PS - 2 things to know about "Earth Day"

1.) April 22 just so happens to also be the birthday of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (a.k.a. Lenin, as in the Bolshevik mass murderer/Communist hero). Hmm. That's not suspicious.

2.) Founding organizer of and Master of Ceremonies for the first Earth Day back in 1970 (Lenin's 100th birthday, btw), Ira Einhorn, murdered his girlfriend and fled the country.


Guys, I'm all for conservation and being good stewards of Creation, but come on. Earth Day's about as bogus as Kwanzaa (who's founder was also a radical ((a Black Panther in this case, not a hippy like Einhorn)) and also had a penchant for beating women).

Busy busy busy

I now understand why you're held back in public school if you're sick and miss 3 months of school. It's just too much work to catch up on. I've been up to my eyeballs in homeschooling since I was well enough to start schooling again, which explains why I've been scarce on the internet for the past 3 months or so. I'll continue to be this busy probably until my Dad gets home from Afghanistan (read: July). Blargh.

Anyway, I just felt like posting here for some reason, I guess to keep y'all updated, assuming that you care. I got an iPhone 3G a few weeks back, but I didn't even have it for 24 hours because it can't yet send/receive MMS (which consists of about half of all of my daily texting). I miss the iPhone and all, but it's ridiculous that it can't send/receive MMS yet. I mean, come on. So I'm on a Samsung phone now, and it's okay.

Speaking of Apple products, my little green 2G iPod Nano just up and died on me in the middle of a podcast. Oh, and my laptop is going into Geek Squad again, probably for another couple of weeks, so I'll probably be even more scarce than I have been. Oh well. I haven't had much time for art lately, which is a shame, but I do have some sketches that I could probably scan sometime soon.

I hope you're all doing well, God bless. "Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul." "May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you."

The fruits of my artistic labors...

Here are two of the better things I sketched up today, despite the constant interruption of my brothers of a span of 8 hours or something like that... I was experimenting with a color palette that I've seen before and found interesting--neon green on black. I think it looks kinda toxic and nightmarish. Anyway, without further ado...



As always, God bless. ((Seff, if you're reading this, I'm missin' you, bud!!!))

I have at least 2 billion things that I urgently need to do

...But I'm going to just relax for once and enjoy some art.

I feel like such a bum, and I've got all this stuff that's gotta be done, but...... I just wanna draw. *puppy eyes* (I am a simple man with simple needs. Art just so happens to be one of those needs.)


Ugh.

Neon Genesis Evangelion comic/animation concept... 01

I am excited for my next personal project; my own little spin-off of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's going to be practice for comic making and animation, all in one, which freakin' awesome practice as far as I'm concerned. I'm not gonna spill the beans just yet, considering that there aren't many beans to be spilled yet.
This is my first Eva prototype unit design. My character will be piloting this 'un, but the other 2 or 3 main characters will be piloting Evas that are equally as neat looking. The only female pilot will be using an Eva with wing assemblies like those on the Mass Production model Evas, and she'll wield a spear. The other male pilot will mainly be equipped with rifles and rockets. :B
It'll even tie into the End of Evangelion story a bit! Did I mention that I was excited? Because I am.
Anyway, good night all. God bless.


Neon Genesis Evangelion (Evas, Nerv logo, and related content) © Gainax, etc

Art © RJL

The long and arduous journey that is the Work in Progress...

Decided to work on the Carl piece a bit today after Economics. It was fun finally getting down to the coloring and stuff. Pickin' out Carl's colors based on his personality is pretty fun. I should be finished cleaning up/coloring this soon. Hope you all had a more productive day. God bless.

Whoops

Forgot this one last night, whoops. Makes PW look a bit more like a coyote, I guess, but whatever. It was late, I was tired.

PW © himself

Drawerings of the week

Study Hall sketches

Yeah, I take my laptop to enrichment--just to doodle in study hall on my tablet. It's fun. I was working through a drawing composition book that someone got me while I was really sick. I'm still working through it as part of an "art class" type thing. Also, notice Talos's aversion to being colored... sort of typifies most of my drawings.

Deige Taoren-style, for DJ

This one's my favorite version.

Here's the final version, all souped up with Deige's final details. I hope you like it, bud. :]

oC with Shadow_D_Husky 2009.02.25

Shadow wanted to draw in oC, and I obliged. It was fun while it lasted. My drawin's on the left side, and his is on the right. I like how he colors and shades. And his guns are awesome, I'm serious, he draws 'em better than anyone I know--and just by memory.

Hope y'all are well. God bless.

Talos © me
Deige © DJ
Shadow © himself

Happy St. Valentine’s Day!

    Here’s the general public version of my Valentine’s Day drawing. :D Hope you all had a good one! God bless!

Darth Sabera / Bastila - Work in Progress 1

   I had to draw something tonight or I thought I’d go crazy with the scholarship competition on Saturday morning. Of course I couldn’t finish Carl before I started on someone completely different in the Star Wars gang… oh well. This one is being colored and drawn at the same time, because it’ll turn out to be more of a painting in the end. :] Hopefully, anyway.

   Yay for stress! I’ll probably get sick again after getting all worked up and anxious over the scholarships, but… oh well, that should be fine. I’m not doing anything terribly important after that until I have to finish my portfolio for the fine arts scholarship which is, like, next month. And then I think we’re going to Pittsburgh again.

