There is a titanic scheme behind my madness

I meant to talk about Paul Theroux's writing, but got distracted by my sudden impulse to describe my recent observations on the illuminati. Paul Theroux does not discuss illuminati subclasses of course, he describes his travel experiences. I didn't mean to imply a connection between Paul Theroux and the illuminati, although as far as illuminati subclass categories go, I would certainly categorize him as a literati, and not an illiterati.

And I must admit that if there were any readers of this blog they might find it ironic that I would go off on the illiterati at all, after posting delightful descriptions of my own struggle to learn programming. Am I trying to become a member of the illiterati that I elsewhere denigrate, those fictional readers might ask?

Good question. First of all, I've decided that I am not a true literati.  A true literati would reside a bit further up the global pyramid than myself, and would make their living from doing literati stuff, reading and writing and teaching in universities. I have a humanities degree, but do very little with it, and I basically have a factory job. That would place me far down the pyramid, definitely under the literati, but lower down, and significantly less purely literati. My sub sub class is huge in number, and already in the process of dissolving, crumbling into  the amorphous base of the pyramid, about on a level with the barely employed blue collar class. 

So I have little incentive to fully subscribe to literati loyalties. I have instead decided to join the great wheel, to swim sideways by learning programming, not up, with many others, toward the other base of the pyramid, toward the techies. And they should swim toward us!  By reading.  Science fiction is only the beginning. Together we will fold the corner in, and we will make a wheel out of the great pyramid. And we  all know what a wheel does. Please enjoy figure 1.1:

And figure 1.2:

Und figure 1.3:

Und concluded en figura 1.4:

Viva la revoluccion! And you're welcome, literati. 

Meant to discuss my travel memoir, got off track

I've been reading a lot of Paul Theroux's stuff lately. He's not the documentary filmmaker that all the hip young illiterates talk about. That's Louis theroux, I think. I believe he's a nephew or grandson of Paul theroux, the actual writer that I read. That's a telling generational gap, isn't it?  One family member produces work for the readers, or literati, and the other produces documenteries for the illiterati. These are the underclasses of the illuminati, the low level believers who do the dirty work for the chieftains of the illuminati, the Luminati. The literati produce the deceptive marketing copy and fake news articles that manipulate the masses, while the illiterati, who are mainly technocrats, produce the invasive surveillance apps, software that read minds and collect personal info for big data. We literati despise the illiterati for their pseudo intellectualism, for developing their naive and shallow and overly simple world view based on documenteries and anime and superhero movies. Both of these classes are doomed, of course. Once the illiterati develop AI sophisticated enough to produce written content perfectly synced with big data trends, the literati will be cast aside, left to drown in a sea of idiots grasping for lotto winnings and drug money to escape the living wage neighborhoods. But eventually, once the AI masters the gene technology necessary to mass produce obedient tech workers, the illiterati will be cast aside as well. The comic cons will lower their prices, drop the celebrity appearances and any other extravagant expenses, or close their doors. Any businesses catering to disposable income customers will disappear, replaced by cyclopean walmarts.  Across the country, remaining science department faculties, stumbling out of their laboratories, will gaze through blinking tears at the automated bulldozers moving toward their offices, and remember a similar day a few decades before, when they laughed as the ethnic diversity and gender studies professors in their tie dyed t-shirts, sandals, and grey ponytails had fled their patchouli scented offices as a cruder, oil-powered version of the same dozerbot had rumbled over their politically conscious and economically cozy life of poetry readings, discussion groups, and student teacher liaisons. Good riddance, they'd cheered. Now let's roll up the sleeves of our lab coats and arm wrestle for the extra funding.  

Alas, their day has come, and they stagger, their lab coats torn and grey, listlessly clutching  microscopes and pipettes, some of them cradling lobotomized lab rats, whispering inane words of comfort or endearments, glimpsing furtively at the mocking graffiti, mostly geometry puns, spray painted on the ruins of the lib arts classrooms. They slowly make their way to the temporary housing camp prepared for them, before their transition to the new living wage village being constructed downtown. We humanities degree people will already be there, greatly reduced in numbers as the weaker succumb to relentless monster truck rallies and UFC football games, the nonstop top 40 played everywhere, year round holiday decorations, the Walmart people everywhere, and go to the Special retirement camps, sponsored by Pharma. But we will remain, the really awful humanities people, the ones that never really cared about Shakespeare or diversity, who took the classes just to learn how fake enlightenment to meet girls, the most seasoned and highly trained liars in history. We will have prepared the way for the technocrats, the illterati. Our people, the good people of the old religion and the UN conspiracies and Ronald Reagan and cowboy movies, will know who's to blame for the collapse of freedom.  The technocrats' old masters, sitting in their floating mansions in their ageless, perfected GMO bodies, idly scanning the action in 4D from micro drone scanners, will shake their heads sadly as electro synth robots sing heavenly Buddhist inspired mantras from the holographic waterfalls in their living rooms. "The undermenschen are at it again. Why do we even waste money on them?"

The presidential election is a fraud but I have some ideas

I've gotten into some arguments and discussions with several people over the presidential election.  I'm now convinced that the presidential election is a gigantic fraud, a big show put on for voters while rich people rig the "smaller" elections for their own agendas. But I don't like the idea of a president anyway. It's just a polite word for King. What's the difference?  You don't select the president. If you sat down and thought over which person you'd really like to be president, before any party primaries, I can guarantee you that your particular choice won't be elected. It's all compromise, and the less money you have, the more you will compromise.

If I could redesign our constitution I would abolish the presidency with its odious hero worship overtones, and replace it with an executive committee of boring technocrats. There would be a national election, but only for parties, and the committee membership would represent the exact proportional results of the election. If the independents got 5%, they'd get 5% of the committee membership. 

I would also institute a credentialing system for journalists who would write for public, nonprofit entities. For profit entities would not be allowed public bandwidth. No more ads! Well, that's actually complicated, because of free speech. I would want to provide a forum for free speech without marketing the air time. Here's how I'd do it. People would vote the use of their air time. Every citizen in the broadcast area of a station would own exactly the same share of air time per year, and you can decide exactly how that will be used. Actually the government would have to maintain a forum station, limited by money of course. Honestly, the whole point of this exercise would be to eliminate annoying advertisements while providing a forum for annoying opinions. That people could turn off whenever they wanted. Or rebut, on air. 

I'm really getting some good ideas, now that I'm redesigning the government. I might even run for president

Into the Future very slowly

I haven't done an installment of "Into the Future" in a while. That doesn't mean I'm going to do an installment now, though. I'm just noticing, and thought I'd point it out to myself. I've soured a bit on the whole computer programming thing, because it's taking longer than I thought. I read all these stories on the internet about old people my age learning programming in one year, but I'm not even close to really getting even one basic language.  I originally envisioned, when I began the project, that by this time I'd be programming my raspberry pi to send security feed from my porch GoPro directly to my phone, and sending my drone on search and destroy missions against the neighborhood dogs. I expected my life to look something like this:

My wife relaxing on the couch while our robotic servants await commands. Notice the robot dog, it would have an adjustable bark volume. 

