I am in the realizing that it's been nearly a month since I last blogged anything, granted this comes on the heels of an unusually active period for me. But, hey. Nothing terribly exciting has happened, so there it is.

I decided that last week would be a pretty good week to blow a whole bunch of my paid vacation time... after all, the best day of the year happened to fall in that week (hint: my birthday). It was nice to just forget about the world around me and piddle around quietly the way I used to back in the days when I was without work. I churned out no less than three distinct (but wholly unfinished) projects.

The first of these is a UX re-imagining for my ongoing project, the Music Page. Now that I am a far better JavaScript guru than I was when this was originally written, I've decided to take a completely different approach in terms of user presentation (though, the underlying functionality is pretty much the same).

Another thing I did was start in on learning some more HTML5 canvas stuffs, as it provides a pretty sweet opportunity for gaming purposes. I started messing around with coding a simple drawing framework and, at the behest of my osu! fanatical brother, began attempting a clone of sorts for that. Ultimately, I made some good progress and the canvas object is certainly a powerful tool, but there are some simple things that it simply can't do that keeps Flash at the advantage (I'm looking at you, per blit alpha).

Other than these few programming things and a goodly amount of time with my nose in books, it was a slothful week to be sure. But, then again, that's the whole point of "vacation."

Tune in this weekend as I head to yet another anime con.

There was one week a month or so ago when I churned out a crap ton of art. Then I stopped. Not sure why, but here are some of the fruits of that (and other) endeavors.

[gallery=May 2009 Art][/gallery]

There you have it. Enjoy!

Punny titles aside, I have made more than one allusion to my walking sessions. Currently my graph is telling me that I had a pretty crappy week last week, but that's not what we're here to discuss.

The Pathfinder Parkway has been my preferred walking path of choice for the weekends as it removes me from all the loud roads and reminds me of the lengthy walks I took to the bank in Winter Park via the Cady Way Trail. The Pathfinder runs right along the Caney River, Bartlesville's local body of poisoned water, but it does provide that "nature" feel. But, I could throw words at you all day and not get the point across, so queue up the photo gallery!

[gallery=Pathfinder Parkway][/gallery]

Okay, so it has it's downsides. Arguably the most annoying part is the dozen or so oil pumps, but it's amazing the crap I've spotted along this trail. I will, perhaps, update again with more pictures later as these just barely scratch the surface.

I was on another one of my afternoon walks, shooting to get in my 10,000 steps for the day, when I ran into yet another billboard that struck me an odd way. As can be seen above, it depicts Mr. Monopoly jumping out of Hell, presumably after having used his "Get Out of Hell Free" card. Their illegal use of the Hasbro icon notwithstanding, this brings up some interesting notions.

The sign insinuates that you've already BEEN to Hell (you can't get out of something you're not in). This means that you are some sort of terrible person, probably a child molester or some one who talks at the theater. This notion of leaving Hell kind of makes "eternal punishment" seem a little less eternal. But, let's play by their rules and assume for a bit that Hell is indeed an escapable place so we can extrapolate further.

Anybody who is mildly familiar with Monopoly knows that when you land in jail there are three ways of getting out: get our of jail free card, roll doubles, or pay $50. Applying these rules to our great Hell-break scheme - as these seem to be the rules we're playing by - there are now other ways with which to escape eternal damnation. If you've got some extra cash, just be sure to be buried with some tenners or, if you're not, play it like a game of chance, bring some dice and pray to God that you get doubles (remember, you get three throws). Suddenly, your chances of escaping Hell are looking pretty sweet.

Now that we have traversed the psychology cleverly hidden in this image, we can finally extract it's true message: Hell is for poor people.

The second in a series of K-ON! inspired sketches.

Inked in Illustrator, colored in Photoshop