Haven't wrote in a while, but looks like everything's official. For most of my friends, I think you know what I'm talking about. If not, they say pictures tell a thousand words, so here's a thousand words for you:
Alright, that was two thousand words. Sue me. :b Don't worry guys, I'll be back like crack so don't get a heart attack.
So yes, it's about that time again, where comic convention season kicks off. First convention of the year: New York Comic Con. Great time, got to meet alot of artists, stay motivated, and got a lot of good advice. My portfolio review basically summed up to this: You are a good storyteller, now learn to draw. :T Lots of work to do!
Highlights:
- Kyle Baker offering to review my portfolio. The man is a 5 time Eisner and 4 time Harvey winner (the Oscars of comics) The fact the guy still has time to look over my stuff is just flattering to know.
- Hayden Patiennerre was also present (the cheerleader from Heroes) Looks the same in person as she does on camera. Minus the cheerleader outfit. I was very tempted to bumrush her table screaming "Save the cheerleader save the world!" but managed to keep my composure.
- Gary Coleman. Yes, Mr. Watchu Talkin Bout Willis. When I passed by, his table was empty. :b
Not So Cool
- Waiting in line for AN HOUR for Rob Liefeld for an autograph, and being a no show.
- Another long ass line for Jeff Smith of Bone fame. I got smart and left this line. :D And got a free Bone tshirt to go with that
- Inexorbant long lines for Marvel artists. Blah, I already got my autograph with Jim Lee and a picture. I'm good to go.
And yes, of course, everyone wants to the see the pictures: The line. Keep in mind this was after waiting in line from 39th Street. (Jacob Javitts is on 34th) Some goblin vs some anime character What comic convention is complete without the Storm Trooper pic. Darth Vader was in the house too but I was too lazy to take a pic with the crew The line was too long for him. Plus you had to get a ticket. I did want to shout "Nice cameo as the bus driver on Heroes!" though. Pikachu. And yes, that is a full grown adult next to him. That's how large the outfit was. I don't think the suit had eye holes either, because he had to be escorted by a person everywhere he went. I don't know which Transformer this is. :b
All in all a great time. Hope to see more at San Diego Comic Con!
"Much to success to ya, even if you wish me the opposite Sooner or later we'll all see who the prophet is"
-- Nas "Nas Is Like"
“The best part about falling is getting back up again”
BTW, the guy has been doing harder jumps than this for 15 years. Just watch Banlieue 13 to see what I'm talking about.
So the year has finally past. For those that actually talk to me, they would know I through a lot of shit this year. I’ve lost many things from employment to family members and friends all in the span of months. I’ve been backstabbed, and people who I thought were my friends turned out to be my enemies. Just remember you reap what you sow, and negativity breeds negativity. Maybe not the worst year ever, but God has given me enough dosage of pain to feel the burn just a little. (alright, it fucking hurt) I know I’m keep a lot of things vague, but I guess maybe xanga isn’t the forum to air out the dirty laundry. (and I have quite the pile) You take what you can from bad experiences and you learn.
BUT, I’d like to keep it positive. Good things have happened this year, and all the tragedies in my life, I just learn from it and move forward. Always have to get back up when you’re knocked down. A human’s resilience is pretty amazing sometimes. So I rather talk about the good things because well, shit happens all the time, and it’s what you do with it that matters.
In retrospective, I’ve gained a lot of new friends, met a lot of interesting people, and reconnected with old friends. (myspace and facebook does wonders) I’ve discovered Entourage and Heroes. Haha. My art has improved a great amount.(still much room for improvement) I did find a better job in a better work environment, so being canned might just have been a mixed blessing. I definitely enjoy working in the city and having lunch with friends all the time, as well as moving at the fast pace that only the tri-state area could offer. Talk about the the bounceback.
Which brings me to the new year. I fell a little short of my goals this year, and I make no excuses. At this point, no point in crying over spilled milk and I will just make 2007 my best. In the end, I finished off the year strong, and am good to go for the New Year. I’ve read over a couple of other xanga entries, and it seems that everyone is bent on making this coming year their best, and I’m no different. Maybe everyone else went through their trials and tribulations and was just crappy to a lot of people. In a way, it’s nice knowing I’m not alone. All I know is this coming year is the year to make noise and I’m going to make so much of it that my dad and grandmother will be able to hear me wherever they are. Here’s to a good New Years to all, knock’em dead!
I've been fucked over, left for dead, dissed and fogotten Luck ran out, they hoped that I'd be gone, stiff and rotten Y'all just piss on me, shit on me, spit on my grave Talk about me, laugh behind my back but in my face Y'all some well wishin (bitches), friendly actin envy hidin snakes
- Nas "Ether"
Been meaning to post these two, probably my two best pages since I drew them last. This should give insight to the rest of the story for those that bother reading. :b
IF YOU'RE ON MY FRIENDS LIST, I want to know things about you. I don't care if we've never talked, never liked each other, or if we already know everything about each other. I really don't. You are obviously on my list, so let me know with whom I am friends! JUST HIT REPLY.
