MatthewMeyer.net

When I was in college, my favorite website to hang out at was rsadgame.com. Sadly, though, last summer it went down when I was no longer around to take care of it. It was an awesome gaming web portal, and most importantly it had a forum where I kept in touch with all of my friends year round. Things just haven’t been the same online without it. :’(

But all that is changing now, because I’ve installed a new forum and imported the data from what was left of rsadgame.com! The new forum can be found at http://www.matthewmeyer.net/forum, so please join in! It’s a really informal environment, so feel free to just post about anything.

Woot. I am happy.

I’m watching Bush’s live address dealing with Hamas’ victory in Palestine… and holy crap! I’ve never seen such a disgraceful attempt at speaking.

It’s clear he has nothing planned, he’s having trouble forming complete sentences and finishing ideas.

(Holy crap, he just “shushed” someone like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers!)

My initial reaction was that, you know, the president has a lot of stress, and a lot of duties, so it’s understandable if he’s not 100% eloquent. But after about 2 minutes of watching, it was clearly not just a case of flustered president. It seems like he was forced out of bed, kicking and screaming, forcibly dressed and made up, then thrown out onto stage with nothing to say.

This is an utter disgrace… if any foreign country is watching this, no wonder they’re having trouble dealing with the US these days. If Hamas is watching this, they certainly won’t want to become anything like the US… this is horrible.

On the plus side, I bet the daily show will be funny tonight.

Ugh I’m getting so sick of WoW… chiefly because of travel times. The game itself isn’t really that good at all, but the travel times are the absolute killer for me. Unless you log out in the middle of a combat area, you can expect to hold your mouse button down for at least 10 minutes while you run and run and run and run and run and run to get to wherever the hell it is you’re trying to go. And all the while, you have to dodge monsters who will hit you in the back and slow you down even more (“Hey! FIGHT ME!!! Pleeeease!”) and horde players who happen to be in the area and would just loved to kill you while you’re already badly wounded or have resurrection sickness. And then, of course, when you come back to life, you have to run another 10 minutes to get to your damn body, rez, hope that you’re safe, and continue on your endless journey. And of course, once you arrive at your destination, your first quest will be to travel one thousand miles away to pick up a spool of thread for Granny Weaselbum.

This brings up an interesting question… Why do the denizens of Azeroth bury their dead in the middle of dangerous jungles, and high in the remote mountains? Wouldn’t it make sense for all the graveyards to be in safe towns? So they don’t risk more lives while digging these graves? So wild animals don’t dig up and defile all the bodies? So grieving widows can visit the graves of their poor dead husbands who got ganked while trying to retrieve 20 octopus boogers so Professor Lipton T. Baggins could give them the recipe for octopus booger pie?

And then there’s the gryphons… what could be the most convenient mode of travel turns out to just be another need to babysit the computer. When you fly the “faster” way, you still have to spend 10 or 20 minutes travelling, but now you can’t even stop to change your mind, use items, or do anything but sit and babysit the computer, so that when your gryphon finally lands, you can hop on the next one to continue to your extraordinarily-out-of-the-way location.

I hope someone gets the brillian idea in the next patch or so to sell transfering flights, so you can use all that time waiting to do something productive, like alt-tab out and look at porn, or watch TV.

Anyway, I’m about 2 days away from cancelling my WoW subscription, since I hardly ever get to play the game anyway, and when I do, all I get to do is spend 30 minutes in transit, then get ganked, and get so frustrated due to lag that I have to ctrl-alt-delete and kill the task just to turn off the nightmare…

I noticed that the last artwork I posted was in August. Yowch! I’m so lazy. So here’s an update of what I’ve been doing since then:

Those fantasy sketches I did ended up paying off, but I think the chickens had more to do with it; I got a job doing illustrations for Dog Soul, a d20 publishing company. I’m sure I’ve mentioned them before, but here you can see some of the art I’ve done for them. I ended up doing four pencil drawings for their folkloric book, Gallia:

