Been a long time, hasn't it? Over a month has passed since my last journal, and around five months since my last main-gallery deviation submission. I really need to work on fixing that...


On Life

So, since my job at JCPenny was only through the week of Christmas, I've been back to the realm of the unemployed for a few weeks now. Haven't been doing much in the way of being productive, either... Hooray, laziness. At least I still have plenty of money saved up (for the moment) from there. With luck someone will hire me soon. In the meantime, I've been considering going back to school... The classes I took in college were, for the most part, useless. Lots of English and Literature, plus the basic required classes. I don't feel like I gained any useful skills there. I may end up trying to get some scholarships and apply at WSU this time, and major in Business or Computer Programming. Something useful, at least. But we'll see.


On Art

I think this section can be summarized quickly and accurately in one sentence: My art sucks. Before you jump down my throat or try to tell me it doesn't, let me explain. For me, artistic skill is the ratio between how good the drawing appears in my head and how accurate to that image it is when finished. Four years ago, I had a terrible time visualizing anything in my head. I thought my art was great because it was better than what I could imagine. After I joined dA and was exposed to so much art for the first time, I began to draw in earnest, and to improve myself to the level of the artists I was finding here. In the process my ability to visualize what I wanted to draw improved, bit by bit, and today I can almost see a completed work in my head without considerable strain.

But what does that mean? The ratio has become unbalanced. I see great drawings in my head and my hands produce juvenile mimicries of them. I can't consider my art good anymore because it falls so short of what I can imagine. That's become very discouraging to me, and it's one of the major reasons I haven't drawn anything besides a few sketches in my Scraps in the past several months. It's hard to spend the considerable hours it takes me to draw, line, and color something to completion when I know from the sketching phase that it will fall so short of what I imagined it to be. It's not that I don't want to draw, it's just that it's...lost its charm. Sometimes I'd rather go back to that fledgling artist back in October 2005 who had first joined the site and was producing art like mad...but then, I know that the cycle would repeat.

...That sounded really depressing.

And by the way, none of this applies to my stories. That's just pure laziness there.


On World of Warcraft

As most of you should know from my past journals, I've been playing World of Warcraft for about six months now. I've recently gotten a second character up to the maximum level, 70, and I also have a level 63 character and two level 50s along with a gaggle of characters in their teens that I never play. This means that I've been through a good portion of the game at least twice, often many times. I'm the kind of person who doesn't do repeating games well. So why do I keep playing? Is it because I'm addicted? Maybe, but not to the game itself. One of the major things that keeps me there is the player interaction. Consider that I have no friends living closer than halfway across the US, then wonder where all of my social interaction comes from. It comes from the internet. In the past this manifested itself in forums and chatrooms, and those are well and good, but one of the major problems I've encountered with them is activity downtimes--when there's very little or no conversation, or nothing interesting being talked about. That's one of the big advantages MMO games have over chatting and messaging: if nothing interesting is going on, I can just go out and kill monsters or run errands for NPCs, or help a guildmate with a quest, or just explore the area. And then if something does come up, I can stop and chat, or do both if I'm in the mood. It's flexible. Of course, WoW itself has held me better than other MMOs because it's actually very interesting. The world is very deep and there are a lot of interconnecting stories and history involved with it.


On Movies

Okay, blah blah blah, wrapping that rambling section up. I've never been a very avid movie-goer, so I rarely have things to say about movies, but I wanted to mention a few things about some I've seen recently too.

First, Dragonheart and its sequel. I saw this movie when I was a kid and I loved it, but the video was lost and it wasn't until I got it on DVD recently that I've been able to see it again. Basically, it sucks. I'm surprised at how much praise it gets from dragon fans on this site. The actors did an amazingly terrible job...it was like watching a whole bunch of amateurs try to play the parts. A middle school play would probably have been more believable. The lack of any sort of sufficient story didn't really help, either. Still, if you were just watching it for the dragon, you'd have been satisfied, because he really was done well. If you ask me, he was far better animated than Saphira was in Eragon (so go spend your millions on good, cheap animators instead of shredding the story, Fox!) The funny thing is, Dragonheart II, which was on the same disc, was actually better in both acting and story than the first. Drake wasn't as likable as Draco, though...of course, it's hard to beat Sean Connery's voice acting.

I wanted to mention Dragon Wars, which I saw recently as well. Again, great animation, terrible story. Is this a running theme in dragon movies? Well, if you just wanted to see some dragons blowing stuff up, it was great, and since that's all I expected, I did enjoy it. Hopefully not a spoiler, but the Asian dragon at the end was surprisingly good. That was the first Asian dragon I've seen in an attempted photorealistic style, and I must say the animators really outdid themselves. It looked fantastic.

Cloverfield was going to be in this, but I still haven't brought myself around to going to see it. $15 for a movie and a soda is expensive, plus I'm lazy and don't want to go to a movie on the weekend.



LONG JOURNAL IS LONG