Shifting Gears.

I'm shifting gears - a visit to the Staffing Office essentially landed me the reply of, "You don't have a valid driver's license. Go get one."

I'm enrolling in driving courses to meet the criteria for insta-work.

Once I can be readily employed, I can be free to visit whoever I please.

The world's a good place. Hell yes, Capitalism.

Also, I visited the gym - I'm out of practice. Preparing for the marathon I'm running for Medical Science hurts so bad. My legs are like two bruised noodles.

Today's picture comes from Utsuho.
She's performing the famed Kinnikubuster.
On Minoriko no less.

Mashed potatoes.

Chuckzan.

Chuckzan, the Super-Mutie Nyuudo.

I've finally gotten around to immortalizing his exploits. I wanted to draw him with a hypo of Psycho, or his Gauss cannon a-whirlin', but in posting this, I've accepted that that's not going to happen.

More later, when I feel like writing. There's actually quite a bit to talk about.

I am Monday's Child.

Hjalmar probably doesn't even know how inadvertently inspirational that phrase was.
Or that it's hanging on my wall like a mantra in the place of my old "I am Hank Rearden", which I have lost somewhere between states.

I'm going to get out there and suplex life after a morning of black coffee and pre-class conversation with my favorite Swede.

Because I'm Monday's child.

Also, this was supposed to be a Bren gun.
I've stumbled into it in Fallout: Tactics, and while terribly impractical, it's a
favorite of mine simply because it's very pretty. This one isn't. I don't know what happened, but it exploded halfway into it.

Life's good. I'm invincible. I love people.

4:00 AM comes early. I'm out.

I Look to be an Overprotective Creep.

I just dialed cross-nation to call an emergency dispatcher for someone who didn't need it. That kind of rained on my morning parade.

Everyone he knows is pretty livid.
Moreover, they think I'm some sort of psychopath for doing it.
They said they'd call first to make sure all was well, but it'd seem that wasn't the case. I guess if he'd had a stroke or something, time lost is brain lost, so I wouldn't bother to just dial, either.

My clothes are largely unboxed.

Also, here's Pyonta as a Dullahan. Dullahan are the coolest monsters since the Mimic and Mandragora.

Puffers, Mace Gloves, and Powder Bags.

None of them really matter, because prior to tonight, it'd seem my bank account was in the red.

Not a whole lot of time to be dicking around and being comfortable now.

I've gotten out of debt, but my account-balance is now pretty pitiful.

Of my weekly to-do list, three items have been marked complete.

On an application hop - I've even tried a few "Manly" places like the Autoparts dealer.

I also got a crate of Club Soda with yesterday's groceries.
It's kind of the only thing keeping me wheeling and dealing.

Picture sort of related to the title - I was anticipating that Fallout: Tactics bit, and drew it in fancy of my Mace Glove, Powder Bags, and Beastlord Grinding.
I kind of counted my Geckos before they hatched.

I'd love to further dissect this, but I've got applications to turn in and fill out. Not having a job and just getting out of debt really makes me feel like a bum.
I hate feeling like a bum.
Like a Jim Taggart.

I also got into a really good discussion with Sparrow.
Maybe not a discussion, or "really good" in the usual sense; it was really more of an, "I'm so conflicted in my self-perception that I can't think, and I've come to you, as a reasonably intelligent person, with hopes of making anything a little more solid."

I was an inadvertent help, and the conclusion wound-down to, "I can just be me".

I feel really good about that. I feel like I'm paying forward the sometimes inadvertent, sometimes extremely deliberate help I get from my esteemed teacher.

Tacking this to the end kind of picks me up a little.

Guest Art and Fisticuffs.

Bashmak whipped me up a doodle in exchange. If things go like I think they might, we may very well be killing time by playing Ragnarok later; I don't know whether to be a Priest and hope to keep him alive, or to be a Monk and punch crap with him.
Only priests get the hoods. Assassins get the hoods, too, but that wouldn't be pious, now would it?

I've had this raging desire to punch crap in Vidya. What I'd really like to do is be generally useless in Fallout: Tactics, just stocking up on Powder-Bags and bludgeoning people with my Mace Glove until I'm perked-out. The troublesome thing is, the entire endgame enemy-list is robots.

You can't punch robots - Kawashiro has me beat for Endgame content. As such, Ragnarok is looking ever more appetizing in its ability to punch crap.

Rather than leap into punching, however, I've decided to be useful. Have a purpose. A month of sleeping on the floor's left me without much achievement, so I made a list of crap to do now that I'm done unpacking, they are as follows:

1.) Handle the Driving Course to get my New York Driver's License.
2.) Get the Full Subscription at Gold's Gym.
3.) Transfer my bank assets.
4.) Fill out at least three more job applications within the week.
5.) Get to the post-office to dish out Yerba Mate, among other things.

