Dearest LiveJournal,

While you have served me well over the years, and will continue to do so on some level, my main blogging interests have been snagged by Google's Blogger program. Something about it just makes me want to use it more than it makes me want to use you.

But don't lose heart. I'll still be here for memes, scans_daily, and reading and commenting on all my friends' updates.

It's not you, it's me,
- Professor Hazard
Podunk, Oklahoma
February 1865

Yoinkéd from sashafiero:

Post 3 things you've done in your lifetime that you don't think anybody else on your friends list has done. See if anybody else responds with "I've done that." If they have, you need to add another!(2.b., 2.c., etc...) Have your friends cut & paste this into their journal to see what unique things they've done in their life.

1.) Created a yearly convention with attendance on an international level.

2.) Was voted one of the six biggest Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans on Earth.

3.) Was roared at at point-blank range by a lion.
3A.) Filled out the entirety of the map of Level 1 in ToeJam & Earl.

Probably my favorite birthday gift of this birthday season - a handmade Prof doll, courtesy of my homegirl rupestur. Her daughter even donated one of her favorite monsters for Yarn-Prof to catch!

April 28th will herald my 28th birthday. Is there a special name for that? Is that Birthday Prime?

Professor Hazard by *BabyLondonStar on deviantART

When I was playing Rock Band, I started out on the drums, then graduated over to bass guitar, after an embarassing stint on vocals during "Black Hole Sun". I also attempted to Steven Tyler it up a bit on "Wanted Dead or Alive", which the game really didn't seem to enjoy (possibly because it is originally sung by Bon Jovi).

This does not change the fact that I am a cowboy, and it is on a steel horse that I ride.

I enjoyed playing the bass, despite the fact that it's an idiot's instrument. I can effortlessly handle the Medium setting of difficulty, which gives you four buttons to manipulate with your left hand while strumming and wah-wah-ing with your right. The Easy setting only requires you to use the first three buttons, which I could basically do in my sleep. However, moving up to Hard, where you have to manipulate five buttons on the left, was too much for my frail sensibilities. It became too much like playing a harmonica, which I have never been able to do. I was kicked out of the band, caused the bus to catch on fire, all our roadies died of dysentery, et cetera.

Anyways, while I was busy stuffing ears, it occurred to me that it was a good thing for the video game industry to move in this direction. The arcade has nearly died entirely; all games are focused on the console, now. We were all being drawn into our caves, alone in the dark. But there has been a surge in popularity for games like this, that require a group of people to get together. And that's a good thing. Even as I sat there playing plunkan gaems, I thought, "Why isn't there a group blogging option for LiveJournal?" Instead of seeing three people write up the same thing about a shared experience, they can actually all three edit the post, based on settings put in place by whoever originates the post. Therefore, all three names and all three avatars show up next to one post, and other people don't have to read three accounts of the same story.

Anyways, I imagine we will be seeing a copy of the game show up at Snipe House, some time after I become more financially solvent.

Chaotic Neutral

A chaotic neutral character follows his whims. He is an individualist first and last. He values his own liberty but doesn’t strive to protect others’ freedom. He avoids authority, resents restrictions, and challenges traditions. The chaotic neutral character does not intentionally disrupt organizations as part of a campaign of anarchy. To do so, he would have to be motivated either by good (and a desire to liberate others) or evil (and a desire to make those different from himself suffer). The common phrase for chaotic neutral is "true chaotic." Remember that the chaotic neutral character may be unpredictable, but his behavior is not totally random. He is not as likely to jump off a bridge as to cross it. Chaotic neutral is the best alignment you can be because it represents true freedom both from society’s restrictions and from a do-gooder’s zeal.

--excerpted from the Player’s Handbook, Chapter 6

What's your character's alignment?

Additionally, Wikipedia's section on chaotic neutrality compares my alignment to characters like Captain Jack Sparrow, Al Swearengen from the TV series Deadwood, and Snake Plissken from Escape from New York.

You know, there's no individual part of the geography of office life that I do not enjoy. I love cubicle mazes, I love the smell of the break room, I love big electrical fans perched in high places to try their best to deliver the refreshment. I love these things because, two feet tall, I was brought toddling to the places where my father worked, and because they were associated with him, they were like the halls of Olympus, where great men did great things in a way I didn't have the capacity to understand.

