PROJECTS: PART 2

Just to give everyone a heads up. ZOMBITORIUM.COM is being designed as you read this. It may take me a while with my fucked up work schedule and all, but hopefully I'll have something up by mid July.

PROJECTS

All you readers (all six of you) no doubt have seen a list of things I wish to accomplish before the end of the year. That list is going to get thrown out for now. I got a job (an awful one) and going back to school is going to be difficult since my MBA application got REJECTED. Other than using Dan McCleary's computer chair, everything else was accomplished.

So time to make a new list. It's been a long while since I've built a new physical project. A little more than a year ago I helped my father build an attic and before that were a few wacky projects in college. Those projects will of course be discussed in a later post.

The next project will have to be something dangerous and downright diabolical. Trying to earn money by working long hours in tech support has made me even more short tempered than usual. It's time to direct some of this destructive energy into making a weapon. What kind of weapon you ask... well a flame thrower of course.

After reading The Zombie Survival Guide by Michael Brooks, I realized that I needed more effective means of destroying hordes of the undead if they ever choose to attack my home. Small firearms aren't very useful against the undead. A well placed head shot on a Zombie with any round smaller than a .44 may not be enough. Automatic weapons are also in short supply for many of us civilian folk, so small arms fire will not be sufficient to fend off a full horde.

A home built flamethrower is the perfect answer. If the flame thrower is properly constructed, it can be capable of deliviring a stream of flame over 40 feet in length. Perfect for a nice spread flame over a wide area to kill as many zombies as possible.

There are well documented ways on building your own flame thrower for less than 100 bucks using pvc piping and a few valves. The design can be as simple as making on long pvc tube capped off at both ends. This of course limits your choice of flamable materials. PVC piping dissolves in gasoline making the fuel necessary for a proper flame thrower a little more scarce. The next alternative would be denatured alcohol but this too has known issues. To make sure there would be no leaks in the aparatus, pvc cementing glue and teflon would have to be used but unfortunately both of those materials are dissolved by denatured alcohol.

The next possible alternative is to use a cheap bug sprayer used by any lawn-care service. Not only are these tanks relatively inexpensive but they're designed to be pressurized. The tank can be pressurized using any common air compressor. All that would be left is the spraying apparatus with a pilot light attached. There you have it, a flame thrower ready to burn armies of the undead to a cinder.

NEWS UPDATE

I have registered the domain zombitorium.com and within a few days I will begin to build a full fledged website. I'm growing tired of this blogging business. While blogspot's hosting is free, there's not much I can do in terms of design. Needless to say there's a lot of work in the near future for what I have planned.

MY FAVORITE RECORDS: PART 1

A common question I hear everyday is "What kind of music do you listen to?" This always amuses me because after the age of 20 very few people care what music anyone listens to. The answer to the question however is typically, "All kinds." For now that means remixed tracks from old videogames available for download from VGMIX and OCREMIX. What people don't know is that I have a secret stash of old hip-hop tracks. The bright colored neon style of early 80's hip-hop help to brigthen my day. Take a look at the cover to my favorite Devastatin' Dave record.

I'M HAVING A BAD DAY

MOVING ALONG NOW. LET'S ALL TAKE A LOOK AT THE SCIENTOLOGY HANDBOOK: THE DUMBEST BOOK EVER PRINTED

Seeing as how I can't seem to get my Buckaroo Bonzai flash applet to work correctly, it's time to move on to some photoshop. Recently someone scanned in pictures from THE SCIENTOLOGY HANDBOOK and posted them on the Something Awful forums. These pictures, taken either in the late 1970's through the mid 80's, depict individuals using Scientology in their everday lives.

Unfortunately these pictures make little sense and leave you scratching your head and saying "what in the holy fuck is wrong with these people?" Take a look at some examples.

FIRE
SIMILARITIES ARE SIMILAR!
STUPID FUCKING REDNECK
MAGICAL WAREHOUSE ADVENTURE
YES, I'M FEELING BRIGHTER ALREADY!
TIME FOR A MANLY EMBRACE
WHAT?
THE CHAIR AND TABLE INCIDENT

Pay close attention to the last picture as it is the subject of my most recent photoshop. Naturally with idiocy like this one can't help but make a visual joke for all to see. But since working a crummy tech support job has pretty much ruined all my abilities for humor and creativity, I made an adaptation of a Red Meat comic strip by Max Canon.

Take a look at my adaptation and enjoy.

Goddamnit! Seems like I'm still doing this wrong.

20 YEARS FROM NOW, THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE WILL CLAIM THIS MOVIE AS BEING THE BEST MOVIE EVER MADE

Screw you Citizen Kane, say hello to the next cinematic masterpiece.

"After 20, no one cares if you're nice."
- George Orwell

Status Anxiety. Every adult life, he says, is defined by two great love stories. The first is our quest for sexual love, which is well known and well charted. The second is our quest for love from the world, and that's a more secret and shameful tale.

