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

I was just clearing my throat

Already the graphic producing process which I developed with the idea of a relentlessly productive content machine has begun to hit snags and coughs and stoppages, and I can sense little contractions along my shoulder hunching muscles, the onset of the full shoulder tensing that accompanies the delivery of a failure. 

I would class this week's picture as a cough. It's a demonstration of my hanging Christmas tree idea, an idea that I've cuddled myself to sleep with many a night, with visions of sales in the millions and a company run from my basement and entire mornings in my bathrobe. 

So I finally drew a picture of the idea: 

The happy dream is ended, my wife showed me several photos posted to odious online forums, showing off several variations of the idea as actually constructed by smug crafty people in their smug little workshops. 

I added some little guys with drone heads to the picture, but found them insipid, so I tried to depict a swarm source for the drones. I enjoy swarm source scenes in movies, but I completely failed the swarm source drawing. My kids kept asking me what it was and I didn't tell them because I was eating my heart and the taste was bitter, bitter!

That's a reference to a poem. The narrator comes across a man-beast eating his heart and he says that. I don't know the poets name. But I did try to quote it to my kid as a joke because my illness is to do that whether the joke is funny or not and whether the other person gets it. My kid liked the joke and the picture including the swarm source or said so at least. 

If I were to color this picture I would make it incredibly dark and gloomy except for the one guy's face who would represent me. His face would be glowing from the lights of the tree, and the viewer would be confused, because the actual tree lights would be dim and feeble, so where is this glow?

It is the glow of ignorance and self deception. It burns warm and cozy no matter what people say. And I would be there to tell the viewer that and I would see the realization in their eyes, of the incredible true depth to the picture, and I would hear the little pop as I blew their mind, and I would take this home to cuddle with. 

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Except to Pass

This week's picture is a scene from a graphic novel project I've been kicking around for a while. The novel would cover an investigation by a fictional detective in a futuristic landscape which would resemble the desolate landscapes of all those dreary post apocalyptic  sci fi movies like Star Wars which relentlessly portray the future as taking place in the desert because it's cheap to film there. And the people and aliens and spaceships and buildings look grimy and steal and lie like love-able street urchins because it's cheap to hire them. As you can see from the picture, my graphic novel will resemble those hateful post apocalyptic sci fi movies almost exactly, because I have no idea how to draw it any different. 

The two characters depicted in the picture are beautiful women who have mutant powers and hang out in a van in a riverside park. I have not finished the picture and probably never will without the aid of computers. I meant the window in the upper right to be looking out onto the trees and bushes at the edge of the parking lot. I believe I drew the tree fairly well, but experienced a total failure at the curb and gutter, which dominate the lower left corner of the window. I failed at the gutter because I have not practiced drawing actual curbs and gutters and because my left brain meddles with all my pictures like an insufferable backseat driver who periodically lunges forward and grabs at the steering wheel if my right brain shows any weakness or hesitation in the middle of a drawing project. Ideally, the analytical left brain should perform navigation while the right brain drives. If the right brain has a problem drawing a gutter, the left brain should say; "pull over and let me navigate. Do not stop in the road. Okay, there's a real gutter outside, let's go look at it. We'll use it as a model. All the real artists do that."

But my hemispheres draw like we've got a hotel to get to and pulling over is not an option, so my drawings tell a tale of discord and strife, they record a ferocious struggle at all the spots where a real artist uses their training in perspective and composition, but where my pen trails off in confusion until the left brain lunges forward and slaps the right brain's hands away and seizes control and downshifts and executes a five year old's version of a gutter with lots of mistakes and heavily emphasized redrawn lines and incomprehensible proportions and then gets bored and lets the flustered right brain take over and shakily continue the mangled picture in an atmosphere of sad denial and dreamy defeat. And the hotel is booked except for a room where the so-called second queen is a hide a bed in the couch and the bathtub doesn't have a working shower head and the bathroom fan roars like a jet engine whenever anyone needs to get up and use the bathroom, and the kids cartoons playing on the large and loud and dominating TV make it impossible to read and there's no time to draw, and the next day is all driving through the post apocalyptic wasteland to another hotel

New year, new resolution, new project, old story

I've begun a new project and completely scrapped any projects previously discussed on this blog. Good riddance!  They were all worthless ego trips. This new project is monumental in scope: To keep a weekly journal, for the whole year, detailing my daily successes and failures with my main New Years resolution; To spend at least 30 minutes each day reading about computer languages. I just altered the resolution as I wrote it, to make it easier and more realistic and to maintain positivity, but I'm not going to say how I altered it because it's in the past now and to be a billionaire you have to be positive and triumphant all the time and keep moving and keep your teeth razor sharp just in case. 

In addition to monitoring my ongoing success in achieving this daily goal I will illustrate that success with a picture, actually two pictures per week, as the sketchbook I purchased for sooooper cheap has fifty pages and I can do a picture on each side. So why am I reading about computer languages? Because I desperately need to rejuvenate the hagenart site and business with some pepped up action on the web page, something spicy and powerful, a computer game. To create intense computer games I will absolutely require total knowledge of all computer languages and specs, and to gain that knowledge I must study, and to study I must have motivation, and to have motivation I must doodle. 

Here's my first semi-weekly doodle, actually begun at the end of last year when I first got the idea:

It's a picture of me as a superhero. I'm a little embarrassed by it, it feels naked, even though the superior figure is fully clothed. It feels as if I've bared too much of my inner soul, mostly the part about a neighbor's dog (on the next street over), which is a repellent beast that barks all the time. I met it twice, both interactions were unpleasant; the first time it frightened my kid chasing a stick thrown by her by the idiot owner, second time it was actually running loose in the street, barking in a creepy senile way at every person outside.  Also the picture is not very good (except for the dog), and I didn't actually achieve the first week's goal. Huge disappointment.  As the horse in Animal Farm says; "I will work harder."  (Don't read that book, it's an incredible bummer).