Now I am my father - literally, he left the company and I got all his projects - and I should be happy. I make good money to do tasks that require very little skill and zero exertion. There are assholes here, yes, but 75% of the project floor likes or respects me. So why don't I feel content to be living the dream?

I think it all boils down to the fact that I'm getting the package, but it's not on my terms. I wanted all this - the cubicles, the coffee, the fans - but I wanted to be making art, not conveyer belts and pumps and tanks for a factory in Michigan. When I lean on a cubicle entrance, coffee in hand, I want to look in and see people working on a cartoon, or a comic book, or a video game - and I want to see my characters and properties on those screens.

So what do I do? Go back to Tennessee, buy a small warehouse, and fill it up with cubicles and computers? If I build it, will they come? I hope so. Because that's a place I could go to every morning with a smile on my face.

This is called "furoshiki" (風呂敷＊)!

Spider-Cat by *professorhazard on deviantART

I haven't had much to say for a while, so prepare for massive data assault.

The weekend of February 23rd and 24th, sashafiero and I headed down to Florida to deliver a computer to powergod83, who really needs to get a new LJ username (like he ever uses his LJ). His mom works at Disney World, so we finagled a few free tickets out of the trip and spent most of Saturday there. It is a known fact that Walt Disney is one of my childhood heroes, so I am always happy to get an opportunity to visit the culmination of his life's dream, despite the toll it takes on my feet. Next time I go, hopefully I will be level 40, and thus able to save my little tootsies a hurtin'.

While in Florida, we also took a little side quest to deliver and install a telephone system for my grandmother. It was good to see her, even though since I am now no longer a child, I am the one who gets to/has to listen to all the family's dirty laundry. Normally this would fall on my parents, and I would be somewhere else, probably playing my Game Boy.

Well, the Florida heat didn't seem to sit so well with my car, and we broke down a couple of times. It turned out the culprit was bad fuel. Luckily, there was a family-trusted garage a few blocks from Grandma's house, so we had it taken care of. However, we didn't have it taken care of before Monday, and thus missed a day of work. This is significant because the week before that, we had missed essentially the entire week, so our absence on Monday caused our boss to go feral and kill some people and drink their blood. However, we're still here.

That may be due, in large part, to the fact that when the garage got done with the car Monday afternoon, I then drove all day and much of the night to get back to Atlanta. Went to work on Tuesday without having slept (we'll have to see how many of the equipment models I worked on come back with notes from the checkers saying What Were You Thinking).

I'm overdue for my drawing-a-week resolution that I made this year. Mini-Uri is coming along pretty well; I just need to get some time to work on the picture. After Mini-Uri come Mini-Replay and Mini-MDude, and then I will not take any more commissions for Minis*, so I can compile them all onto a wallpaper. I say I'm going to do Mini-MDude, but that is only because mdude1350 bought a commission from me for that price - he didn't actually send me a note detailing what he wanted drawn, and he won't respond to his Personal Messages on the Snipe Board. For all I know, he wants a portrait of his dog.

*Unless they are purchased before I finish Mini-MDude.

Well, I've done all my work here at the office and taken some work from the other equipment modeler, who is out sick. It gave me time to write this, which has been overdue, but I guess I'll go back to being productive now.

Hurble by *professorhazard on deviantART

Due to the mind-numbing nature of my job at present, I thought I'd do a rundown of how my day goes. You see, we're in a kind of lull here at the office - initial design documents have been sent out to purchase equipment for the plant, and soon we'll begin work on I guess the finalized copy to send out to the construction crew in Michigan. In the meantime, I add fireproof insulation to the steel beams in the 3D model to show everyone who lays pipe where not to lay pipe. The insulation is two inches thick, so what I'm doing creates a visual reminder to all the modelers that they should not have their pipes/equipment right up next to a beam.

To add insulation to a beam (which you can think of as a long rectangular 3D solid - like the checkout conveyer belt divider at the grocery store, for instance) I just make a second rectangular solid out of another material, and make it be four inches bigger in height and depth than the beam itself. In this manner, it gets two inches of insulation on all sides. The plant is made of, oh, I dunno, a thousand or more beams. I basically have to do this to every one of them. And they are not uniform in size and shape.

