working-draft

Bandwagonesque (with bonus picture links!)

2008-05-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

I know I'm not the first to bitch about this, and I most definitely won't be the last.

(First, a little back story)

Friday on my lunch break, I caved in and bought a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV. I told myself that I wasn't going to give in to the hype. I tried to remind myself that I'll only drive around and kill people as long as I can still get a chuckle out of it, I'll never play the missions and then I'll go back to COD4 or something else. $60 wasted, I'm an idiot yet again (thanks, Rock Star). But I read so much in so many places about how the game is must-see, must-play stuff and I hate missing out on what has become my generation's milestone media events because let's face it, the fucking film industry is completely creatively bankrupt and no one will ever make a Casablanca or Citizen Kane for my age set (unless it's another god damned stinking remake).

So to savor the moment and really, truly appreciate the game I set aside most of my Friday night to devote time to it. I brought it home, hung out with my roommate, made dinner for my roommate, myself and my girlfriend, and ignored it. I ignored the game until I could get dinner and some allergy medicine and some coffee so I could really spend a nice chunk of my Friday night with the game. I popped in the game, sat down on the couch and waited. The moment the loading screen came up for chapter 1, "The Cousins Bellic," the game froze.

Odd, I thought to myself, but not a deal breaker. My Xbox (the swanky black 360 Elite, mind you!) has frozen two or three times as a fluke since I've owned it. I bought it at the end of September, so going on seven months of ownership it was acceptable in my mind to have had one or two hardware hiccups. No big deal, let's just reboot the console.

And there it was. The fabled Red Ring of Death.

On a Friday night. At 8:30pm. With no other plans. Xbox owners know what I'm referring to here -- others may want to read up.

After screaming my usual "you have got to be fucking kidding me," throwing the controller on the couch and kicking the wall a few times, I stormed off past my girlfriend and my roommate (who were in stunned silence at this point) to find my warranty information. I was going to Best Buy that instant, God damn your eyes, and that was final.

No such luck, because I couldn't find it. Plan B -- call Best Buy Customer Care (a term best used loosely). The ever-so-robotic CSR on the line told me I never purchased one, so after calling shenanigans and having him prove it or defeat me in single combat, he proved that I never purchased a replacement warranty by pulling up my credit card receipt.

Okay, Plan C (which doesn't involve any hand-to-hand combat) is to follow the same route a friend of mine has followed -- five times -- call Xbox Support, have them send me a prepaid cardboard coffin, send off my sexy Xbox Elite's desiccated corpse to the Temple of Micro$haft, wait 2-3 weeks for its resurrection, and hopefully have my rather extravagant purchase returned to me in working condition.

Fucking bollocks, I say.

I say bollocks because I can't find an American slang word that conveys my disgust strongly enough. It's not enough to say that what Microsoft is offering me as a solution is bullshit, because it doesn't sound quite right. In order to really understand my dismay, you have to imagine a rather large and unhappy Cockney spitting the words at you. Fucking god damned bollocks, mate.

So, okay. Let me get this straight. Microsoft, arguably one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful computer software producer on Planet Fucking Earth, have made their own gaming console. This console, for all intents and purposes, is a Windows Media Center PC. This Windows Media Center PC has been noted, by sources both internal and external, to be both unreliable and faulty in both construction and operating system management and that is acceptable as a fucking excuse? With any other faulty product, you'd expect a refund. With Microsoft -- the Tentacled Monolith of Technology, they repair your faulty brick and after you wait a month, you get it back and pray it doesn't brick again for some altogether mystical reason. But don't you fret, they send you a postage-paid box to send it off in.

The reasons listed for why an Xbox would RROD on you reach an ominously high number. When asked, a supposed "insider" is quoted as saying,

"RROD is caused by anything that fails in the "digital backbone" on the mother board. Also known as a core digital error. CPU, GPU, memory, etc. Bad parts, incompatible parts (timing problems) bad manufacturing process (like solder joints), misapplied heat sinks or thermal interface material, missing parts, broken parts, parts of the wrong value, missed test coverage. Any one or more, on any chip, or many other discrete components, would cause this."

This person goes on to say that excessive heat and DVD drive failure were significant design flaws overlooked in order to push the console out the door to beat Sony to market.

