Hmmm... cornmeal and no flour... I'm so hungry

There's a big old pot of beans on the stove. Again. Really, you can only eat so many beans before the thoughts of robbing the grocery store set in.

I started looking through the paltry pantry, which is at its bitter end, at the moment. Well, there's corn meal, I thought. I wonder how awful it would be just fried up in a pan, the way I make pan-fried bread. I had no idea.

So I threw it together in a bowl, added salt, pepper, thyme and water. I spread it out in the frying pan in pretty hot oil. After a few minutes, I used the spatula to slide under the "patty" to pry it up and keep it from sticking too bad. So far, so good.

When it came time to flip it however, the trouble started. It would not hold together. I had actually separated the burnt on crust from the softer inside, with the spatula earlier. It just kinda fell apart.

I almost gave up at that point, but I decided to take a hard wooden spatula and scrape the stuck on parts up. I then just started turning it frequently and scraping stuck pieces up again and again. After a bit it was pretty fairly "cooked" with little crunchy burnt on parts and softer inside parts. I decided to give it a go, before I tossed it.

Hmmm.... tastes just like cornbread stuffing. Actually not bad, Kenzie and Shana agreed. So, I poured beans on top of it, and dinner is served.

Damn Diablo 2!

Yes! I am playing Diablo 2 again! Dammit!

It is such stupid fun, I find myself getting re-addicted to it every year or two. It is absolutely the appeal of skill-tree building and random magic item finding that always hooks me. And then... I do nothing else. I spend every waking hour killing Baal and Mephisto.

And Cows. Yes! Hordes of cows. Moo! MOOOOO! Moo? I know my wife hates that sound with a passion. When I play other games, she's like, "Well at least there's no damn mooing." Bah, what does she know? She doesn't understand the mindless wanton slaying of multitudes of thousands of bipedal bovines! How could she?

But there it is. I'm lost again. This is why some of you haven't seen me in a while. And... oh god, Diablo 3 is coming!

"Drag Rat" Sketch

Borderlands

It seems like very few of the games I get nowadays do much for me. I don't know what's missing. It might be me, I'll admit. I don't really care much for most first person shooter style games. The content bores me in most of these games, with few exceptions.

Borderlands is one of these exceptions. I just got it yesterday. Then I played it for the next 6 hours. Wow!

One of the things that appeals to me the most about it is that it seems to be a Firefly/Serenity type setting. You're on a planet, one of those dust-bowl type worlds that they are frequently seen stopping on in the Firefly setting.

The artwork is fantastic. A blend of comic book and cartoon, tending closer to the graphic novel.

I was constantly blown away by how smooth it was. I was running it on a dual-core 1.86 mhz machine with only 2gb of ram (so... NOT a beast), and it ran like a bat out of hell.

The characters each have their own skill trees, and I was playing the girl character who can step into another dimension where she goes really fast, and can move around the battlefield quickly. When she is in that other form she can get skill builds that affect the real world, and do damage when she comes back to the real worlds, etc. etc. 

Anyhoo, a big thumbs up, Borderlands is lovely, get some on you.

Magic Mushroom Coffeehouse progresses

My partners and I met at the IHOP over coffee to finalize some details about the coffeehouse.  We are at the "going to the banks" stage now, and I think things are about to accelerate.

Magic Mushrooms, and Flickr

Business plan is basically finished, other than some formatting (by Shana the grammar format nazi).

I also just started a new portfolio of creations at Flickr.

Tim Minchin is one of my heroes and pretty much sums up how I think here:

If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out.

His Face All Red (online comic)

Very awesome illustration and storytelling style! His Face All Red

Fantastic artist!

sample from waspwolfshark on Flikr.

She has an awesome gallery of illustrations of characters from Frank Herbert's Dune.

Very clean and beautiful style, mostly colored in Photoshop, I believe. Very nice!

Great Minivan Video

That you should never let your kids watch

Yard Sale, The Church of Sigmar & Burning Wheel

Kenzie has made $40 in the last two days doing garage sales. He's pretty happy, to say the least.

