Must post this now before our puny planet is plunged into strangelet apocalypse: for you see, the LHC is going to cross streams tomorrow! Here's the link sans Reddit. Make sure to keep an eye on this nifty service, it'll tell you whether or not you must grab your bugout bag and crowbar (to fend off headcrabs).

If you haven't got anything better to do with your final moments clinging to existence, feel free to marathon Silent Mobius as well as the Silent Mobius movies one and two. The crowbar mentioned in the previous paragraph can also come in useful in fending off Lucifer Hawks, albeit not as much.

Though the blog was neglected, my artist link dump was not: I keep saving artist references when I come across ones that are sufficiently impressive. With that, I present to you Shimeko, who is practically unknown (let's get to work changing that). Her images give the impression of sunny daydream aquarelle; as in something that blossoms in your imagination while comfortably asleep beneath a stream of hot sunlight. Haven't felt that one for over a decade, I can tell you that much... They're brimming with pleasantness and cuteness.

See Shimeko's Pixiv page here. She also runs a blog here, and from it you can glean that she releases doujinshi at Comiket. Her Pixiv page links to this site, but it doesn't appear to have anything.

Choosing one image to post was actually a little hard. I really, really wanted to post this picture of Reimu, but it was too small; then I wanted to post this image of Kaguya-hime (see the myth, if you didn't know) - but it was too large! Thus, I settled on what you see below: delightful Yuyuko. On Pixiv, Shimeko endearingly called the picture "Yuyu-sama". Enjoy.

The job search continues unsuccessfully. I've begun taking steps in a much neglected direction: social networking. Probably exchanged more IMs during this one month than in all of 2008 and 2009 combined. It feels like progress, and I might even get something out of it. Fun fact: I've used my negotiating skills to catch my parents on a promise to hire a maid if I get (and hold) a job. Motivating, no?

Anonidate is surprisingly effective. I've had something like six separate people contact me already, only one of whom I solicited originally. This strongly ties into my Misaki Project idea. Apparently there was also an AnoniWork, but it died promptly. Interesting. This sort of outreach is more or less exactly what I had in mind.

Tomorrow I'll post some much-needed art over here. After all, that was the most redeeming "original" feature here. For now, here's some stuff: Ragnar's Urban Survival, with a related torrent link. Choose whichever source resonates better with you: buying it legally, or ripping it off the Internets. The book, like everything else by the pseudonym Ragnar Benson, is a cornucopia of useful information. We live in uncertain times, with the passing of nationalized healthcare and a South Korean warship sunk by a North Korean sub. Might as well link to The Ready Store, too. They have some very impressive long-term food solutions, like dehydrated apple rinds with a 30-year shelf life. Trying not to sound like Glenn Beck, though... That psycho wingnut has quite a history of telling people to stock up on food.

Wow, I'm neglecting this blog horribly. Haven't finished the new one at all, yet already acting like this one's time has come and gone.

I clashed with an extremely aggressive piece of malware yesterday. XP Defender. From what I gather, many others have also suffered from it; it's some kind of epidemic. I'm talking about that dreaded "[foo] Security Center", or "[foo] Defender", like for example "XP Defender" or "Vista Defender" - it's the same garbage in many forms. The malware takes form of an official-looking spyware/malware cleaner app, gives a heap of bullshit results, nags the user every few seconds, and prompts them to buy the full version (which is how the parasites who wrote this thing gain from it financially). I had encountered this back in late February, after installing Windows XP SP1 on my new box. That one was relatively easy to remove, all things considered. The one that suddenly attacked me yesterday was a wholly different monster. For one, it actually fought back when I tried to remove it, deleting the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware executable that I was trying to install over and over; when I restarted in safe mode, the thing prompted me with a fake warning message saying that I have "...7 days left to activate Windows XP", and that I should do that in normal mode. After repeated attempts to remove it, Windows XP became corrupt and would no longer boot, knocking me back to POST. That's when I went ahead and reformatted my system drive. Not much of a loss, unless you count my Call of Pripyat, Jagged Alliance 2 1.13, Steel Panthers, War in The Pacific and Silent Hunter 4 savegames! Damn it, I had a lieutenant on my submarine whose name was "Tom Armitage"! How cool was that?

Check out Anonidate, a simple and quick dating site for /b/tards, otaku, goons, reddit and digg users, WoW players, and various other societal refuse (which I am a part of). I've created an account and already got messages, holy shit. My "Chernobyl Baby, ask me about it" pitch is working! Ahahaha! Let's see where this goes.

