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.