After watching Iron Man the movie tonight I couldn't help but get jazzed about my Iron Man, so I scribbled this little thing down. Thought I'd share with you folks. It's not much but it's something.

Ok, so I went to the optometrist today. This was my fourth visit in a month. The first three visits had to do with some kind of virus or conjunctivitis that I had in one of my eyes and that later spread to the other eye. It was uncomfortable but it went away eventually.

Anyway, this visit was to do a full checkup and see if my prescription had changed any. I've been thinking about replacing my glasses since Doodlebug sent a wild kick into my face about ten months ago and broke those glasses right at the bridge.

So I'm sitting there, waiting for my pupils to dilate, and I'm looking at eyeglass frames. Wondering what would look good on me. I promised Louise that she'd be around to help me pick some frames because she's gotta look at this mug more than I do so they might as well agree with her too. With that in mind, I was making no commitments to frames but I did try a few on.

I seem to be leaning towards something with a kind of chunky frame but I wonder if that's a bad idea for me. So I went to the internet and looked for a virtual boutique where I could try some sample frames on a picture of my face. The results of that looking are here:

( Pictures of me in eyeglasses )

Please, comment, I want to hear everybody's opinions, not just those who know me for reals.

Just saw Iron Man.

<falsetto>LOOOOOVED IT!</falsetto>

Ok, so I found the time to draw the follow up to this Meme. Some people were drawing then and now pictures, showing how they've changed from their teen years to now. Most people are comparing themselves after five to ten years of change. For me, it's been eighteen years since I was sixteen. I haven't changed as dramatically as some, I suppose. Anyway, here's the output:



This was fun. I'd like to see other people do this too, but nobody is forcing you, no sir.

There's a meme going around on my LJ to draw yourself as a sixteen year-old. I managed to get off my butt long enough to draw something. And here it is:



This was kind of fun running down memory lane. Thanks davario.

For reference, as a sixteen year-old, I was doing a lot of skateboarding and taking a correspondence art course (you know, the 'draw me!' one you saw on TV) I wanted nothing more than to become a pro skater and design my own skateboards. Ahhh, good times, good times.

Not one to usually get excited about these sorts of messages, I'm propagating this one. It's entertaining and informative.

It was pointed out to me that the quantity and quality of my guitar-related posts is at an all-time low these days. Time for an update.

I would love to have some kind of recording to share but I just don't have much to show at this time. I'm learning a few new songs with my instructor. He's given me 'Blackbird' by Paul McCartney which people seem to not know by name but they've all heard it once they hear it.

Instructor has been asking me to bring a song in that I want to learn, something I've picked for myself. I really agonized over this because I wanted something different from what I've done so far. I've found myself not playing my SG so much lately and I think that has as much to do with the sound that I get out of it un-amplified versus the acoustic. This is an unfair comparison but it really hasn't been a conscious decision, I have simply been playing the acoustic more. Well, that, and the few songs I've been working on so far have been finger styling pieces, namely, Tears in Heaven and Blackbird.

So I brought a few CDs with me today and on my way down to the lesson I tried to figure out which CD I would bring in and which song I would suggest. I was leaning towards some Stevie Ray Vaughn because I've been enjoying the Blues a fair bit and between SRV and Eric Clapton, I'm getting a healthy dose. I do listen to other Blues too, B.B. King, Albert King, etc. but I don't have any of that on CD to bring to the class.

But I digress. I did two things today that were different, the first thing was to bring my SG to the lesson with the thought that at least it might provoke the instructor to try something a little different with me and the second thing was to bring a Rolling Stones CD -- I hadn't quite picked a song but at least I narrowed it to a single album of solid tunes.

Man, I do ramble, don't I? Anyway, I suggested both 'You can't always get what you want' and 'Paint it Black.' Cory was in favour of giving the latter a try so he transcribed a portion of the song for me and now I'm working on a new song. Also, he give the SG a real workout when I first pulled it out of the gig bag. He made it sound pretty good and assured me it would serve me well.

Jam night has been a no-show for the last month or so both on dhutchings side and on my own. It's been a difficult time for schedules, it seems, but we're trying to pull it back together so we don't lose the group altogether.

Anyway, still going strong. I would like to improve my discipline on the practicing as I'm not sitting down and working hard on it for an hour each day but I do pick up the guitar and practice either my scales or a song or simple skills for a few minutes at a time.

