| A call for artists who want $ |
[Mar. 24th, 2008|03:25 pm] |
Ok, so me and two friends are launching an online t-shirt company. We have a great design portfolio ready to go, a great web designer, and a fully developed online and guerrilla marketing campaign so yes, we're very serious. What we have is a MAJOR art bottleneck, so, here's the offer we're making:
If we use your art you will receive 15% of the profits for that shirt's sales for 1 year and a flat $500 payment at the end of that period if we choose to continue using your design. Also we are accepting design submissions which will have the same payout structure. Submitted designs will be reviewed by committee, all submitted designs must include any necessary artwork. Text only and art only designs are also perfectly acceptable. Contact me ASAP and I can give you an idea of some of the art we're looking for. Priority in terms of listings and likelihood of having your idea used will go to the images we need for designs that already exist.
The website will credit all artists in a comments section attached to each shirt.
All art must use 5 or less colors to be considered. Silk-screening is a bitch like that as far as expenses go. We will consider bending this rule for an amazing submission but talk to me first.
icanhasplanet.com is coming |
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| a random hodgepodge of thoughts |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|11:14 pm] |
I feel like life is unraveling a bit when just the other day I was feeling I had all my shit together. Work has been tough because there was nothing going on, now the new catalog has dropped AND my boss wants a bunch of different reports from me so suddenly I'm absurdly busy. Both of these extremes suck and have me wanting a vacation, or a new job, or maybe just a whole new life. Press reset button now please?
Save game: Y/N?
N.
I've decided I want to lose a bunch of weight. I haven't ever been as fit as I wish I was and since college its certainly gotten worse. So, given the success of my quit smoking mission (still running strong with only the occasional brief fall off the wagon, usually while drunk) I've decided to initiate mission: stop eating. Well, no, clearly not, but at least mission eat less. Given that I hate so very many foods (as in induces vomiting/throat clogging rather than just "I don't like this") theres a limited amount I can do as to eating healthier, though there are definitely steps I can take to be sure. So, I'm just going to have to go with eating less overall. I've been jogging, doing situps, and have started a lifting routine, but I think without cutting the intake the effects are not going to be as noticeable as I'd like. It'd be nice if this snow would go away though, it makes jogging suck. So here we go, mission fitness (no, for reals this time) is now a go.
I've noticed an odd thing about the past year and a half of my life. My trusted friend group has gone from being 90% female to being 90% male. I kind of miss the female side though, its way better overall for tough conversations.
A large part of this is, I think, the supa-emo crash following my breakup with Meredith a YEAR AND A FUCKING HALF AGO+ that still casts a shadow over my life. I alienated a bunch of people during that relationship by refusing to listen to them and managed to alienate even more by being a needy bitch when it all fell apart. Note to self: attempt to reconnect with female friends who give good advice.
I've invented a game. A game people seem to really like and keep asking me to play again. I have high hopes for it. Its the first game I've ever managed to invent thats really simple (its a game of placing stones on a board) and its far and away the best. More testing will hopefully ensue along with maybe throwing it at Sam and seeing if he can break it, he being good at that kind of thing.
I'm finally admitting to myself that really I'm not a Sociologist at heart but rather an Economist. An economist who hates economists, and economics. I've moved away from ideas like socialism and am instead doing a lot of investigating into how to level the economic playing field, not once, but constantly. I think that economic systems that don't provide for constant releveling are probably non-sustainable not to mention, in my opinion, inhumane. The problem is that as far as I can tell no one on earth who doesn't write things titled "My Manifesto about blowing shit up till we're all equal scrabbling about in the dirt" really writes about this topic. So, query, how does one create a new field, what does one have to do to be taken seriously?
Here ends by random babblings for the day.
Note to self: don't listen to music that makes you miss someone who doesn't exist and probably never really did. |
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| willpower. and a bike. |
[Jan. 29th, 2008|09:29 pm] |
Long time no post. Sorry lj, facebook stole your glory away.
Nontheless, I feel I have some journal worthy news: I bought a bike. Its a pretty sweet black bike, I'll post some pictures of it at some point probably. Adjusting to riding in the city is hard, people here drive pretty crazily. Brooklyn is a bit better but there are some wacky intersections were I just gave up, got off, and used the crosswalk because trying to turn through solid walls of traffic seemed pretty impossible.
My other thing is a crisis of life direction. I've been fucking about for 4 years now unable to decide what the hell to do with my life and mostly I think its just because the stakes are so high that I remain scared of picking any direction enough to actually commit to it. When I commit to things I get them done. Last month I decided to quit smoking, so I did. Just willpowered my way through it, no gums or patches or anything, and now I'm fine without cigarettes. I smoked one the other day though while drinking, but, and heres the important bit, was fine without one the next day.
