Saturday: I should probably have just stayed in bed all day today.

Because by the time I was heading out, it was already too late to eat any of the dinners I wanted.  La Tour Cafe?  No parking, partially because some asshole in a truck thinks "my right tires are on the wrong side of the line, but that's a fine parking job."  Eggs N Things?  No parking.  Teddy's Bigger Burgers?  No parking.  Tenkaippin?  I'm not even going to try to get a spot in their lot this late in the evening.  So let's go to the mall.  There is infinite parking at the mall.  Kuru Kuru?  Wait list half a page long.  Counter?  Obvious line outside.  So fuck it.  Chili's.  It's there, and isn't sufficiently good to have a crowd.

Although one did form while I was eating.  Who knows.

The onions weren't really "fajita-y", but whatever.  Fine, I guess.  I didn't starve to death.  Whatever.

Drawlloween today is "demon."  I'm not sure how much different this is supposed to be from the devil earlier in the month.  Are we supposed to set up some sort of Blood War analogy?

• Pazuzu.
• Creepy tales.
• This show is good, and I should watch more episodes.

Friday: Trying something different.

Today's lunch was this very confused salad.  Grapes, apples, almonds, craisins, mandarins, chicken, feta, that spring mix I kind of don't like.  This is probably healthier than the Caesar salad, and it is good, but I think I might try to get it with romaine next time.  Also: there is no way to eat this salad correctly.  It's just not possible.

See?  Here's the end problem: all the bits get left behind, because they don't stick to the lettuce.

And today's Drawlloween:

You can still see my lettering guide lines still in there.  Next time, I'll remember that I should actually plan the drawing size beforehand.  This was the most physically painful drawing, as getting all of the serifs right was a challenge.  Grave.

• This is only like a block away from where I live.  That's a bit concerning.
• I really hope this model changes soon.  There are a lot of comics I'm interested in reading now, but dealing with single issues is annoying.
• Bunnies.
• Yet another thing that makes me not like Uber.  "Safe ride fee."  Since when is doing the absolute bare minimum to check that you're not sending a murderer to someone something that needs to be broken out into a separate fee?
• Snorlax.

Thursday: Yesterday's moon looked better, but it set too quickly, so I couldn't get a picture of it.

This was the best I could get.

Drawlloween: amulet.  I didn't notice until I was resizing it that it accidentally looks like Sailor Moon.

• I like the takenoko no seto better than kinoko no yama as well, but this is just silly.
• This seems to be a pop-up/farmer's market place?  I saw it today, but had already decided on a different lunch.  Also: naming a restaurant "Taste Yum" means it's impossible to find information about it.  Still: Indian food for lunch?  YES.
• Yeah.  They can go fuck themselves, I think.
• I had never heard of this before today.
• Bird house.

Wednesday: One day, I should learn how to art.

I think what I wanted to do here instead of what I did was to make sure my 0.3mm pencil is using 2H or 4H lead, and then get my 0.9mm pencil, and put 4B in that.  Then, I can do edge work with the 0.3 pencil, and then do shading with the 0.9 and smudge the marks to get the correct tones.  Just using the 0.3 doesn't work, as I really just get one color, and I'm not good enough to get shading with that.  In any case, Drawlloween bat.

Also, good job UPS, for delivering this at 8:30pm.  I got a confused call from the front desk telling me to pick it up.  I should also pick up a bluray drive and rip the various disks I have.  I could probably just do the DVD version, I guess.  I need easily accessible versions, is the point.  Also, this is the book I didn't buy when I saw it on the shelf in California, and I believe the final Marnie thing I can get.

• This was the place that all the popular birthday parties were at when I was in elementary school.
• Spooky.
• I briefly heard about this, but didn't bother looking into it.  Luckily tumblr is there to do the work for me, so I can simply conclude that Chris Erskine is a bag of shit, and should stop writing.  Then again, given that he's writing things to make old people feel good for a newspaper, he probably has the most appropriate job an actual, for-realsies, living bag of shit.
• This looks as good as the series that had to be cancelled for this series to exist.  Because comic books.
• Pans.

Tuesday: I accomplished everything on my list at work today that I had planned for today. That means all the hard stuff is left for tomorrow.

I thought the sky looked cool while stopped at a light.

