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

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.

Loosely based on a true story.

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.

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.

This passage from Cracked resonated with me because there was an element of truth to it for me. After I graduated from college, I began to notice an interesting change coming over me. The thing I noticed was that I was angry all the time. I’m sure some of this rage came from the near-perpetual cloud cover over the Willamette Valley for nearly nine solid months. (I am a very solar-powered person, and lack of adequate sunlight makes me really surly.) However, insufficient solar radiation couldn’t explain the amount of rage I have been feeling since graduation. Why else could I be feeling so aggro?

Cracked lists student debt as one of the key reasons not to go to college. Student loan debt piling up, as well as stress from insufficient income and general underemployment certainly helped add to my rage. I’m considerably less stressed now that I have a steady job with reasonable pay (more than minimum wage, but still not what my skills are worth), but my rage persists. Why?

I don’t really talk or hang out with anyone I met at college. The education I received has barely cursory relevance to the travails of the modern world. It can’t really get me a job in the the field. (I majored in Religious Studies with a “minor” in Arabic, Latin, and Ancient Greek.) Now, I have just over twenty thousand dollars of loan debt to pay off. However, it was during my college years that I learned what I was capable of as a human being, and that was the greatest gift my college education gave to me. I learned that I have a tremendous potential that I am actually capable of fulfilling. But this discovery came at a price which turned out to be more that the money I owe the government. That price was an unmitigated rage with myself and the world. So Cracked was right that college graduates tend to be more aggro than those who live in blissful ignorance. Go figure. I would still rather eat that proverbial apple and live my life with my eyes open than live a life unexamined.

I’m angry with myself, but I’m also angry with the shape of modern civilization. Gross consumerism, materialism, hedonism, and self-aggrandizement disgusts me, and continues to disgust me. I’m put off by drunk asshat college students who come to university to fuck and drink and get a 2.5 in business or psychology so they can find a husband or wife and live the American Dream with 2.4 kids, a dog, a mortgage, a house full of possessions, and a shitty job they go to day in and day out in order to pay for all the crap they accumulate in order to mask their fear of death.

Breathe.

I think I struck a nerve there. Going to college triggered something in me that not only made me recognize my own potential, it made me realize that our society is flat-out ignoring its potential. Our media preach consumerism, materialism, hedonism, and self-aggrandizement, and our masses eat it up like candy because they are petrified of the future. They’re petrified of their own potential. I refuse to buy into that shit, and so it infuriates me when I spend my valuable time engaging in passive entertainment such as spending all afternoon reading top ten lists on Cracked, because it reminds me how easy it is to slip through the cracks and become one of Them.

Henry Rollins said on one of his spoken word albums, “Not one second of your life do you get back,” which is one of the major reasons why airports infuriate him so much. (And me as well.) But how much worse is that rage when the one wasting your time is yourself. I’m very short with myself, and I hold myself up to some pretty high standards. Now that I’ve graduated from college and I’m aware of what I’m capable of accomplishing, my standards are even higher than before.

Some time ago, I began a quest to declutter my life. It began with an attempt to reduce the number of possessions that owned me to one hundred. Financially I am trying to reduce my frivolous expenditures so I can begin setting aside serious cash to pay off my student loan debt, among other debts. Psychologically I am trying to clean out the cobwebs in the brain. During my walk to the grocery store this morning, I began contemplating my Bucket List. What are the things I want to accomplish in my life before I shuffle off? Right now, my life is not my own. I am owned by my debts and my possessions, which means the items on my Bucket List have to wait until I get these monkeys off my back. And this is why I am obsessing. I want my life to be my own again. I want to be free to do the things I choose to do rather than the things I have to do because I dug myself into the hole of American Apathy.

College was a valuable lesson, and it did help me to chip away at three items as well as accomplish one item on my Bucket List. (Study Greek, Latin, and Arabic, and get a Bachelor’s Degree, in case you’re wondering what those items are.) Perhaps in time I might get to be a little more at peace with myself. For now, all I can do is redirect that rage into activities that are constructive, productive, and progressive. I never want to be counted among the masses who content themselves with mediocrity.

Edit: 21:37 – I realized that my rant here could likely piss a few people off, so I want to make some clarifications. This is about me, and my personal dislike for the status quo. If the status quo makes other folks happy and at peace, then who am I to bag on it? I’m all for following one’s bliss. It’s just that the bliss promoted by our culture leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, and it upsets me greatly when I see myself making excuses and compromises for not following through with my hopes and dreams.

No compromise. Life is too short and too precious to settle for average.

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).

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

Hush. I'm contemplating how to dispatch you.

Fubar Vim, another agent from Jimmy Misanthrope’s “Agents of the End Times“. His characters are so fun to draw!

I totally ordered this non-dairy.

A quick sketch of a character from Jimmy Misanthrope’s comic “Agents of the End Times”. Found here: Agents of the End Times.