Somehow I can't commit that willpower to a life direction though.
Part of me still wants to try for grad school, but the awful lack of support I got from Beloit the first time I attempted has me pretty discouraged. Charles Westerberg basically just dicked me and didn't write letters after saying he would. Carrie Pieratt-seeley wrote the letters, but I could literally NEVER get her on the phone to get some advice or to get her help in getting hold of Charles, who also didn't return my phone calls. All of my contact with her was through e-mail. I ended up really discouraged with the whole affair.
Option two is to seriously take a shot at game design. Game design is a hell of a lot of work though, with lots of failed attempts and discouraging feedback. Its also a huge time commitment while working a full time job. Design and testing eat a lot of time and I guess I'm scared to commit that much time when I have no real concept of how to get the game to market and make decent money even if I do come up with something that testers like. I think not living near Sam also limits my motivation for this one. Sam is a really good person for pointing out holes in a games ideas and not having him around to bounce ideas off makes this harder. Still, it seems like potentially the most fun. Part of my unwillingness to commit here may be I've never quite been able to embrace nerd culture. I enjoy aspects of it but a lot of it gets on my nerves, as do a lot of the people who got involved with it because it was the last refuge of social-ineptness.
Option three is to try and teach. Try to join the New York teaching programs that offer subsidized masters degrees. The problem is I'm a social scinetist and those are far and away the least-in-demand teachers at the high-school level. I like and fear this idea. I always told myself growing up that I wanted to do not teach. So many teachers seems like they end up as teachers because they didn't have what it took to write a revoloutionary theory in their field. I hate the idea of mediocrity even though I'm living it.
Option four is to write. This is pretty daunting. I suspect it may involve lots of writing classes and I know so many failed/struggling writers that theres a big discouragement factor at play here. Ideas come to me, and writing is one of the things I've always done well at, tested well at, and been complimented on. Still, very daunting.
Some furhther thoughts on the grad school matter. The more I read (and I do read a lot) the angrier I get at the concept of each academic discipline wandering aimlessly around in a fog of other disciplines trying to apply their specific set of tools to each thing they stumble across. I read all of these articles about the problems facing the world, socially, economically, environmentally, theologically, and I get angry. No one seems to be studying interconnectedness, no one at all. In our media sound-byte culture someone clamors about some danger (the only thing people seem to react to) and it becomes the cause du' jour until everyone feels they've thrown some money at the problem (or read about it on cnn.com, thats practically the same thing right?) or until some other scientist/philosopher/sociologist wanders along with his own career launching sound-byte crisis. These surges of effort aren't doing anything, they at best slap on a bandaid and move on. Like this tax-incentive package floating about in congress. What bullshit. $800 paychecks won't stimulate an economy where (this is the good bit) almost all of our non-essential purchases are foreign imports. Its stupid short term thinking. All that money could be thrown at fixing a real problem. Or towards educating wall street brokers about economic trends and boom bust cycles. The amazing part is, THEY ALWAYS ACT SUPRISED. Recession? What? But why? I have all of these bets in that the housing market will grow forver. Forver I tell you! Bwah ha ha ha ha, etc...
Mind you, thoughts like the one above are what are stopping me from getting anywhere. Because I get angry at the thought of not doing anything about the infinite issues of the world, and angry about the thought of just becoming another idiot making games, or studying sociology, or teaching kids candy coated fictions about American presidents. But I honestly don't know how to go about doing anything about it at all.
So, LJ, please chime in and help me find some motivation with your suggestions. I have the willpower, but right now I just can't get it to focus long enough to get somewhere.
Thanks,
Your Prodigal Son |
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| The Lost Man's Poem |
[Dec. 7th, 2007|03:24 pm] |
In winter's cold I find regret
upon the path I chose.
In all the endless blinding snow
I fear I mis-turned
The distant sun has little warmth
for those who went astray.
And now the glow of hearth and home
are all too far away.
The rhythms/flow of this poem may make more sense when read in a slight english/scottish accent such as the one the author uses in his head even if it comes out all American when he actually talks.
::sigh:: I miss you English accent. |
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| updatey |
[Oct. 25th, 2007|12:40 am] |
A bit of an update:
About 2 weeks ago I moved to Brooklyn with my friend George. This is definetly one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. I'm happier than I have been since college. I have a roommate who enjoys games and videogames as much as me, a number of good friends in the very near by neighborhood and a fucking awesome apartment with a sweet backyard.