I think I've decided I don't like Agents of Shield again.  The big issue is that the rift between the movie side and the TV side means AoS spends so much time doing dumb stuff, instead of just calling Black Widow and having her dump a Captain America onto a problem or something.  They spend so much time futzing around with government bureaucracy, when they clearly have contacts that should get around that.  The second issue is that they spend so much time setting up cryptic bullshit that nothing ever seems to progress.  "Oh no, scientist B got sucked into this giant stone thingy!  We have to investigate it to see what it is!"  "I, scientist A, who is totally in love with scientist B, will do a bunch of crap for two episodes, then we'll decide it's a portal, and I'll do stupid shit to jump through and save her!"  "I am back home now, but I'm all messed up, so I'm going to be useless for two episodes.  Also: I have to go back to secret other-side-of-portal planet.  FOR REASONS!"

Also, here's a plan:  instead of sending two of the top agents to hunt down and kill the jerk dude from previous seasons for revenge, why not just let him build up his secret new Hydra?  Remember when old Hydra, which had infinite moneys and a full hierarchy of leaders and teams after using the entire post-WW2 era to set up, was taken down by a handful of phone calls and (I assume) throwing Captain America at the problem while having Oswalt Patton clones build a helicarrier?  This is that one dude, the posh son of an old (dead) Hydra dude, and as many generic street thugs he can assemble while killing some fraction due to stupid psychopathic reasons.  This is the kind of team you just call the cops on.  Done.  Just because a crazy person claims they're going to take over the world, doesn't mean you have to believe them.

I mean, come on.  You know someone who can make earthquakes and like ten Asgardians.  And a Hulk.  "Ohs noes!  Angry thugs with guns!  So scary!"

Drawlloween Frankenstein.  It's supposed to just be a head because I started later than I wanted, but kind of looks like he just has a super tiny body.

• Squirrel.
• This is a good series.  The Death one is the best, I think.
• "I'm definitely not Star Lord."
• Facebook is dumb, and I'm undecided on if their machine learning image identifier is as well.
• Yeah, I noticed that that seemed odd as well.

Monday: It's annoying hot and humid again.

I thought about doing something fancier, but I had so much trouble just drawing a circle that I went with the two color scribble version.  Drawlloween theme: Moon.

Also, when I posted yesterday's Raven picture to tumblr, I discovered that the official Small-Butera tumblr liked the Pumkin I posted last week.  Sure, they probably like all the fanart they see, but that's still kind of cool.

• I'm going to claim it's because the theme today was moon.
• There's a Sailor Chibi Chibi Moon?  That last season is just crazy, isn't it?
• To be fair, nothing Tuxedo Mask ever said made much sense.
• This is why Clickhole is one of the best sites around.  Important journalism like this.
• This is Gawker's important journalism.
• This looks good, and I'm still waiting for my Howard the Duck trade to arrive after seeing it sitting on a shelf in California.  That way I'll be somewhat up to date.
• "Damn it kid, you didn't carry the two from the tens column!  How are you going to help me lead a world revolution of communism if you can't do simple arithmetic?"

Sunday: I didn't do anything today, but I did cull my youtube watch later playlist down to like 400 items.

To be fair, I also was sneezing and stuffed up all day, so being lazy and not doing anything was probably the right choice.  The biggest problem with this was that I wanted curry for dinner, but by the time I was heading out, it was also dinner time for other people.  This meant that the parking at my usual curry place was more fucked up than usual, so I went to the one at the mall instead.  Parking is a bit crazy there, but there's at least an infinite supply.  The mall curry place isn't as good.  You have to order at the front, get your own coke, then sit down, and there's a massive pillar in the middle of the eating counter.

Also that right-most slice wasn't cut from the one next to it, and it was almost entirely fat.  Everything else was the same, since that's how things work.

I spent three minutes trying to get this to focus better.  I didn't color it, as I assumed the crayons would just make it a messy black smudge.  Today's Drawlloween is Raven.

Also, I did a pun one.  Raven.

• Pancakes were something else I considered for dinner.  They would not have been this fancy.
• Old people.
• Skeletor.
• Something about knives.  I can't come up with good link-text today.
• Marnie.

Saturday: I have far too many tabs open, which suggests that there will be lots of links. Also: Art-venture!

Today's plan was to go see movies at the Doris Duke Theater at the Museum of Art.  Since I was going to be there for the entire afternoon, I decided it would be good to try their cafe again.  I called to make a reservation, but I probably could have just walked in.  However, since I didn't want to get there and not have anything to eat, and since I'd have to plan to get lunch elsewhere if I couldn't eat there, it seemed like reservations were important.

