You are stuck. Probably, there are still images vivid in your mind, but you can no longer link them together. They are no longer a part of any story. In your desperation, you start, for a moment, to write about a man sitting in front of a typing device similar to your own, suffering from a lack of productivity similar to your own. You are not the first to attempt this. You will not be the last. You have been told a thousand times to write what you know, and, at this very moment, not being able to write is exactly all that you know.

Wait. Feel yourself out, get a sense of your body, your environment, your feelings. Surely, you must know at least one more thing, you must know something beyond this most tired of cliches.

Your stomach growls.

You know that you are hungry.

Every character worth the words that make him wants something. Your protagonist must want something badly enough to propel him through the hell to which you are about to send him. You know about hunger. You know about wanting…

A delicious turkey sandwich.

So you are downstairs, in the kitchen. You’ve pulled the good bread out of the bread box and inspected your two slices for mold — better to risk moldiness than screw up good bread in the fridge. From the fridge you’ve retrieved your grainy German mustard. You smear it on thick. Lettuce and tomatoes are placed on the table, but not married to the sandwich; you eat a slice of each separately. Turkey and Mustard and Bread… a holy trinity of tastes… they deserve no flavour interference.

Lastly, you open the meat tray, and lo: There is no turkey there to speak of!

For every protagonist that wants, there must be a universe that conspires against him. You see, where you expected thick deli-chopped turkey meat, waits thin, grocery store roast beef slices, slick, and dull to the tongue. You must make a choice, eat now, in mediocrity, or move forward, overcoming whatever increasingly improbable obstacles rise before you.

This wouldn’t be a story if you settled.

You take your half-made sandwich carefully in hand, and in your trousers you stuff your Glock, and a keen butcher’s knife. You open your kitchen doors, and make your way into the woods. Somewhere, over the eastern hills, the prophets say, lies a field untouched by the hands of man, home to turkeys enough to feed man until the end times.

You walk for hours, over boulders the size of houses, and through hollow logs twice size of office buildings. Something had better force you to act, to make a decision; something must challenge you. You arrive at a river.

The river is as wide as an eight-lane highway, and roars savagely. You kick off your shoes and roll up the cuffs of your trousers. You raise the gestating turkey sandwich high above your head, and step into the water. You are barely ankle deep when the water’s tug begins to affect your balance. You are not more than an eighth of the way through, and the water is above your belly button. You strain on the tips of your toes to keep the sandwich as far away from potential sogginess as possible. This, a mistake. The water drags you off of your toes and then under. Your body tumbles and you thrash your arms wildly.

You are sitting on the riverbed, opposite where you entered, if a little downstream. Your clothes are soaked, your hair is soaked. The soaked sandwich disintegrates in your hand.

All is lost.

You rise to your feet, and check your trousers. You still possess your glock and butcher’s knife. You begin to walk. At first, each step is strained, deliberate, but you pick up speed, purpose. You enter the woods. The ground slopes upward.

If you didn’t face certain defeat and keep going, this wouldn’t be a story either.

You happen upon some grain, sprouting from between two rocks. You take your butches knife and cut it at the stem. You grind it up between two stones, and add water by squeezing out your soaked shirt. You build a fire, and this evening, you bake bread.

The next morning, after travelling even further up the hillside, you encounter a wild mustard bush. You squeeze out the remaining water from your soaked trousers, and grind the mustard seed. After letting it sit for a while, you spread the fresh mustard onto your fresh bread.

After a full day’s climb, you reach the top of the hill. The sun has just dipped below the horizon, and all life is bathed in the purple-orange glow of magic hour. The trees open up to a field. Before you a rusted wire and wooden stake fence barely stands. The wire has decayed enough to split in several places, and many of the stakes have toppled over. All of it, is nearly completely overgrown with weeds. In the middle of this grassy clearing stands a lone turkey.

