ellejohara

Penelope Pitstop

20100902.2022 #illustration

I drew this in about 25 minutes. I was inspired, and a little tipsy.

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I draw 90% of all of my artwork on the computer. That means over the years, I’ve accumulated a fair amount of computer related stuff. I even have a junk drawer for all the surplus computer gadgets and cables that I don’t need. Needless to say, this doesn’t sit well with my desire for a clutter-free minimalist lifestyle.

It’s been said before, but I think it bears repeating: Minimalism isn’t about doing without, it’s about having only what you need and making the absolute most out of that. Let me give you a brief rundown of the essential gear I use to draw a comic…

Macbook Pro – This is absolutely essential. I love the form factor of the laptop, and I love the ease of use of the Mac platform. Portability is also a must.

Power Brick – I debated even listing this, but I actually plug in my laptop quite often. Without this, I would be dead in the water. Typically a laptop battery lasts only about three hours at best. Plug a power-thirsty Wacom tablet in and that time drops even more. Plus, given that it usually takes much longer than three hours to do any sort of illustration, a laptop battery alone just isn’t going to cut it.

Wacom Tablet 6″ x 8” – Again, absolutely essential. The first time I ever used a digital tablet, it completely changed the way I interface with computers. It’s a fantastic thing to be able to hold a pen to a pad and draw something virtually on a computer.

Wacom Pen – Like jelly to peanut butter, the Wacom tablet is pretty much completely useless without this little gadget.

External Mouse – As awesome as the Wacom tablet is, sometimes it’s necessary to use a mouse for things. It can either be a fancy Bluetooth mouse, a wired mouse, or even the Wacom 4D mouse that comes with the tablet.

That’s what I need to draw a comic, just those five simple things. Now my computer is old and busted, so I have to have a few additional peripherals in order to make my laptop do what it’s supposed to do out of the box…

External Hard Drive – I actually have two of these. One stores music and movies and other silliness, and the other I use as my dedicated backup drive. Only a fool goes without a backup drive. (I was a fool for a really long time.)

External DVD Burner – Sometimes I need to burn optical media, and for one reason or another the internal burner in my Macbook stopped working properly a long time ago. Even after a replacement when my graphics chip exploded it still refuses to work correctly or consistently. So I gave up and got an external optical media drive. It’s a pain in the ass, but there’s not a lot I can do about it until I get a new laptop.

External Webcam – The onboard Apple webcam crapped out a long time ago. Strictly speaking, I don’t actually need a webcam. However, it is nice to have if ever I need to take a quick and dirty photo of some non-digital art I’ve been working on. It’s also quite handy for webcam chats and live streaming.

External Speakers – While the onboard speakers on the Macbook Pro are better than laptop speakers in the past, they’re still total crap. I like to listen to music when I draw, and headphones give me a massive headache after a few hours of wearing them. So while I can, I’ll revel in the luxury of external speakers.

So that’s pretty much the rundown of all the equipment I use to draw a comic or illustration. Yet it seems just a bit on the excessive side. If there was a way to combine and/or eliminate some of this stuff (and all the USB and power cables that go with it) that would be fantastic.

The Axiotron ModBook Pro could resolve some of these issues. Not only would I be getting a new laptop, I’d also be getting a functioning DVD burner and webcam, a bigger hard drive, and (this is the kicker) an internal Wacom tablet, making the whole shebang into a portable Cintiq tablet. How fucking badass is that?! This is the computer I hope to have when I go on my world travels.

I don’t have the money to purchase one of these bad boys right now, which is just as well. The system won’t actually be available until sometime in 2011. In the meantime, I’ll have to simply do what I can with what I’ve got, even if it is a horrific clutterbomb.

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Tequila

20100821.1812 #booze #comics

Loosely based on a true story.

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Agency Hyper Detection

20100724.0922 #blog

“It is natural to [primitive man], something innate, as it were, to project his existence outwards into the world and to regard every event which he observes as the manifestation of beings who at bottom are like himself. It is his only method of comprehension. And it is by no means self-evident, on the contrary it is a remarkable coincidence if by thus indulging his natural disposition he succeeds in satisfying one of his greatest needs.”