The backyard is especially good for smoking our pimping new hookah. We even have a spare bedroom for guests or if we ever need to rent it out to save money. Ninja has been a bit slow to adjust but is hanging out more and hiding under the bed less.
We have a fucking enormous HD TV that George GOT FOR FREE ON CRAIGS LIST, I mean, goddamn, free. Booyah.
Work continues to go decently, got a raise recently (which I may have mentioned already, I forget) and with the christmas spending season coming up I should be making good money on commissions and overtime hours.
Life is, indeed, going pretty well. |
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| Bashing Bush |
[Oct. 9th, 2007|09:29 am] |
Excerpt from a cnn article
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/10/09/iran.protest.ap/index.html
So, how familier does most of the below look if you replace the name Ahmadinejad with the name Bush? As if it wasn't bad enough to have enemies with loony totalitarian leaders...
"Ahmadinejad's popularity at home has fallen since he was elected, with critics saying he has failed to fix the economy and has hurt Iran's image internationally.
Last December, Ahmadinejad's allies were humiliated in municipal elections, with some reformists gaining seats. He was dealt another blow when a rival, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, was chosen as chairman of the Assembly of Experts, a powerful clerical body, over a close Ahmadinejad ally.
Conservatives who once supported the president have increasingly joined in the criticism, saying that he needs to pay more attention to domestic issues and that his inflammatory rhetoric has needlessly stoked tensions with the West." |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 29th, 2007|12:03 am] |
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I finally got a facebook. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 11th, 2007|03:07 pm] |
So this weekend I went to a Mets game. I know, I know, not a very Ian like activity, but it was really fun times. I really don't care much for watching sports on tv, I get bored and decide video-games are a better thing for my tv to be playing, but live sports really are a lot more fun.
We got totally hooked up on seats. A client of George's mother gave her tickets for field side seats near third base. She doesn't give a damn about baseball though so we got them instead. I got sunburned as all hell, but had a great time.
Also this past weekend I got a new bed. I've been sleeping on a futon (with a thick mattress, but still a futon) since leaving behind my mattress with Meredith when I moved back to New York. I got myself a nice comfy full bed with a sweet pillow top. I'm still adjusting to having such a soft bed but it sure feels nice to sink into.
Thrilling update huh? =) |
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| Boom! |
[Aug. 22nd, 2007|03:04 pm] |
So this past weekend I went to Gencon for the first time. It was fucking awesome.
I was flown in by Wizards of the Coast due to my Dreamblade rank and got a free pass to boot which was pretty sweet.
I arrived Thursday morning, met up with Sam, Justin, Dave, and others, hung around the con for a bit then money drafted dreamblade. I failed to win this draft which was sad times but would have upset me more were the 4 of us playing not 4 of the best players in the world.
I then got to learn to draft the spoils and promptly won. Sadly this was not a money draft.
Friday was a hectic chaos of playing spoils (and losing) and testing Dreamblade. At around 11pm I made a last minute call to change which warband I was playing in Gencon and to abandon the one I'd been practicing with for the last 2 weeks.
Saturday- Dreamblade 50k day 1. I open up well defeating Robert Hatch in round 1. Hatch is ranked number 2 in the world and considered by many to be even better than Sam so this victory put me on top of the world and I promptly won my next 2 matches as well. My last minute warband switch was proving to be a superb decision.
The tournament then moved into the draft portion. My first draft deck seemed insane but I took a loss to Redcap Council teammate Lucky Dave (he wasn;t formerly called Lucky Dave, I added the lucky after this weekend because damn, that man's high fives are the luckiest.). My second draft deck was a little dodgy but I managed to pilot it to a 2-0 finish. By the time the 3rd draft started it was 10:00 or so already and we'd been playing Dreamblade for almost 12 hours. While a little loopy from tiredness during the draft I succeed in drafting a hot warband...but once again have to face Dave. This time I beat him and move on to my last match of the day against the last undefeated person left in the event. Going in I was pretty nervous, his warband was straight up better than mine and he had a lot to play for, a win here ment that even if he lost his 3 constructed matches tomorrow he would likely top 8. A win for me ment I would only have to go 1-2 tomorrow. I beat him handily and walked out of day 1 the top seeded player in the event.