Ran Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition last night. Very fun. I'm running Ashes of Middenheim, the first part of the Path of the Damned campaign, and the halfling managed to talk himself into a complementary torturing at the hands of the Church of Sigmar, but he amazingly survived and they determined he had been tainted by stupidity instead of chaos. However the halfling (Podwise) did manage to acquire another insanity point due to being tortured.

The players began the investigation of the murdered church official and similar murders in the town, under the auspices of the Town Watch Commander, and there was NO COMBAT! Woohoo! A good night.

Discussed the possibility of doing the next part of my Elven Emissaries campaign in the Burning Wheel system, and I bought the second book for 6th edition Hero System.

Kenzie Logan Hickman

is still a dinosaur.

Schwarzenegger Cartoon

Old Poetry from the Old Blog

I leave her alone in her house of stone
Though I swore to you that I'd never...
She's moved on
And I
Feel the loss in my bones
Sleeping moans and groans
I'm pained in the well of night
For my past wrongs
And she
No longer has that need to watch herself bleed
So I'm not wanted the same way I was
And I am glad
To see her bloom again
Without You
And I

Micro Mechs

Sam Hill posted these micro mechs on flickr. Nice use of the minifigure neck bracket.

Austin Symphony Orchestra poster design

illustrator cs5 project for school

3' pastel of Kenzie

The Amazing Kenzie

Star Trek cited by Texas Supreme Court

The Texas Supreme Court when writing their opinion in Robinson v. Crown Cork and Seal cited Mr. Spock, effectively making him a legal authority for interpreting the Texas Constitution.

Appropriately weighty principles guide our course. First, we recognize that police power draws from the credo that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Second, while this maxim rings utilitarian and Dickensian (not to mention Vulcan²¹), it is cabined by something contrarian and Texan: distrust of intrusive government and a belief that police power is justified only by urgency, not expediency.

Footnote 21 reads: See STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (Paramount Pictures 1982). The film references several works of classic literature, none more prominently than A Tale of Two Cities. Spock gives Admiral Kirk an antique copy as a birthday present, and the film itself is bookended with the book's opening and closing passages. Most memorable, of course, is Spock's famous line from his moment of sacrifice: "Don't grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh . . ." to which Kirk replies, "the needs of the few."

Emilio Gomariz

Spanish industrial designer and art director Emilio Gomariz has what could be described as a wildly varied portfolio. His animated gif series entitled Extremity is of particular interest. The images are 'tridimensional collages' utilizing 3D models (bodies) which Gomariz found floating around the internet.

My favorite RPG Motivational Poster

Portable App: URL Gather

URLGather is a nifty app that sits on your USB drive and let's you save all of your bookmarks from all of your computers, etc. on it. Just stick it in a flash drive and open it up to access your saved bookmarks. Very nifty!

Pen & Ink by Ceranko & Whisenant

Pencils by Mike Ceranko, Pen & Ink by Terry RW Whisenant © 2010

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Second Edition

I started running WFRP2e two sessions back, and the guys seem to be enjoying it. I think only one person in the group has actually ever played it. We went the full random route and ended up with a Halfling Rogue who everyone calls "Fat butt", Dwarf Tomb Robber, Dwarf Town Guard and Elf Rogue. When Sheena joined us she promptly rolled up a Human Jailer, which seems to fit her grandly. I ran the adventure out of the core book over the last two weeks, and we're about to start the first part of Paths of the Damned.

Combat is incredibly deadly. I think I scared them so bad with the first combat, that now they are just going to run away.

Speaking of games we've never played, Sam is about to start running D&D 4th Edition. I've rolled up a Dwarf Fighter and an Eladrin Mind Harrier, or some silly shit like that. I'm actually looking forward to it, since we played the Ravenloft board game last week, and it was kind of fun, and I've heard so many people say 4th Edition is essentially just a board game now. We'll see.

Today I found an awesome desktop calendar/events planner/to do list called Rainlendar. It's pretty slick and I locked it on the second monitor.

Finished up some school projects in Indesign and Illustrator today. I still feel woefully behind, though I don't think this is actually true.