Yeah, I seriously am, still alive. Much has happened in the... Er... God, has it really been 7 months since I last wrote? Jeez, I'm amazed dA didn't just hold a MIA wake for me or something.

So, what have I been doing in these many moons of devious inactivity? Answer is... Well, sadly a bit too much gaming and a bit too little productivity. If I added up the hours I've spent on games and compared them to the hours I've spent on PROJECTS... I doubt I'd be proud of the results. But hey, we all need to kick back once in a while, right? And seven months is a totally normal timespan for that, right? Right??

Hmm, seems like I still love emotes as much as ever... Heck yeah. Anyway. So, ASIDE from the oodles and oodles of gaming - by the way, Portal is every bit as epic as everyone says and if you didn't get it during the free giveaway then too bad just go and buy it anyway because it will change your entire LIFE - I've been undertaking a few interesting bits & bytes of goings on. Here are the highlights.

PROGRAMMING: Yeah, I'm still working on that computer game. And yeah, it's taking ages.
And yeah, it's going slowly. And yeah, despite all that it'll still be AWESOME when I finish it. I've been saying that for so long, though, that I'm starting to become embarrassingly "all-talk," so I think I'll say no more about it for now until I have more RESULTS.

DRAWING: Yeah, I still enjoy doing typical Japanese-styled "Manga" art. I've got a few bones to pick on the age-old subject of Manga vs NOT Manga, but that's for another day. For now, let it be said that I have another piece in the works that WILL BE UPLOADED before this next week is out, and preferably before the weekend's over. It also marks a sudden and EXPONENTIAL improvement in my art skills that took me completely by surprise.

MUSIC: Well, not a heck of a lot have I done in this field. However, I did find an excellent chiptune composer, FamiTracker, that creates genuine NES 8-bit musics. How do I know it's genuine? Because it can output the tunes into .NES files which can be played on an actual NES emulator. So yeah. The majority of my time has been spent LISTENING to music, which is gradually giving me more and more insight into what makes good music GOOD.

CONSTRUCTION: Yes, construction. Cardboard construction, at which I consider myself quite good. I don't want to give too many details away; let's just say it's for my Halloween costume this year. And yes, I started very early. Because I needed to. It's not your run-of-the-mill 5-second job.

GAMING: Well COME ON, you knew this was coming. So, what have I been doing. Lots and lots and LOTS of Mabinogi, entertaining as always despite the usual gripes: sometimes-poor design, sometimes-lousy players, and so forth. L4D and L4D2 are always a blast, as is THE SLY COOPER TRILOGY, ZOMG. Never gets old, that. Also, thanks to a SNES emulator I found, I  finally played the famous Super Metroid, the magnificent Final Fantasy III, AND the incredible STAR FOX. All three of those games kick major arse.

MOVIES: CUBE, CUBE 2: HYPERCUBE and CUBE: ZERO are very... INTERESTING movies. Not for the squeamish though. "Diabolical" might be the best word... From what I understand, they're like SAW, only with a deviously intelligent mind behind them. Bicentennial Man is an EPIC movie that I finally got to see again for the first time ten years. Also, MEGAS XLR is just the best thing that ever happened to Cartoon Network, PLAIN AND SIMPLE, and the idiots had the gall to cancel it in 2005 after only two seasons. Kind of a rare commodity nowadays. Like more so than Star Trek. OH AND SPEAKING OF STAR TREK, we just watched season 2 of the original series. Epic stuff. When season 3 appears cheap enough on Amazon, we'll nab that and go through it.

Yes, this Journal entry contains a metric LOTS of lines beginning with "and." I'm well aware that this is one of the biggest taboos of Grammaziism, but I write my Journal entries as though I were SPEAKING them, not as literary works. So sue me.

Guess that about wraps up the news from Lake Novagen. Stay tuned for that new art piece. Adios!