Facebook is now blocked at work.

I don't know why I didn't post about this sooner but Jett Atwood has recently revived her wonderfully fun and beautifully-drawn underdog super-hero comic Red Sparrow.

You can start at the beginning here: http://redsparrowcomic.com//index.cgi?date=20040927

Or you can pick up with the new comics at this point here.


(may the Internet gods forgive me for hot-linking)

If that hasn't sold you on this great comic yet, let me break it down for you:

Red Sparrow is a fledgling hero in a world where super-heroes are sanctioned and incorporated. In true underdog fashion, Red Sparrow is overshadowed by the "big name heroes" like Heroman and Diva but that quickly takes a secondary role in the comic once we get introduced to Red's associates, Ninja-person and Precursor.

It's a fun and rollicking story that eventually leads to a climax at the imposing castle of an honest-to-goodness bad-guy, Lord Darthac. Jett wrote the story up to this point and after bringing the story to climax in March of 2006 it abruptly ended a lay still until she picked up the pen and started making new comics in February of 2008.

The great thing about this is that the transition is almost totally seamless. Jett wrote the continuation as though what followed the climax was meant to be told and explained in more detail after the fact. So with the rebirth of the comic we have a narrative box that informs us what happens is happening 2 years later. We are fed little bits and pieces of what happened that fateful day and it looks like Red Sparrow has been blamed for what happened as she's been stripped of her hero status and is living a far more humble existence.

But that's just the beginning of a new story and it's really really worth your time to read this thing.

I picked up a copy of Dos Rios today and found it not hard at all to convince my lovely friend and wife to play it with me. I had played this game once before at t_mck's place (brought by yet another friend) and I found it to be a lot of fun with some pretty unpredictable turn to turn events.

We broke it open and gave it a turn this evening and it was fun! Louise won but it was close. As a two-player game, this game has a high degree of screw you neighbor action but the stakes are so low that it doesn't feel like major screwage when you do it. The end of the game came without too much warning but not too soon and not so long after game beginning that we were hoping for it to arrive.

I haven't rated this game on BGG yet, but it's getting a solid two thumbs up from me. Edit: I had rated it on BGG already.

So I drool over the artwork of a lot of artists and one such artist is jodycody who drew himself as Green Lantern.

Of course, I got inspired by this. Who couldn't be? Therefore, I drew this:



People who know me know that I've gone the highly idealized route. I certainly don't have the heroic proportions that this guy does but it feels enough like me that I can dream. I mean, heck, if I'm dreaming about being guardian of the sector I can dream I have a heroic physique, can't I?

Anyway. It's nice to draw something for a change.

If writing to tell someone how much you love maple syrup, be sure the typo you make is not to omit the 'p' from maple.

I'm just saying.





You wouldn't want to give the wrong impression.

So my older daughter decided to draw herself today.



I think it's pretty darn good. It's also worth noting that she wrote her name in almost and exact mirror image. She's a southpaw and I understand this is somewhat natural behaviour. She can write her name properly but for some reason this time she wrote it this way.

Anyway, thought I'd share.

I just bought one of these:

Dyson DC07 Upright Vacuum Cleaner

Man, this thing rocks! Our old vacuum is a $100 cheapie that we bought ages ago with some in-store credit at Home Hardware. It never really did a good job but we couldn't be arsed to replace it until today. I do a fair bit of vacuuming in the house and I always think how crappy the thing is because it just doesn't seem to pick anything up. Today, I decided to it over and have a look at the beater bar and whatnot. See if I could improve its operation.

The beater-bar was enmeshed in hair and dust and god-knows-what. It was pretty disgusting but I resolved to clean it so I removed the bottom panel and got the beater bar out. Something fell out at my feet. It was the belt to rotate the beater-bar and it was torn apart. Well, ok, perhaps I could replace that.

I tabled the issue with domestic management and suggested that we could probably replace the part, as the thing needed a new bag anyway, I could do both. Alternatively, I suggested, we could replace the darn thing and possibly get some better performance anyway. Louise was pretty receptive to this idea as she's oft-complained that we have too much dust and pet dander in the house. She actually suggested a budget beyond what I was imagining and this led us to purchase the dyson.

I bought the item (after a slight cross-town jaunt to find a CanTire that had one in stock) and brought it home. I had already vacuumed the main floor using the POS, mind, but I decided to give it another pass with the Dyson this time.