But this beautiful vision has not materialized. I'm still floundering around learning basic PHP:

<?php echo 'hello world, where/'s my goddamned programmable drone?' ?>

Actually not even sure that will work, it usually takes me three or four tries to remember how to do the quotes in the string. One problem with learning style is that I don't do organized lessons very well. Nor have I stuck to learning one language. I kind of do some reading or a tutorial, try something, get some basic few lines of code to work, get overexcited, get a huge idea for a neat application, try to write it, get lazy about the exercises in whatever instructional book or tutorial, fail spectacularly at implementing the big idea, break down, sullenly go back to tutorial, mechanically churn through a few lessons at a listless, once a week pace, think up a reason I should actually be learning some other language, start a new tutorial, forget everything I learned about the other language. And the robots wait for instructions, mute and immobile. 

In this way I've learned a little bit about Visual Basic, C, JavaScript, Python and PHP. And it took all my willpower not to dump PHP to learn Ruby.  And I haven't really done anything interesting with any of them, but I've made some magnificent plans, imagined some really cool applications, with all of them

I've saved the movie industry from themselves, again

We've been watching Stranger Things, the 80's nostalgia sci fi series, and enjoying it even though I feel it signals another milestone in the ongoing contraction of Western civilization. I could not have enjoyed it in the actual 1980s when the movie themes so lovingly restored in Stranger Things regularly enraged and disturbed me whenever I found them, i.e., the repetitive telekinesis trope which I've always disliked, especially in "science fiction". I originally disliked it because I felt it didn't belong in science fiction because I had a young man's idealistic and naive view that there was something intrinsically valuable about maintaining some pure platonic version of a genre, but now I realize I just found telekinesis boring. I find the electrodes on the heads boring and the dumb experiments the phony scientists performed in all the movies on the telekinetic "mutant" person bored me. I mis-attributed my own anger and frustration to a more flattering cause: Righteous concern for scientific truth.  I was just bored. I know it was boredom, because I love another 1980s trope in Stranger Things: Alternate Dimensional Reality, especially an Alternate Reality with spooky resonance to our own, blinking lights, ectoplasmic portals, shadow worlds, I adore that stuff and want more of it, and as a younger man I never made a fuss about how completely nonsensical the science behind the Alternate Reality was. A physicist might groan when they see the Alternate Reality Part of the show, especially when the characters in the show talk about "Alternate Dimension" as a synonym for "Alternate Reality", but I didn't care in the 80s and I don't care now, because it entertains me. 

As a young man in the 80s, I spent more time than I should have trying to fix the telekinesis trope in my mind, by thinking up scientific explanations and rules for the telekinesis. But I think these explanations would not have worked for popular movies; too cerebral and time consuming. So I've come up with an explanation that utilizes my favorite Alternate Reality trope: All humans have an alternate monster self in the alternate reality, some of us have plant-like, relatively motionless monster selves, some have moving monster selves, but everyone's monster self corresponds with their psychic power; mind readers have monster selves with antenna, telekinetic people have monster selves with long tentacles, maybe there are monster selves with the ability to fly, granting the human the power to teleport. 

This would be a very cool movie, and it would certainly spice up the monotonous lab scenes with electrodes and nosebleeds and crushed product placement

I will write the graphic novel, I promise

"The Art Zone": A creepy new web comic!

By changing sides we turn defeat into victory

After careful analysis of the content dominating the Internet I've come to the painful conclusion that print is dead. I first heard about this idea from Ghostbusters and I vigorously disagreed with it (by inner monologue only) even as I generally enjoyed most of the movie...

Most of the movie, not all of it. I disliked enough of the movie to mildly enjoy watching the feminists rip its entrails out online. Ironically the line "print is dead," is delivered by Egon to impress one of the only two female characters in the show (the ghostbusters' secretary, cute and comforting, unlike that Fe-Man Sigourney Weaver). 

Anyway, I have devoted most of my life as a pseudo intellectual  and amateur writer to the idea that the printed word is sacred, so the idea of its death has been emotionally painful for me to resolve, especially as I long held out hope of a career as a writer and book critic. As those career hopes foundered and I became embittered towards mark twain and other fascist American writers, I began to enjoy the schadenfreude of the idea, cackling like a bitter old man on a rickety rocking chair on a dusty porch at every inroad by the illterati; Twitter, Facebook, Doom, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and more seriously, the evisceration of public libraries through diversion of resources to audio visual departments. The fools, I cackle, the fools!

In keeping with this triumphant march against long words and extended paragraphs, I have begun a word purge in my own inner, personal, and electronic lives. We will be veering this blog away from the word thing, instituting a push toward graphic novel type storytelling. This transition will be difficult, necessitating some improvement to my graphic communication skills, but I have set a goal for this blog to be 100% word-free by August 2017. 

Step 1: Pictorial communication. See below. 

Coming attractions on channel hagenart

The blog as TV network idea has gained some traction with the fictional characters whose  conversations comprise my embarrassingly stylized inner world, so I'm swerving toward animated content for this blog. Not full stories of course, I have nowhere near enough time, but gifs. Most people capitalize gif but I'm too lazy. Anyway, here's my first gif, capturing my current work in progress:

I'm hoping to improve these obviously. In keeping with the moving picture theme, I will also be instituting a periodic review of whatever TV shows I watch. Most recently I watched the pilot for "Vice Principals" on HBO. It did not capture my interest, as the producers have already made one of the basic fatal errors; writing an amusingly unlike able side character as protagonist. This only works if you cast a fantastic actor for the part, who can find nice things about the character to communicate. Actors that good are rare, even among talented comic actors. I think the lead of vice principals is good, but in the first episode, he didn't find anything nice about his character for us. He has made an amusing side character, but he needs a straight man main character. The producers furthermore chose to demonstrate this shortcoming through what they probably thought was a slick marketing coup, getting Bill Murray to appear for two scenes and in previews. The opening scene with Murray made me laugh because he understands so thoroughly how to play a sympathetic straight man. I laughed at the two other characters because Murray laid the groundwork for the scene by communicating a sense of longstanding weariness and irritation with the vice principals. He makes the viewer believe they are witnessing something real, and the arguing becomes funny. In the rest of the episode, without Murray's straight man take to make the bickering vice principals real, their words have no life and I did not find them funny. The show needs a straight person, and so far they haven't found one. 

It seems to me that there is a lesson here that I could apply to my own life, but I don't know it. That might be a good feature of these reviews, kind of a homey Sunday school type vibe where I apply the teachings and become a better person. Or maybe not finding the moral is the lesson

Injecting Vampiric Life in a Dying Series

If I ran this blog as a TV network, and I do, I would run the next installment/episode of "The Incredible Lightness of My College Experience" as a two-hour special, where the plot would turn into a bad vampire story halfway through, similarly to "From Dusk to Dawn".   I got the idea for this from "From Dusk to Dawn" of course, but also from a dream I had while sleeping at one of the creepy cubicles in the basement of the Marriott library where I sometimes had to go on busy days when all the nice upper floor study cubicles with a view were taken and I just needed a place to sleep. The similarity in layout of the floors of the Marriott fascinated me, especially the repetitive layout of study desks on each floor, but the basement desks seemed a little dustier and more cheaply made, their placement seemed subtly more haphazard, and the feng shui of the area felt oh so slightly off, just enough that no one wanted to use the desks in the basement, even to sleep, even though it was noticeably quieter. I went to the basement often during busy days, but never ended up staying long, except for this one time, when I felt tired enough to sleep there, in a study cube in a far corner of the map department. 

