"and you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking..."

Here I am, 37 years old, wondering where the hell the time has gone. Sometimes I think I should invent a fuckup detector. It could bleep through the timelines and show you exactly where you fucked up. That would be free- fixing the fuckup would cost $99.95 (this week only!) I’d make a mint! But then wouldn’t all the web of possibilities in the multiverse become ensared, some pruned, some twisting back upon themselves? But if there’s an infinite number of possibilities, would one or two less matter? How do you define infinity -1? Of course while possibilities are infinite, probabilities are not. (Yes, this is what I lie in bed thinking about.)

Time just keeps slipping by. I think of Pink Floyd. “And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you…” Or I think of Mister Dark in Something Wicked this Way Comes, tearing the years of my life away, page by page.

Well I don’t mean to be depressing or anything, I’ve just been introspective today. Thank you so much to all my friends for all your birthday wishes. Here’s to another year of beating the reaper!

TTFN
-Tony

Morning Kvetchings

Some cool building on 5th avenue lit up red in the early morning.

Once again, my loathing of the MTA knows no bounds. They are my cross to bear, a blight upon my existence. The ads on the subway are depressing to the point I want to eat my own spleen. Most of them are attempts to get me to go back to school so I can better my life. There are romance novel ads, "Evelyn... The middle sister who had it all, but there's trouble in paradise." ConEd (Save money by cleaning out your AC filters!) I just want to shut my eyes and blot the world out. The train is old, the ride is slow but rocking and bumpy because the infrastructure of the city is falling to hell in a ham sandwich and I keep knocking my head back against an ad for storage space and I wonder how many other heads have banged against it and did they have cooties and did the cooties become one with the advertisement until being awakened by my head?

Speaking of advertisements, every Bloomberg ad makes me want to vomit. I just have something against politicians who perform end-rushes around term limits because "we need him." If he's so goddamn wonderful then he should have worked his magic over the eight years he had in office to help us instead of seeing us merely as money making assets.

The screeching wheels are like razor blades against my nerves. God, I'm crotchety today. Isn't that a great word, "crotchety"? I feel like I'm the first Doctor. I can picture Beavis saying "crotchety" over and over again. “Crrrrrrrrotchety!!!” God, I miss Beavis and Buthead. "For there is but one bunghole! One almighty bunghole…"

Here we are screeching into Lex & 53rd. This station is so filthy. That's it's claim to fame, being filthy. There used to be a guy who sang opera for cash. A woman with a tremendous voice used to sing blues standards here too. Did they try America's Got Talent, or perhaps American Idol?

OK friends and neighbors, it’s been fun kvetching to you. Hope you all have a nice day.

TTFN
-Tony

OK, So He's Not Doctor Killinger...

Can someone please tell me what President Obama has possibly done to earn the Nobel Peace Prize? So all you have to do is be a democratic president following a republican hawk? Is this anything but just a political statement or god forbid, part of that whole worship thing I keep hearing about?

TTFN
-Tony

Kvetching Pays Off!

I start a new job tomorrow! Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers. Here's hoping it's a good one - I'll let you know :)

TTFN
-Tony

More Thoughts that Keep Me Awake at Night...

Ok, if it's true that only two people know the secret to making Coca-Cola, then how the hell does it get made? Do those two guys fly from plant to plant every morning?

TTFN
-Tony

Stimulating my Package

Hello friends and neighbors. I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while. I’m still unemployed, still surviving, still breathing in and out. Still listening to Doctor Who. I went to download a new one tonight and it’s taking hours because either Verizon is slow or Big Finish’s server is slow or who knows somebody somewhere is slow. Holy fuck, it’s October already. In eleven months I’ve worked three weeks. I guess that stimulus package isn’t working too well. Everything’s getting more expensive. My rent’s going up next month. Every night for the past three days our hot water mysteriously stops working. I feel like I’m just killing time but I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I feel like I’m just surviving day by day. How many games can I waste time with? At least I have my writing, and my friends and family have been amazingly supportive, more than I could have ever imagined. Soon the year will be over and I won’t have anything to balance out the humongous tax bill I’m going to owe the government, because I was stupidly counting on working… oh I don’t know… just a few months this year. Because the government has done such a goddamn fine job of running things that they deserve my money.

I feel like I’m just whining writing this. I don’t know. I think of Vonnegut and how he said that the point of writing was to show other people that they weren’t alone. Maybe I’d have to be writing anonymously to completely do that, but maybe this will help some other poor schmuck know they’re not alone.

Bye for now, keep your teeth clean.

TTFN
-Tony

Everywhere I See Them There I Stop & Stare at Patterns...

Illustration Friday: Pattern

(Please click above for higher resolution.)

TTFN
-Tony

To Infinity...

(Please click the above image for higher resolution.)

The Illustration Friday word of the week is Infinity. There seems to be a lot of stuffed packed into it :)

TTFN
-Tony

Sci-fi Weirdness

(please click above for higher resolution)

This was the background to something that just didn't work, but I liked it on it's own :)

TTFN
-Tony

Remembrance

Here we are again on 9/11. I considered posting my letter that I wrote at the time as I've done for the past few years. Instead I decided to write something new and just link to it.

