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Have you ever thought that moshing might be a great way to stay fit? Nope, neither did I.
- An expedition has recently set out to locate the lost city of Atlantis, which they are hoping to find in the seabed between Cyprus and Syria. Apparently no one is really taking this one seriously since I found the article in the offbeat news section.
- I finally finished Dan Brown’s last night. I thought the plot was very predictable towards the end, and that the writing was pretty pedestrian. Nevertheless, I learned alot about the history of Christianity and paganism, so I guess it still beats reading textbooks. I wrote a short piece about Brown’s take on The Last Supper over at highfiber, if you wanna see pictures.
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Kewl Aerobics, Atlantis and the Last Supper
30 Apr 2004 -
How to Draw the Joker in Adobe Illustrator
28 Apr 2004The Joker is one of my favorite villains to draw, because the entire character is defined by his facial expression and body language. He could be wearing a monk’s sack-cloth and he’d still be the Joker if you could draw him just so, and I love that, which is why I’m devoting a whole post to how I drew him in Adobe Illustrator.
@##@
For those of you who don’t know, Illustrator is pretty different from Photoshop, although they work really well together. For this drawing though, I stayed away from Photoshop completely, mostly because I’m an arrogant purist and I like showing off.
Every vector drawing starts with a fast and loose sketch using the Pencil tool. I wanted to have the Joker lighting a cigarette, because that provides a convenienty opportunity to use shadows and highlights all over the place. Also, it makes him look cooler when his smile is one-sided.
Here I’ve started blocking the various parts of the drawing, and added some general lighting. I’ve also decided to keep his cigarette short because, well, the long black filter thing is something the Penguin uses and I don’t think it’s a good idea to mix up their accessories.
This is the part where it starts getting fun: drawing the shadows around the wrinkles in his face is where all the attitude is.
More face detail. The eyes and teeth were really fun to do, although the hair was tedious as hell. At this point, I’ve been drawing for about an hour and a half, and I’m getting kinda tired. I go online for a bit to look at how other artists drew the Joker, which is when I realize that his hair is green, d-uh.
Hehe, you’d think I could remember a simple violet and green color scheme. So now I need to start drawing his forearm and the match he should be holding.
Man, i don’t draw hands well.
Details on the suit, which i decided had to be pin-stripe.
Darker gradients all around, for that extra menacing feel. Notice I forgot to change the eyebrow colors to match his hair.
All done! My font kinda sucks, but i’m no pro.
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Sin City
27 Apr 2004
I haven’t drawn for fun in ages, so this is one of those rare once-in-a-year type of updates. I used to be a big comic buff, and one of my favorite comics included the Sin City books by Frank Miller. I drew this image completely in Adobe Illustrator this afternoon while eating lunch, and I thought it was decent enough to upload here.
As always, click the thumbnail to view the full-size image.
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Boobs and TV
26 Apr 2004This article (pointed out to me by nyx) talks about how the women in Spelman College have gotten together to protest Nelly’s “Tip Drill” video, among others.
I haven’t seen the video but according to the article, the sequences they found offensive included “a credit card [being] swiped through a woman’s backside” and “men throwing money between women’s legs”. I’m not sure what these college girls have been watching over the past couple of years, but it seems to me that hiphop has had videos like these since before I stopped watching TV.
I’m not sure where I stand on this whole thing. It’s a lot like a chicken-or-the-egg situation:
- Record artist makes raunchy video
- Record label releases raunchy video
- TV station broadcasts raunchy video
- Millions of fans drool over raunchy video
- Record artist becomes god-like
- Everybody wants to make a raunchy video
There are so many entities involved in the whole process that it’s naive to be saying that it’s the artists alone that are to blame. In a way, the record artist is a reflection of his audience, because they are what makes him popular. And if his audience is comprised of the sexually-depraved, then that’s what his music and his videos will cater to*.
I guess the question here would be, “Where do you draw the line” and “Whose responsibility is it to draw it?”
Obviously, you can’t expect the masses to rise up as one and say, “No more tits and ass!” because that’s never going to happen. So barring a third-party authority, artists have to learn to police themselves. Of course, this assumes that the artist himself is not a member of the sub-100-IQ strata and that he has enough salt to know where and when to stop.
*This is actually why I hate pop. It’s not about the artist’s self-expression, it’s about the audience being played what they want to hear. It’s repetitive and deceitful, and I can’t imagine how anyone could keep listening to this garbage.
- Record artist makes raunchy video
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Deus Ex 2
24 Apr 2004
The new rig has gotten me back into gaming again. I’ve been goofing around with Deus Ex : Invisible War a lot these past few days, which has turned out to be pretty entertaining. The only thing that bugs me is the fact that whenever you arrive at locations that are supposed to be crowded (like train stations or night clubs), there are only ever a handful of people. I mean, they’ve got the thumping music, the crowd sounds, the shifting mirror ball lights all down pat, but there’s like 2 people on the dance floor. Is it a technology limitation? Activision was able to get away with having hundreds of soldiers storming a beach in Call of Duty without any slowdowns, so what gives?
I like how you have so much control over the storyline though; it’s almost RPG-esque with all the plot-forking. I’m also trying out Unreal Tournament 2004 a bit later, which seems to be an extremely good-looking game, and which should give my Radeon a decent workout. More later.