I dreamt that a pale and icy skinned vampire woman, walking on a broken foot like a zombie, walked over to my desk and bit my neck. Then I was on the library pay phone, berating someone who was somehow responsible for the vampire attack. Waking up after, drooling and disturbed, I reflected that the dream would make an interesting vampire movie, where two students come across a thesis paper about satanic scripts, and end up summoning a recently deceased girl who pursues them as a vampire. 

They argue over how to destroy the vampire as one of them is Catholic and the other is Mormon. They try a crucifix on her and it fails, and she attacks the Mormon again.  The Catholic is stricken and feels guilty as his study partner is dying in the hospital. He tells his family and his priest that their belief is a lie. They try a Book of Mormon on the vampire, but this fails too, and the Catholic is attacked this time.  The Mormon denounces his own family's religion. 

The Catholic's family priest, in a crisis of faith, seeks out the man who wrote the original thesis, a mysterious old man who lives on Antelope Island. He tells them that the vampires can only be destroyed by the icons of their own religion, so they must research the vampire woman's life. 

They discover that in life, she was Jewish. But, the crazy old man on the island says, the icons must be held by a true believer to kill the vampire. The priest resolves to find a good rabbi. 

Meanwhile the Mormon dies. The Catholic is terrified, certain that his friend will come after him as a vampire. "He's mad at me anyway".   He sends the priest to request that his friends body be cremated. The boy's family refuse him, referring to him as "that creepy Catholic."  The priest tells the boy he will go and kill both vampires before night falls. He meets the rabbi at the airport. They drive to Antelope island and find the crazy old man, holding a rifle and a triple combination. The priest passes out wooden stakes. They discuss their plans in a war council, where it turns out that all three are martial artists and highly trained weapons specialists.

 On their way to the cemetery, just to break the tension, they encounter a series of situations that resemble the plot to several "priest, rabbi, and Mormon" jokes. Then they find the family mausoleum of the woman vampire.  When they open her coffin, she is lying still, but she screeches horribly when the rabbi begins singing in Hebrew from a scroll. He lights a menorah, and at each lighting of the candle a graphic flaming Hebrew symbol appears on the howling vampire's forehead. Then the rabbi draws an Izmel and the other two draw their stakes, and they stab the writhing vampire in an incredibly graphic scene with sheets of black blood and green ectoplasm spraying everywhere. The vampire grotesquely degenerates into a skeleton.  

"She is at peace," the rabbi says. They leave the mausoleum and drive straight to the morgue where the Mormon student's body is located. At the sight of the vampire hunters, the staff call the police, but the priest and rabbi draw pistols and they advance to the big cabinet with the long slabs behind drawers like you see in movies. They find a mortuary staff person with a stack of file tabs with peoples' names on them. He says he's re-doing the tabs. They start pulling out the drawers to find the Mormon student, tension growing. Finally two cops burst into the room. The rabbi goes into karate mode and takes them out, but he gets shot and dies dramatically in the priest's arms. The other two frantically open drawers until they only have one left. Awful pause. The priest tells the Mormon to ready his triple combination and stake. But the Mormon confesses that he lost his faith while they killed the Jewish vampire. He says he is Jewish now, and won't be able to wield the Mormon icons. At this point the young clerk with the file tabs speaks up and bears his testimony. The priest grabs the triple combination and throws it to the boy, whose name is Trey Parker. The priest slides out the drawer to find, the body of an elderly woman. "Where is he?" the priest demands of the clerk, who shakes his head in confusion. 

"I can answer that," says the Mormon, as the door to the room opens and the mortuary staff run in with automatic rifles. As they disarm and handcuff the priest, the crazy old Mormon tells him that the body of the Mormon student is headed to Europe, where he will infect chosen missionaries, who will be unstoppable and will initiate a vampire apocalypse, as it turns out that no Mormon outside the old boundaries of the territory of Deseret is actually a true believer. The vampire plague will rampage through all the world and leave the Mormons of Utah and Idaho untouched and in control of the world. This has all been the master plan of a secret cult within the church, led by himself. He reveals himself as the clonal offspring of both Joseph Smith, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Bormann.

  As he laughs demonically, the mortuary staff push the priest onto an empty drawer slab. But at that moment the door bursts open and the Catholic student comes in with a group of nuns armed with Uzis. They shoot up the mortuary staff in a firefight, and only the crazy old Mormon is left, holding his hands up in surrender. The student holds a pistol on the old Mormon, who laughs and says they'll never stop the Mormon vampire plague. The student holds up a handwritten piece of notepaper, a last message from his Mormon study partner, indicating he wants a nondenominational funeral, as he has become, an atheist!  The cray old Mormon screams, as the scene switches to an international airport in Brussels or something, where an ominous oblong box slides down the baggage chute to the claim carousel. Waiting at the carousel are a group of Mormon missionaries. The scene slowly swings behind the missionaries, to another group of people, old men with gray ponytails and tie-dye, a few younger people with nose piercings and Charles darwin shirts, all in sandals with tube socks and dumpy, I'll-fitting jeans. They are holding slide-rules and prisms and copies of "Cosmos" and "the God Delusion". They see the box and nod grimly to each other. 

As the closing credits roll, we do an inset advertising my upcoming series: "The Booth", based on my time selling magnets at Festivals.

Losing an Ocean, Capturing a part of myself I'd rather release

I've inadvertently created a sad record of my artistic decline - again. I used to bring multiple sketchbooks and bags of pens in my art satchel (basically a purse made of army surplus material) everywhere, especially on vacation, where I would expect to be miserably uncomfortable for hours at a time, and could look forward to making anyone with me miserably uncomfortable by stopping at inappropriate junctures to draw whatever and whoever I happened to be sitting or sometimes even standing by, and the combination of physical discomfort and the intense performance anxiety caused from openly drawing live humans right in front of them would lend a sense of artistic seriousness and purposefulness to the endeavor.  The absolute lack of any enjoyable stimuli would induce a trancelike focus to my drawing that I became somewhat addicted to.  This is a true sklog, where the artist's social awkwardness and physical stress imbue the drawing with a patina of desperation and shame that makes it more interesting for the viewer. 

I fantasized that I could recapture this feeling during our trip to the Oregon coast, so I brought a sketchbook and a small bag of pens. I thought about bringing the whole art satchel with multiple sketchbooks and pens but decided against it to save space. This unfortunate compromise of my artistic integrity bore bitter fruit throughout the whole trip.  

Bitter fruit plate 1:

My favorite pen ran out of ink and I had no backup fine tip, so I had to use a cheap medium point, which made my already shaky lines look worse. And it smeared a lot.  

Bitter fruit plate 2:

I disliked the cheap pen so much that I tried a few drawings with a light blue fine point. 

Bitter blue fine point plate 1:

You won't see the bitterest fruit of the compromise in these drawings, but the discerning viewer will infer it from the location and setting of the previous plates: I drew them all in the beach house. We actually went outside, to more interesting places than the interior of the beach house; we actually wandered around on the actual beach, for instance. But I only brought the one sketchbook, which is too big for a pocket, and I didn't have the art satchel, which could have held the bigger sketchbook hands free, enabling me to ward off the physical attacks of my offspring while bringing the proper art tools right up to the ocean itself, with all its rich sklog material; rotting crabs, vicious seagulls, garbage washed ashore, obnoxious tourists too cheap to take their kids to San Diego (Here!). 

