was supposed to make an appearance until I ran out of paper. Hate that.
2. All I can say about this one is that you know your meeting has been going on wa-ay too long when CaramellDansen Lionel Luthor starts making sense. The pages in my notebook are just transparent enough that I could totally have done a full flip-book style animation of this… until it occurred to me such a thing would probably make my brain explode.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Well, last post was a pretty heavy one, and I'd like to thank everyone who's taken the time to respond to it; I'm getting around to answering back to everyone, but all the Heavy Thoughts are a kind of a bummer so here, have some Zenntheartof sketches to lighten the mood.

These are all pulled out of the Moleskine notebook I use at work. I have a terrible, horrible habit of sketching during dull meetings and, well, here're the results.

From left to right:

1. Me and my notebook, taken from the front page, right underneath the "Please return to" information that promises cookies as a reward.
2. Loki and Cthulhu, doodled in response to this incident.
3. These are all from one long, tedious meeting. I admit I'm a bit addicted to drawing Lex in this style; it's the bald head. It's just so minimalist!
4. Same week as the last three, but a different meeting. It's "Zero" meets Fight Club!

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Lolz new style!

This one's randomredux's fault for inadvertantly inspiring me with his awesomesauce picture of Miriah. So naturally I knock up a Loki for the same contest, mostly as an underhanded way to pimp Chainbreaker (oh ho ho I so schneaky).

The pic took about four or maybe five hours of work from start to finish. I sketched/inked it by hand (something I haven't done in aa-aa-ages), scanned it, ran it through Vector Magic to get the outline, imported it into Photoshop and filled in the block shapes with the gradient tool and the Freehand Pen. It was… surprisingly a really relaxing way to ink and colour; something y'all'll remember I loathe doing with a passion. I can see the style fitting Zenntheartof stuff really well… of course I'll probably never actually do it again but, yanno, what~evah!

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.