The joke's on him, now.


The Joke Is On Him by ~NexusDX on deviantART

Shortpacked!: Men are from Mars, retcons are from Venus

Our hamster babies are finally old enough to wander out and about their living area themselves.  Ham mommy doesn't like that very much, and will go drag them back to the nest, but ever so often we'll find them eating some food on their own.  So tiny!  Seriously, they're like a centimeter or two long.  The video exaggerates their size.  They could fit on a quarter.  




Anyway, they're adorable.  And there's five, we think.  Five is the most we've seen all together at the same time, but there is a chance there's a sixth or more in there.  But we've seen no evidence for that.  They just spend most their time buried in fluff under their mom's butt, so it's not very easy to get a headcount of them.

I believe they're still blind at this point.  Their eyes haven't quite opened.  So they're just clawing about on the strength of their other senses.  Not that adult hamster sight is incredibly great...

I think I'm still overwhelmed. I think I may have taken the last three years far too seriously.

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New Comic: At The Midnight Hour

Shortpacked!@TNI: It's head-in-a-jar time!
Shortpacked!: Her, uh, anatomy makes slightly more sense than Blackarachnia's.  

Hello!  Everyone and their mother emailed me asking about the lineart for the Mike/Amber Smoochy-Smoochy strip.  Well, you can have it!  But you'll have to fight each other for it first.  That's right, it's auction time.  

As usual, it's on 12"x18" art paper, was rendered in blue pencil and Copic brush marker, and comes to you rolled in a mailing tube.  Add it to your collection!  Or start one.  I'm not fussy.

Auction ends in 5 days.  

So, like, even back before I started getting all the Batman guys from DC Universe Classics, I kinda coveted their Robin.  It was my favorite Robin design ever!  It kinda helps that Tim Drake's One-Year-Later-through-Batman-RIP outfit was based on hisNew Batman Adventures look, sure.  You know me and my Bruce Timm designs.  I liked that the green is dropped and he's just a red, black, and yellow guy.  But the comic takes it a bit further and draws him closer thematically to Batman's motif.  He's got a scalloped cape, for instance.  And those little tufts on his gloves.  And, oh, hey, pockets on his belt!  He's like a mini-Batman with red.  It kinda makes sense, don't it?

I passed it up at the time because I wasn't collectingDCUC, but I am now!  So, yay, an excuse to get him.  And the fun thing is, BigBadToyStore still had him in stock for non-secondary-market prices!  (they don't seem to any more)  And so I was just a day or so away from just going ahead with the whole thing and ordering him when I found that damn Robin at our local Target.  Just sitting there on the shelf.  What?  Okay.  Well.  I guess miracles do happen.  

Robin joins my Batman in punching villains now.  Sometimes he even gets the punching!  (Okay, most of the time.  He's only second behind the Riddler.)  The toy comes with a few accessories.  He's got his martial arts staff that Tim Drake likes to carry around and two Batarangs.  (Robinorangs?  Birdorangs?)  I kinda wish he could store the -rangs in some of his pockets.  But no, they'll probably just get lost.  I prefer the staff.  He also comes with a stand, as he's not part of the "build-a-figure" deal.  

I'm grateful that there's a smaller, teenager-sized body-type for Robin to be.  It just wouldn't do, being the size of everyone else.  Plus, y'know, I guess it'd come in handy for the rest of the Teen Titans.  

Anyway, speaking of Power Rangers, you know how they all wore color-coded outfits when they were in their civilian identities?  Red Ranger wore red, Pink ranger wore pink, etc?  Robin totally did that in the very early comics, I noticed, as I've been reading through my Batman Chronicles collections.  Dick Grayson is always in a yellow collared shirt under a red sweater and green pants.  Wow, that's a bit conspicuous.  Batman probably color-coded his civvies, too, but blue and gray formal wear is a lot less outlandish.

What's everyone's favorite moments of this season (for your team and/or teams in general)? I got a few moments that I've found myself going back to look at, numerous times.

In no particular order

1. Luis Castillo's dropped pop-up. As a Yankee fan, how could I not love this one? At first I was angry at us for losing, but then suddenly we won the game.

(Video here)

2. Eric Bruntlett's game-ending unassisted Triple-Play. Just amazing. I wish I could experience something like that live just to look at the puzzled fans who needed a few extra moments to process what just happened in front of them.

(Video here)


3. Dewayne Wise's catch and Mark Buerle's eventual perfect game. As the President said during a call to Buerle... treat Wise to a dinner. This catch still amazes me.

(Video here)

4. Nick Swisher's strikeout, scoreless inning and 0.00 ERA. This was especially hilarious because it was the best pitching the Yankees offered in an embarrassing early season game in which the Rays offense dominated us. This outing was almost worth team's pitchers being charged with 15 earned runs.

(Video here)

5. Philly Dad. I'm assuming you all saw this. Hilarity. This family got a nice fifteen minutes of fame from this, as well as a new baseball from the Phillies organization. Good for them.

