I gave fellow deviant $15 to draw my OC Neith the Nubian archer, and she gave me this beauty:




Be sure to check it out and give her some traffic!

Normally I don't care for the current cinematic fad over 3D glasses, but I'm still stoked for Jurassic Park's return to theaters. I don't care so much about the 3D, but I really want to experience my all-time favorite movie in the context of a movie theater for once. I am going to have a good weekend!

Sorry for the temporary deactivation...again. I would go into why I did that, but honestly I'm feeling under the weather this evening (for reasons unrelated to my deactivation) and so would prefer to reserve that for another day.

On a more positive note, I have a Facebook friend who works as a public school teacher, and he suggested that we should collaborate on putting together an illustrated children's book. So far we haven't mapped out a plot yet, but he did invoke ancient Egyptians, dinosaurs, and time travel as the subject matter. I think a collaboration like this would be good for me, because if I lose interest I still have someone else holding me accountable for pulling my weight. Besides, collabs mean less workload for each of us individually.

Of course, given the book's target audience, my friend did advise me against putting up more booty drawings...

You may have noticed that after over a year of neglecting them, I have finally begun to play with my Copic marker set again. They can be a little messy, and I often have to combine colors in order to produce ones not in my set, but it feels good to color traditionally again. Honestly, coloring traditionally feels less awkward than the digital coloring everyone does these days.

Copied over from my Tumblr...

I hope you enjoyed a merry Christmas yesterday. I know I did; I didn't actually get many presents other than money, but since the sum of money my parents gave me was huge, I don't mind at all. If anything, I'm grateful for it because I can choose my own presents instead of waiting on my family to guess what I would like.

I've also drawn a Christmas present for one of my friends on Tumblr and DeviantArt, but can't scan it in until I get home from Colorado this afternoon.

I've heard about so many mass shootings in my life that they have ceased to surprise me by now, but even a jaded guy like me will say that this recent Connecticut shooter sets a new low. What makes him stand out in my mind from all the other young mass shooters is that he massacred small children. I cannot fathom what a young man like him would have against helpless innocents who inflicted nothing upon him. Simply suggesting he was somehow mentally ill or abnormal doesn't satisfy me since mental illness, rather like the concept of normalcy, is so vaguely defined in the first place. The few rumors I've heard that proposed a specific diagnosis have suggested Asperger's or some other variation of autism, and I hope that isn't the case at all. The last thing I and the majority of aspies need in this world is any association with a mass murderer. Even if he does turn out to stand somewhere on the spectrum, that does not excuse his atrocities in the least.

Wrote 1,400 words worth of a new story's opening scene today. It's not the end of the chapter by any means, but hopefully I'll finish that chapter by the end of tomorrow. Thankfully I have a clear idea of where my current work in progress is going now!

My deepest apologies for the deactivation two days ago. I was upset over how the community over at the forums was bullying one of my friends, but now I feel that blaming DA as a whole for a few douchebag users was unfair. Besides, I've met some wonderful people here too, and I don't want to see them go.

Also, thank goodness Obama won.

I've uploaded some of my drawings onto Tumblr, and so far the ones featuring Cleopatra VII have FAR more likes and reblogs than the rest. It's almost catapulting me into fame. What's up with that?

BTW, my Tumblr is here: [link]

A recent post at the Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracking blog pisses me off, because it epitomizes an annoying trend in certain paleontologists' attitudes towards dinosaurs:

We need to reimagine what a confrontation between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops would have looked like. Instead of two equally matched dinosaurs squaring off against each other, adult Tyrannosaurus probably ambushed young, unwary Triceratops or picked off sick individuals too weak to put up much of a fight. Tyrannosaurus had no sense of honor to uphold–the tyrant was an apex predator that had to maximize its chances of acquiring flesh, and the only safe adult Triceratops was a dead one. Perhaps, someday, a lucky researcher will stumble across evidence of our favorite Hell Creek scene at a field site or in a museum drawer. For now, though, we need to consider the magnificent Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops as real animals and not slavering monsters made to gore each other for our delight.

The problem with this quote isn't that he's technically wrong. Insofar as most predatory animals are opportunists who won't pass up an easy kill if they find it, I agree with him that T. Rex would have done the same. What I take issue with is his insistence that we not envision dinosaurs as monsters who fought each other, which echoes how other paleo-fans I've seen complain about the media's sensationalistic over-emphasis on dinosaurs' ferocity and killing power. These people may know a lot about paleontology, but they seem to have forgotten why anyone even loves dinosaurs to begin with.