Oh. My. God.

I must have half-filled the plastic canister on the vacuum with dust and hair and crap just doing the living room. It was such a remarkable change from the POS that I just sat back and gaped in amazement.

Long story short, I think the house is going to be a lot cleaner now and perhaps I'll even suffer less from my allergies, both dust and cat.

This is by far the most bizarre and fast-paced game I've played in recent memory:

http://www.chessatwork.com/gameanalysis/boardhistory.php?gameid=4796730

The first five people to send me an email (pvenables at gmail dot com) with their email address will be sent an invite to see the first six newly inked pages from chapter one of Overfull Ragebox.

These are pages without any text or cleanup done so it's not going to spoil the story for you, it's just the art.

Limited time offer, act now!

Edit: All gone now, thanks for playing!

I know, I'm as surprised as you are. Anyway, here's a sneak peek from the latest action-packed page I've completed. This chapter seems to be taking longer per page to complete partly because of the choreography involved. Basically, I have Ragebox trading blows with another robot and this takes careful thought to show the moment to moment action.

I'm happy with the results but it's a tad more complicated that drawing two talking heads.

Gone with the Blastwave was shown to me by a co-worker this morning. I read through it pretty quickly partly because it's got fewer than forty installments and party because it's just not a wordy comic.

It's got a painterly appearance to the artwork although the lettering has all the charm of a Chick Tract, it does eventually get a little nicer. This serious-looking artwork belies the humour of the comic, however. It's actually pretty silly in places as the humour is hardly sophisticated. It's good, clean fun however and I heartily recommend you take a look.

So it's about time I gave an update:

I completed my six-week lesson trial with the instructor. At the conclusion I'm wondering if it's worth looking elsewhere for another exemplar when I've come to the determination that this guy gives me plenty to learn. I may feel like the class time itself is not jam-packed with me playing and him instructing, but he is consistently giving me new material to learn and showing me technique. It's still a little light on theory but I'm supplementing that with book-learning.

Speaking of which, I picked up a new book the other day that is literally packed with information about guitars, the players, how to play, how to repair, how to maintain, and some music theory too.

The Guitar Handbook, by Ralph Denyer.

This will provide some good reading for me in the weeks to come.

Jam night at our house has been going well, we've got three regular people coming in addition to myself and Louise. The girls don't seem to be waking up to our playing despite the fact that one guy is using the practice amp. We're working on "Sweet Home Alabama" mostly although there's a lot of showcasing going on from the two experienced guitarists who are there.

Finally, I have a question for y'all. I need to devise a practice routine for myself and somewhere along the line my practice has become me playing through the beginnings of songs that I've learned but not really working on them. I'll play the beginning to Tears in Heaven pretty loosely, I'll play the riff from Hell's Bells a few times, then I'll goof on The Ballad of Serenity and my 12-bar Blues. While this is a fun way to practice, I don't think I'm getting a lot of benefit. I need to continue to work my finger agility and learn my chords as well as learn the different timings, strum patterns, and finger-styling that I've got on my lesson sheets.

So, what sort of exercises would you suggest I incorporate into my daily routine? I have some ideas myself and I'm going to nail it down tonight, but if you have any suggestions I'll throw them into the mix.

So it seems Cryptic is taking another stab at doing the super-hero MMORPG and this time they're patterning it after the Champions pen-and-paper RPG.

http://www.champions-online.com/game_features

One thing that always annoyed me about City of Heroes was fitting my character into the relatively narrow band of what a scrapper, tanker, defender, or controller might be. This game purports to give the player a classless style of play that means you can define your character in whatever kooky ways you want.

That, to me, sounds pretty awesome. Add to that the fact that Cryptic knows how to do the paper-dolls thing to a 'T'. I can spend hours building the right costume and that costume will drive me to play more and longer at a character that I've just become a little bored with-- just a costume change can bring new life to it.

Overall, I'd say I'm excited if the game lives up to what they've promised it to be. On the other hand, they're doing a simultaneous release of the game for PC and Xbox360 which leads me to wonder where the platform blending will lead to omission of features on one side and the inclusion of very different gameplay on the other.

Will this mean voice-chat as a standard feature of C:O instead of a chat interface? Will the XBox360 user-base embrace a pay-to-play game? Will they ditch the pay-to-play in favour of what they did with Guild Wars; pay for the game and then gameplay is free?

Questions, questions, questions.