Dreamblade Day 2- On 5 hours sleep my first match is a feature match against a near mirror of the warband I'm playing. I mangage to both out-play and out-luck my opponent for the 99% guranteed top 8 slot (barring bizarre happenings I was a lock). Then I got to play the guy I beat in draft the previous night, the former 1st seed. I knock him down no problem for the hard lock in top 8. At this point I'm riding high and feel invinicble. My other teammates in contention all need wins in this next round though to top 8. Luckily I am paired up vs Ben Stoll and am able to offer him my hand in concession to pull him up in to the top 8. We celebrate with high fives and much shouting of the word-of-the-weekend "BOOM!". I get approximatly infinite congratulations from players from the best in the world to people I just met along the way. My other teammate in contention, Trey Gibson pulls out the win in a tightly contested featurematch for 3 of our team in the top 8!
Top 8- In the top 8 I face a valor/passion band piloted by someone I've never met. He plays well but at first I'm in control. Then I take time during my spawn phase to think about a complicated play that involves giving my opponent a turn to kill either 2 lesser pieces or 1 major piece. I spend maybe a minute and a half thinking, both my opponent and I have taken longer spawn phases than this already, but the judge throws me off with the statement "You must make a play now". I make the wrong decision, a bad, but not fatal error as it first appears. Then my opponent over-rolls twice in that turn, first killing 17 toughness worth of guys on 10 dice and then 16 toughness worth of guys on 9 dice. Down 4 guys, losing that turn, plus the turn I gave him on the misplay I'm basically down and out. I play well the next turn (the last one he needs to win) forcing him to hit a 3 on 4 dice to win. If he fails I probably win the next turn. The odds are in his favor though and he takes the win. It was a bit frustrating but I'm so happy to have played well all day and gotten all the compliments I did that I'm able to walk away happy.
I'm even happier when teammate Ben Stoll manages to win the whole event vs. a quite disliked player.
Then the awesomeness begins. Not only were we celebrating our victories but also 2 birthdays. The party involves lots of booze, a hummer limo, a japanese steak house, an awesome dinner, more limo back to the hotel, smoking, then a horse carriage ride and cigars. Photos from this sweet party will be posted here shortly.
All in all a fucking awesome weekend. I walked away with $2,500 and great memories. |
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| Dream |
[Jul. 23rd, 2007|09:49 am] |
I keep having this recurring nightmare.
I'm in a huge maze of tunnels (high-tech looking and brightly lit, not dank and cave like)and the whole system is full of people who teleport at random both through time and space. Some of them chase me, some of them have been changed in bizarre ways, others tell me stories of things that happened to them that make me jolt awake.
Its a really strange dream and scary in that way only nightmares can be. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 19th, 2007|01:05 am] |
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So today I was in Williamsburg in Brooklyn (trendy mcI'manartist ville) smoking a cigarette while I waited for Ben to finish leaving the world's longest phone message to a potential date and someone in the building next to me started playing this song on their guitar that just perfectly matched my mood. It was a pretty sweet moment. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 13th, 2007|12:58 am] |
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Today I picked up Buffy season 4 for $16. Thank you Costco. |
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| The Dark Side |
[Jul. 12th, 2007|12:38 am] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | My phones Vader ringtone | ] |
I've turned to the Dark Side. I'm trying to convince myself to like Diet Coke.
I'd like to apologize to the millions of innocents throughout the galaxy who may die as a result of my choices. |
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| Origins |
[Jul. 8th, 2007|11:36 pm] |
I went to Origins in Ohio this weekend. It was toally fucking sweet. I have not had that much fun in ages, it was awesome.
I picked up a new game. Its about getting a moose across a river. Its randomly one of the best fucking games ever, especially for drinking.
The game has 10 pieces. 2 platforms, 2 moose, and 6 "stones". Your mission is to get your moose to the opponents platform (which can be any distance you like apart). 3 stones start near you and 3 near your opponent. You move your moose by flicking the stones around the tabletop. You get 2 flicks per turn and can move as many times as you like (clearly limited by having 2 flicks, but you can move, flick, move, flick, move for example). You can use any of the stones you like, even the ones that start near your opponent. Once you touch a stone, thats your flick, even if you fuck up and just nudge it. If you pick up your moose to move it you're committed even if the move turns out to be impossible. If a moose falls in the water during your turn (yours or theirs) then you reset your moose to as close to how it was as possible and immediatly pass the turn. Then your opponent gets 3 flicks on their next turn. My theory is this should be played with 1 shot every time you wina nd 1 shot everytime you knock a moose into the water. It is presumed that hilarty will then ensue.
On a seperate note I am really feeling the wanderjahr. I don't want to work, I want to have enough money to go back to europe and hostel hop and explore. Stupid reality. I think it'll be time to move again before too long, I'm getting tired of the view from my windows. |
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