A few words of wisdom that seem to ring true as adulthood kicks into full gear. In any sort of social situation the same question keeps getting asked. "What do you do?" For a while now all I could say was "Not much, but I make a lot of bad art on the side." Now I get to tell them "I'm an internet technology specialist!" (aka, teach southerners how to right click)

It's always inspiring to see someone who manages to be successful at doing something they love. As a person who's been praised for certain creative talents the aspect of accepting mediocrity is very dissapointing. I guess what it all boils down to is if I am to be judged for what I do in life, then I'd prefer to be doing something that I enjoy.

Maybe I'll stick around and get the digital art degree instead of an MBA. Maybe I'm just thinking too much.

WOW! WINDOWS REALLLY IS CRAP!

Right now I'm making this post while running the latest version of Knoppix. For those of you who don't know, Knoppix is a linux distribution that is exists on a single cd. Meaning, if you want to run linux, all you need to do is pop in the cd and boot off of the drive. The entire OS is loaded into RAM.

For the past two months my good friend Edward Carter offered to teach me how to program in perl and I never could because I couldn't install linux on this machine. Apparently you cannot partition a "dynamic" hard drive. Luckily on my birthday, John Roland (god bless is heart) handed me a copy of Knoppix.

Just today I started running Knoppix just as a little project for the night. This is the first time I've used Linux since my Junior year of college. Then I was using a commercial distribution of Debian called "Stormix" for my programming classes.

So here's the real kicker about Knoppix. You already know that it runs off of cd and loads itself into the RAM of your machine. What you probably didn't know is that despite all this, Knoppix runs much faster on my machine than Windows XP ever did. That's just shameful. Now, to reinstall everything and to get Adobe CS working on Linux...

Weegee used the trunk of his car as a darkroom.

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, contributed images of murder, mayhem, and drama to New York's press through the 1930's and 40's. Weegee derived his name from the phonetic spelling of Ouija, claiming that psychic powers enabled him to be the first at fires, crime scenes and the like.

A little photoshop or two of famous photography helps pass the time on a Sunday morning. Here, take a look.



If you want to see more of the work of Mr. WeeGee, then go visit here, here, and here.

"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it's like to live as a slave."
-Roy Batty -- "Blade Runner"

After staying up 22 hours yesterday it doesn't make any sense for me to have only 6 hours of sleep. It is possible to be so mentally worn down by shit work that you or anyone else would be willing to fight off feelings of fatigue just to be with friends. The lack of adventure and social interraction is getting to me.

Needless to say, an adventure is required. At 24 years old I have too many regrets and not enough happy memories. A certain level of caution was always there to prevent me from taking those risks. Caution can be helpful at times. A careful forethought that hopefully prevents one from doing extremely stupid activities. Activities such as running around in a thunderstorm while carrying a t.v. antennae wrapped in tin foil. The problem with being a cautious person is that it's hard to have fun in life without taking stupid risks.

Imagine seeing Surgeon General warning labeles plastered on everything you see but not just for cigarettes and alcohol. Right now I see getting an MBA at ASU as "WARNING: Persuing higher education in a field you were never suited for will cause regret and loss of friends." Thus staying in Arizona is labeled as "WARNING: If you don't leave now your life will never change." At the same time leaving home reads as "WARNING: May cause endless wandering and poverty." The worst is seeing this label on a woman I find attractive. "WARNING: Persuing relations with this person may cause heartbreak, humiliation, and financial loss."

All these labels are generated by fear. Back in October, someone very close to me, someone I loved very much asked me if I would go skydiving with her. I was mortified with fear over the idea of jumping out of an airplane. "I don't want to be that 1/10000th guy who's parachute doesn't open." While a parachute not opening is a valid concern and a dangerous possiblity, that wasn't the reason why I didn't go skydiving. Fear had gotten the best of me. Here was an activity that I wanted to do, but my own fear wouldn't allow it.

The only way to strengthen a relationship is to take a risk. I learned the hard way that if you don't take risks with the person you care about, then they just might go find someone else who will. The skydiving opportunity is just one incident out of many that led to the demise of a relationship that I cherished above all others. Feelings of regret and bitterness bubble up from my stomach when I look back at it all and that's the problem. No one should feel regret looking back at their lives. Instead, they should be able to look back and say "at least I took a chance."

WELCOME TO THE BOTTOM OF THE HOLE

At least that's what a fellow co-worker told me yesterday. It seems like the University of Phoenix is where people go when they fail or get screwed over. Outside of these walls people are moving on to bigger and better things. Folks are moving into their careers, getting married, etc...

Where am I and what am I doing? I'm in the hole.

I'M SORRY

One look at my site statistics have shown that hits have gone down like a lot of percents! I want to apologize to my loyal readers out there who come here everyday looking for TOTALLY AWESOME content. Life's been a little rough in the Zombitorium as of late. My usual content of gross crap, vector traced animation stills, and cooky images has been replaced with boring tales of how I'm a cog in a machine.