   When we went to get me a gewd thesaurus for the competition (I am particular about my thesauri, in that I prefer them to be actually be a thesaurus and not a dictionary/thesaurus, because the latter of the two is more of a dictionary and is very skimpy on the synonyms and antonyms), my mom and I purchased an Astrud Gilberto cd. She’s helping with the stress as only a very fine Brazilian woman with a very nice voice can.

   Blah blah blah… back to art therapy! God bless y’all, friend or foe though you may be. Hope you’re all doing well. Boa noite.

Shadow the All-American Husky

    A birthday present for one of the most American people I have ever know, and one of the people that I am proud to know. I hope you had a good one, bud! Everyone should be so lucky as to have a husky like you.

Carl – Work in Progress 1

   The only thing I really have left to do with this sketch is shorten his prosthetic in the foreground. Then I’ll color it, and move on to Carth or Bastilla.

 

Carl © Lil’ William

Art / Image © RJL (myself)

Happy Hump Day!

   If you’re not in a military family, you’re likely not to know what Hump Day is. Heck, even if you are in a military family, you mightn’t know.

   But nevertheless today is Hump Day, huzzah!

On Windows 7…

   …Trying to enable Aero, gosh darn. It’s still pretty awesome, it’s neat messin’ around with the improvement upon your current OS. Although, to be honest, it feels like Windows 7 = Vista SP3.

Tweet me up

   You can follow me on twitter, if you like. My username is Talos18.

My Take on 3 Flavors of Ubuntu

   This is just something that I’d like to toss out there. Of my four virtualized PCs, 3 of them are flavors of Ubuntu (the other is Windows 7 beta). All 3 Ubuntu derivatives are running on 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are each running on 1 GB RAM and 128 MB video memory. Xubuntu is running on 256 MB RAM and 32 MB video memory (it still ran perfectly on half those resources, btw).

   Here’s my take:

Ubuntu:   How the heck do people live with this OS? I’ve read that if you tweak it to the umpteenth degree it’s as good as or better than Windows Vista. I sort of find this hard to believe, but then again, I haven’t tweaked Ubuntu to the umpteenth degree. I don’t really have the time to sift through thousands of software packages to find a bunch of stuff that’s gonna make Ubuntu look a bit nicer, when in reality it should look nice (or at least decent) “out of the box.”

   If Ubuntu wants to compete with Windows and Mac OS X, Canonical is going to have to ship it at least looking a lot better than it does. To be honest, I remember Windows 98 SE looking a lot better. By default, GNOME looks like some bubbly, ugly interface literally designed for children. I can see how they’d want to emphasize their “Ubuntu/Linux is way easier to use than Windows”, but the interface isn’t so much “so easy a child could use it” as it is “designed to be eye candy for very small children.”

   Anyway, while I personally find it fun to do things the command-line way, I’m sure that most people can’t make heads or tails of it. And that’s probably frustrating for your average user that would like to be able to double click a file to get it to execute, instead of using sudo, navigating to the file directory, and executing the “sh ./[filename.*]” command on their file. Being able to just double-click a file is nicer/easier/faster.

   Other than that, I guess it’s okay. If I didn’t want to shell out the money to buy a closed-source OS, then I guess Ubuntu’s an okay way to go. I still have yet to try OpenSuse, OpenSolaris, and Open/FreeBSD, or Fedora, though. They might be better, I dunno.

Kubuntu: Kubuntu is… well, I dunno. KDE is a bit prettier than GNOME, but it’s still kinda… weird? It just doesn’t work for me, I guess. In my opinion it’s very pretty awkward, but I guess some might call it innovative. My favorite part of Kubuntu? The nifty part of the login where it’s loading the file system and such, and it fades the icons in when it’s done with that part of the login process.

   My least favorite part of Kubuntu? EVERY OTHER APPLICATION AND IT’S GRANDMA STARTS WITH “K.” Oh my God, that bugged the crap out of me. I couldn’t stand to go through the start-up menu for anything, because of that. I don’t know if it’s my OCD or what, but that was freakin’ annoying.

Xubuntu: I tried Xubuntu in the past on an 8 year old machine, and found it frustrating. Then I tried Ubuntu, and found the same frustrations there (ergo my frustrations stemmed from general Ubuntu stuff, not Xubuntu-specific stuff). I appreciate it much more now that I’ve tried Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Xubuntu is just the way to go, in my opinion.

   It’s much faster and more efficient than the other Ubuntu derivatives, it’s not at all cluttered, and it looks nice by default. I no longer have any Xubuntu-specific grievances to hold against it. It’s a fairly viable alternative to modern, closed-source operating systems, especially if you’re using a computer that’s of the older persuasion.

 

   So, um, there you have it. I’ll be uninstalling Kubuntu, and using Ubuntu and Xubuntu a little when they need updating or I find software that I’d rather test before installing on my main OS (Vista SP1). That’s enough Ubuntu-related rambling from me (for now). Ta ta, enjoy your evenings.

It’s been a while

   Long time no see, eh? I had a sort of relapse with my exhaustion recently, and so I haven’t really been online much at all for nearly the past two weeks. I guess I’m just posting so that anyone who checks back to this blog will know that, no, I’m not dead (yet).

   By the way, I figure that I’ll make this more of an actual blog, where I don’t just post art but also rants and ravings and my opinions on stuff (like software, politics, philosophy/theology, etc). A blog, basically.

   I hope you’ve all been well. Talk to you again sooner or later.