We also went in a huge cave to look at sea lions, a dark and magical place that photos can not do justice to, but that with their unthinking detail, photos can give a viewer the dangerous and illusory sense that they have captured a place, so that the viewer does not know what they are missing, where a sklog would properly capture the total inability of the artist to capture the place, and would communicate that failure to the viewer. 

In honor of that failure, here is the only drawing from the trip with any ocean water in it. 

Bitter blue fine point plate 2:

Note how the failure to capture the ocean fairly leaps off this sad image, wistfully drawn from the front porch. You immediately sense that something ineffable has not been captured. And compare that with a drawing of an nautical setting I began long before the trip to the ocean and never got back to, the level of pointless detail, the absurdity. 

Absurdist Escape plate 1:

The final stage in the artistic and moralistic decline, the drooling daydream, the escapist nonsense. There's really nothing more to do but to begin coloring them in

Survival of the Fittest in Dreamland

Explanation: I've read a lot of science fiction, some of it fairly apocalyptic end-of-the-world type science fiction (which people in populous societies - especially young people - tend to be irresistibly fascinated with, for reasons that should be obvious). And I've learned quite a bit from those books about living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, mainly that living in the rubble after the collapse of civilization is not so bad if you are a firearms expert with a lifetime of survivalist training, or if you are a mutant with psychic powers. 

So when I muse and ponder about what we would do in the aftermath of Armageddon, which I often do, I usually begin the story with the survivalist tactics, acquiring water and food and weapons, and then after some deeper thought, an honest appraisal of my weapons handling experience (juggling knives), physical stamina (not good), and feelings about un-refrigerated food (canned beans only), the story tends to focus on the bare minimum of mutant superpowers we would require to maintain our standard of living at the end of the world. Also some helpful robot servants, shown here accompanying the family on our wanderings. One of the robots would have a fridge compartment in their torso, with a filtered water tap, and the other would shoot lasers out of their eyes. I don't know how they would maintain their power supply - ah ha! Mutant superpower number 1: Psychic battery recharging. 

The giant magic rabbit could step in with cleaning tasks when the robots were busy. I am pictured on the far right wearing the outfit which is for me the most pleasant aspect of the fantasy; my cozy bathrobe and sweatpants, and a backpack full of snacks. My imagination gets a little hazy on many of the details of our perambulations through the ruins, but the bathrobe and sweats and snacks are always high res. Then I usually wonder how I'd clean them (as well as the socks and underwear) and end up praying that they invent self cleaning fabric right before catastrophe strikes. That problem solved, we continue our journey as pictured, wearing our magically clean robes, my  kids in their favorite animal costumes, the robots and the magic bunny amusing us with various shenanigans. I usually imagine my wife learning plant lore before the journey sometime, and brewing medicinal potions each night, to help me forget my grief over the end of baseball, while I would learn to control people or zombie's minds like Professor X or the kid in Game of Thrones. And just as I've arranged our survival in the Wasteland satisfactorily, after a great deal of mental effort, I usually drift off to sleep

Visions of the Future; part 2; You Don't Really Need a Debugger

So, I've learned enough about VBA to write a few subroutines with variables. A subroutine is what the programmers, or coders, call one little part of a program. These little subroutines were excel macros. 

I didn't know what a macro was for a long time. A long long time. I would read the word "macro" and immediately think of "macrobes", a scientific sounding term in the CS Lewis space trilogy that I don't think has a title for the whole trilogy. A "macro-title", you could call it, like "Lord of the Rings". I quite enjoyed the Lewis series, most of it, even the religious elements; because he reworked Sunday school stuff into fun science fiction elements.  Unfortunately the Sunday school stuff took over the series in the end. Much like the Microsoft part takes over and ruins all the cool stuff that Microsoft almost develops. There, I brought it all back. It was no digression after all. Macrobes, cool, "Macros" why called so?  

But eventually I learned what macros are and had lots of fun recording macros and looking at the code - You can record a macro in excel or word, and then go look at the automatically generated script in the Visual Basic editor. You can find the Visual Basic editor by employing super secret hacker methodology, going into the excel or word options menu and clicking an option in one of the menus. You'll immediately know when you go into the visual basic editor because you go from the newfangled ribbon layout of the later versions of excel to a layout looks like Windows 3.11. I think they've probably kept the old-timey look of the editor because the only people that use it are my age, and we don't like things to change. 

The editor is fun because not only can you look at the generated script, you can change it just as easily as you can rewrite an email. And you can add things to the macros or subroutines  like variables, which I learned from the Dummies book. I'm just old enough to admit that I found the dummies book helpful, and just young enough to feel embarrassed when I admit it. 

And Ive learned just enough about variables to write some macros that Ive used at work, but read just enough online to know that my coding is incredibly lazy and sloppy and jury-rigged. I constantly attempt macros based on ideas I have that are always slightly beyond my actual programming abilities, which due to extreme mental laziness I consistently overestimate. So whenever I have trouble with public variables, which I always do, I just slop the data into some corner cells somewhere in an unnamed sheet that I may later delete because I've forgotten about the slop and end up wondering what the hell happened to my previously kind of working macro until I go back and rework some lines and accomplish nothing or make everything worse until I remember the slop data and think I can just use a public variable and it doesn't work so I redo the slop sheet and put a note to myself not to delete them and delete the note later when I find copies of the same file in two folders and keep the newer one without checking the change history. And I write bad comments that I never understand later, during the long debugging/utilization process.  And I do not practice good file management/ organization techniques.  So I have grown very accustomed to the "Send Error Report?" Message box. It's one of the most reliable results in my macros. 

Having achieved this level of VBA knowledge, wherein I am constantly in "debug" mode in the Visual Basic editor, I decided to try web programming, the glamour child of the programming world; using html, css, JavaScript, all three coding languages with no debug mode at all, just a stab in the dark guessing game. I wanted to have a neat website, you see.  So where my bad programming with VBA results in error messages and yellow highlighted lines, the inept JavaScript programming results in a blank. It just doesn't do anything, and I end up looking through my handiwork in total confusion, looking for semi-colons and curly brackets, as illustrated in this week's pic:

Please note that I couldn't remember the names of any real laptop making companies nor what the back parts of a computer look like. 

After finally getting the script to do something, I have to get it to do what I actually envisioned it to do, which means inserting an endless series of "alert" boxes in an effort to pinpoint the parts where the written code has diverged from my inner vision. My inner vision can swing right by brackets and misspelled variables without a trip up, this is one of the marvelous things human brains can do. We can run a preposterously illogical program in our heads, we can compile almost anything, no matter how sloppy it's written. 

I easily picked up JavaScript from free iPhone apps, because it's comparatively easy if you know a little C.  It uses C type script, which Ive learned from a beginners guide that my wife got me, that I didn't think would be useful but thought would be fun and it turned out both. When I say easily picked up, of course, I mean just enough to write web pages that do things that are somewhat related to what I wanted them to do like the shadow of a cone is related to the taste of ice cream. Still making the hand shadows and waiting for that sweet taste of functionality

And another change in direction, I'll shake off you readers yet!