Go ahead and mull that over. The Xbox 360 was not rushed to market to get it into your greedy little hands. The Xbox 360 was rushed to market, with obvious and glaring design flaws, to beat Sony to the punch. Well, that's nice. Now Sony's laughing because almost no one has bricked their Playstation 3, and they're finally catching up with solid game releases.

Another thing that kills me is, after hearing all the stories of folks having their Xbox shit the bed I didn't think it could happen to me because I'm not doing the things they say cause console failure. My console is not used for more than 6-8 hours at a time. It is located in a reasonably well ventilated area. I do not mistreat my game discs, and I don't feel like I overtax the hardware's capability. Having been a PC gamer for over 15 years I'm fully familiar with the idea of not having enough machine to run a certain game. But when it's stated in more than one interview or blog that a game, graphics heavy or not, designed for a uniform piece of hardware could be the cause of hardware failure, that's fucking completely out of order.

If I buy a game specifically designed for a given console, I expect that console to be able to run it. I'm not a retard -- I'm not trying to shoe horn a copy of Super Mario 64 into my Super NES. I'm not trying to get Gears of War to run on a PS2. I purchased an Xbox 360 game for my Xbox 360 console, and given that Rock Star designed the fucking thing with Xbox 360 hardware in mind, I'm fairly certain that the fucking Xbox 360 should run it! I didn't know that some games take up more GPU bandwidth so, God help me, I'm gonna crash the console by playing a game marketed for the console!

I can't really think of anything that represents a bigger consumer cock-slap than this. And Microsoft didn't start sending out boxes for you to send off your unit to repair it until a year or two ago -- hasn't the Xbox 360 been out for close to five years now? I might be wrong about that. My main point, and I doubt that there will be people who disagree but I'm always open for debate -- is that a company as large as Microsoft should be extremely fucking ashamed for marketing a console that fails pretty widely across the board even when being used well within normal guidelines and common fucking sense, and the fact that they pay for you to send it to them for repair does not now, nor will it ever make reparations for their planet-sized error in quality.

I'll post a recap when my Xbox finally makes its journey, and when it returns. Don't worry -- you'll hear about it if the fucking thing RRODs again, because I'll make a blog post with photos of me setting the stupid thing on fire and going to my local retailer to buy a PS3.

Which definitely will have a warranty purchased for it.

Sketchbook Month

2008-05-01T23:02:00.000-07:00

For the month of May, you will find a (mostly) daily post from me on the Sketchbook Month blog.

I'm hoping to keep stride with the big boys and girls and make 100 pages of art in 31 days.

Wish me luck!

It's been a while

2008-03-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

Happy hunchback.

Krampus, badass, Spidey, soldier

Bizarro!

Iron Man and Hulk, and me over to the left wondering why I'm drawing at a bar with people more talented than I am.

Penciled by me, inked by my roommate. He's so talented I shat when I saw this finished.

Iron Man (again).

Random junk from my micro skertchberk. Pocket-sized for at work win and/or lulz.

A cartoon version of our nude model from Friday night's figure drawing. She was not angry...she was actually blank-faced all night (wheel spinning, dead hamster). This was what I imagined whenever we made eye contact. One of the few successful drawings of a woman I've done.

Again, from figure drawing. Model's pose was boring so I talked to myself. WITH ART.

Aquaman (queen of Atlantis), Supes with all-new forced perspective (and a pose lifted from Shane Prigmore), and a weird Yoda-ish thing.

Bats. 'Nuff said.

Cowabunga, dude.

Random crap.

Cowboys and pirates inspired by Steve Silver's new book (buy it!) and one of the only other successful female drawings I've produced.

Toony Bats.

Bizarro (me ams not recurring theme)

Luchador El Generico

Thor!

Sticker design for my buddies' band.

Yeesh! That was a lot. Leave some comments, already!

Twitter -- blogging with ADD

2008-03-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

As if it wasn’t easy enough to mobile and email blog on here, Twitter makes it quicker.

You can see the minute to minute updates of my barely interesting life at this very location.

RIP Dave Stevens 1955-2008

2008-03-11T16:05:00.000-07:00

You will be sorely missed. Talent like yours is extremely rare in this world.

I think I need creative overhaul. (random thoughts)

2008-03-06T09:57:00.000-08:00

Oh my dear god, I’m writing something for a change and not just posting stupid crappy doodles!