The reason dinosaurs have such a grip on our imaginations is precisely because we perceive them as much more monstrous and spectacular than anything that has walked on land ever since. They are the closest things to the dragons of our mythologies that reality has ever known. It is technically true that not all dinosaurs were fierce predators; some were majestic behemoths or beautifully plumed birds. It is also true that even the most belligerent theropods spent most of their energy outside of combat. However, these same dinosaurs appeal to us not because they fought all the time, but because they could wreak incredible damage whenever they did have to fight. Analogously, no one likes martial artists or superheroes because they fight all the time, but because they can kick ass in those occasions when they have to. When you complain that we focus too much on dinosaurs' monstrous qualities, you implicitly claim that we focus too much on why we even like dinosaurs in the first place.

There's nothing inherently wrong with depicting dinosaurs doing mundane or otherwise non-combative activities. Truth be told, it can even be a visual novelty. However, since many dinosaurs' cool factor depends on their martial prowess, it's little wonder that most artists emphasize their scary and savage side. Furthermore, as an aspiring storyteller, I know that conflict is what drives stories, so dinosaurs fighting or attacking is practically a necessary inevitability whenever we feature them in our stories. No one wants to watch a dinosaur movie in which the creatures simply graze in the jungle while ignoring each other.

Dinosaurs were real animals---really monstrous animals. Let's not lose sight of why they command our reverence.

A couple of days ago I drew an Ornithomimus with a feathery coat:


Now today I've just heard that an Ornithomimus fossil has been found with feathers recently. I'm not terribly surprised that another feathered theropod has been found, but the really creepy thing is that this dinosaur belonged to the exact same genus I drew earlier. WTF?

I've asked people to draw my characters before, but this may be the first time someone drew one of my OCs on their own initiative. Check it out here:

Courtesy of

It won't start up. We don't know exactly what happened to it, but personally I suspect it caught a virus. Whatever the case, I still have my laptop with me, so I can still use the Internet and write. Unfortunately I won't be able to scan in any new drawings until the desktop issue is resolved.

Almost three years may have passed since this came out in theaters, but after watching it on DVD recently I wanted to do a journal ramble on it anyway.

Avatar ranks among my favorite movies ever. I absolutely love the verdant world of Pandora, its fearsome wildlife, and the beautiful Na'vi culture. It's both visually spectacular and a perfect example of rich and intricate world-building. Additionally prehistoric warriors riding jungle creatures and battling space marines is a hard concept to mess up.

I don't mind that the plot seems familiar. It isn't actually a bad plot by itself, and the presentation more than compensates for it. In fact the plot's familiarity isn't necessarily a weakness to begin with; while a few twists and turns can definitely enhance a story's excitement factor, on the other hand a certain degree of predictability does make it easier to follow. Overly convoluted plots tend to lose my attention.

Another, somewhat more potent criticism I've heard claims that Avatar has a strong Mighty Whitey subtext since it shows the hero Jake Sully fighting on behalf of the Na'vi. Let me make one thing clear: I hate patronizingly racist movies like Precious and The Blind Side which feature good light-skinned people saving poor dark-skinned people from their poverty, but there exists a critical difference between these and Avatar. For example, in Precious (probably my most loathed movie ever BTW) you have the light-skinned teachers saving Precious from her stereotypically pathological upbringing, but in Avatar Jake doesn't save the Na'vi from any poverty at all. He does help defend them from his former associates, but instead of pulling the Na'vi out of their original culture, he embraces that culture and assimilates into it. He doesn't educate the Na'vi; instead they educate him. It's much more uplifting to the Na'vi than movies like Precious are to African-Americans.

If there's one thing I didn't 100% like about Avatar, it's that the Na'vi look a little too human-like for my taste. I would prefer that they have a more, well, non-human look, maybe something like the prawns in District 9, but then the Sully/Neytiri romance subplot wouldn't work so well.

[link]

I don't know how much this will interest my watchers, but I for one really love the idea of nomadic pastoralists (animal herders) being the architects of a monument like Stonehenge. I might build a culture like that for one of my worlds someday.

