Who the hell is this guy? This might help (wikipedia).  Don’t worry, I’ll wait until you get up to speed.

I had never heard of him until today when I read an entry over at geekinheels. The author there posted a quick little article about how she found a neat little web app that analyzes a sample of text and tells you what famous author you most write like. When she did it with her blog entries, it spat out Stephen King most often. This is what I got more than 50% of the time:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I got a smattering of others, but apparently this David Foster Wallace character was quite influential. I feel like reading his stuff, but it might be kind of like masturbation at this point. Like discovering you’re actually a clone, finding your seed person, and making out with them or something.

Wait, what?

Homer Simpson Clone A: I love you Homer.
Homer Simpson Clone B: No, I love you, Homer.

Usually I simply add a link to the right column and call your attention to it in a short post, but I feel I have to talk a bit more at length about this one.

StrYderz is a comic hosted on the Internet, but it is more than a cut above just about every webcomic out there. It is presented in a full page format and most pages are black on white with more than a few in grayscale. A couple are in color for dramatic effect, but the noir feeling throughout is astounding.

Characters stay on-model, the storyboarding is top-notch, and the dialogue is natural.

I honestly can’t recommend StrYderz enough.

The online customer Printer I use for my artwork has decided to stop offering short-run print services. They have now instated a 25 copy minimum for any print run. I thought maybe I was missing something on their website, but I called their customer service department and they confirmed it.

What’s frustrating is they are still very affordable even with the minimum requirements. I need to make a choice whether to use them at all even when I have a need to print 25 or more of anything. The other frustrating bit is I have been framing my art in software at 11″x17″, the size their printers output. Granted, I have always worked within 11″x14″ because that is a standard Wal-Mart sized frame. If I find another affordable vendor, I don’t want to lose image quality because of it.

This is a very valuable lesson though: Don’t trust a vendor to offering the same product or service indefinitely. I could have learned that from just about anywhere in the last 25 years of my life by looking around and simply watching, but I have never personally been burned by this phenomenon.

I’ve been drawing an awful lot lately. Just like my other phases, it comes and goes, but I do love doodling on some paper or sketching in Photoshop; it’s very soothing and meditative to draw for extended periods of time.

I can see why some people engage in addictive behavior though. It is so enjoyable for me, that other things slide like chores and even remembering to bathe and feed myself.  I’m surprised my stress-rash hasn’t popped up lately. Maybe the drawing is a healthy outlet for dealing with the ’shit happens’ in my life? Except for the basic human needs and hygiene thing…

With the volume of output I’ve got going on lately, I really should collect the complete and mostly complete work I’ve got, package it up, advertise and sell it on an online store here. Doing that would legitimize my absent-minded fasting. Of course I need to polish the mostly complete stuff, but feh, that’s “trivial.”

After I get that done, I could dig into the file of sketches I’ve got going or scans of work languishing in archive for more material, and I could go even further back and look into my filing cabinet or any of my dozens of notebooks for doodles. There is a limit to this madness of course. If I go too far back, the quality of artsmanship goes way down and I don’t really care to share that stuff. Also, I say “trivial” as I have to make the decision to stick with the particular style a work started off as or scrap it and make it Modern Steve.

This isn’t a bad plan though, I might be able to get some extra coin from this by selling prints. Fortunately I’ve had the foresight to work at a ridiculously high resolution for a long time now so printing will be trivial. See? No quotes that time!

After a long absence, I have something to show you! No, it didn’t take a month to make. But this is the result of a conversation Ame and I had about Hello Kitty vs. Darth Vader:

Wicked sick, eh? I feel it’s pretty spot-on and couldn’t be any more perfect.