Through Dog Soul, I also ended up on a project with their parent company, Emerald Press. It’s for a new d20 Campaign Setting called Living Nights. I’m doing 10 illustrations for them, spread across a couple of books. Here are some of the pictures of done so far (pencil, followed by Corel Painter):

That’s all that I’ve got finished so far, although I’m nearly finished another one… so I’ll post it soon. The Cintiq has allowed me to work much faster on the digital paintings, so aside from these fantasy paintings, I want to do more images from Journey to the West. Kazumi has told me that I can sell some Japan-related artwork at the Cherry Blossom Festival this spring, so that’s more incentive to get some done, as well as make prints of my Japan sketchbook.

I’m almost finished reconfiguring the site to to same level of functionality as the old one, before I start adding new things. I just finished redoing my portfolio, which you can view at matthewmeyer.net/portfolio. It still needs a few touches, but the most important thing is that it’s functional now.

I still have to fix the Category Archives so that my Kanazawa and Senior Trip journals display properly.

Once I finish updating everything, then I can focus on adding new art to the site. I like this design a lot, but it’s not my own design. (I didn’t steal it! It’s got a Creative Commons license.) So I want to add some things to it to make it a little more unique.

(Take a look at Saiyuuki. This isn’t the site I got the theme from, but I just love the flash banner at the top. I’ve just started watching this Japanese drama — the second episode aired yesterday.)

The Cintiq is so awesome! It feels like I’m actually painting, not scratching out on a plastic tablet. My speed has more than doubled using Painter and Photoshop, and it actually is fun to use, not like the old crappy Intuos I was using. I’m so excited to have this! (Plus, as a 21″ widescreen monitor, it makes playing WoW, Civ4, and watching movies a lot more interesting.)

Well, as you can see, some things on the site have changed. I’m changing a lot here, from the look and organization of the site right down to the coding. I’m now using WordPress 2, and it’s a lot smoother than 1.5 was. For now, my portfolio is offline, but I’ll be working on a nicer, cleaner one with a better selection of my work. I think my old portfolio had too much work and no real unity among them. The new one will have less work, geared specifically towards what I want to do. Of course, I’ll still have all my art in my blog, but I’m going to try to organize that better too, so it will be clearly distinct from my portfolio.

I think perhaps the problem with the old site is that I designed it when I was looking for illustration work. Now that I am happily working for the JASGP, it’s given me some time to focus less on art, which has sort of cleared my mind a bit. The time that has passed since then has also helped. Now that I haven’t been desperately thinking about art jobs in my spare time, I’ve been able to better figure out what I enjoy drawing and painting. So I will point this new portfolio in that direction, instead of trying to showcase an extremely wide range of paintings.

So for now, I’m using the ChinaRed theme for WordPress. I’ll be editing it in the near future to make it a bit more unique to my site, as well as to accomodate the changes I’m making to the site. I think this theme has less of a “bloggy” feel to it, and more of a real website feel… and since I really like Asian art, I think I can make it mesh nicely with my work.

So let me know what you think of the new design!

I’ve been away from this blog and from my portfolio for a long time now… at first due to business, then due to lack of things to write, and finally due to laziness, my greatest foe.

So aside from being very busy with the Japan America Society and illustrations, here’s what I’ve been up to:

We went to Erie, PA to visit Erik and Anna for the holidays. I celebrated my birthday with them, and it was definitely one of the best birthdays in my life (considering that most of my birthdays are spent home alone, bored, until I’m forced to go sing at church for the Christmas Eve service, this isn’t saying much; but it really was a great day). Erik and Anna took me to an indoor heated water park, and on Christmas Eve it wasn’t crowded at all, so there were no lines. There’s something extra fun about water slides and lazy rivers when it’s 30 degree outside. After the water park, we went to Chuck E. Cheese’s, where I was told I set a new age record for birthday parties. The management looked so unhappy and uncomfortable to be singing the happy birthday from Chuckie song to me, but I enjoyed it. I hadn’t been to Chuck E. Cheese’s in years, but let me tell you: it doesn’t get any less fun with age!

