Kevin's Watch

there was a while there when I changed my avatar a lot but I finally settled on anne sexton. that pic best represents how I see myself. (not NEARLY the writer anne was nor any where near as pretty) she was my first muse. her work was a map to my own so...yeah...thats my avatar. I think i'll keep her.

Suits you.

--A

See. The interesting avatar stories just keep coming.

And so does the interesting Avatar stories.

If I didn't leave the band, it's highly unlikely Clear Frontier would have made a professionally produced cd. The fact that they never marketed said cd is completely baffling to me.

aTOMiC wrote:"
I guess I'll take the time to explain my avatars in this thread when I post them.

This week's av is a page from a comic strip I worked on in the late 80s that was published in a local fan magazine The World of Fandom. It was called The Ivory Soaper (don't ask me what I was thinking). The character was a bit like the Silver Surfer however he was quite grumpy and hated humans. In this page he is getting the crap beaten out of him by another old school character of mine Power Star who was previously named Star Warrior. dAN also published a strip in the same magazine called Zit-man. I'll let him explain that.
The image below is a cover from WOF from around the time I was working on the Soaper but may not be the exact issue the strip appeared.

A friend
Wow. Again you insult me, and again you fail to tell the complete truth.

A friend of mine was offered to have his comic, Zitman, published in WoF, in 3 consecutive parts. Once part 1 was published, Chris was embarrassed by the art. He asked me to redraw parts 2 & 3, and the publisher was interested in me doing more stuff, but I told him that Tom was better than me, and that he should do it. Or maybe they asked if I knew another artist to do something for WoF.

Either way, I helped Tom get published.

dANdeLION wrote:

Either way, I helped Tom get published.

Yes you did and I appreciate it very much. I however did nothing with the opportunity. After that, other than draw a bunch of frogs for Don Taylor, owner of Green Shift Music, I haven't drawn much of anything besides hundreds of Glurps on the inside of Christmas cards.

Truth is I was kind of hazy on the details of how the whole World of Fandom thing occurred. I'm sure dAN explained it in detail but something tells me I didn't absorb the whole explanation though I did know that the Zitman character belonged to someone else and that dAN was picking up where he had left off.

Also dAN is and always has been a much better artist than I am. His work is well ordered, innovative and detailed. I tend to draw stuff off the cuff without much thought or planning and it always looks that way. He's also a much better musician, a superior drafter and has fathered more kids than I have.


IMHO of course.

Avatar wrote:Suits you.

--A

thanks! i'll take that as a compliment. /hug

My avatar: this is the rocket celebration cut scene from NES Tetris
(NES=Nintendo Entertainment System, the original Nintendo from the 80's)

999,999 is the highest score you can get. The score counter "maxes out" at this point.

In 2003, I first heard about players who had "maxed out" the score counter at 999,999 on NES Tetris. It became my goal to do this, too. I practiced and practiced, plugged away at it, and the best I could ever do was 663,637 in July 2006--and I only got that after being stuck at 622,363 for three days shy of a year.

I never entirely gave up, but I just couldn't beat that score. I played less and less frequently, discouraged. Where I started out playing it a few times per week, I fell off to a few times per month, and eventually only a few times per year. By 2010, I wasn't playing at all anymore.

I kept a record of my high scores, I wrote them down on a wooden board which I called my "Tower of Power". At one point I wrote on it (paraphrased, because I wrote it in pencil and now I can't quite read it anymore), "This is what should be written on my tombstone. It perfectly sums up my life: I tried so hard to achieve something and forever fell short."

Well, in November of 2011, I saw a trailer for a documentary called "Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters". It was about people like me, who were dedicated to mastering NES Tetris (in fact some of them I knew from an old Tetris message board I frequented 2002-2006). Needless to say, it reignited my passion, and I began to pursue my goal with fury.

Luckily, this time around, I learned that my understanding of the "physics" of how my pieces shifted left and right had been fundamentally flawed. I discovered the true nature of rules of auto-shifting and finally started down the road of true mastery.

On December 2, 2013, more than ten years after I began my quest, I achieved a high score in Tetris of 999,999 points.

Only twelve other people in the world had done this before me.

Here's the video

A little background info: a "Tetris" happens when you clear four lines at once. A Tetris is worth 36,000 points on Level 28, and it's the only scoring move that matters (clearing less than four lines does not give any significant amount of score). At 230 lines, you transition to Level 29, which is unplayable (a killscreen).

At 229 lines, one line away from the killscreen, I was still one Tetris away from maxing.

The video link jumps in right at the end of the game, right before the max happens, but the whole game is there if you care to see how I got there

The Tower of Power:

I had a feeling it was something like that, SG.


This week's avatar is a cartoon picture I made for a friend of mine. His band's name was Blind Mullet and wanted me to make some kind of mascot. What is interesting about this picture is that it was made entirely using Microsoft Paintbrush from Windows NT.

Pretty damn good for MS Paint. Did you have to draw it pixel by pixel?

--A

Avatar wrote:Pretty damn good for MS Paint. Did you have to draw it pixel by pixel?

--A

Well, not exactly but the original picture is visibly pixelated when you zoom in close enough. I remember shading the details pixel by pixel.
I had a lot more patience back then and I still found computers and software fascinating.

So tedious...

--A

That's a lot of work. I can't draw with conventional tools, much less a mouse or stylus or whatever people use these days.

This week's avatar (or maybe I should say next week's avatar as I will be home next Monday) is a pencil sketch of a robot playing with a water bug that I drew around 1990. I have no idea what inspired the picture other than it just developed as I was doodling.

I added the blue tint just for this avatar. The original is light grey.

Thanks to the fantastic assistances I have received from Sorus cropping the picture and from Avatar doing the photoshopping work on it, I'm likely to stick with my current avatar for years to come!

Good topic. I can't help but begin to see people as their avatars. Av, for me will always be a slightly punky risk taker (sorry Av - luv ya) based on his avatar(s), Cameraman Jen's smokey besunglassed grainy pic makes her (in my mind) a literary jazz geek and was it Seadreamer who had the stunning girl clinging to a pole - well ( sorry Seadreamer) the less said about that the better! . When people change their Avatars of longstanding, I am often slightly dismayed - "Who is this new amalgam of picture and personality with which I must communicate", "Is it still ....... inside there?" The whole thing opens up a very interesting side of our psychology; about how we form a mental picture of all individuals​ with whom we interface be it in the flesh or otherwise, and I'm betting that we could learn much about our inner mental workings by a deeper study of the subject.

As for me, I never change the avatar I have because ......... well, because it's how I recognise myself now on the Watch. It's a small section showing the head of Gath of Baal from Frank Frazetta's Death Dealer in case you didn't know.

Haha, funny, I'm usually pretty risk-averse actually.

--A

psst, peter...Seareach, not Seadreamer. We do have a Seadreamer, but that member only posted twice and the avatar is nothing like what you describe.

That's Catherine Zeta-Jones in the Seareach avatar, IIRC. Sea, herself, is every bit as fetching, but in a somewhat different aspect.

This week's avatar is based on a pencil sketch I drew in the 90s that depicts a defiant smiley balloon that refuses a command from Satan.

The ideas that cross my mind are equal parts idiotic and fascinating.

What was the command?