I came up with something after posting a thread on 4chan decrying my NEET situation and soliciting advice. An idea for a website.

See, there's an utterly abysmal lack of information online for persons like me. Specifically, if you go on Google and search for "never had a job before", or "impossible to get a job", the results are somewhere on the spectrum ranging from useless to jack shit. Forum posts decrying jobless situations without any real advice; complaints; sickening garbage like "I've never had a job before that I didn't like!" or something. Trolling for work on Craigslist is an exercise in soul-pulverizing futility. Job postings are of two varieties: "sorry, already taken" (~2%) and no response whatsoever (~98%). This is because the job postings are basically just reeling in resumes of random people: an employer already has someone in mind when starting a headhunt, like for example his frat buddy's dipshit useless son, and gathers up a bunch of resumes merely so that if a government dick comes to assay the situation, the employer will then show the resumes and create an illusion of having hired the dipshit all proper, like an obedient carebear.
Posting your resume on Craigslist is the better method, but overwhelmingly it just gets some weak efforts to scam or spam you. At one point, I exchanged half a dozen e-mails with a semi-literate moron from Britain, trying to coax me into a check kite. Getting actual job calls is very, very rare; so far, I've only gotten jobs that I can't do (no car, etc) and jobs that were snatched off before I could reply. Don't hold my dubious online lifestyle against me here, either: I've gotten myself a detached GMail account, to wash up in case finding this blog will not be conducive to hiring me.

Anyway, yes. The Misaki Project, as I'm calling it so far, is named after Misaki from NHK ni Youkoso, the girl who tries to help the hikikomori protagonist. It's a project to fight social dereliction, and initially I'm thinking of some kind of forum - to help coordinate these people to exchange advice, and ideally go outside to meet each other in groups. As far as I know, the only country that currently has NEET outreach offices is Japan - but this is a global problem, so something's got to give. The site would also target persons with social anxiety, since they have extreme difficulty finding and keeping jobs in our disgusting smiley-monkey world. Ultimately, I'd like to have some kind of service where jobs are put right in front of these people, and the employer understands what they're dealing with. I know for a fact that the military would be glad to advertise just about anywhere, so that's already one venue (that scarcely any one of my target demographic would take, but hey).
So, yeah. I'm already trying to get a couple of my online BFFs to associate with me on this. Seems like a niche that I could actually capitalize on.

So depressed lately. Been taking a vacation from pretty much everything. Also, feverishly trying to troll up a job on Craigslist, to no avail - the very few successful finds lose me once it's apparent that I have phone phobia. What a motherfucker this world of ours is. Finding a way to get income is so easy in MMOGs...

At last, at long last, episode 14 of Bakemonogatari is out. Excellent. Can't wait to watch it.

Let's see if I can accelerate this blog up to speed again. Please, post some damn comments, they really help me fight depression.

Seems like it's very easy to break away from routines for me - just pause for a few days and it's all gone, like confetti in a hurricane. Oh well, nobody seems to be complaining. But whatever, going to keep at it.

There are non-depression related reasons for why there have been no posts. For one, I've significantly upped the search for a job of some kind, and moreover I'm lazily working some more on the blog over at Blogspot. Fine-tuning the code is going to be hard - I'm learning some new stuff as I go - but I'm damn glad that there's the freedom to dig around in it to begin with. Perhaps it's standard, but after the highly proprietary nature of Livejournal, it's a big upgrade.

A bunch of stuff happened over these past week or so. Apparently, it has surfaced that on January 30th, an unidentified object passed in front of the sun. It's apparently a quarter of the size of Earth (how do they know?), and it resolutely could not have been Mercury because Mercury last transited the sun in 2006 and will not transit again until 2016. Wonder what it was.

Wired has published a brief article about DARPA finally beginning to get its shit together with synthbio. I can't fucking wait. This is just a baby step, of course, one of many - judging from the pittance of a budget it has been assigned... Let's not forget that the common sequence of technological advancement is scientific >> military >> industrial >> commercial >> widespread, which means that we're not even close to our glorious biohacker future (or our glorious bio-apocalyptic future).