I was inspired by stumbling upon On My Desk this morning and I think I may do that very same thing detailing my workspace tonight or over the weekend. It’s not like I’m a superstar artist or writer or graphic designer or research scientist, but whatever. I’m creatively bankrupt and it sounds like an idea worth copying. I’ll take photos of my dirty desk and room and how everything is arranged and post it soonish. My creative space really isn’t what I’d call awesome or eclectic; it’s just a desk with a PC, a (sorely underused) laptop, a couple of (also sorely underused) Wacom tablets and a scanner. I keep my sketchbooks and pens/pencils in the bag that I carry with me wherever I go (usually). More often than not I venture out into the world with my roommate to draw so the workspace tends to vary. I will say, however that the small round tables at Barnes and Noble absolutely fucking blow for spreading out my drawing stuff. I tend to throw my elbows out real wide when I sit at a table and those tables suck shit for doing that. I also have this terrible habit of liking to work small on a large space (little doodles, big sketchbook).

Not to mention some obnoxious bitch was walking around snapping photos while I was trying to draw a man punching a horse. I appreciated her intrusion about as much as she appeared to appreciate the idea of a man engaging in equestrian fisticuffs. Funny, I was the one left in peace while she was escorted to the manager by a rent-a-cop.

I felt really powerful just now, when I added “soonish” to my word processor’s dictionary. Who’s the bad speller now, Microsoft Word?

The guy in the cube behind me has a really dumb tone in his voice and says “uh” a lot when he’s on the phone. He also calls his girlfriend (or his mom? I still can’t tell) every morning and calls her things like “Sunshine,” and “Beautiful.” If I were that woman that would get extremely irritating in a hurry. But then again, she apparently doesn’t work and this guy commutes an hour to work every day so she’s probably got a thing going with the mail man. I’ll leave you to make your own jokes about express package delivery.

I wonder if I should be proactive and tag all my blog items so people can surf through them easier? I’ve gotten a decent amount of hits on this thing since I’ve kicked it into high gear for 2008. I’ve done a lot more drawing and a lot less writing, which seems to have lost me a handful of followers and gained me a handful of different ones. I’ve kind of lost my flair for writing random blogs (dictionary added again, I am victorious!), because I’ve been working on a super secret project that has kind of sapped all my creative energy so I can focus on it. I don’t know if I can get what I want out of this project but if it reaches a stage where I can show it off, you can rest assured I’ll be promoting the living hell out of it here and everywhere else I’ve managed to extend my inter-tentacles.

I bought Ween’s newest album, La Cucaracha. I think, well…I’m at a loss, actually. I can’t really explain what I think about the work as a whole. It’s all over the damn place. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but I usually purchase CDs that have a coherent feel and elicit a certain mood or set of feelings while listening. I listen to metal when I play video games, I listen to classical when I write and I listen to moody, contemplative stuff when I draw. La Cucaracha has a little bit of everything from punk to country to progressive to instrumental and it’s really hard to nail down one real mood for the whole thing. Oh, I forgot! Reggae’s in there too. If I absolutely had to rate it I’d probably give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Things I need right now (in no particular order)

- A hundred or so more Pitt brush pens (and a fine point or two)

- About a dozen or more non-photo blue pencils…drawing with those is really fun.

- To quit smoking

- To quit drinking coffee

- To not be such a disgusting fatty

- To travel more

I also need a disgustingly original premise for a comic book script! I’ve got a roster of characters ready to roll. I just can’t figure out what the hell to do with them.

I also need to do my chores for the week. Who wants to come mop the floor for me? I hate mopping.

ADDENDUM: Drawing is probably one of the greatest hobbies anyone could have. If I can imagine it, I can put it on paper. If I can't put it on paper, I learn how or I teach myself. Or, I do it wrong until I get it right. I really don't know what I'd do with myself if I hadn't learned to draw or write. I'd probably be an athlete, and that's a terribly scary thought.

ugh

2008-03-05T16:18:00.000-08:00

my glasses are dirty.

Oh my god

2008-03-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

I’m not dead…I’ve just been way busy. More sketches and some short fiction coming soon. I’ve got tons of stuff to post that I haven’t scanned yet. If you love the garbage I’ve already spewed onto your screen, you just wait until I shovel more down your throats!

Draw Night #2 skritches 1

2008-02-28T23:50:00.000-08:00

The rest to follow tomorrow. Pretty happy with a lot of the work I did
tonight.

Does whatever a white board can

2008-02-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

Spidey!