I learned many valuable things during my Year of Moving Constantly (covered in my previous blog series 6 Migrations - link to be updated post post).  The primary lesson: Do not keep more than you can swim with (one hand free). 

I have adhered to this valuable principle in all my efforts to build readership of this blog, and this post is one of many occasions where the enhanced mobility made possible by the light readership of the blog has rewarded this adherence. Yes, I'm changing direction again and starting a new series. No, this does NOT mean I won't EVER return to previous series. Think of this blog as a sort of verbal TV station where they do a LOT of pilots and they still haven't cemented a programming schedule but they never ever do reruns. YEs!

New pilot: Gateway to the Future - a brutally honest account of my personal attempt to learn computer programming, or "coding" as the young people call it. Lingo is important. My journey to VR will include many new terms, like "VR" which stands for "Virtual Reality", which is the future, especially for old people like me, who will be the first old people to be plugged into a VR cable and left to rot on a plastic recliner in a room strongly resembling a closet by our ungrateful children. That's if we're lucky. That's what this quest is all about. I don't mind the thought of living in video games at the end of my life, but I definitely want to be able to hack the system enough to verify that the attendants are changing my diapers and linens. Especially if the attendants are Russian. They might be robots, of course. So much the better, then I will be the secret boss of the living center, controlling everyone's meds and room assignments, scheduling snack time, who gets first dibs on the whirlpool. Obviously I've thought about it a lot. But first, I'll have to learn "coding". Don't say programming online. They'll tear you apart in the forums. It's like admitting you only know Visual Basic (wipes away tears - vicious little bastards). 

Which brings me to the first installment of Gateway to the Future, learning Visual Basic for Applications, which is super easy to do if you have MS Excel, which I do, and you like it, which I do. Excel is the best thing Microsoft ever did. As a matter of fact it might be the only good thing Microsoft ever did. I'm thinking about it, but no sense in wasting too much time...

I've actually taken a few stabs at learning programming in the past, one a long time ago, in high school, in the computer lab, when a friend who was TA'ing in the computer lab and who I played this King Kong banana throwing game with (I was not taking computer lab, I was TA'ing across the hall, don't remember anything about it as I spent all my time in the computer lab or riding around with my friends) showed me how to call up a list of Basic commands from the DOS prompt. I remember the mindless enjoyment I had, typing at the prompt, watching the files and directories whiz by, and then typing DEBUG and something else and suddenly seeing a column of characters and gibberish, all hex numbers, and discovering that I was seeing a text file Character by Character, as it was actually written on the disk itself!  I was amazed , but I was also thinking a lot about girls and dice and sci fi novels at the time, and we didn't have a home computer, and I will totally give up on something, at the drop of a hat, so I never learned more. 

Later, during one of my many spans of unemployed time, I took a stab at learning Visual Basic.Net, which seems to have flickered in and out of existence in the time since then, and I don't really understand what it's for now and can't afford to re-learn and there's so much free stuff to learn that there's no point. I quite enjoyed that experience, to the point that I eventually made a picture viewer for my web page, where people could click through some of my drawings that I'd scanned. But eventually my unemployment ran out and I had to go back to work at various horrible temp jobs and had no time to return to it until now. 

And I discovered that not only could you record macros in Excel, which I had used often and on some rare occasions even for actual work, but it would actually generate VBA code as you recorded and you could edit it!  It was on a par with the time my wife showed me the board editor in Age of Mythology. I was amazed that Microsoft had included something fun in their office software - but of course, it was for Excel. I eventually got a for Dummies book on Excel programming, and midway through that book, I experienced my major insight on computers and my relationship to them: I hated and feared computers for the same reasons I hate and fear air travel; total loss of control.  You are in the maddeningly indifferent hands of others, subject to their soul-sucking security checks; bag probes, password requirements, security questions, long lines, progress bars, enforced bare-footedness (an ancient Assyrian technique for humiliating prisoners), swirly word pictures that don't make a recognizable word!  

The solution? For air travel, to find superman's fortress and steal his green crystal (if you dare run through the gigantic hologram of Marlon Brando, denouncing you in a voice like thunder! - it's just an alarm system, but superman is coming and he is very swift and fast) that is to say there is no solution but the proud highway, meaning road trip. 

But for computers there is a solution, the green crystal is out there and you can steal it from them, we are aged but cunning and I still have a day job thank Christ. Many my age have no net, and face the grim prospect of mass competition with the other career refugees, learning to program in some language they will come to despise in "coding boot camps" with masses of other bewildered old timers, now rendered useless by the creepy millennials in Feel the Bern T-shirts, waving batons (crafted to look like light sabers) and herding us and our children to the vast tent cities accumulating just outside the inner city cosplay-grounds for twenty somethings where they work. 

I will be avoiding the boot-camp type learning system for now, as I prefer to learn at my own pace (think glacier), but I'm not above jumping in if the financial opportunity presents, like an old people scholarship or a bequest. 

Back to the VBA for Excel book, and my quest to learn to learn coding. Upon experiencing the epiphany, I made a goal that I would make a game written in VBA and configure it as an Add-in that anyone with a copy of Excel could install, but since then I resolved on another goal which has put the Excel game on the back burner: To rework the hagenart website with JavaScript. I resolved on this goal because I picked up some JavaScript from a free app, (which I will credit and discuss in time), and JavaScript is fun and maybe I take too readily to quick and easy and I'm tired of all the remarks on Stack overflow. 

Also, with html and JavaScript I'll be able to put actual examples on this blog! Maybe, not sure of the support

The Unbearable Lightness of My College Experience; A Scientific Treatise

This post marks a departure from the sloppy, narcissistic solipsism  of the previous posts in this series. Actually "this series" is over. I have begun a new series. So this post actually marks a new series, not a change in the current series. I will however be using pages from the current sketchbook, the same sketchbook that I used for the recently ended series, as graphical scientific illustrations for the new series. Just to make it clear to my readership, or mother, that I haven't given up on my resolution to do two drawings a week for the whole year. 

New series: A scientific study of my life, beginning with college and going back, like a paleontologist, digging down through layers of dirt to find older and older fossils. What a miserable job that must be, digging and sifting through the dirt, looking for bone-shaped rocks. You can tell how miserable it is by the toys they give kids to promote the science: Shovels, sieves, and tooth brushes. The etchings look fun though. 

And speaking of fun: The Marriott Library. My primary college residence, or my primary hangout while in college. For most of my collegiate years I resided in my parents' basement, and did not experience a great deal of the magic and excitement of the college years that you see in movies. I wish I could say that I devoted that socially muted time to intensive study, to the maintenance of 20+ hours of bio-engineering and applied mathematics classes, but obviously I can't, or I wouldn't have built up to it.  

I spent a lot of my freshman year in the Marriott, with my face buried in textbooks, sleeping. I did discover the abnormal psych section in one corner of the fourth floor, and spent a good portion of waking time reading the kinkier case histories. I also enjoyed finding a study desk by a window where I could watch people walking on the sidewalks outside, or, as depicted here, I particularly treasured the rare days I found an empty desk around the edge of the atrium, with the marvelous view of the people wandering the lower floor card catalogs and or pretending to study at the other desks. 