Well, just to give you a flavor of the old stuff. Here's an animated picture from one of my favorite movies of all time. Batman.


"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"

Trapped Inside

Greetings from the university of Phoenix Online building 3201. As stated in one of my comments, I'm interviewing later today for a graphic design job at U.S. Screen Printing. Hopefully I can jump ship out of a job that would require me to answer phones for the second half of a day and do something that's more suitable for my talents.

Just being in a work setting again has made me calmer. There is a fear lurking inside this old brain that this type of job will turn me into quite a mundane individual. It must be a new mission for me not to become an uncharismatic working stiff. The environment here is much like the environment back at Eller College. White boards, power point slides, and lots of crude office humor. However, a lot of the fellow trainees are nice and interesting people.

Many of the guys here are ex-military folk just trying to get by. Others have been working in tech support since the mid 90's and are trying to recover from massive lay-offs that occurred not too long ago at MCI. A very lovely young lady sitting next to me shared a story about working as a convenience store clerk. She told stories about the many items that were thrown at her while working. The most notable item was a whiskey bottle followed closely by a sub sandwich.

The working world is indeed a bitch and it does make one dream of a hermit like existence up in a cold foggy mountain. Only problem with a cold foggy mountain would be the lack of photoshop + illustrator. I'd give anything right now if I could photoshop a killer whale jumping out of the ocean while having air to surface missiles attached to its fins.

GOODBYE

I'll be gone for the next two months. The goal: earn enough money to leave. So to my friends who I will not see during the hours of 4 p.m. - 2 a.m., you will be missed.

FINISHED IN A SINGLE DAY

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Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you my latest vector trace. This is Zack Hugh from the "Running Man" animated short you may remember seeing on MTV's Liquid Television back in 1992.

REMIND ME TO NEVER VISIT CARLSBERG

Goddamn that photo creeps me out. Now onto the list.


  1.  Build web server with John
  2.  Create new lay out for blog and other blogs
  3.  Create post about the wonders of drinking black lemonade
  4.  Create MAME box of own design.
  5.  Learn to how cook Agedashi Tofu for a pot luck
  6.  Sit in and use Dan McCleary's fabled computer chair
  7.  Defeat "Ghosts and Goblins" on the NES.
  8.  Finish and perfect my upcomming zombie tribute to DeChirico
  9.  Rewatch all the good movies from the past 2 years with Sara when she returns
10.  Study for and pass the GMAT with flying colors
11.  Get a job.
12.  Go hiking in Havasupai
13.  Go back to school


Well technically I got a job. A real shitty job that starts on monday. It will get me money, but it's the graveyard shift. Luckily I'm still in the running for a few jobs at other locations, so with any luck I'll get hired onto them while training for the god awful one I have now.

Sorry, I just wanted an excuse to post the cover to one of my favorite NES games. RESCUE: THE EMBASSY MISSION Yesterday's events, while not as thrilling as rescuing an embassy from terrorists, are interesting enough to make a decent story.

At around 11:00 AM I receive a call from my good friend John Roland. John provided the usual "Hey how's it going," phone conversation starter but there was a slight hint of anxiety in his voice. While conversing back to John the usual "not much right now," a faint voice was heard in the background saying, "SAVE US." That voice belonged to Ryan Smith. John, knowing that I heard Mr. Smith's cry for help, fessed up when I asked him where he was at the moment.

John and Ryan had gone hiking up South Mountain. The two of them started in the early morning and managed to hike for four hours. Their goal was to reach the T.V. Towers stationed at the top of South Mountain. When John and Ryan finally reached the towers, they were out of water. Rather than face dehydration and heat-stroke, they decided to enlist someone to drive up the mountain and save them.

So in the car I went off to the mountain to save my friends in peril. A problem soon arose. I didn't know how to reach them. Worse yet, my car was severely low on precious gasoline. There existed a possibility that I could get stranded up on the mountain along with my friends. Of course that possibility didn't stop me from being hasty and reckless. My friends needed me! So up the windy roads of South Mountain Park I went.

When the sign says to go only 15 mph on the road to the T.V. Tower, it's not fucking around. Even my little Honda, with its outstanding turning radius, was having difficulty navigating around this narrow road. Adding to the suspense and danger, the gas needle kept falling down near that horrible little 'E'. I arrived at the small look-out parking lot at the summit where I found Ryan and John conversing with people inside a large white truck. Inside the truck were two Native American gentlemen. The driver was named Clancy and the passenger (whose name I don't remember) was very drunk.

John and Ryan were happy to see their rescuer had finally arrived. Their eyes bugged out once they saw the two large bottles of fresh water I brought to quench their thirst for precious water. They climbed into the car as I cranked up the A.C. and we soon headed back home. Of course going down the mountain along that windy road was twice as scary going up it. The road was no match for my superior driving skills and everyone made it back to John's house safe and sound.