This was my view for lunch.  I didn't bother to properly align this, as I anticipated that writing today's post was going to take forever anyway.  Maybe tomorrow, if I'm feeling bored.  There's a waterfall, is the main point.

None of the specials sounded that great, so I went with one of their sandwiches:

Chicken sandwich, with maple bacon, fontina, and another whole salad in addition to the side salad with walnuts.

Honestly, I was not expecting that many vegetables on my sandwich.  I was also hoping that the maple bacon would taste better than it did.  There was something slightly off about it.

Also, this bird kept doing this.  Are you hot, waterfall bird?

This was the point where I attempted to tempt fate and see if I could get dessert and the check in the fifteen minutes before the first movie started.

Chocolate pot de creme.  It was chocolatey.

I did, but it was very close, as I sat down with just a few minutes to spare.  The first movie was Marnie.  Again.  Again again.  But this is the first time since reading the book, and all my points on that hold.  It is still the best movie of the year.

The only problem Marnie has is that it's only an hour and forty-three minutes, and the gap between the two movie starts was three hours.  The doors open thirty minutes prior to a movie, so I had something like 45 minutes to kill.  And, since I entered the museum with a "cafe/movie" red sticker, I wasn't allowed to see any art.  Well, any galleries of art.  Incidental courtyard sculpture was fine, and wall-based murals too.  It's hard to block that kind of thing.  But since the cafe closes at two, this left only one place to kill time: the gift shop.

This did give me the chance to take a detailed look at all the books on sale there, with me ending up buying a book on Hokusai.  "Have you finished the book you got last time you went to the museum?"  I'm more than half way done with it.  I do have like three other books I've bought since as well, so I'm not doing this correctly.  Whatever.  I also got this:

It's a book for kids, I guess.

Each page has most of a bear, and you a kid can fill in the rest.

The second movie was The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which is about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.  It's the source for this gif set, and was filmed around the time of this blog post, as they reference the same news story.  The main story is watching Miyazaki work on The Wind Rises, with a back story of reports from Isao Takahata's group working on The Tale of Princess Kaguya.  I've linked to those pages as the original plan was to release both of the movies on July 20, 2013.  As you can see, the main part of the Takahata reports was that he was not on schedule to hit that date, and he didn't.  It was an interesting view on how Ghibli films are made, and the discussion of Hideaki Anno doing the voice was funny.  Here are my reviews of the two movies.  Kaguya is the better of the two.

After that, I was hungry again, and decided I wanted fish.

So...

 Nico's is far busier at dinner time.  However, eating alone means you can skip lines if you don't mind eating at the bar.

Seafood pasta.  Pretty much all the seafood with a creamy sauce with vegetable bits.  It was sufficiently good that the fishing boat captain who sat down next to me and was only there for a beer decided to get the chicken version.  "I smell fish all day long, and when I go to bed in my cabin, I can smell them cutting the fish up down below."

 And then taking the long way home to listen through the Marnie soundtrack.

Today's Drawlloween is "alien."  He has pants because he's not some sort of barbarian alien.  They can weave as well as make ray guns.

•  Fun links.
• This is an excellent point.
• A bit of a long read, but worth it for Mr. Sato ruining the day.
• Neanderthal.
• Pika-no.
• Not fun links.
• More guns do not make people safer.
• John Kasich is a bag of shit, and hates people who still have youth in their souls, as his dark calcified soul is just another piece of shit inside the bag that the rest of his shit.
• Ted Cruz is a fascist who wants to be given all the power so he can get back at those he hates.
• The entire "Freedom Caucus" is full of fascists who want to be given all the power so they can get back at those they hate.  Also: claw each other to death because they fundamentally don't want to cooperate.
• Barry Loudermilk shows up in this article, and his quote at the end shows that he too, like the rest of his hate-filled fascist friends, are fascists who want to be given all the power so they can get back at those they hate.  Also, despite spending the requisite five minutes looking through his wikipedia page, his biography from congress, and his about page from his house page, I have no clue what he did for the years between 1992 and 2001.  Eight years in the air force, nine years "shrug", then thirteen years donking around the Georgia legislature doesn't really suggest "this dude should be in charge of anything."
• Martin Shkreli is still a fucking asshole.
• So
• a) this guy is an asshole.
• b) pretty much all of that article.
• c) this guy also isn't sufficiently old enough to push it off as "old people don't understand change."  This is just "an asshole."
• d) I also don't understand people who touch other people.  Who does that?  At all?  People are gross.  Don't touch them, ever.