I don't know what to say.

I remember feeling angry and afraid all the time. I remember working restoring power to buildings afterward and seeing the giant column of smoke in the air for months and smelling that horrible burning all the time and knowing that part of what I was smelling were people who had been loved and needed. I remember being terrified that what I was breathing would make me or my family sick. I remember watching people on the subway for the next few weeks, unashamedly crying. 9/11/2002 everyone left their construction jobs to stand in the street for fifteen minutes of silence. Last year, I worked at a building right next door to ground zero, and we got to take a minute to stand by the window if we wished. Life goes on I guess.

It's eight years later and if I think about it, I just feel angry. I'm angry that my friend lost his brother. I'm angry that some of my friends and family had to risk their lives overseas- some of whom still are (take care of yourself, Jimmy.) I'm angry that there's been such an infinitesimally small amount of reconstruction downtown in the last eight years. I'm angry that our constitution got shredded to pieces. I'm angry that our economy keeps spiraling further and further into the toilet. I'm angry that I haven't worked but a few weeks in the past ten months.

I don't know how to end this. I could tell everyone to hug their children, I could tell everyone to be excellent to each other, I could tell everyone to write their congressbeings and tell them to get their asses in gear, who knows. I think I'll just leave you all with your own memories and feelings.

TTFN
-Tony

Firefox Risen from the Ashes

I've used Mozilla's Firefox for a long time. There are two main reasons. One, it has Adblock Plus, which means that I can happily browse the web or watch videos without seeing goddamn commercials that may pay for but have completely ruined the internet, and two, it has Video Downloadhelper which lets me easily save videos from almost any site.

Recently, Firefox 3.0x was slowing down, so I upgraded to 3.52. This is where my troubles began. The new installation took five minutes to load, and then every page itself would take at least ten minutes. Searching the web did not help, just pages and pages of people with problems like mine but with no solution. I tried reinstalling my earlier version to no avail.

I tried some different browsers. Safari is very pretty, but has no add-ons for the Windows version. Opera just was another browser, nothing really special. Chrome is very fast, but again, no ad-ons. I don't even want to talk about IE.

I took the plunge and removed every key I could find mentioning Firefox or Mozilla from the registry (kiddies don't try this at home!) I restarted, reinstalled, and VIOLA! I can surf without annoying ads again! I can download videos easily again!

God, I feel good about myself when I solve annoying problems :)

TTFN
-Tony

Speech, speech!

Today, my children will more than likely hear President Obama’s welcome back speech telling them to (gasp!) take personal responsibility and (good gravy!) stay in school. Who cares? I think if anything, kids across the nation will simply zone out from boredom, or throw things (if they're in an assembly) or make obnoxious comments back, or doodle, or fantasize about the girl sitting in front of them - you know, things kids do. I’ve always been confused by the fear of children hearing a whisper from an ideology that their parents don’t agree with, and adults who are terrified to hear a whisper of a conflicting ideology make me giggle even more. I always have the utmost respect for people who can hear an idea they don’t believe in and actually consider it and think about logically. Of course, there are limits, (like the time I took the painstaking effort to explain to my son that Cinco de Mayo was the day of mourning for the 10,000 jars of mayonnaise lost on the Titanic, but his teacher had the gall to insist it was some holiday or something,) but people who are comparing this morning’s speech to the organizing of the Hitler Youth need to turn down their exaggeration meters a few hundred notches.

TTFN
-Tony

Spider-Thingie

Just for shits and giggles, I've been making a sort of spider thingie with 3ds Max. Here's the work in progress, hope you enjoy!




TTFN
-Tony

High School Sketchbook

Here are two images I dug up from my old high school sketchbook. (Click on images for higher resolution.) Enjoy!


William Hartnell



TTFN
-Tony

Illustration Friday: Wrapped

Please click above for higher resolution.

TTFN
-Tony

Boring

Welcome to today's boring post. There's nothing really going on here. I'm still unemployed, my life consists of pretending to be Mister Mom when it rages against my inner Mister Slob. Somedays I wish I could teleport to my own island somewhere, or even better my own planet. I think it would be a nice blue one. My days are spent walking, writing, farting around on fb, chatting with friends, eating, playing games, and wishing not that life was differenet so much as wishing I was different.

In between having kids want to play with me all the time, I've been trying my damndest to make the end of this one novel work so I can finish SOMETHING in my life, and feeling frustrated. I'm also putting time in on this week's Illustration Friday, so stay tuned.

OK, onward to a game of Civ4 with Joe. Any other Civ fans out there? How about Spore? You know what would be an even more fasciating strategy game? If instead of playing a civilization or a lifeform, you got to design a human brain, and what went into it and what happens to it, and see how it turns out. Instead of adding things like learning how to hunt or learning electricity, you could have spanked by parents, wet pants in second grade gym class, first kiss, brother killed in car crash, or won first prize in elementary school art contest. I know, this sounds a lot like GRIOT in Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus, but I think it would be much more interesting. Like the song says, "All in all it's just another brick in the wall."

OK, more later, a big :) to my friends out there. Can't help missing you all when you're far away.

TTFN
-Tony