Money, money, money

Posted in Random Rants on August 11th, 2008 by VitaminZinc

Just like anyone, I have an ongoing list of things I’d like to buy. The problem I have is that at this point in my life, everything costs a fuckton of cash. I’ve got this really nice PC pieced together on newegg.com, but I lack the funds to finalize the purchase for the core hardware. I’ve already got the case and heatsink fan ready to go. Problem with this is, I need another grand to finish it off. $800 if I leave off the monitor I want.

The other thing I want is a HDTV. I have a PS3, but I’m playing it with a normal TV. It still looks nice enough, but certain things are near impossible to read in GTA4.

The last thing I want is a USS Flagg. That’s right, a Flagg. If you don’t know what that is, lemme tell you about this marvel of GI Joe toys. It’s an aircraft carrier that measure around 7.5 feet long. This mammoth of plastic was the dream of every kid–well, those that knew about it. I wasn’t really in the loop as far as Joes went, and this came out when I was like… 2 or 3, so I didn’t know about it. Thing is, I want one to finish off my collection. I collect a lot of GI Joes just cause I never had them as a kid–which is a bit silly, but I don’t like to feel like I’ve missed something, so I’m getting them as I can now.

This is a little better than my comic collecting spree a few years back because of the fact that they don’t make GI Joes anymore (25th Anniversary doesn’t count!), so I’ll eventually be done with it. Not to mention, I don’t want all of them. I just want the vehicles I thought looked badass. There are quite a few that I thought were very boring. “It’s a jeep. Wow, great. What’s it do? 4 wheels and a gun, you say? …That’s kind of … normal. No thanks.” I was all about the massive tanks that split into multiple pieces and had escape pods, and formed bases. Stuff that wasn’t realistic in the least–but looked cool. That’s what GI Joe is to me.

So, what’s keeping me from just finishing off these purchases and being done and moving on to saving for a house of my own? Weeeeeell, I have normal bills, which takes about a third of my income. And the rest is taken by ninjas! God damn ninjas! Actually, it’s taken by large amounts of small purchases I make on stupid shit. I’ve never been in the negative, cause I do know how to manage my money extremely well. But I never seem to be able to just save money.

Which, this really cuts into my money now, cause I’m taking 4 classes this semester. Pretty sure I’m going to have to drop one just because I don’t have the time for 4 classes and a full time job. But either way, these classes I’m taking are freaking expensive! The books cost between $80 and $120 a piece. Bye-bye random spending money! I shall see you again next month!

School Books & Motivation

Posted in Art, Random Rants on August 6th, 2008 by VitaminZinc

So, my classes start in a few weeks and I decided to check and see what books I need. I can usually get them pretty cheap off Amazon–well, I used to–as a design student. Design books are pretty cheap, cause anyone can design, I guess. My networking books for this semester, by Amazon.com/college bookstore prices, would be around $350. That… is a lot of money to pay for books. It makes me sad in the wallet. I don’t mind paying for stuff, but damn, this stuff is expensive. So, I’ve decided to scour eBay in hopes of picking up some of the costlier books at a bargain price. Normally, I’m not one to do that for books–but at near $100 a piece for these books, I can’t afford that and my expensive nerd habits! I could ask my grandma for some money for the books–and she’d gladly give it to me to further my education, but that just seems wrong at this point. I have a full-time job and waste so much money that I could have saved. So I’m getting my books myself.

In other news, like I always do after updating my site–I wanted to post some artsy stuff. So, in order to post that kind of stuff, I’d need to have something new to post! I couldn’t think of a damn thing I wanted to draw. I sat here, looking for inspiration, and thought of nothing at all.

Although, my interest in nerd props has risen again. The last few weeks, I’ve been looking over stuff on how to make molds and replicating stuff like that. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and there’s way more that goes into it than I had previously thought about. It’s also way more expensive to get into than I thought. I’ve considered a few different ways of going about this–one is wooden props. But I wasn’t sure how the time vs. product thing would pan out. Plaster doesn’t seem that durable, and if I’m making props for people, I want them to last. I want them to take a beating. I’m a big fan of moving pieces, and exactness, so it’s kind of hard to think of a way to make a replica of something come out as nice as possible without a tradeoff of time. But then I start wondering… What if no one wants it? Wouldn’t that suck if I spent weeks or months working on a Wolfwood ‘Punisher’ Cross (from Trigun, ya know?) and no one was willing to pay what I wanted out of it? I guess the only way to find out is to start off small and see how it goes from there.

In other news, I’ve been playing Wii Fit everyday that I’m able for at least 30-minutes a day. I haven’t seen any real results yet, but I do feel a little better. That may just be because I stopped chugging down the caffeine everyday. Meh–we’ll see.

First! …Well, maybe not…

Posted in Random Rants on August 5th, 2008 by VitaminZinc

Ok, so it’s not really my first post here, since I did do a test one first. But, like that really matters.

I used to have a pretty extensive and drawn out site here, but honestly–no one reads this. It’s all just for my own archiving purposes. So there’s no need for all the extra trash I had sitting around. Now, it’s just a blog site. Perfect, if you ask me. Everything can be as organized as I want, it”s easy to update from anywhere, and I don’t have to worry about actually coding anything.

Normally, I’d enjoy the coding, but I don’t have time for that anymore. I barely have time to sleep, considering the amount of things I like to get done in a weekend, or in my time off from work. I really don’t have to worry too much about troubleshooting, aside from trying to get this crap to work in the first place.

I feel kinda limited by what I could do with my database with my current webhost, and I’m too stubborn to just ask them where the option is for some of the stuff. Either way, I got this thing working after about an hour of tweaking it and reading help files, etc.

I would say that I’ll be updating this more often, but we all know that’s a lie. I’ll just do it when I’m bored at work, or something else.

Also, the title, since I can’t come up with anything better at the moment, is an allusion to www.drhorrible.com ; which is an awesome musical created by Joss Whedon, and starring Neal Patrick Harris. By now, it’s probably no longer free, but I’m sure you can find a free version somewhere on the interwebz.

Test

Posted in Random Rants on August 5th, 2008 by VitaminZinc

New test.

Test.

Blah.