1.Your Middle Name: 2. Age: 3. Single or Taken: 4. Favorite Movie: 5. Favorite Song: 6. Favorite Band/Artist: 7. Dirty or Clean: 8. Tattoos and/or Piercings:
HERE COMES THE FUN ... ... ...
1. Do we know each other outside of LiveJournal? 2. What's your philosophy on life? 3. Would you have my back in a fight? 4. Would you keep a secret from me if you thought it was in my best interest? 5. What is your favorite memory of us? 6. Would you give me a kidney? 7. Tell me one odd/interesting fact about you: 8. Would you take care of me when I'm sick? 9. Can we get together and make a cake? 10. Have you heard any rumors of me lately? 11. Do you/have you talk(ed) crap about me? 12. Do you think I'm a good person? 13. Would you drive across country with me? 14. Do you think I'm attractive? 15. If you could change anything about me, would you? 16. What do you wear to sleep? 17. Would you come over for no reason just to hang out? 18. Would you go on a date with me if i asked you? 19. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together? 20. Will you post this so I can fill it out for you?
Oh man, what kind of replies am I going to get... :b
Happy Friday everyone! By request, here are the pics from Otakon 2006! Probably the largest convention I've been to, I've also seen the most cosplayers in one spot ever! That is until I ever find a way to San Diego Comic Con, but that's another story. And no, I did not dress up, and if I ever did, I'd probably make sure nobody here on xanga would ever see them. :b Or at least until Lil Neezy would leak them out. :b Here we go! ( Otakon 2006 )
For those wondering about my caricature, I drew that myself. Took me forever to finish it, so someone would have to pay me to make them a caricature. :b But you can create your own Skateboard P versions of yourself at:
"I'm from the Bay where we hyphy and go dumb From the soil where them rappers be getting their lingo from"
-- E40 "Tell Me When To Go"
So I am about a week late with my Convention update. I'm sure everyone already has said their opinion and told the juicy stories. But here is another one, from an alumni's perspective. I thought LA weather would be nicer, but it was actually colder than NJ. But the dryness factor is nice. You don't realize how nice it is until you step off the plane at Newark airport and your balls start sticking to the sides of your legs in 85 degree weather. Pleasant. Everyone is going to have their opinion on how everything was hosted, but overall I do realize there are some things that cannot be avoided. Props to Alpha chapter for pulling it off and having a roof over my head for four days in a row instead of two. :) Highlights of the trip:
- Akadotretail.com's retail store in Gardena. I don't think I have to order art supplies for a while. :D Got G-pen for days. (artist talk)
- Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. One meal from here and you don't have to eat for the rest of the day. I think the picture sums it up.
- In and Out. Jack in a Box. Ok, now I'm tired of fast food.
- I was debating about whether to throw a deuce in this pic or not, but I figure I'm always a youngin next to this guy. :D Our principle founding father, Master Craig Ishigo.
- View from our hotel. One cool thing about Cali is the mountains that always seem to be in the background.
- Getting sworn in as SE Governor. Not the greatest pic, and not even sure if you can see where I am. :b Oh wells, National Board baby!
- What's with all the hyphy music on the radio? Good to see the west with their own movement. But seriously, E40 "Tell Me When To Go" was on the radio about every other 5 minutes. Go dumb!
Belated shoutouts to Purdue on becoming our Alpha Iota chapter, and Carnegie Mellon and Kansas on Associate status. Good to see our syands (Purdue) get promoted. But why you gotta cry Noid? j/p
Another shoutout to my baby Lil Neezy on becoming KDPhi's Rho chapter. Looks like all those all-nighters on my computer with Photoshop paid off huh? :) Love you babes.
Finally, no I did not get shitfaced for my birthday this year. I know. Amazing. There reaches a point in your life when you realize you can't vomit every birthday for the rest of your life. Or at least not for 2006. Here's to being 26 years young! :)
With Star & Bucwild off the air, what am I going to listen to on the way to work now? Damn, his comments about Envy's wife and kids are definitely insensitive and wrong, but dude was a equal opportunity hater. Everyone was on blast equally, and you can't hate on a guy for that. *sigh* There's still Steve Harvey in the morning. You have to wonder though, with a guy that HAD a $17M contract for four years, he must be in demand on the air regardless of what station. I think he will pop up somewhere else, and hopefully soon. THE LISTENER WILL NOT BE DENIED.
That being said, decisions decisions. I definitely need a lil extra push in my art, and I deciding between the community college way or studying a class at SVA. For $50 I can take life drawing classes, and the college is in my town. Figure drawing is probably one of the biggest foundation type classes I could take for myself. OR, I can take a comic making class in NYC at School of Visual Arts (SVA) for 8 times the price at $470. I went to their open house yesterday, and the staff seem really cool and laid back. A tad bit more artsy than me, but definitely looked like a fun class to take. That and the rep of SVA, where many professionals have graduated from. You really do pay a premium for the experience of studying in NYC. That's really the only way I can justify the cause. Decisions decisions.... what to do?
Feeling better now, managed to finish this one up in the meantime..
Just a picture of my mannequin doing the best "Please Ike no more" impression it possibly could. (and no, I don't hear that too often myself either :b) Same tools as last time minus the brushes.