Christmas was nice as well. We spent the day playing board games (mostly Carcassonne) and taking naps. We also haven’t had a nice family Christmas like that in a long time, so it was definitely something special. And since I hardly ever get to see Erik and Anna, that was nice too.

We came back to Collingswood after that, and Erik and Anna followed us and stayed here for a while. My Aunt and Uncle from Vermont also visited for New Years weekend. And Frances came! She was able to stay here for 10 days (pretty much her whole winter break).

Frances and I watched a bunch of movies at home and at the theater. I finally got to see King Kong and Memoirs of a Geisha (and unfortunately we also saw Bloodrayne). We also watched the whoel series of Densha Otoko, a Japanese drama based on a true story about an otaku who falls in love with a beautiful lady and draws a huge following with his series of postings on a singles BBS asking for advice. It was such a good show, and I guess I’m extra partial to it being a nerd myself.

Last week we spent most of the time in Philadelphia… and neither of us had done that much walking since we were in Kanazawa. It was great though! I hardly ever get to walk around Philly, so we got to explore the area together. We walked through Chinatown, visited the Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute (plastinized bodies — go see it if you haven’t had the chance yet), walked around Old City and all the historical areas, visited the Constitution Center and saw a bunch of stuff related to Ben Franklin (it will be his 300th birthday on the 17th). We also went out to dinner with my Japanese coworkers at a sort of belated New Year’s party. We were very busy the whole vacation, but I guess when you don’t get to see each other often you end up trying to make up for lost time.

So what’s the plan for 2006?

Well, I just noticed that WordPress 2.0 recently was released, so I will be upgrading the blog to that relatively soon. Actually, I want to redesign my entire webpage… redo the portfolio page as well as the blog, and organize the whole thing a bit better. Web development is pretty fun for me and I’m not too bad at it (although I could hardly be called anything more than an amateur), so sometimes I get these bursts of desire to build and update. I don’t know when I’ll find the time to do this, but I will.

Of course, I’m still working at the JASGP — now 3 days a week instead of 2. We’re preparing for the big Cherry Blossom Festival this spring, so I have extra work to do, which is good for me as well because I need the extra money to work off my big December purchase: a brand new Wacom Cintiq 21UX digital tablet! Digital illustration is fun, but with the current tablet I have, it seems more like a chore than like creating art… so this will help out a lot with that. And it will speed me up a lot with painting, so hopefully I can start taking on more artwork.

One of my holiday gifts to everyone in my family was a “Chickens of 2006″ calendar made from the chickens in my senior project. It was a big hit, and I’m glad I finally followed the advice of everyone telling me to make a calendar out of them. Unfortunately I only made a few of them for family, so I don’t have any to sell now, and even worse, it’s no longer the Year of the Rooster, so the double-appeal of the chicken calendar is gone. But 2007 will be the Year of the Boar, so I want to make 12 new paintings, this time of pigs, in a similar style as the chickens. That will keep my quite busy, I’m sure, but if I do them all digitally on my new tablet, it won’t take as much time as the chickens did.

I’m meeting up for Japanese conversation practice a little more often now, too. So hopefully I’ll be able to sharpen my speaking and listening skills a little more. This fall, I plan on applying for the JET Programme to teach English in Japan with Frances. That’s still a ways away, though.

Those are pretty much my current plans for 2006… I guess if I have any resolutions, they’re to eat healthier and get more exercise (one of the standard universal resolutions), to play less video games and spend less time doing nothing in front of the computer, and to force myself to keep drawing and painting. My room doesn’t have good ventilation, so it’s hard to paint in here (especially in the winter)… but the new tablet should fix that, and I want to remember to draw sketches when I’m not painting.

And I guess one last resolution is to update this website more often… anything that forces me to be more active so I end up using my time instead of killing it. (You know, it was a lot easier to write in here when I was stuck at the ARC in Ringling with nothing to do…)