Fuck.  Now I have to make all the links links. :-/  11:16:27.

Links done. 11:19:31. :-(

Friday: Whatever. I don't have a title for today.

I did have a slice of monkey bread, though.  Banana bread with peanut butter and chocolate.  It is delicious.

Today's Drawlloween is eyeball.  Yep.

Yesterday's was "zombie."  This is clearly a zombie, as it's missing a hand and it's shirt is half untucked.

• This is disappointing, as that's not a hard problem.
• Fuck you, Jason Chaffetz.
• Poor Mike.

Thursday: I'll do today's Drawlloween tomorrow.

I wasn't paying attention to the time while trying to sort out hotkey issues with my new laptop.

Also I had to make a bird gif.

• Have you ever heard of Frank VanderSloot?  Well, now you have, and he's an asshole.
• I thought it was a fake Daily Show webpage.  It is as real as it can be.  "Learn more about organizations."
• Fuck you, Verizon.
• Dog.
• I hadn't heard, and the linked story is an interesting read.  New copy of part of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
• I would like to see more of this.
• Squirrel.

Wednesday: Why is it that I'm the one suggesting xml? Shouldn't that have been decided long ago, instead of "just a bunch of files everywhere"?

Ha ha ha, fuck you, Verizon.  You just want to steal my precious unlimited plan back.  I'm on to you, jackass.

I didn't feel like adding crayons was a good idea, so I just did pencil shading and left it.  How do I know it's a haunted house for Drawlloween?  Because it's the house from Scooby Doo.

• The comments are full of the same kind of thing, but I got "ground/ground" and that's how I know this was not well planned.
• Republicans are stupid, and can't be bothered to learn history.  Also kind of racist.
• That's a pretty good plan.
• D&D.
• Meh.

Tuesday: And then I spent twenty minutes stuck in traffic driving home, because H-1 was designed by an idiot.

But I needed arbitrarily priced goods, and so I had to go to Target.

My Target has very little branding reminding you you're at Target.

Paw Patrol has a game?  Right next to the infinity Frozen games?

I assume this means, "Someone can be Elsa, but at least you don't have to pay for the Anna dress."

I also was able to fix items 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 from yesterday's new laptop list.  The solution to 4 was to simply remap home/end and page up/down to each other.

Today's Drawlloween is Pumkin.  Pumpkin.  Whatever.

• Cards Against Humanity.
• Red pandas.
• Huh.
• Star Wars.

Monday: Old shoes and new laptop. Or...

At least that was the planned title all day long.  I had to box up my new shoes with the split sole to send them back, and that meant wearing my old shoes.  They are surprisingly uncomfortable after wearing the new ones for three months.  My new laptop showed up today as well, so that all went as planned.

Until I got home after work and going to the UPS store to mail my shoes, and saw that I had a package notification sitting on my door.  The package?  The replacement shoes that I thought wouldn't get shipped until they received my defective ones.  

See?

The new laptop (chespin) is working reasonably well.  systemd is a piece of shit, but I knew that going in.  For some reason, even doing all the completely non-intuitive shit it requires to disable the system going to suspend mode when the screen is closed doesn't work.  And since there's no log anywhere, you can't even really see if your change was respected in any way.  I'm sure I'll sort it out.

The only other things that don't seem correct are:

1. The trackpoint not doing middle click scroll (which I'm not going to bother explaining, but it's important).  This is supposed to be fixed with kernel 4.0, and I updated to a 4.2 kernel, but I haven't rebooted yet.
2. Sound seems to default to the HDMI output on the display port port.  I can redirect it, but I need a global setting.
3. I'm not totally sure that I have the network setting saved permanently.
4. The page up/down keys are in the wrong place, so I may need to map shift-home and shift-end to shift-pgup shift-pgdn (because I really only ever use those keys to do terminal scrolling).
5. It's super light and thin, and kind of feels like it's not real.
6. I need to configure the open-gl stuff so everything can be accelerated like it's supposed to be.  This is generically a pain, so it'll probably be a weekend thing.
7. Mouse acceleration is too slow.
8. I need to rsync and cvs up everything.
9. Also develop a global data storage strategy so all laptops and my main computer can have a uniform location for things, making it easy to find and restore things.