But that was freshman year. Utah is a commuter college in a fairly populated area, which, I've been given to understand, offers a more impersonal, or less iconographic, college experience than the small town university. A part of me enjoyed the bleak solitude of afternoons on campus, but I'd seen enough frat-centered college movies to know that I was missing something.  I believe advertising agencies are built around this strangely suggestible facet of the human mind; that an artificial image of life, pretended to be lived by attractive and well dressed people in a setting far from one's life, or possibly any real person's life, can instill a powerful desire to imitation. They call it "following your dream" in America. It almost always ends in disappointment, but the small minority of success stories are the people with the free time available to write books about it. 

Forgot my original point again, but that doesn't matter.  Whatever point I thought I would make was a digression from the more important general purpose of this new blog direction. So I digressed from a digression from the redirection, bringing it all back the new direction. Which is science, meaning charts:

Another New Direction for Science!

I have often waxed rhapsodic on the magic of books, but only to close relatives or my own offspring. I myself am a reader who would never advise other people to read, because even in a democracy like the US, where an uneducated electorate can take your money and wreak havoc, I would prefer to always feel like the smartest person in the room.  And for that reason I don't like children's books about books where characters emerge from the books, emitting magic sparkles and preparing to fill someone with wonder. 

Well actually that's not the reason. I find them vapid and saccharine. That's the reason.   And I believe they're useless as far as encouraging people to read. 

So what are we to make of this picture of a little book town?  

Drawn by someone who doesn't like those kind of pictures?  I honestly don't know. I'm almost fifty and I still can't explain myself. Pathological immaturity and laziness, but maybe I'm flattering myself. There may have been a book or two sitting inside the toy train track circle, that inspired me with the notion to draw a little book town. I do remember having a vague idea for some kind of neat representation of book people coming out of the books, little letter people with serif hands and bow ties, or perhaps the characters of every book, magically come alive and on whimsical foray beyond the edge of their flat papery home.   They would have sparkly dust floating around them to signify they were magic, and would speak in rhyme. 

I'd like to say I didn't do that because it's an overdone idea that other people, many other people, had already beaten to death, over and over again, in countless children's books. But it appears that I started to do it in this picture and then gave up for reasons of laziness, leaving the little people without sparkles or indication of the wonders of reading. They're just little figures that could possibly be descendants of silverfish, completely illiterate, and slowly devouring the pages of the gigantic books they shelter in, caring no more for the inky gibberish that appears on their food than we would for the stems and leaves that we wash off our fruits and veggies before we eat.  Perhaps they would enjoy and prefer the rare blank pages as we enjoy a seedless watermelon, delicious food that can be savored without annoyance.   

And it appears I did try the same thing again a week or so later on another sketchbook page:

I'm breaking a rule, my own rule, to include this second picture in the same post, but I don't like this second picture and it doesn't deserve its own post. I honestly don't know why I include pictures in the posts at all, if only to continually remind my family that I wanted to be an artist, that they might share my sense of failure. This second picture features the magic of words, or letters at least, coming to whimsical life to bring a little magic to our sad lives.  I usually critique my own pictures with the ferocity of a doting grandparent on their only grandchild, but I can barely stand to look at this one, and it has forced me to re-appraise the meandering unfocused nature of this project.  If I were a young man again, 30 years old and living in my parents basement without a job or a care in the world, I could well believe that a yearlong project to produce two random doodles a week might indeed yield a plethora of astounding art, and the unfocused and free range thinking would allow my sexually repressed and angry young brain to conceive revolutionary artistic themes, drawing upon intuition and passion, not the cold reason of my dry, jaded middle age. Yes, the artistic time of my life has passed. Like my father before me I have a house and family and a job that I'm ashamed to tell my children about, and see modern art as a huge scam and literature as a tired, dull magic trick. I have completely lost that delightful cluelessness and ignorance that make art possible. I view movies as an irritated skeptic, like Siskel and Ebert with a painful hernia and an inflamed prostate, unable give a thumbs up to anything longer than fifteen minutes. I roll my eyes at the opening credits, and I find every ending is either lazy or forced. 

And so I have decided to change the entire direction of this project: A scientific study of my life, where it went shatteringly wrong and why, told in graphic form. This will not be a graphic novel. I have grown weary of the recent spate of graphic novel memoirs. This will not be a story to warm the heart and inspire. I envision a cold, dispassionate dissection of my youth, a treatise, absent of the rich, painfully honest detail that the Norwegian guy filled his autobiography with. Only a Scandinavian would do that.  They watch shows about trains in Norway. Not Thomas the Train, not stories about people riding a train. Just a video of a train going on its track for hours. Not even funny videos of commuters fighting as the doors close, or neat speeded up shots of people going in and out of the station like koyanaskatsi. 

 I've covered the years between my work at the radio station and family life, and the final collapse of my artistic pretensions, in the sklogs. I've graphically covered my inner world from mid twenties to the radio station, the aftermath of my college failure, the life chapter I've entitled "Flight into Delusion", in the ballpoint illustrations that I later sold at local festivals. Now for the science. Beginning with college, before I gave up on being a writer. This won't be a chronologically-ordered study. We'll go back and forth, like pulp fiction or Doctor who. We'll begin next week, after I've prepared some graphics about my college years. This will be statistically intensive, but I'm assuming anyone reading this has read their prerequisites

Requires 2D Glasses- Har har that's a good one!

I have a strange fetish for two dimensional pictures that I believe to be the result of artistic childishness; I can't draw convincing three dimensional people or objects, and instead of pushing myself to learn perspective and proportions I have allowed myself to regress back to my two dimensional world in everything I draw.  This failing turned fetish has biased my preferences for any art or design, and I have turned away from the current 3D mania in movies and video games. I want everything on the surface, like old-school Nintendo, and the first person shooters tend to fill me with existential dread. If I was given a choice of virtual reality afterlives, I'd go for the 2D, like an eternal webpage with comics. And I draw pictures like this one, flat with the whole story on the surface. 

One interesting result is that people think I'm drawing abstract art, when I never do. Abstract art is based upon all kinds of beneath the surface meanings, but I never put anything beneath the surface.  Not abstract. No themes or symbolism. For this one I was drawing a port, with two dimensional buildings and little boats in it. The shapes further out are are plants growing on islands. Obviously an art major might be able to sleuth out some subconscious meanings in the picture, but really, it's a port with little ships in an alien, two dimensional world.  

If I suddenly became a famous abstract artist and sold pictures for loads of money, and people asked me what a picture meant, I might not say the same thing. I might say it the first time someone asked me, but if they seemed disappointed or if I felt embarrassed, I might say something like I was "toying with shapes". Then I might read critical reviews referring to "exploration of organic forms" or something very cool like that, and I might prefer to say that instead of "little alien ships". I might start referring to "pieces" instead of "drawings".   

I just realized that there was a Kurt Vonnegut book, "Bluebeard", where the protagonist, an abstract artist, says about the same thing; that he has silly stories in mind when he does his pieces. I'm a little disappointed to be imitating his idea, but I think my backstories for my pictures are more embarrassing.  His were about a deer or something. And I do not claim to do or try to do abstract drawings. I was just saying that I might change my tune if I became rich, which is a completely different theme than Vonnegut was pursuing. 