You draw your glock and point it at the bird; you can feel the cold steel of the belted butcher’s knife against your skin. Your bread is fresh, your mustard is fresh, soon the trinity will be complete and you will feast on the finest freshest sandwich every assembled by the hands of man.

Your finger squeezes the trigger. And then, you are overwhelmed by the turkey’s majesty.

Its tail fanned like a peacock, it’s feathers striped like a bold tiger, it’s face decorated with the wild colours of a gaelic warrior, all in the subdued tones of the puritans. The turkey is the most regal of all galliformes. A pilgrim king.

The glock lands lands among the weeds, unfired.

You fall to your knees and weep.

Trying to do thinner inks… More humans coming soon.

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Something I dug up from my last year of school – though sadly not the version with the explosion at the end – oh well. Thanks goes to andy for shrinking this sucker down for me, enjoy.

Here’s a couple more things. The backview for the Modern Bioshock Big Daddy is done – I may need to add some dials to the gun but otherwise this one is at last done. High fives!

Also here’s a quick coloring of the girl with the gun that was posted in the last slew of uploads.

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So. A badly botched wisdom tooth extraction when I was 18 led me to avoid dental care for approximately 8 years. The previously posted wisdom tooth picture was the first, and biggest price paid for my hiatus. As of today’s drilling, I am now officially caught up… the political environment of my mouth has been stabilized by a popular new government.

I tried to drink some coffee too soon after the dental work, and my frozen mouth drooled it all over my sweater. I guess this is what I have to look forward to when I get old.

No way! I’m still alive! Sorry for the lack of posts. Everything from my New York trip over 2 months ago, to multiple sicknesses and working seven days a week has kind of drained me a bit. But I’m coming back! Slowly but surely. Here’s me getting back into the grind with some quickie head sketches before work at the local market… and me fooling with power armor and aliens. I’m also revamping certain parts of my website soon too as I’ve finally thought of way to (somewhat) effectively combine process with the finals to show a progression.

For the sake of grossness and nothing else…

The dentist said it was still drillable, but with a useless wisdom tooth, what’s the point?

Here’s something I hate. Sentences ended with “,no?”. It occurs mostly in writing, mostly in e-writing, on the stupid fucking internet.

“Dark Knight was a great movie, no?”
“Pizza Hut is greasy, no?”
“Being punched in the face is totally rad, no?”

Here’s what “,no?” translates to: “amirite?!?”

Fucking Stop It.

Grow some balls and make a fucking statement, or rewrite your sentence so that it’s an actual goddamn question.

“Dark Knight was a great movie.”
“Pizza Hut is greasy.”
“Being punched in the face is totally rad.”

OR

“Did you think the Dark Knight was a great movie?”
“How do you feel about the greasy-ness of Pizza Hut pizza?”
“I used to think that being punched in the face was pretty rad, but I’m having second thoughts; what is your position, apropos a punch in the face?”

“,no?” is lazy fucking writing, and every time I read it, I feel like I’m being insulted personally. It is simultaneously the mark of a will too weak, too desperate for approval to make a clear, and firm statement, while at the same time too disinterested in the eyes and minds of the sensitive reader to write AN ACTUAL BEARFUCKING QUESTION!

I imagine, in my mind, that anyone who ends a sentence with “,no?” sounds exactly like Alyson Hannigan’s flutist character from American Pie.

Of course, it should be pointed out that the “,no?” ending serves a similar function to the Canadian, “,eh?”. However, “,eh?” has a long cultural history in this great nation, and is a word exactly suited to its purpose. “No” is already a word. It already means NO. By using “no” in the place of “eh?”, one essentially says, “I’VE JUST NEGATED MY WHOLE STATEMENT IN THE DESPERATE HOPES THAT YOU WILL REAFFIRM IT!”

Stop. Stop it you jelly-spined crybabies.

My friend Jordan recently made a post in which he invents a term, and then lays claim to it. The post is relatively small, and doesn’t really serve any purpose other than marking the time and date and claimed word.