(Video here)

6. Mariano Rivera's first RBI. Just seeing this guy hold a bat is full of LOLz. And even though I'm no Mets-hater, a good K-Rod collapse never hurt anyone.

(Video here)

So, I took the GRE Literature in English Subject Test today. Took the General Test a couple of weeks ago. I did well on the General Test, probably not so well on the Subject Test, because it was pretty brutal and mostly dealt with poetry and canonized dead white males, and my field of academic interest is African-American Literature and I don't know shit about poetry. But yeah: British Literature makes up 50%-75% of the test - the entirety of literature from anywhere in the world after 1925 is less than half that. Literature other than British or American hardly appears at all. Oy. It's kind of like living in a world where things like Postcolonial Studies, Feminism, and Ethnic Studies never happened. Although there was one question about Edward Said, come to think of it. Hooray?

Anyway. I took the Subject Test at Berkeley High. And it was definitely Berkeley High - the classroom I was in had a poster on the wall with an American flag design and the message, "THESE COLORS DON'T RUN...THE THE WORLD," and there was an Angela Davis Reader on the teacher's desk, and according to a message on the dry erase board, they were watching Bowling for Columbine as part of history class.

The room I was in had two tests going on - on the right side of the room were Computer Science folks, and on the left side were Lit in English folks with names A-C. Watching folks file in, it was remarkably easy to tell who was who. CS: all nerdy-looking white and Asian males, joking amongst themselves. Lit: 50/50 male/female split, mostly white, slightly hipster looking, quiet and keeping to themselves.

Looking online, apparently the CS Test has only 70 questions, compared to the 230 on the Lit test. I was jealous of that, but then again, I was looking at a practice test for CS, and I literally have no idea what any of the questions mean. For example:

85. Consider a binary function g : M × M → {true, false}, where M is a non-empty subset of
the natural numbers that contains an even number of distinct elements.
Which of the following statements might be true about g?
A. g is symmetric and antisymmetric
B. g defines a total order and an equivalence relation with at least two equivalence classes
C. g defines a total order but not a partial order
D. g is reflexive and antisymmetric but not a surjection
E. g is an injection

86. Consider two natural-valued functions f : N → N and g : N → N .
Which of the following statements cannot be true?
A. f ∈ O(g) and g ∈ O(f )
B. f ∈ Θ(g) and g ∈ Θ(f )
C. f ∈ Ω(g) and g ∈ Ω(f )
D. f ∈ O(g) but g /∈ Ω(f )
E. f /∈ O(g), Θ(g), or Ω(g), and g /∈ O(f ), Θ(f ), or Ω(f )

61. Which of the options shown below is an optimal Huffman code for the following distribution?
a occurs 10% of the time
b occurs 14% of the time
c occurs 16% of the time
d occurs 18% of the time
e occurs 42% of the time
A. a = 00, b = 01, c = 110, d = 111, e = 10
B. a = 0, b = 100, c = 101, d = 110, e = 111
C. a = 000, b = 001, c = 010, d = 011, e = 1
D. a = 000, b = 001, c = 1, d = 011, e = 010
E. a = 00, b = 10, c = 010, d = 011, e = 11

I literally understand nothing in those questions, whereas a CS person could probably at least do some of the Lit test, stuff having to do with reading comprehension or whatever. So there's that.

Anyway. I'm glad to be done. Now I just have to finish my applications.

OK, now that the season's over and everything in this community has quieted down, I thought it was time I posted this scene from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." This just cracks me up.

(I hope it's OK to embed a video here.)

Actually, it feels like I could improve the Furies illustration.

I’ve printed a portion of it out in cyan and have been practicing inking on it. A lot of the line weights are too slight and too similar. I can make the piece a whole hell of a lot more dynamic by going over some of the lines again, and I think I can make them feel more confident and less shaky in the process.

And if I really screw up, I can always use white-out!

Edit: Damn it! Well, I didn’t ruin it. I did make it better, and I’ll be scanning it later (probably tomorrow). But, it appears that part of my control problem is that the pen bleeds on the paper I’m using for the final illustration! It doesn’t, however, bleed on the practice paper. Double damn it.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

9 of 'em.


Each One Is Unique by ~NexusDX on deviantART

I found this cool Battletech engine that runs on the Mac called MekWar MegaMek.

So, I was doing a little game, piloting a classic 3025 Scorpion against a Wolfman Hybrid. I though it would be a fair battle, but it wasn't. The Wolfman stripped my armor, blew one of my legs off and crippled a second, leaving my four legged mech with only two good legs, and then disabled both my weapons, all before I scored any critical hits against him. -- correction -- I scored a lucky engine crit with an SRM before that was taken out.

So I decided to charge him at five hexes:

( And this is what happened )

note: also, this is handy but this is even handier.

I’ll put this up for sale when I’m done coloring it, I think:

click to visit larger image Inked original of The Erinyes From Grass Dog Studio

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

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New Comic: A Truly Fascinating Phenomenon