This picture would be much better in color too. That would be another failing I have; letting ultimate intent skew current method. I drew the picture with the idea at the back of my mind that it would be colored, and so drew a less interesting, un-colored picture instead of an intended black and white celebration of its own monochromatic nature sort of picture, like ansel Adams photos. I also do the opposite; I add colors to a picture, in line with earlier intent, that actually mar the black and white picture, because it didn't need any colors and was drawn to be without colors, by myself, because I forgot about the colors halfway through the picture and drew it to be black and white. The moral of the story is don't add color unless it needs color, but you'll never know if it needs color unless you're a real artist, so the moral of the story is I never know and neither by the laws of probability will you the reader because my mother is not an artist either. 

I may use computer technology to color the picture later, using the magic wand and the button with the sloshing paint bucket, but for some reason, probably age-related, a drawing task that I wouldn't mind spending two hours doing by hand seems almost unbearably difficult if it would take more than five minutes on the computer. 

My Creative Output is an Enigma wrapped in a Mystery Containing an Imaginary Comic Book

I didn't continue the story of Doctor Elephante in the sketchbook. I continued the story in idea mode, meaning in my head, for several days after. And in my head the story got so incredibly good that I could hardly think of anything else. I became completely involved in the story as a viewer, and could hardly wait to see what would happen next. At the same time as a creator I became convinced that I had a monster hit on my hands, a story that could possibly be the best selling comic book of all time, and a hit movie and a tv series and an Oscar winner that might go down in history as comparable to the works of Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Bach as one of the supreme achievements of the human mind. My expectations as a viewer soared into the stratosphere at the same time as the pressure to deliver began to inhibit the playful creativity that I had begun the imaginary story with. It stopped being fun, and turned into a chore. I began to just grind out the illusionary episodes like an indifferent machine, without feeling any connection to the character or the audience which was also an imaginary character. Then finally, as a viewer, I gave one of the installments a negative review.  As a creator my world came crashing down around me, and I resigned from the show (it was no longer a comic book at that point).  Unfortunately the panels and scripts and completed episodes were all in my head, in idea mode, so when I stopped writing and inking and publishing the comic book and adapting and directing and filming and starring in the series about 72 hours after the original doodles, it all sorted of faded away and I have nothing real to show for all that effort but the memories - which are all sort of fading away too.   Anyway, heat death of the universe, water under the bridge. 

Then we went on a road trip to Tucson and I drew a picture of our motel room:

I had some problems with the layout of the room in this picture due to the un-calibrated nature of my representative drawing style, meaning I can't do proportions and don't know how real artists do them. They may use a ruler or something. Also, I tend to adopt a circular scanning technique wherein I draw one side of a doorway and draw along down in a clockwise motion of my field of view, drawing the stuff nearer the doorway, down to my own feet, then moving up along the left side and up to the left  side of the doorway - which, mysteriously - did not now line up with the right, not even close, the left side bottom began at a spot just below the top of the door frame. This left a blank void in the middle of the room, which I filled with a farewell panel from the Doctor Elephante comic.  I then simply completed the left side of the door in space, so to speak, leaving the door and frame seeming to stand about ten feet inside the room, past the entrance area. Looking at the picture now, I am astonished with how natural and realistic and cozy the room looks with this fantastic door standing confidently in the center of it. The phantom doorway lends an easy and delightful flow to the layout to the room that motel designers and architects should pay close attention to, and the yawning chasm of nothingness through which my financially and critically triumphant comic book from an alternate universe makes its enigmatic appearance doesn't seem to mar the aesthetic of the room as severely as I'd originally feared

Diffident Continuation of Previous Story

The story of Doctor Elephante

Continuing the development of the character introduced in the previous doodle:

Revisiting this origin story, I have to confess that it seems to me to display several fundamental weaknesses of myself as a comic book writer. For one thing, who is this person in the first panel? I mean, to start with, what's his name?  Even Stan Lee took some time before the Origin Event of his characters, to show them as normal humans in a normal life. I personally found these introductory sequences almost completely unbearable to wade through, but it doesn't mean they didn't help a little to ground spidey or Mr Fantastic in a kind of boring, this-is-your-goodguy-like-him-and-get-to-the-pow-pow, kind of way. At the bare minimum, a name and occupation, and at least one adjective having somewhat of a relation to personality should preface the explosive origin event. 

So, reviewing this comic, I would say this writer has no patience and is unwilling to put much work into his craft. And does not possess the ability to visually tell a story. The best part of this panel, in my opinion, has got to be my idea for the two ton elephant pants. If I had continued the comic, I would have dedicated it to the development of this idea. How does he make the two ton pants?  How does he walk in them?  What events transpire, in his post-origin-event experience, to set him on the path to conceiving and devising and creating the two ton pants?

But alas, we will never know. These doodles are not blueprints of what will be, but merely shadows of what might have been about to be.  They offer a snapshot of an unproductive mind, in continual ferment, with no progress, no habitable structures. A roiling mob of ideas with no will to organized government or culture

The man in the mirror is a brutally honest doodle

I wanted this entry to continue the gritty inside story of the development of a computer game, SubOrban, which I basically created in real time during my previous post, but I haven't done any real work on it besides the orb puns and a pretty listless bit of research into the orb imaging abilities of the drawing apps on my phone. Very negative downer experience. I also haven't submitted the concept to Marketing, to be rent into pieces. Or is that rended to pieces?  Or maybe de-rendered to pieces. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm berry excited about SubOrban, the possibilities and money and all that. And even more excited about the possible book I could weave together out of the blog entries, a sort of "Soul of a New Machine" type novel. 

But I don't have any material yet. And I do have another sketchbook entry to post, as in the name and while point of this blog. 

This actually might be a close number two to my picture from two posts ago, of myself running with the branch, that I said might be the magnum opus of my later life. I think this one will be the one most often mentioned with that picture, as belonging to the same artistic period. A few critics or some family member or maybe my mother will say that this is their favorite, just to be different and surprising. It will be like the empire strikes back to Star Wars. 

What does the picture mean?  I'll leave that for future generations of miserably bored people to decide, but it seems to follow the main theme of the sketchbook so far: Ongoing failure, a continued lack of progress on both fronts, or prongs, of my overall yearly goal, which is basically a low key college years worth of study of computers and literature. I set the goals with an academic theme in mind because my creative doodling juices seem to be most stimulated when I have other, more important things to do. I can only truly focus on any task in a desperate attempt to mentally fend off some looming real responsibility, and school has always, since my wasted youth, a powerful symbol of What I Should Be Doing. 

Back to the picture, which seems to depict a socially awkward and emotionally remote meeting between myself, Santa Claus, and an elf. The two diminutive figures at our feet could be interpreted as children in costume or large action figures, or both one and the other. One is my homage to Doctor Octopus, my favorite comic character next to doctor doom and the fantastic four (the hulk died in me with the avengers movie).  The other, well, is a new character that I've created myself; Senor Elephante. I've actually created an origin story for this character that I'm not very happy with but which will have to do for now.   

Amazing insight!  It just occurred to me that the diminutive figures represent my lost childhood (Doctor octopus) and future wasted effort (Senor Elephante). In that light, Santa, who seems in the picture to have that mental illness where people hug themselves, is gazing in sad question at me, while I look away, avoiding eye contact, looking somewhat ruefully at my mental progeny (get it?) while the elf comments sarcastically on my stomach fat. 