I believe that book sales are overrated as a measure of how successful the books being sold really are. Sure, the authors may reap in a lot of monetary profit, but there are many more ways to gauge success than income alone. I for one would feel much more successful if most people liked my writing than I would if I simply made a lot of money off it. I care far more about earning other people's respect with my creative skills than I do about accumulating financial wealth. On the other hand, it is possible for books to make lots of money without actually winning the public's hearts and minds. For example, back when Twilight reached the peak of its infamy, I bought a copy only to see if it was truly as terrible as my peers claimed (suffice to say that I indeed didn't care for it very much). It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of notoriously bad books sold well simply because of people's curiosity or for the same quasi-masochistic reason people watch Uwe Boll movies. Such sales should not at all compliment the authors.

After fruitless weeks of preliminary planning and worldbuilding, I finally started actually writing a story last night (~1,700 words into it as of this post). Although I have developed a clear mental image of my plot from start to finish, I haven't written this "outline" down anywhere on paper or the Internet. Honestly, story-writing seems a lot easier and more fun when I do all the planning in my head.

If you're curious as to what my story is about, it features my OC Nzinga, but again I've revised most things about her. The core concept of a reptile-hunting African Amazon still persists though.

I feel that it distracts me from more productive pursuits. I'll probably return after several weeks, if not a month, and hopefully I will have some creative productions to show off by then. See ya later!

I've just come home from a relaxing four-day vacation in Alberta, Canada. For me, the trip's major highlights were visiting the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology and the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. The former houses one of the world's largest collections of dinosaur fossils, including multiple T. Rex skeletons, whereas the latter is an archaeological site where prehistoric Native Americans would drive bison off cliffs. Especially fascinating were the Natives' hunting techniques, which drew heavily on observation of the animals' behavior. For example, Natives would construct lanes lined by cairns for the bison to run through towards the cliff, since they knew the cairns would somehow intimidate the animals (who had poor vision). It amazes me how much more resourceful hunter-gatherers were than we give them credit for.

It seems that the majority of the female characters I find attractive fall into one of the following archetypes. I have an illustration of all three archetypes in the works right now.

The Scientist: Highly intelligent and well-educated, the Scientist usually comes from a more modern, cosmopolitan society than the other two archetypes. She may work as a professor or researcher in either a social science or something biological or paleontological. The Scientist is relatively humble and down-to-earth, although she may have distant ambitions along the lines of curing cancer or AIDS. More often than not she's a pacifist who strongly disapproves of violence. She has a more "average" or curvy physique than either the Amazon or the Queen.

Due to her mundane and peaceful lifestyle, the Scientist rarely features as a fully-fledged protagonist in my stories, but ironically she's probably the kind of woman I would end up marrying. Her personality and interests overlap the most with my own.

The Queen: Whether or not she's an actual queen or simply a princess, she's almost always royalty in line for her kingdom's throne. She usually comes from one of the more "advanced" African civilizations like Egypt, Nubia, or Mali. Her physical beauty is of their elegantly dainty type, with a tall and slender body, and she likes to adorn herself with gold and gems. The Queen's demeanor is polite, classy, and politically savvy, but she also bears a high maintenance attitude or vanity. Since her subjects often perceive her to have a special relationship with their gods, she has greater religious piety than the other characters. The Queen aims to govern her people benevolently, but she suffers from arrogance and a rigid adherence to her personal sense of right and wrong.

The Queen most often comes to mind whenever I think about ancient African civilizations and is fun to draw, but since Queens often isolate themselves from dangerous situations, they make difficult protagonists to write. They work best either as love interests for male warriors or if combined with the Amazon archetype (which I've actually done several times).

The Amazon: This is the kind of character who hunts dinosaurs for dinner. Although sometimes she hails from an advanced civilization like the Queen's, more often her culture has a more "tribal" flavor (think Zulu or Maasai). Either way she spends a lot of her time traveling through wilderness and has accumulated a rich repertoire of survival skills. She has a more muscular build than either the Queen or Scientist, but her fighting style emphasizes speed and agility over brute strength, similar to a martial artist.  The Amazon is the most courageous heroine of the three archetypes, but also the most short-tempered and vindictive.

The Amazon is perhaps the easiest protagonist to write because she's more likely to experience physical conflict head-on than the Scientist and Queen. However, the whole "warrior woman" trope is challenging to justify in a pre-modern setting, and honestly we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that a female character must behave in a stereotypically masculine way in order to count as strong or positive. Besides, I don't know how compatible I would be with an Amazon-type girlfriend.