MY REAL NAME! BUT WHY!?

NAME RAGE!!!

So I've joined a group working on an artistic/academic project. It seems like it should be exciting and all but they are using blogger and, as a result, I am changing my name (hopefully temporarily) just so I don't show up as the only person with a weird name in the project. I am curious, does anyone know a way in which I could have S!R DOOM for Last Blog and then my real name for this other blog? I have been searching around and I can't find anything like that. Damnit universe, conform to me I say. Conform to me!

So I've been thinking...

Late last night I was playing TF2. As any gentleman gamer knows, the choice of head wear one sports while destroying his enemies is of dire importance. Well, I had been putting my long hours of gametime and item drops into the hopes of finally snatching up a desired hat for my favorite class, the Pyro. Well last night, I finally collected all 70-some items needed to craft a class-specific piece of head gear, but, when I crafted everything together I received one of the Pyro hats I had absolutely no interest in.

This left me a little fed up with the crafting/drop system. It took me my entire TF2 career to gather all of those items and I imagine it will take another extremely long time to get the same number again. This drove me to do the one thing which I have always hated the concept of: achievement boxing. As I have played TF2 I have never purposely set foot in an achievement server and it has been a point of personal pride that every single achievement I have managed to pick up has been done entirely within the scope of regular gameplay. And while I still stand by my rule of never getting an achievement in TF2 through achievement boxing, I have taken to sitting on the idling servers to quickly mass up on items so as to be able to get more chances at crafting the hats I want.

And this makes me wonder: is this a failure of some sort? Is it a failure on the devs part that the effort and time put in is not rewarded? Is it a failure on the community's part for standardizing what is essentially cheating the system? Is it a failure on my part for not understanding what hats represent and accepting their role in the system?

This makes me think back to a distant conversation Cello and I had about achievements and cheat codes in games. In general, what should the roles of the achievement and the cheat code be? If a cheat or an achievement only affects me, what is the connection between pride/morality and each on its own? And what about when one cheats to get achievements? What about that?

I don't know good sirs. I only have questions today. Anybody have any thoughts or any questions which might further shape or re-direct my own?

And So They Dubbed Him: King of Wheelchair Basketball

Was Durkheim Predicting the Superman Dilemna?

"Imagine a being liberated from all external restraint, a despot still more absolute than those of which history tells us, a despot that no external power can restrain or influence. By definition, the desires of such a being are irresistible. Shall we say, then, that he is all-powerful? Certainly not, since he himself cannot resist his desires. They are masters of him, as of everything else... One cannot be master of himself when he has within him forces that, by definition cannot be mastered"

-Emile Durkheim from Spirit of Discipline

Dear Internet, Thank You

LET'S STAY HEALTH CONSCIOUS

Alrigth all you good people out there. It's time to get in shape. Get out your yoga mat. Put on your sweat bands. Get a bottle of water and maybe a punching bag filled with granola or something like that. Let's begin:

One and two and wait... Wait, what the fuck are we doing again?

"Like monkeys don't signify"

-a hipster lady at the bookstore when I asked her if they had a copy of Signifying Monkey by Skip Gates.

Anyway, on to the larger post which is actually pretty short and is actually related to signification (i.e. riffing on past things, often for parody). Hip-hop is a musical form which is built around signification. But what happens when you re-signify a crazy hip-hop signification (actually it happens all the time but that's not the point). See below, a song from a commercial, turned into a song about guns, re-applied to said original commercial. Amazing*

*the poster does not officially support any music created by "50 Cent" or any other "G-Unit" members though he does occasionally bob his head to their songs because hey, everybody makes a jam once in a while... Even Nickelback... MARCELLO

Drawing Experiments

I've been sort of pre-working on a story/comic I want to do. Problem is (besides vicious slow-startery as always) I'm not a visual artist. I do have my ideas though and I've been fiddling some with Fabe's bamboo pad. Well, here is my first attempt at drawing some of my character concepts on the computer. I have a shit-ton in my notebooks but somehow it feels good to get it digital.

I've been thinking some a bout how I want to do coloring for the book (since coloring is my weakest and also the most annoying aspect of art for me) and I had thought about something which is essentially anti-coloring like this. Then again, I don't know how nice this swishy anti-coloring would look when it is smacking into backgrounds and all that as well. Hmmm, something to think about and test I guess.

Depict1

Click this link. Play this game. Do not scroll down and read the author's comments before you play the game. Read nothing about the game before you play the game. It should take you something like 30 minutes to play. Enjoy.

Clark Kent: Grownup Man-Baby

It's true.

Work in Progress

I'm currently trying to work on A.L.B.o.T.'s website. I'm using the same basic template that Sam used since it just seems pretty damn intuitive. I haven't don't much work on the game over the past couple days but I am hoping to do a little each day. Sam and Cello have both given me some of their character ideas and it all seems pretty exciting. I really look forward to this project getting up and running (which is still a ways away).