It is, in short, a kind of linguistic submarine patent.

That said, the term isn’t that bad. He calls it the Red Baron Ploy, the use of a particularly standout evil villain to become the defining face of his otherwise vaguely defined countrymen (or group members of some other kind). Red Baron Ploy doesn’t sound very good, however… too many words. And in being so specifically about a black and white good/evil dichotomy, its utility is somewhat muted.

Instead, the term ought to be just “The Red Baron”. The Red Baron is often the villain, or at the very least, the antagonist, but his defining characteristic is his group membership.

A Red Baron can never work alone. The Red Baron is the representative, the face, the avatar, of a much larger group which the author does not characterize more widely (either because the group is so large as to make that unwieldly, or the author is simply uninterested).

The Red Baron is often flamboyant. Is often Jeremy Irons in Dungeons and Dragons o’er the top. It is in his nature specifically because he must become the character representation of tens if not thousands of other bodies (whom our protagonist perhaps slaughters by the dozens [if there are more than tens]). He must think for thousands. He must move for thousands. He must emote for thousands.

The Red Baron is a useful trope, and appears frequently. I recently watched a piece of shit called Death Race, a not-really-a-remake of a particularly good cult film called Death Race 2000. Our protagonist spends most of this malformed asshole of a motion picture in prison. There are fights, there are confrontations, there are various meetings with the wierdly-botoxed female prison warden: there are many events in which prison guards are obligated to appear, and frequently do violence to our cranky english hero. In exactly every single instance in which a guard interacts with any character onscreen (usually our main character), it is the same guard. He’s got kind of a freaky looking chin, makes his face look like a crescent moon in profile. In a prison the size of an island, day or night, at any far-flung corner of the prison, he is the guard to show up with his stick in hand, doing violence and muttering some lame Paul WS Anderson dialogue. He also appears at the right-hand side of our botox’ed warden whenever we see her. He is every guard. He is improbably, illogically sadistic… he is the sadism of every guard combined.

He is a Red Baron. Paul WS Anderson violated every rule of logic or sense just to make him so.

Don’t watch Death Race, though. It really sucks.

Look at the costume similarities between Darth Vader and the Storm Trooper. Darth Vader is a storm trooper in a black uniform and a cape. Also, with magic powers. Darth Vader is a Red Baron, effectively filling the characterization gap of a hundred easily slaughtered storm trooper infantry.

But it doesn’t stop at antogonism and villainy. Mel Gibson’s William Wallace very nearly acts as a Red Baron for all of the Scots in Braveheart, at least the bold, fighting kind.

Where the author chooses not to, for reasons good or evil, represent a large group as a diverse set of individuals, but instead, Superions them into a single, usually flamboyant representation, he has made a Red Baron.

It is a useful trope, with plenty of life left in it. Maybe an endless supply of life, really.

If you find yourself disheartened by the facelessness of your hero’s enemies — choose one of them to follow, one of them to deepen and grow. Let your audience learn to hate him, or love him tragically. Make a Red Baron.

I’m currently on vacation in Sayulita. I have been semi-functional for a couple of days, due to what I think is a minor sinus infection (I have been swimming a lot, occasionally in questionable waters).

In my out-of-conditionness, I may have accidentally read a couple of Michael Crighton (god rest his soul) novels.

From the two books, Michael Crighton appears to have supported two positions.

1) Nanabots are coming soon, and pose a real and significant danger to the human race.
2) Global Warming is an overblown myth believed only by people who haven’t had the time to do any real reading or thinking for themselves.

I’m thinking of writing a book called State of NanoFear, about a group of Anti-NanoBot activists who create a nanobot plague to show people the impending danger of nanobots. Either that or a lobotomy.

The thing is, I didn’t read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell today because I was feeling sick, and it looked too big, too daunting. Both of those Crighton (may he rest in peace) books combined adds up to not much less Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I have a sinus infection *and* I could have spent today reading a real book.

Christ.