MatthewMeyer.net

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

But if they’re going to name that, it really does need some lolcats…

I just upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. Yay! It’s fun, and a lot nicer than 2.3 was. If I have some free time tomorrow I might fiddle around with it for a while. Maybe my blog will change a bit during the week.

I was adding some tags to old posts and going back through the old artwork… man it’s amazing to see how crappy a lot of that stuff is. Oh well, it was a good learning experience. I actually got to sketch a bit with Hitomi today, which was nice. It’s been ages since I had time to draw, even though I didn’t really accomplish anything special.

The new “year” starts this week, so my schedule will change a bit. Overall it’s a pretty good change, I think. My classes are a bit bigger this year, which means less repetition. That will give me a bit more free time at work to prepare for lessons, which should equal less stress and therefore more ability to come home and relax, and hopefully paint. We’ll see.

I ordered a bunch of DVD’s a long time ago… Late January? Early February? Around then anyway. They finally arrived earlier this week. Seinfield, Monty Python, Stardust, The Great Yokai War, and Escaflowne. That should keep me occupied for a *very* long time. Very good.

This week, in addition to starting my new calendar, I have 2 drinking parties to go to after work. Drinking parties are generally looked on as more of an obligation here than a way to unwind, it seems. Everyone has to go to them, even if nobody wants to, and nobody is ever willing to admit that nobody wants to go. It’s like a duty. Fortunately, I don’t mind them one bit.

Also very exciting is the fact that this week my Fiber Optic Internet will finally be set up! People will come in on Wednesday morning to hook me up. I hope there are no extra snags… I feel awful not having a good internet connection. I’m lucky that I was able to make this update tonight!

This is really cool!

Also really cool is this set of photos from a camera that was strapped on to a wild elephant’s trunk. It seems like elephants have a lot of friends…

Julio Diaz got mugged last month at knife point. Instead of running away, he gives the mugger his coat and buys him dinner!

read more | digg story

I found this NPR story on Digg. It’s a really good read! It makes me wonder what I would do in the same situation… It’s hard to say, though. Hopefully I would have the composure to do something like that.

Well, there was a dramatic lemur earlier… so why not a dramatic hamster?

I like my job and my life here, but the biggest downside is definitely the hours. While I appreciate being able to sleep as late as I need to in order to have energy during the day, as far as energy after work, there’s very little left. I get home around 9:30, and by the time I get changed, make and eat dinner, and begin to unwind it’s already 10:30… and while it’s physically possible to squeeze in a half hour or so of painting every now and then, it’s not possible to find the inspiration to start something new in such a small time window.

I’ve been working on one painting since January — and actually I haven’t worked on it very much since January. I can take solace in the fact that it’s a lot more complex than many of my other paintings, but honestly it’s mostly been an energy thing. These months have been a lot busier than before New Year’s.

Complaining won’t help of course, but sometimes you need to put your thoughts into writing before you get off your ass to do something about it.

“May a ninja use a gnome battle cloak without penalty, or will they still lose their AC bonuses?”

This was the latest question posted on Wizards of the Coast’s D&D article “Ask Wizards,” and it represents everything that is wrong with D&D and fantasy gaming these days. What is fantastic about Fantasy when everything becomes common? Does the fact that this question made it to Sage Advice mean that enough people asked this question that they felt they had to answer it? If so, I weep for the future of the entire fantasy genre.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine to game like this, and if you really like to merge every single fantasy element ever invented into one big cartoon world, that’s fine. But that shouldn’t be the standard of fantasy. The whole reason that fantasy is enjoyable is the element wonder that springs out of the ordinary world. When there is no ordinary world, and when everything fantastic has become mundane, you don’t have Fantasy anymore…