Yep, this blog is exactly what you thought it was about.

That's right. Strapping Young Lad, my #1 favorite death metal band as of today thanks to Saints Row 3 having great taste in music.

Sorry Cryptopsy, take the back seat, way in the back, your stuff isn't good without Lord Worm anyway, gtfo! It's Pickles to the rescue.

My goodness am I in love with this band.

Annnnnyways, time for some actual blog content and other shit.

#1

Well, I haven't been drawing as much lately, because guess what? Turns out I may have inadvertently slipped into another art block. GREAT, right?

Though thankfully it's not bad, I'm still able to doodle 'alright', but I don't possess the patience and will to do a finished piece or anything too thought out/detailed right now. It's still very depressing though, when you suddenly can't live up to the standard of something you do so well.

It's like living your life for singing, and then finding that you can't sing that one song you've sang perfectly so many times over to the same ability as you used to. It's like stepping down a few notches, and you don't even want to, the only thing you did was use your gift too much… This isn't WoW, nobody told me about skill cooldown times, fuck this. Why does being an artist also have to be a curse?

#2

About a week and a half ago I was shitting my pants because I had already spent approx. 2.1k on a trip to Scotland, as you guys have heard about if you've actually read my other blogs (bear with me here, I know my blogs are primarily about the art, not the reading, I knowwwww), and guess what? I had no passport. So here I am having already shit out over two grand for a trip to a country I probably couldn't even get into. Eventually, after panicking the most hardcore I ever have since highschool graduation.

After researching a ton, even going to sites I KNEW wouldn't get me my passport on time aka passport expediters that cost double the amount, I lucked out bigtime. There are only a handful of Regional Passport Agencies riddled across the US, thus 'regional'. Luckily there's one smack in Aurora, Colorado, and all I needed was an appointment. No problem, right? Wrong. I call and the fucking stupid automated system tells me that there are no available appointments in the next 14 days. WHAT!? At the end of that 14 days is the 6th of August, which is when I depart, no way, no fuckin' way. I call customer support and speak with an actual person rather than a robot, and they turn out to be useless… so I keep checking, hoping; hell I would have been praying, but I don't have anything to pray to.

Eventually I got a date that was open, pretty sweet eh? NOPE: next available appointment, July 23. So I'm like 'you're kidding me, right'? You've gotta be effing kidding me, please tell me you're just trolling, please.

At this point my heart is sinking and my anxiety disorder is sending me off the charts. I'm sitting here basically having panic attacks every time I think about anything that has to do with passing and ports. Not only will I not be able to go see her, and dash her hopes, I'd have literally just given away all that money.

Now I'm an optimist, not one of those stupid optimist, for any realist around here who wants to attack me for being an optimist, cause that's what they do (my gf is a realist too, but she's cool), no, I recognize that if I'm fucked, I'm fucked, and I accept that. But this was unnacceptible, so I had to pull a Kratos and change some rules.

I check back again after summoning all my strength and using half my jar of good karma to bend the laws of the universe, and I get an available appointment for the next day at 9:30 am. Ho-ly- shit, I don't even. I snatched that appointment up like I was Usain Bolt.

With that taken care of, all that was left was to fill out my papers, get everything together, and -NOT FUCK UP-. Which I didn't, whew.

So my mom gets up super early to take me all the way out to the Aurora Dam from the heart of Denver, cause she's super awesome like that. We try to go by the directions they give us, which was by the highway… Well this is when I find that life really didn't like that I cut up its strings and did some… tweaking, cause the highway was backed up for miles. So we wasted 15mins getting off the highway, going backwards into the city with about an hour and a half left until my appointment, and a 15 mile long trip to make.

Long story short, my mom is a great navigator, we got there with 30 minutes to spare, or more.

So thanks to the Regional Passport Agency being an emergency solution to those that were stupid enough to not get a passport in the first place, I got my passport in the mail within the week, which was like four days. THANK DA LAWD.

#3

Did I mention I've never gone traveling before? Yea, cause I haven't. So my first trip being international with stops is gonna be pretty wicked. I stop off in London first for about an hour, ugh.

I just hope I don't miss a flight and get stranded.

#4

I remember there was a blog talking about the secret to fame on DA. I decided to give my theory a go, which was to join groups and submit pieces through there, where traffic is much more focused, and you get more exposure. So I joined the Gears of War Club on DA.

Sure enough, I've gotten more views, comments, and favorites on THIS

than I have any of my recent un-grouped pieces.

Same with this.

So there you have it, people. In order to reach some sort of fame on DA, either draw furry porn, porn, tits, tits and ass, or join groups. Be warned, some groups are kinda specific as to what they'll let in. I'm also a member of the ConceptWorld group, have been for months now, and when I tried to finally submit a silhouette piece, they declined it. Maybe it was too sketchy? Maybe it looked unfinished? Maybe it was because I had the tag 'doodle' in my tags? Lol.

[tl;dr] ?< man, didn't think I'd ever have to use that here

Anyways. I'll see you guys around the middle of August when I get back! Maybe minus the art block.