It all started out fine, woke up early, had my milk/coffee/caramelized sugar cocktail, felt just fine.
I managed to do the cartoon for tomorrow, scan it and paint it nicely. I think I’m improving on that one, it now seems fine.
Then I procedeed to work on the new entertainment site we’re about to launch and voilá! it finally fell into place and I managed to come out with something cool.
By the end of the day, things were all going nicely until this e-mail came. It was about a bunch of stuff but what really bummed me out was the part about our longest standing cartoon.
It’s been almost a year we started the cartoon about these technology experts who always mess stuff up, anyway, it’s coming out weekly on an online mag for almost a year. We asked for new conditions, gently, not only were the conditions turned down, they’re shipping us off, no further questions.
It’s going to end. My jaw just dropped! I always entertained the notion that they actually appreciated our work and… well, liked it! Apparently they don’t give a toss and so they’re simply getting a new cartoonist or whatever… amazing… on top of everything they send their “executioner” to do the dirty work…
23:33 GMT – now playing: Marilyn Manson – The Dope Show
It’s the weekend. I don’t like it. The weekend is full of bad things.
On Saturday I stop, I want to sleep, rest and do nothing, so I do that and the whole day passes me by. At a certain hour I’m bored to death (specifically, now).
Then on Sunday it’s the end of the weekend and so Monday is right around the corner. It sucks, to use vernacular.
So today we did our taxes, which is always a perfect time to make me perfectly infuriated. I simply have trouble accepting that the state takes away my money in whatever percentage they please and then enforce a billion strict rules to not let me deduct my expenses. I become agitated and angry.
About an hour after doing this, I let a little problem with running a game really get to me and thrashed my office. I broke some stuff and threw chairs around and screamed. I didn’t feel much better and proceeded to go watch a match on TV, which sucked bad and my team lost by 2-1.
I’m going back to school today… mind you, I’m a teacher there, not a student. I have to get on a boat in about 8 hours from now to go there and I haven’t come up with today’s class… I’m a bad, bad teacher. I think I dislike teaching a lot…
Anyway, I still haven’t collected my pay from school for March and we’re halfway through April. Needless to say we’re broke and that’s how important it is that I teach as a second job.
I teach in a sort of post-highschool course, which isn’t college, but isn’t that bad either… I really couldn’t say what kind of degree you get there, but I suppose you get out of there ready for action. It’s an art and design school and I’m teaching computers to the first two years of the graphic design course. Basically I have to tell them about PhotoShop, FreeHand, Illustrator and Quark Xpress. We use iMacs at the school which sucks because I absolutely loathe the damned little ugly things.
The computers do look nice when you first set eyes on them… after two months they just look “different”, and now they just bloody look ugly and I realized: “yes! that’s why computers are usually either beige or black”… It’s a low profile thing I don’t suppose fashion victims who actually bought iMacs will ever understand.
Anyway… I still gotta come up with an exercise for the students to do tomorrow, plus I gotta teach them how to start using Xpress which is something I basically can’t do because I don’t use the damn thing and I hate DTP anyway. (DTP means Desktop Publishing, it’s a severly cocky expression for putting stuff on a page and printing it out).
I’m also noticing that it’s only 1:26 am, although I supposedly started this entry at 1:29, which means I either misread the time in the first place or there has been a major space-time warp and I’m about to meet myself in three minutes. Interesting as my life is, I’m ready to bet on the first choice.
I think the worst thing about being a teacher is that you have to get along with a large number of young people. Young people are fighting to establish their identities and personalities and what-have-you. So when I walk in the class room and propose: “everyone draw me a rock band logo containing an illustration of a skull done in FreeHand”, there’ll be a guy yelling out: “cool!”, another guy will say: “this is pathetic!” and a third one (could be a girl this time) will say they’d prefer to do it using PhotoShop… What do I do?
I’m the teacher! I act like a mature adult, of course! I reach in my bag for my trusty double barreled, easy loading Quake shotgun and start distributing hellish punishment. Heck… I’d do it if it was a perfect world. Like my wife’s brother said the other day: “we should have several lives so we could just do that kind of stuff (he was referring to driving off a steep cliff)… then we’d just load…”
And he’s right, you know.
I just know that in a few hours, when I’m driving down to the boat station I’ll start feeling that Carmageddon sensation creeping up on me, I’ll start looking wickedly at pedestrians and sleepy slow drivers… unfortunately, I’ll just be a good boy and prevent a lot of deaths.
Life just isn’t fun enough. Neither is death, apparently.
…I don’t think anyone reads this, isn’t that pathetic? I double dare anyone reading this to e-mail me (not you, you nearly-successful lawyer with the highly intelligent 2-year-old who will inevitably take over the world)… but anyone else, I triple dare you! e-mail me now! Yeah right…
8:56 am GMT
Hello? am I awake?
I went to bed about four hours ago, now it sort of feels like I have thin long acupuncture needles in my eyes. I hate not sleeping.
On top of everything my e-mail program insists on downloading messages from the server that I already have… it’s now downloading the sixth version of every message in a 33 message batch, isn’t that nice?
Oh well, I gotta go to work…
20:05 GMT
Home… home at last.
Got my March paycheck, so it wasn’t all bad. Actually it wasn’t bad at all, except I was unbelievably tired… and I’m staring to suspect that my students think I’m some kind of junkie by the way I drop my head on the cafeteria table and gulp down coffee, like I’m trying to recover from some terrible hangover. So now I’m gulping down my 9th coffee of the day and reading my e-mail… all seven copies of each message… I long for Linux.
23:42 GMT – now playing: David Bowie – I’m Deranged
Coffee number 10.