Also! Here's a resource that I just cannot bear to keep to myself, though it's probably not entirely appropriate to post here. The Big List of Porn is a directory of various non-garbage free porn sites. It also has links to online porn fiction and so forth. All the sites linked there contain no malware, spyware, browser hijacks, link redirects, or bogus content. Obviously the link is NSFW, so don't click it if you don't like/may not view porn. On a related note, Australia has outlawed the depiction of small breasts and female ejaculation, so keep that in mind before clicking if you live in that Jesoid-overrun festering wound on the buttock of planet Earth.

Life is still pretty shitty right about now. I guess it's kind of a zigzag curve; at the very least it's not dipping as low as it did about a week ago. Much of it stems from completely unreasonable fights with my mother, who has gotten more entrenched than ever with her conservatard politics and is going on the offensive every now and then. Trench warfare, in other words. Brutal, filthy, and altogether miserable in its utter inability to advance either way. Curiously appropriate analogy.

The binoculars arrived today. In case you were wondering, they're the model seen here - 7x35 Wide-Angle Outbound. Let's all briefly smirk at the outrageous gouge-price seen on that site, considering how I effectively paid less than a tenth of what's listed there. They're pleasantly excellent (but then again, what do I know - my prior experience is effectively limited to childrens' and theater binoculars). The image is clear from what I can gather. The binoculars have no focus knobs and are instead permanently focused on infinity, which means objects less than 10-20 meters away look blurry, but then again such is the philosophy of use for these: appraise distant scenes at a glance without worrying about focus. Stars and look decidedly pretty in these: they ought to, what with how I'm in light-polluted NYC and haven't properly seen them before. Still have yet to try the moon on for size. There's also a kinda flimsy removable cap at the longitudinal pivot joint which conceals a tripod mount screw. Seems like these would make good hunting binoculars, if they turn out to be hermetically sealed (against water, fog, and condensation). I feel good about the purchase.

Been reading up some about the prospect of scoring a teaching job; namely, took a look at the NYC Teaching Fellowship site. No good. They all require college commitment to validate potential types, except for special ed - but I might as well just off myself if my future is going to commit me to "teaching" retards. The little inner-city slideshow on the site's main page also dug up some bitter memories from junior high. Fuck 'em. I'm not asking for luxuries - hell, I can get by with very little - but this wouldn't even be living; it would be eking out an existence. My psyche couldn't weather such long-term punishment.
Fired off an e-mail to the counseling department of Brooklyn College. Got to try getting back in there... Time's ticking away on jack shit, at least I ought to be earning a degree doing just that.

A classic. A lot of similarity can be seen in this guy's works and those of kawa/yoo. Are these the signs of a defined art style? I sure as hell hope so. I've posted Arma Eater's art before.

See his website and his Pixiv page. His site is relatively difficult to navigate, but that's not a problem overmuch.
The image below, depicting a bunch of fantastical youkai gathered for drinks, is a commissioned piece for a bar called Vanilla Mania in the busy and well-known Ginza district of Tokyo. Take a look at their website, which sports this image right on its main page. I certainly hope you like it as much as I do, and kudos to the bar for supporting aesthetically pleasing progressive art.

I'm taking some days off from the blog due to being depressed as fuck to the point of feeling physically ill. The worst is past; getting better, slowly. This is going to mean skipped posts. Come back on February 1st, I promise a good old-fashioned art post that day.

It's high time I switched over to Blogspot, so that's coming up in the near future too. Long ago, I already squatted dracova.blogspot.com, so it's just a matter of surmounting some procrastination.

Snagged a pair of Carson binoculars on eBay for a total of ~$5, after applying a discount earned for buying box components in October. The binoculars are 7x35, wide-angle, with BK-7 borosilicate glass lenses. Old, discontinued model (hence cheap); new in box, however. Careful analysis suggested that they were good, but I could be wrong. Still worth the gamble given the price. Have you seen the prices on some of the NIB brand-name optics? Insanity; over a thousand dollars sometimes. Perhaps it's all because I grew up in a sociopolitical anomaly, but no practical pair of binoculars should cost over a hundred dollars. Then there are all those crazy numbers, like 10x21 for a pair of compact hunting binoculars... Does it really have to be 10x with such a relatively small front aperture? Compact emphasizes stealth, so does it need to have such a magnification with an obviously small view angle? And then there are all those continuous zoom binoculars with loopy numbers like 20-60x. From what I gather, continuous zoom is garbage with binoculars because it invariably uses a mechanical linkage to synchronize and results in shifting focus. Select-zoom is the only proper way about it.