A lil late with my www.myheritage.com results, but better late than never. Man it was hard to get a match. Guess there aren't that many famous people with a big nose and chinky eyes. :b
yielded me:
Park Ji Sung - I can see the resemblence with the small eyes.
Zhang Ziyi - Guess I do have Chinese features afterall.
Joss Stone - I guess her eyes ARE pretty chinky.
Walt Disney - I don't get it either. The eyes aren't even that chinky. Ah wells.
Then I tried using my baby picture to skew the results a little. And got no results in return. :b
This could apply to me, who has not have had an original posting in a while! :b (with the exception of artwork)
From www.damninteresting.com:
When asked, most individuals will describe themselves as better-than-average in areas such as leadership, social skills, written expression, or just about any flavor of savvy where the individual has an interest. This tendency of the average person to believe he or she is better-than-average is known as the "above-average effect," and it flies in the face of logic� by definition, descriptive statistics says that it is impossible absurdly improbable for a majority of people to be above average. Clearly a large number of the self-described "above average" individuals are actually below average in those areas, and they are simply unaware of their incompetence.
It seems that the reason for this phenomenon is obvious: The more incompetent someone is in a particular area, the less qualified that person is to assess anyone's skill in that space, including their own. When one fails to recognize that he or she has performed poorly, the individual is left assuming that they have performed well. As a result, the incompetent will tend to grossly overestimate their skills and abilities. A few years ago, two men from the Department of Psychology at Cornell University made an effort to determine just how profoundly one misoverestimates one's own skills in relation to one's actual abilities. They made four predictions, and executed four studies.
Justin Kruger and David Dunning made the following predictions before beginning their investigation:
1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria. 2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it�be it their own or anyone else's. 3. Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability. 4. The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.
In each study, the men tested participants in areas where knowledge, wisdom, or savvy was crucial, specifically humor, logical reasoning, and English grammar. The participants were then asked to guess at the accuracy of their own performance so their self-assessment could be compared to the actual results.
In short, the study showed that the researchers' predictions were spot-on. Participants scoring in the bottom quartile grossly overestimated their test performance and ability, and analysis confirmed that this miscalibration was due to deficits in metacognitive skill (the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error). Those who were incompetent tended to suspect that their abilities were unequal to the tasks, but the suspicion often failed to anticipate the magnitude of their shortcomings. As predicted, training the participants on the subjects in question increased their metacognitive competence, and allowed them to better recognize the limitations of their abilities.
Also interestingly, the top performers tended to underestimate their own performance compared to their peers. The researchers found that those participants fell prey to the false-consensus effect, a phenomenon where one assumes that one's peers are performing at least as well as oneself when given no evidence to the contrary.
Were their conclusions accurate? If asked, they would probably answer in a confident affirmative. However their execution forces one to ponder whether these chaps may have overestimated their own competence. In the first study, participants were asked to rate the "funniness" of a series of jokes, and the correctness of their responses was used to measure their metacognitive competence in humor. The test's answer key, which was used to grade the participants' responses, was provided by a panel of expert comedians. The comedians were asked to rate the jokes on a scale from 1 to 11, and one comedian's responses were discarded because their answers did not correlate well with the others. One hopes the irony of these decisions was not lost on the researchers.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that "the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." This is true whether one interprets "stupid" as foolish (short on smarts) or as ignorant (short on information). Deliberately or otherwise, his sentiment echoes that of Charles Darwin, who over one hundred years ago pointed out that "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
The Internet is a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of such misplaced confidence. Online, individuals often speak with confident authority on a subject, yet their conclusions are flawed. It is likely that such individuals are completely ignorant of their ignorance. Cough.
Certainly the "Unskilled and Unaware of It" research backs up the idea that when a person cannot recognize his or her own poor performance, their self-assessment does not include that negative information. This results in an artificially inflated view of one's own skills, often tempered by ego. The same effect will cause the incompetent to congratulate one another as they fail to detect one another's inadequacies. One possible corollary to these conclusions is Scott Adams' Dilbert Principle, which tells us that the most ineffective workers are systematically promoted into management. Perhaps those doing the promoting are incompetent, and therefore fail to recognize the incompetence in those they reward.
Obviously not all confidence is misplaced; sometimes it is the result of strong skills and accurate self-assessment. But it seems that much of the time, confidence is the over-inflated result of some degree of ignorance. As is the case with many human flaws, perhaps the best remedy is to never stop learning, to seek out and absorb constructive criticism, and to always be prepared to admit that you may be wrong about something.
Of course, the researchers may be drawing the wrong conclusions� maybe most people really are above average.
Welp, didn't make the Top 20 for Tokyopop's contest. But I will put my comic up here for grabs in case anyone was curious what the hell I drew. It's pretty amateuristic but even then 20 pages are a bitch to draw. :b Anyways, here's the link:
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
lfe_kickingbird's journal
Park Ji Sung - I can see the resemblence with the small eyes.
Zhang Ziyi - Guess I do have Chinese features afterall.
Joss Stone - I guess her eyes ARE pretty chinky.
Walt Disney - I don't get it either. The eyes aren't even that chinky. Ah wells.