I’ve just watched a pretty cool movie my wife rented. I was called “Dark City”. Nifty. It’s about this sort of alien race which uses a whole city as an experimentation lab and they exchange people’s memories around every night turning them into someone else altogether. Very good story, nice sets. The alien characters looked a bit like a cross from Fremen from “Dune” and the guy from “Hellraiser”, but ok.
Blast! My coffee’s over… I can’t get online the damned phone operator is messing up again! No, not the ISP, it’s the telecom company, the damned monopolist bastards…
Here’s a little of what it all means: Tritão is obviously a nickname for my partner Nelson. A Tritão, or perhaps Triton, is a small amphibious lizard commonly known as Salamander. A Triton is black with yellow spots. This is not, however, where the name derives from, it derives from a homonymous cartoon character created by Nelson back in college which is nothing short of a laughter riot. Unfortunately these adventures are not yet online due to character registration and trade marks which are still not taken care of. When this is done (probably around 3652 give or take a year), there will be literally dozens of new comic strips we can publish online.
19:56 GMT – now playing: Jí¶rn Brackhagen & Don Tano – Jerusalem Boogie
It’s cold and almost raining. Just a few days ago I was going out of my mind with how bloody hot it was in this house…
The music I’m listening to is available only on MP3 format and is part of “Lost in Static 18”, a musical tribute to Mike Oldfield put together by Jí¶rn Brackhagen. It’s made up of several pieces by fans of the Oldfield mailing list “Amarok”.
I was supposed to participate (and I actually did), but my piece never made it. I’m about to re-record it now and put it online on my own and sod everyone else. Anyway the music available at the Static 18 page is pretty nice for amateurs, some of it is very professional actually. Of course you should be at least a little bit into Mike Oldfield if you’re going to download any of this.
So yes, I’m a Mike Oldfield fan… or perhaps used to be…? I have become very sceptic lately… His latest albums are more and more a sort of mid-life crisis, to old to rock and roll, elevator, new age, meditation music. I’m pretty much still into his old stuff, and when I say old I mean from the seventies, like “Tubular Bells”, “Ommadawn”, “Hergest Ridge” or “Incantations”. Actually I run a small mailing list and website of the Amarok Tabbing Society. It’s a group of people that works together to tab Oldfield stuff for guitar and bass, you can find it here:
I’m browsing with Pato (the duck!)… Man, the web sucks! It’s incredible the amount of people that have responsibility, fame and influence in the industry and present themselves through the crappiest websites you’ve ever seen!
There are literally whole pages done as an image. All of it! text, pictures, all a big JPEG! The vast majority uses stolen art, deja vu clipart and invariably badly resized and adapted images.
And what I can’t imagine is why anyone at all in the web today still uses the animated e-mail icon with the word “e-mail” rotating around the planet earth, or the one with the envelope entering the mailbox… These are companies we’re talking about, not personal websites, companies!
It’s also unbelievable that most companies can’t even present their own logo in a decent way! there are distorted logos, bad transparency matting, creepy stuff…
It’s getting pretty funny now! I’m laughing uncontrollably… there are some sites… man! It’s getting out of control, I’m laughing my ass off! It’s just unbelievable how some sites look… completely ruined JPEG images due to maximum compression, webpages with no background colour (welcome to Netscape gray!)… and the worst thing is probably the slogans… I’m getting hysterical!
I truly have nothing at all to say today, isn’t that sad? What do I do now?
Here’s some trivia: I’ve found that my fingers are thicker again, it’s so funny… just a couple of weeks ago, my wedding ring nearly fell off my finger if I wasn’t careful; now I can hardly pull it off past my knuckle. It’s the heat, I guess…
What a boring day! I did go to the gym and workout for one and a half hours, but there’s never much to tell about that. I am moving on to pretty heavy weights in almost every exercise, althgouh I’m fortunantely not getting huge. There’s this new guy, used to be a thin little number, but he’s on steroids now… what a difference… I wonder if he thinks it’s worth it to have huge arms and tiny testicles…
Me, I just enjoy lifting stuff I guess. And I always go with my parents which is nice because otherwise I don’t get to see them much.
Had chinese for dinner and watched “Apollo 13” on TV, just because it was on. It’s not a bad movie, it’s kinda cool, actually, although I never did like the “oh make me cry” sort of ending… I like the space sequences, I can’t help it.
Oh well, I’ll just go surf a bit and then on to play Quake, maybe…
21:28 GMT The day was great! And it wasn’t. It all started out fine, woke up early, had my milk/coffee/caramelized sugar cocktail, felt just fine. I managed to do the cartoon for tomorrow, scan it and paint it nicely. I think I’m improving on that one, it now seems fine. Then I procedeed to work […]
23:33 GMT – now playing: Marilyn Manson – The Dope Show It’s the weekend. I don’t like it. The weekend is full of bad things. On Saturday I stop, I want to sleep, rest and do nothing, so I do that and the whole day passes me by. At a certain hour I’m bored to […]
1:29 am GMT I’m going back to school today… mind you, I’m a teacher there, not a student. I have to get on a boat in about 8 hours from now to go there and I haven’t come up with today’s class… I’m a bad, bad teacher. I think I dislike teaching a lot… Anyway, […]
14:40 GMT Tritão turns 26 today. Happy birthday. Here’s a little of what it all means: Tritão is obviously a nickname for my partner Nelson. A Tritão, or perhaps Triton, is a small amphibious lizard commonly known as Salamander. A Triton is black with yellow spots. This is not, however, where the name derives from, […]
18:56 GMT I’m bored. 22:11 GMT I truly have nothing at all to say today, isn’t that sad? What do I do now? Here’s some trivia: I’ve found that my fingers are thicker again, it’s so funny… just a couple of weeks ago, my wedding ring nearly fell off my finger if I wasn’t careful; […]
