Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

My Oculus Rift arrived yesterday and I have no Windows machine to run it with (and they've still not released the Mac SDK). So rather than fall into a pit of despair, let's focus on some recent positives.

Visited my parents in Vancouver two weekends ago. Lounged in my verdant childhood backyard and gobbled a number of fruits and veggies right off the vine. Saw The Book of Mormon. Did a lot of reading.

Our head of Engineering keeps bringing in veggies from his garden, a most kind and appreciated gesture. On a Friday my posse & I made squash/everything/anything cookies. Too much egg resulted in them being more like mini muffins than cookies... but still good! The whole squash that was grated and tossed in did no harm!

Visited Seattle last weekend for a wedding. The planets aligned and my sisters were both in town as well (for their own Washington based weddings to attend). Always disturbing to see which parts of you come from your family, visible in the looks and behaviors of siblings. Weddings that prominently feature Jesus and preach about marriage belonging only to men and women are aaaaaawkward.

I've been carefully grooming a playlist themed on my character Jaya from the 4th Terminus game. Good times, been listening to it a lot. A lot. Have found myself doodling while sitting on airplanes (a disturbingly common occurrence lately) and I've been running through my list of tabletop characters but frequently finding myself back to drawing Jaya.

I've been pushing numbers around at work lately. Wringing my hands frantically wishing load times to be faster. Pulling at my hair trying to extract meaningful information from a pile of logged data. I appreciate the diversity of work for my current team- writing SQL statements, poking at iOS code, still battling JavaScript, and possibly getting better at python (I still hate python)

I saw Snowpiercer in theaters. Twice. Damn fine film. Most excellent. Best thing I've seen in a long while. I felt good while watching it, like someone hitting a hard to reach itch. Have finally escaped my horror shlump of reading material and am back on a good kick of distopian material. Am on book 3 of the Silo series (which starts with Wool). The author, Hugh Howey seems like a cool guy. Finally read Starship Troopers. Am looking forward to the new Mad Max movie coming out in 2015.

My old art blog just passed 10k views.

Orange Monster

It's been a while since I made a monster... Not since March, I believe. They're still on my mind, I've just been so distracted by other things and lacking any good mindless TV to watch while I work.

This fellow is yet another crab-parts monster. Much simpler this time, working on the theory of less is more. The core of this fellow is just foam so he's super light and squishy but not lumpy/shifting. The legs are just basic pipe cleaners I believe. The whole thing was super easy to make.

Unfortunately, I just brought my first crab-parts monster home from work and found his forward leg-claw to be chipped on the tip! Not sure if that's a sign that they will decompose further or just that they're brittle and I'm a clutz... Also not sure how to actually repair it... But the whole monster never really pleased me so not that big of loss... maybe it'll be one of the first monsters I finally throw out....

It's too bad that the only big claws I had all curved in the same direction... too many lefties I guess. Also, one of the claws has a chipped bump. The orange/white color scheme makes it pretty forgivable though. The little fellow looks like a creamsicle! I like the large bulging eyes as well, though I still wonder if I should have put a lid on it.

I enjoy this little guy- the fact he was easy to make helps a lot. The way I sewed down his legs makes him rather floppy and easy to pose/place on things-- they come together so as to lightly "grip" something but can't bend too far back (because the body is in the way) and therefor can stand pretty reliably (though low to the ground).

Because our house is already crawling with my monsters and I like to keep a fresh rotation at work, this fellow is currently listed over at my Etsy shop as Orange Crab Claw Monster. Or you could just ask me for it in person and I'd be happy to give it to you for free. All monsters priced to move!