My latent psychic abilities have flared up lately. They're not supercool psionics or anything as bitchin' as all that--i can't, for example, toss cars with my mind--but i can subtlely cause things to screw up, or machines to malfunction. liquids to spill, and I can summon bees. Maybe it's not so fantastic, and maybe it's just a crappy workday. I prefer to believe I possess some nascent powers that will one day develop into a full-blown psychokinetic hurricane before its rigors cause me to explode into a jellied mess. Today, i wreck paint spraying apparatus, tomorrow i crush whole industrial parks with a thought!

I "borrowed" my friend's copy of HBO's "Rome", season one. I put "borrowed" in quotation marks on the off chance he reads this and thus suspects that I plan on keeping it indefinitely until it becomes absorbed into my collection, just like his special edition of Dune. Ha ha ha, you sucker. When you buy a replacement copy of something a friend has borrowed, you're handing him a thief's victory on a silver platter. Bwa ha ha.

Anyway. That series rocks so hard. You could cut 50% of it as nonhistorical or artistic license and it'd still be brutal. Not ten minutes goes by without someone killing, lying to, or screwing someone, or all three at once. A mere two or three episodes in and the sight of someone eating the business end of a dagger or being drenched in animal blood is just business as usual. I think what i appreciate most is all the ho-hum everyday details that by modern standards are ghastly transgressions. A servant bumps into someone and they get five across the face without a conversation even breaking tempo. Politicians have a vote that ends in brawling and attempted strangulation. Slavery is rendered as about as boring and trivial as grocery shopping. If people are concerned about rampant sexuality in today's culture, hoo boy...there's a ways still to go. It doesn't have the all-too-common revisionist-history vibe, where modern mores and ideals are projected into a historical context. It's hard-down on representing an era of human history and if any punches are being pulled, it's hard to know where.

Actually completely unrelated to all that stuff...awhile ago I got a good, stern review via dA notes regarding my posted work on this site. It came as a shock but not really an unpleasant one. It'd be easy for someone to just open the hate-spigot and unleash and say how crappy i am at my work and how i'm just a hack and blah blah blah, but if they're reading this and I haven't made it clear, i really appreciate that they took the time and the honesty to make a good case about where i stand as an artist. They were not unkind or abusive, but realistic. I think i take it for granted that I have an opportunity to show my work and the opportunity to entertain, and just because I get an occasional "I love your stuff!" is no reason to assume I've achieved anything, or that I can ignore my obvious weaknesses.

It takes a certain amount of effort to bluntly throw down the "you're not as good as you might be led to think you are" gauntlet. It's delusional for me to think that I don't get SOME kind of enjoyment out of being watched and commented and praised; in fact i think any artist who expressly denies such feelings is guilty of an entirely different but no less potent form of vanity. It's important to me that people like what I make, but it's just as important or maybe even more so that I occasionally get aired out and humbled by an informed opinion. That this person took the time to look at my body of work as a whole and offer an outsider's opinion on my actual development at the craft really struck me as thoughtful.

deviantart's been good to me. Having an audience, regardless of size, has helped me improve more than I could if i was just working for myself. I think i have more confidence in what i do and a more ready mentality to learn and improve, if not by observing the works of tremendously talented artists on this site, then from commentary and suggestions both positive and negative.

boy, that just reads as boring, doesn't it? Whatever. Thanks, dA. I'll submit more crap soon

ja, mata