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Animals in the Human Kingdom
22 Apr 2004
- Horny rhino rapes car. Now there’s a headline for you.
- Specialist brought in to fleece rogue sheep. The slippery devil had been avoiding roundups for over 6 years, and reportedly carried at least 27 kilos worth of wool.
- Doggies get diapies! The panty-like devices sell from $20 to $50, depending on the make.
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My Shiny New Friend
22 Apr 2004
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Bluejacking Ipods
20 Apr 2004A bunch of random weirdness today:
Apparently, Kevin Spacey’s late night “mugging” in a deserted London park was actually a bit more embarassing than that. The weird thing is, speculations about his sexuality are beginning to kick up again, since the incident seems to beg the question, “What could he have been doing in the park at 4am in the first place?”
And speaking of weird sexual trysts, this new spin on bluejacking looks to be an inevitable evolutionary step: now people are using it to meet up and have sex with strangers.
And Gucci’s first foray into the world of iPod Accessorization seems to be relatively well-received. Kinda looks a bit tacky to me, but it might be the $200 price tag throwing me off.
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Fish and Jerry’s
19 Apr 2004
I got my first taste of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream today. I know that sounds mighty primitive, but I swear to God, I didn’t even know we had it in this country until a few days ago. Nyx and I bought a pint of Fudge Central at Rustan’s supermarket in Makati, which is basically a half-brown-chocolate, half-white-chocolate concoction with a fierce column of dark fudge dividing the two right down the middle.
We borrowed a spoon from Le Coeur de France and sat there eating it for almost an hour. The last couple of scoops were a bit of a chore, but overall I thought it had exactly the sort of wild-romp-in-the-chocolate-jungle attitude that other high-end brands like Haagen Dazs lack. I also love how they have flavor names like Phish Food (named after the band) and Rainforest Crunch (which a band was named after).
Oh, and we watched Big Fish, which is easily Tim Burton’s best movie ever. But you already knew that, didn’t you.
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Guns N’ Roses’ Greatest Hits
18 Apr 2004
This collection of hits from the came out late last month, but I forgot to mention it until I saw it reviewed here.
I happen to have a lot of love for GNR. Back then, you were either a Metallica fan, or a Guns N’ Roses fan, and I was pretty dedicated to Axl Rose and company. I think it was because I preferred GNR’s uber-manic attitude to Metallica’s grim and angry mood. I was never one of those “I want to kill myself, because the world doesn’t understand me” types in grade school, so James Hetfield’s music didn’t really speak to me.
In my mind, there are two very important reasons why GNR is better than Metallica, and that is 1) Hetfield’s name isn’t an anagram for “oral sex” and 2) what’s a lead guitarist without a nice hat?
Anyway, I just downloaded the whole album today (I absolutely refuse to pay for a collection of songs that I already own the cassette-tape versions of, so yes, I pulled this one off of edonkey/overnet again), and have been listening to it for the past hour or so.
The song list is noticeably lacking “My Michelle” (which is very nearly my all-time favorite GNR song), “I Used to Love Her” and “Estranged,” but other than that, it’s got pretty much every GNR song the casual fan is likely to want to hear. They even have “Sympathy for the Devil” as a sorta-bonus track for the hardcore fans.
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Welcome To The Jungle
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Sweet Child O’ Mine
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Patience
The three tracks that open the album are the definitive GNR songs, the ones that they’ll forever be remembered for. I mean, god, where would the world be without that Sweet Child guitar intro? - Paradise City
- Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
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Civil War
Where Metallica had “One” and The Scorpions had “Under the Same Sun“, GNR had this 9-minute patriotic, anti-war epic of a song. The opening dialogue (the part that goes “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate …”) is from the Paul Newman classic Cool Hand Luke, in case you were wondering. -
You Could Be Mine
I never liked this song much. -
Don’t Cry (Original)
The only thing really notable about Don’t Cry is that the Alternate-Lyrics version (from ) were better written. -
November Rain
I don’t much like November Rain as a song (a 9 minute piano melody written to showcase Slash’s guitar licks is kinda self-indulgent don’t you think?), although I thought the video was an over-the-top classic. Does anyone understand exactly how Axl’s bride dies here? Because I’m 23 and I still don’t get it. -
Live And Let Die
This take on the Wings original is a great example of why I love GNR. One of the best metal covers ever, imho. -
Yesterdays
A pop song, by golly. -
Ain’t It Fun
I’ve never heard the Dead Boys original, but this song was one of the only notable ones in the ill-fated . The whole band just sounded bored. -
Since I Don’t Have You
This is ok I guess, but really, who are they singing this schlock for? Certainly not for themselves. -
Sympathy For The Devil
From the Interview with the Vampire soundtrack. This Rolling Stones cover is the last GNR song I heard and liked.
It’s hard to describe the feeling I got while listening to this album. Somewhere in between “wow, it sounds even better than I remember it” and “wow, is that all?” Recently I found this link detailing Axl Rose’s adventures in cosmetic surgery. Weird shit, but I guess the years after GNR went under has been pretty rough on the poor guy. When your first full-length album is “Appetite for Destruction,” coming up with a stronger, more mature followup can be next to impossible, I guess.
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Welcome To The Jungle
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