Stupid Antiques Roadshow was offset by half an hour so I didn't notice I was late to start my drawlloween until 10:20.  So.  "Werewolf."

• Fat squirrel.
• Bunny ears.
• Loki Skylizard.
• Here's another link about how United is crappy since the merger.

Sunday: So yesterday's illness was confined to yesterday.

Which is good, but is still a bit odd.  Yesterday was just miserable, and today was just a regular normal day.  Weird.

So I got out of bed too late to mail stuff I was going to mail today, and then got a burger.

A bit asymmetric today.  Vampire for Drawlloween.

• And the answer to yesterday's question is yes, they're called refill packs of crayons.
• These would be the best Disney movies.
• Yeah.  That makes sense.
• Cats are jerks.

Saturday: I have used almost a box of kleenex today.

Because I either have a cold, or allergies that aren't bothered by medicine.

First, I wanted to see if I could find reasonable colored pencils.  The Ben Franklin craft/art store is on the way to lunch, so I stopped there.

These are not tsum-tsums.  They're non-copyrighted animal characters in convenient tsum shape.

Also colored pencils.  $8 for 36.

 Lunch was designed to be super hot to attempt to burn out the cold/allergies.

So spicy tan tan.

And lots of chili oil for the gyoza.

 It was not terribly successful.  I then got allergy drugs at the store, but they do not seem to be very effective.

This didn't come out as good as I'd hoped, but the main points are there.  Also, do they sell just a box of all black crayons?  I use more of that than any other.  In any case, this is how you draw a goblin for Drawlloween.

• Snorlax.
• The cooked chicken.
• I scored 59.  One was a "I'm sick and can't read the typo answer," one was "I know they're both twileks, and since this is clearly super computer animated, I assumed it was Ahsoka, since she's from a computer animated show, and Aayla isn't, but you're assholes, and chose to use Aayla from the cartoon instead of the real life one because, see above re: assholes," one was "I'm supposed to know all the characters from the movie that hasn't come out yet? Fuck you," and the last was "no one cares about shitty astromech droids that aren't R2-D2.  I'm talking to you R5-Dgo-fuck-yourself."

Friday: Office supplies and the most WTF Japan thing ever.

I bought new chalk for my office yesterday.  It's sidewalk chalk, so hopefully people won't break it all the time.

 It's not like chalk is complicated.  Lightly press chalk against board.  Pull chalk across board.  Do not push.  Pushing will likely break the chalk.  Or, I guess, I'll buy sidewalk chalk, so try not to break that too.

The colors were not sorted like this when I opened the box.  I sorted them into the row-cohorts shown above.

Then after work I went to get an eraser, as I didn't have one yesterday.  I found an acceptable one in a three pack for $5, and then wandered around and found a four pack of the eraser I actually wanted for $2.

Although they had a shitty selection of mechanical pencils and colored pencils.  The first isn't so bad, since I have the a full set of the best mechanical pencils ever, but I was hoping to find the second so I could do more coloring.

Today's Drawlloween is a devil.  

• Red panda.
• Hedgehogs.
• There are so many good things in this cover, but Tippy Toe and Squirrel Girl arguing about the brownie is the best.
• Poetry.

And now the most "WTF, Japan?" thing ever:

Thursday: Birds and the start of Drawlloween.

Birds:

The small bird had a crumb, and the pigeon really wanted it.

Drawlloween.

While I was visiting, Julie showed me a facebook post that had the details for Drawlloween, where everyone draws the a thing each day based on the schedule.  I tracked down what seems to be the original source, after discovering that there are at least two different drawlloween schedules floating around.  The one Julie found is clearly better than the other one I found ("return from the dead"? That's dumb, and your puns are bad.).  So:

Spooky ghost.

 I have a number of ideas that I like for some of the other days, although I suspect my "shitty pencil outline and crayon" art style may not be up to completely matching the image in my head.  Also, I need to buy an eraser because I don't seem to have one at home.

• Well.  Hopefully someone feels stupid.
• Hmm.  I could go see Marnie again.  The Ghibli cat movie looks interesting too.  I should not forget about this and try to get tickets.
• OMG, people are dumb.  "I don't understand these lines on the road, so I'm going to never go into that lane."  Here's a quick test:  Is that lane filled with cars approaching you?  If yes, do not drive in that lane.  If no, then it's probably not contra-flowed.
• Also, it's right there in the manual.