Hey all, this is going to have to be a quick rant because it's close to 1:00 AM and I'm so tired that I'm having trouble focussing on the monitor. Whee! At any rate, as you can see, nobody I know is stupid enough to buy a PSP at launch (or at least, not stupid enough to admit it) so I had to make up some asshole to actually be playing one of these things. He's a kind of combination of a bunch of the trendy teenagers I've seen wandering around the mall. I want to say right now that I really don't understand the whole CCCP nostalgia, or even why CCCP merchandise is being sold in the US. You all know that I'm a pretty liberal person, so it may seem odd that I'm not behind this whole irreverent "CCCP is not taboo" thing, but hear me out.
     First, I have no problem with the fact that these things are being made and sold in the US. That's somebody's right to free expression, and I'm all for that sort of thing. I think it's kinda dumb to put CCCP on stuff when we actually know it as USSR in this country, but there's no accounting for stupidity. What disappoints me is that people are buying them in some sort of "nostalgia" kick. How can you be nostalgic for something you were never part of? I love listening to the Beatles, but I don't pretend that I'm nostalgic for a band that broke up before I was born.
     And of all the things to be nostalgic for,.... the CCCP? I'm no knee-jerk, "cOMMUNISM BAD" reactionary. I know that there's nothing inherently evil in socialism and that Russia is a wonderful country with a rich social and cultural heritage. I know that there are many people who believe in communism and that that belief comes out of their assessment of the tenets with relationship to their own world view. But wearing a CCCP shirt out of nostalgia is like saying "remember when Communism was applied in Russia and a corrupt government took over, oppressed the masses, and committed multiple acts of genocide? Yep... good times!"
     At any rate, I've got this image that I did yesterday. I think the coloring came out okay on the whole. Still not quite what I was going for, but slowly getting there. I used some of the principles from doing that to speed up the coloring on tonight's strip, so any artwork is good artwork (since it's like I'm an RPG character gaining EXP for each drawing I do). I have another image to post tomorrow... did some work on the raytracer trying to create a skydome object. It's coming along relatively well and all I really need now is to figure out how to shade the clouds properly. Like everything... slow steady progress.