Because this is terrible, I can only do it for a short time without passing into a life-draining coma. So here is what I do to pass the time.

- work on insulation until I can't stand it any more
- check the Snipe Board (nothing there!)
- check Google News (Britney Spears has problems? Who knew?)
- go back to 3D model, look at it despondently, don't actually do anything
- check Snipe Board again (still nothing new)
- go bother sashafiero at her cubicle
- get some water in the break room

And then back to step one. I repeat this process basically four times per hour for between six and eight hours a day. All day I think about how I'd rather be home drawing, and then when I get there, I have no energy to do so.

A yellow planet with an average temperature of 77 degrees. Flying over it revealed simple houses and large, coiled, friendly-looking serpents of an orange coloration.

Two young twins riding an equinoid quadruped of some type, speaking in a creepy monotone, finishing each other's sentences. Their sex is indeterminate. They speak of punishing a playmate for getting away from them.

Inside the glass of the painting's frame I found a delicately carved image of a tengu mask that, when the frame was closed, would overlay one of the painted characters' faces, which was the source of all the problems. I was exultant that I had accidentally figured this out. Everyone would be so impressed when they read this in my case file, but when I tried to gather my family to listen to me, they would all wander away, disinterested.

"Picture of Night with Moon", a painting of two humanoid thunderheads pointing at each other as though about to go to battle. Google Image Search brought no helpful results as I tried to explain to everyone how this was connected to my previous discovery. As I got closer to waking up I became more enraged as I realized that the title was all too similar to a work of fiction I was familiar with in the waking world.

I could have rubbed away the tengu mask imagery on the leaden glass at any time, stopping the possession of the twin children by malevolent entities, but nobody would watch me do it, so I didn't.

A man in a thickly-woven dark suit of what could only have been the scratchiest of materials. He tried to barter with Batman for one of Mr. Freeze's cold guns, only to be told that it would be ineffective against Etrigan the demon. He was rushing things; he was going to get killed, I could just tell.

We had been in an art museum that I hoped would have a copy of the painting, to prove me right, but the museum was just a museum of comic book art, displaying an exhibit about strong women in comics.

George Washington walked by, and a pair of scissors slipped out of my hand, banging the table loudly. The man in the suit asks me to be quiet, to which I respond, yelling, "I DON'T CARE." The man only adds on, reproachfully, regarding General Washington, "He's not well."

Snipe Hunt Minis - Mini-Ciono by *professorhazard on deviantART

It was shaping up to be a tolerable Monday. I got cleaned up, got shaved up real nice, got dressed. Printed out a nice glossy copy of my PDS Bender to hang in my cubicle as a big "LOL" to my bosses. And then, the troubles began.

You see, the night before, my father had brought home some fried chicken from the grocery store. sashafiero, the first to try it out, found it so spicy (the package did not mention such spices) that she couldn't finish it. Having the rest of it myself, I found that the dough had been infused with what seemed to my taste buds to be chili powder. Interesting, not entirely bad. I had the rest of her share. Then I had my share, then I had all remaining shares, since Dad decided he didn't want to tempt fate by having any. Such a wise man.

I was up and down through the night dealing with it, but the worst came this morning, when I was revisited by all that chili powder... except on the opposite side of my body. And that orifice, my friends, does not take well to chili powder. No, not much at all. Suffice it to say there was about ten minutes of fist-clenching silent screaming going on in the bathroom this morning.

Now the problem is... I can't tell when it's done. And I've missed the whole morning of work. And my dad is going to give me a heck of stern look for sabotaging myself for eating all that chicken. He's disappointed, I'm disappointed, and I can't even make it out the door to do something about it. This, friends, is what you might call feeling "helpless". No one to blame but myself and my gluttony. Except, perhaps, whoever packaged the chicken in the first place.

Snipe Hunt Minis - Mini-Jeff by *professorhazard on deviantART

I just realized that Brian Cox would be just perfect to play the role of Wobbles the Clown* in some sort of biopic of life in Kingsport.

Wobbles was the kind of man that, no matter when he died, it just wouldn't have seemed like it was his time to go. He is missed.

* Wobbles the Clown died from complications of being an elderly drunken clown before the Internet really had a chance to take off for him