Jeez, it's been this long already?!

Okay, well, I've been neglecting my blog, which is doubly irresponsible now that my brother lives far away and I'm terribly out of touch with him.  The biggest news, I guess, is that I did the above art piece to be auctioned for charity.  Every year, this local coffee place does a silent auction event called Valentine for AIDS.  The money raised goes to help cover treatment for AIDS patients that isn't covered by their insurance.  My piece went for $150, woo!

I also got a commission to do another like it.  I guess this would be my first ever commission for real money by a complete stranger  .I say "real money" because I've taken for-fun requests from people for online game items, and "complete stranger" because I've done commissions for substantial amounts in the past, but always for family or,  in a couple of cases, coworkers.

This piece was one of those  not-for-real-money commissions.  It was a lot of fun:  I did quite a bit more digitally in this piece than usual.  The darkness and foggyness, as well as the dark beam that the little guy is shooting through the green cyborg mutant hamster; all added digitally.





This piece actually languished unfinished for years in a file among other works.  If I remember correctly, I was agonizing about how to color the sky without oversaturating it with over-strong American flag blue.  I finally figured out that a plain blue colored pencil does the trick.  The drawing had been finished all the way back in 2004, but it made its internet debut just a couple months ago.





This drawing was a commission for a Christmas card.  It was important that this be a Christmas card, not a holiday card or a "season's greetings" card, but a celebration-of-the-birth-of-Christ card.  A snapshot of a homely church Christmas play did the trick nicely.





Last and possibly least, this is just another mandala that had its beginnings as a lowly at-work doodle.












Let's see, what else. . . Since September I've gotten a wicked, yellow-and-grey vaccuum cleaner with a built-in mini-vac thing for getting pet hair off stuff.  I went to Portland during a week when the Interstate between Boise and Portland had been closed most of the time because of snow, spent a week with my mother-in-law there and didn't even come close to getting in a wreck (or wanting to). 

After playing the RPG Persona 3: FES on the PS2 nearly every night since it came out last April, I finally gave up on it and bought the next installment, Persona 4.  Boy did I ever get my money's worth from that game.  Speaking of, I also borrowed The World Ends With You for Nintendo DS from my brother, and I've been playing that game into the ground as well.  Zero Punctuation's Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's review of TWEWY is correct all around, but I still really like both the game and Yahtzee's reviews.  I recommend watching even the ones for games you've never played.

I also (finally) got subscribed to Netflix, and have sampled a good number of anime series that I've liked and a couple not so much.  Although it's difficult for most people to find anything to complain about with Netflix, I have to say that it fills me with an inappropriate amount of rage to have single volumes out of multiple anime series showing up in my queue as "very long wait" (basically, forget about renting it through them) when it's a brand new popular series.  Yeah, you guys might want to invest in a copy of the 8th volume of Fate/Stay Night.

I finally finished reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novel series.  I managed to make it the third time through, thanks to the audiobooks.  I've also listened to his latest, Anathem. 

The only other thing I can think to add in this update is that I discovered the music of Jonathan Coulton.  His music often speaks directly to/about geek culture, usually in a humble, unassuming way with just his guitar and a mic.