Sigmund Freud wrote these words in his treatise on religion, “The Future of an Illusion”. While most of Freud’s theories on psychology have been pretty much thoroughly debunked, his ideas on where religion comes from (the mind), and how it developed in early man and early civilization, is what got me interested in understanding the genesis of religious thought in human beings.

I was in the bathroom when I read that passage, and its similarity to one branch of Pascal Boyer’s theory of religion—agency hyper detection—absolutely floored me. It made me think two things: the first, I’m not a very meticulous reader. I read “The Future of an Illusion” two years ago, yet somehow I completely overlooked this passage, and the second, Freud’s evidence to support the idea of humans looking for human agency in the non-human natural world was extremely shoddy, but the idea was nonetheless there. It would be another century before Pascal Boyer came along and reexamined Freud’s hypothesis with some much more solid evidence coming from twentieth and twenty-first century cognitive science.

The idea that human beings have a tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things has been around since well before the ancient Greeks, whose language we use to derive the concept of humanizing non-human objects. But the question lingered: Why do humans do this? Boyer claims that the cognitive mechanisms that create this behavior are an evolutionary trait humans acquired over time which boils right down to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”.

Human beings in the wild, untamed, natural world were no doubt prey to a lot of critters out there. (Remember in the film 2001 when one of the monkey-humans gets attacked and eaten by a big cat? Yeah, like that.) So, a cognitive mechanism which Boyer calls agency hyper detection emerged in early humans which gave us the power to imagine that the rustling of leaves in the bushes was not simply happenstance, but instead caused by another living, breathing, thinking critter. And as evolutionary theory goes, the humans who thrived are the ones who got the hell out of the big cat’s way after hearing the rustle of leaves in the bushes.

Agency hyper detection is the modern interpretation of Freud’s idea that primitive man projects his existence outward. It’s not because of some ludicrous idea infantile sexuality or Oedipal complex. No. It’s based on something way more solid than that: The idea that cognitive functions in the brain are a product of evolution, and have a direct influence on human social behavior.

Anyway, yeah. That’s what I was thinking about in the bathroom this morning.

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Madeline by Jimmy Misanthrope

20100705.1351 #blog

I'm not Ancaluvion. But I've slept with a few.

I woke up this morning and found this waiting for me on Twitter. I was thrilled! Many thanks to Jimmy Misanthrope for the artwork. The comic in question where you can see Madeline in her stripey skull shirt can be found here.

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The Lesson I Learned from College

20100703.2038 #blog

I’ve been obsessing, more so recently than I have in past years. I think it’s because I’m getting greyer. By “greyer” I mean “wiser” as well as literally grey. (Although my grey is actually silver, but this is beside the point.) I would have to say the source of my recent obsessing was my college education.
Below the Fold »

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Singapore Sling

20100703.1814 #booze

This is the original recipe for the Singapore Sling, as found on Wikipedia. I’m putting it on my site so I don’t have to dig it up on the Wikipedia page every time I want to make one. (Why I don’t have the damn thing memorized is beyond me.)

This is all metric, so Americans and the other two slightly more obscure nations which still use Imperial measurements will have to use their brains and convert.

4.0 cl (8 parts) Gin
2.0 cl (4 parts) Heering Cherry Liqueur (cherry brandy)
0.5 cl (1 part) Cointreau
0.5 cl (1 part) DOM Bénédictine
1.0 cl (2 parts) Grenadine
8.0 cl (16 parts) Pineapple juice
3.0 cl (6 parts) Fresh lemon juice
1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake it all up in a cocktail shaker with ice, and then pour it (sans ice) into a Poco Grande glass (or a tall glass if you don’t know what the hell a “Poco Grande” is or don’t have one).

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Purple Drank

20100703.1049 #booze

This is a tasty drink I threw together in a moment of inspiration and a trickle of blue curacao.

In an old fashioned glass, put in some ice and add:
2 oz. gin (or vodka)
1 oz. kirschwasser
1/2 oz. blue curacao
splash lemon juice
top with cranberry juice

The result will instantly explain why I call it “Purple Drank.”
el jo