I just realized two things; Santa is awkwardly holding a bag over his shoulder, not mentally ill at all, and the elf has no lower body. He's apparently suspended in mid air or the picture is incomplete. And he and the picture will never be completed; the artist is distracted (willfully?) by the tiny fruits of his imagination, while his generous, empathetic side (comforting Santa) is avoided and his sober, critical side (sarcastic hovering elf), is left with his lower half, including supporting limbs and procreative organs, unfinished and discarded. Reeling from powerful self assessment. Must go doodle this feeling away immediately

Orb-orb's Orb of Fate rotates on Orb Wide Web search

I can't keep beginning every entry with the words "this week's picture", so each week I have to think up some pointless comment to begin with before I inevitably refer to "this week's picture."  So I'm not going to say that at all. We'll just assume there's a picture I'm talking about unless I make the special disclaimer at the very beginning; "I have no picture to share."  

More robots, I know. These are actually my vision of metallic life forms that will someday proliferate through the solar system if I have any say in the matter. They live on tiny worlds that have minimal gravity. They stick on the worlds through electromagnetism. The robots are little orbs, but they can upgrade by purchasing arms and tractor legs and additional spherical body sections. Actually I've created a video game, essentially. Orb-land. Or Orb-ball. Those names won't work. There's no land in the game except on the big orbs, so Orb-land makes no sense. And Orb-ball is redundant. 

I'll have to have the hagenart marketing department research whether this idea has been done yet. Orbiverse. SubOrban. Yes!

I'll keep thinking, but marketing will want to do the name.  My job is the product, and I'm practically finished with design right now. I've really got the Orb rotating! And I have the feeling that the delightfully synonymic relationship of orb and ball and world will provide me with an almost endless river of jokes - a whole new Orb of them! - with which to delight the reader and myself. 

Of course marketing will try their best to find that someone else has already done it, just as development will try our best to replace 'ball' with 'orb' in as many amusing ways as we can before passing the orb to production, leaving them with whatever scraps didn't pass muster in the initial humor mining. 

Back to the picture, which the more I think of it pretty neatly encapsulates the spirit and idea and metastructure of the game so well that production will have a remarkably easy time extracting some fantastic gameplay out of, it's just basically fill in the blanks with simple Java or ruby rails or whatever the coding drones call it. Basically I think we've got it, once marketing sells the idea for enough to hire a production department, and of course pay their own wages as well.  And of course those wages might encourage them to evaluate the ideas rotating  out of development (psych!) with maybe a touch more effort than it takes to do a couple of Google searches. But I admit that marketing is outside my orb of expertise, so I don't want to tell them how to do their job. Yes!  I'm really on an orbit today!

On a more serious note, I attempted to depict the orientation of robot figures in this picture as rotating from directly under the POV at the bottom of the picture to 90 degrees up at the top of the picture, so as to demonstrate the spherical nature of the surface they're on. I failed in this, just as I failed to find a synonym of spherical that uses the root 'orb''. Have I already used up the 'orb' mine?  Already feeling the let-down that usually waits until after the marketing report. Between the orb and the reality falls the shadow

Betrayal of the Limb

I've already fallen behind on the weekly art journal that I'd resolved to do this year, for various reasons, all tied to defects in my personality and the outrageous tyranny of full time work, but it doesn't matter, because I've already drawn the major opus of my later life, like the French guys water lilies. What a load of free time he must have had.  

You educated people know who I'm talking about!  Please tell me, I can't remember his name, and I want to toss it to the philistines like emotionally hurtful bread crumbs. 

I took considerably less time to draw my major opus, and it shows, but I believe it encapsulates these final years of my earthly existence fairly well. 

Unlike the lazy surrealist doodles that have in the past and will continue in the future to waste the time of any stray viewers of this blog, this drawing actually depicts a real life event that has haunted my suburban existence: I broke my neighbors tree, on accident. I was attempting to bond with the little kids that wait for the school bus along with my kid, and one of them asked me to pull on the snow covered branch of this aspen tree, in order that the snow would fall on them in a freezing shower and they would be amused thereby.  I demurred, as the tree was on the front yard property and right by the front window of someone's house. The kids are always playing around in the yard while they wait for the bus, but as I am a grownup it doesn't seem right to me to walk onto their yard from the sidewalk. The kid insisted that the owners of the house have told them that it's okay to play in the yard, and as her will is implacably strong and mine is barely perceptible at all I pulled on the branch and it broke off the tree and fell to the ground before me.  "Oh they're gonna be mad," the kid said, and they all ran to the bus which had conveniently pulled up at that moment, leaving me alone by the broken limb, gazing furtively at the front Windows of the house. The picture depicts my headlong rush up the street, conveying the huge piece of evidence to my own back yard where it could be hidden. I had resolved to approach the neighbor at a more reasonable time of day to apologize for the branch, but I have never done so.  It seems aggressively intrusive to me to knock on someone's door for anything but a medical emergency. Better to just wait for an opportune time, when both of us happen to be outside and walking near, and have no urgent business to attend to, to mention the tree and take the opportunity to say how sorry I was...and if all parties happen to grow old and pass away before that meeting ever happens so the better.  And if there's an afterlife wherein social interaction is some kind of requirement and past wrongs are expected to be righted then I will be happy under those circumstances, where time would expected to be in extremely plentiful supply, to bring the matter up. 

Don't Steal my robot cutlery idea too, Steve Wozniak!

This week's picture incorporates some of my fondest hopes and visions of the future, and illustrates what I feel will be a major theme of 21st century history: the mechanization of food.     Specifically the picture very nicely illustrates my idea of a computer keyboard made of edible keys floating in a bowl of milk. 

This would completely revolutionize the science and industry of computing, which is quite frankly in a bit of a funk since Apple took over and re-made the cell phone into a direct marketing device. We need a new computer revolution!  There are also robots in the picture. I am 100% in favor of robots and pray for them to take over every day. Take my job and my last shreds of self respect, you beautiful mechanical bastards!   It wouldn't bother me if they took over the government at all. What difference would it make?  What could they possibly do that the humans currently in charge haven't already done? Could they really be as greedy and power-hungry?  They may be indifferent to human needs, but what would difference would it make?  

So I drew robots with heads. What's the point of robots without a head or a face?  I think I've read something about an Uncanny valley of robots whose overly lifelike faces will elicit repulsion in humans who see them, but I believe this reflex will wear out and disappear in humans who watch presidential debates. 

The table arrangements I can not so easily explain or defend. I may have been hungry when I drew this, I think I wanted to make a little town or something. So I gave each dish or water pitcher its own little driveway, and drew a few little cars with food on them. Maybe they're butter balls. I gave the cutlery faces because they're the people of the little town, and this is another field of robotics that begs for deeper exploration and investment; robot cutlery that can set itself and sing  you a song or even dance a little, like Angela Landsberry in Beauty and the Beast. The spoon faces would be like a smartphone screen, that would sense what food was on them and talk to you about it. Maybe they could even crawl up your shirt and shovel the food in for you, in response to verbal commands. Truly this picture could be used as a sort of blueprint for the future of food and robotics