In closing, I'd like to present this little number - you can thank Pyon for it:

Yakui: ... I hate going to Duluth.
Ichirin Kumoi: Do you hate its stupid name more than you hate my puns?
Yakui: Nun.
Yakui: There is nothing in the world worse than your puns.
Ichirin Kumoi: Not even Cancer?
Yakui: Your puns are like if Hitler and Cancer aborted the Antichrist.

Bashmak

This is Bashmak.

A long time ago, Hjalmar and I had been discussing a storyboard he was working with regarding a Female Stalker, a la Shadow of Chernobyl. We chucked names back and forth, trying to come up with one of those odd names that Stalkers pick that are sort of tough but kind of weird, too, like Mole, before we'd settled on Bashmak, a type of work-boot.

Bashmak doesn't know a whole lot of English.

Bashmak likes gratuitous sidearms and opium.

Bashmak kicks ass, and so does Hjalmar.

This was done with a few lucky strokes (Those fingers kind of came about by accident)
and was finished around 11:48 PM to the tune of Cult of Personality, which you can thank Utsuho for getting stuck in my head with all of our collective CM Punk fanboying.

I think this is a big step up from my last bit of work.

"Will I Ever Sleep?"

Outlook cloudy, try again later.

For the first time in a long time, I've come to you with a doodle. I was propping my feet up and watching a Fallout stream of Remilia's - we have a running joke that Chuck, a vomit-inducing Super-Mutie, is Unzan as his alternate weapon is simply STRONG PUNCH. This was the humble origins of Chuckzan, the mightiest party-member in the group. I decided I would draw him. And Remilia with her Gatling Laser. And then the Okuupus, with her ninth leg.

Pretty soon, I was on a doodle-kick. I hope to have some more for you later. Hopefully better ones - I didn't really have a character in mind for this, so it was a lot of winging-it. Taking the Remilia-with-a-Gatling Laser off my notebook should be easy, because I know how to draw a Remilia. No real creative liberties there.

I've been sort of busy trying to get reemployed here. In between running job-applications and eating plums, I've been keeping busy by doodling, reading and playing Arcanum. Reading what, you may ask? Dominic Deegan. It's a nifty little pun-laden comic, and it's got like, a million pages. The art gets progressively better as the pages go up.

I particularly liked Luna - she reminded me of Arcanum, which got me in the mood to play it once-more with a little help from all the Fallout stream as the games are a little similar. She's not exactly pretty. I like the idea of a beauty-in-the-personality heroine, though she still suffers from the occasional flare-up of Marysue-itis. Preferences aside, I've been nominated as Szark Sturtz: Gay, competing with women, and delightful almost-pious. You won't see any of that during his first introduction - he's just a villain that time around. Give it a read if you're eager to kill time; I'm only into 2006 and it's gone clear up into 2011. I admire that writer's tenacity.

New York's a pretty okay place insofar, by the by. My lack of furniture, my biggest complaint, will change in a week or so. I went to the local supermarket, Wegman's, and by God, it was like walking into my dreamland. Every backwards-ass recipe ingredient I've ever needed. Bundt pans. Tea-infusers. Yerba Mate. Mangosteens, a curry aisle. Mindblowing. I told the cashier, Sidhe, "I've just found where half my paychecks are going to be spent."

Oh, and on employment - It seems like it's down to The Salvation Army, Starbucks, a Pharmacy, and Wegman's. If none of that works, I'm hoofing it down to the Plaza to see what they've got there.

Greetings from Liverpool.

I've just arrived at my apartment complex in Liverpool.
Twenty-one feet is significantly smaller than you'd think in person, and the neighborhood is pretty lackluster. As opposed to moping about the way things are, though, I'm focusing on the positives: we're right across from the local gym - which gives me an opportunity to work-off that stromboli I had on the way here, and college near Sparrow's gets me right out of here as soon as I find it convenient.

The trip here was pretty rough; not so much traffic-wise, but it was awful lengthy. I grabbed some postcards from Pennsylvania, and one of the Columbus skyline - that one's probably my favorite - they had one of an old style Palanquin look-alike floating in Lake Erie, but I grabbed one of a Lake Erie sunset by accident. Expect those out as soon as I can grab a stamp-book.

None of my things have arrived, and my room's, well, the picture.

I'm once-again living like an unpious thief and stealing internet until the router is turned on. They said it should be up by tomorrow.

Thank you for keeping in touch with me, and giving me all the reassurance and advice I could ask for on my way here.

You guys are my heroes.

My alarm's unpacked, by the by. See you 'round 4:00 AM.