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I was quite happy to leave the whole Tiger Woods thing alone. The media attention was ridiculous when the news first broke, and it only gets worse. But when the number of mistresses started to reach into the double-digits, and I had the idea to do a video project specializing in commercial reviews and parodies, I couldn't escape how ripe the subject was for satire.

This whole thing was assembled with Windows Live Movie Maker, Audacity and Photoshop. Considering my own inexperience, the limitations of WLMM, and the fact that it's not easy to do a Tiger Woods impression, I think it turned out pretty well.

I have my thumbs in a lot of different creative pies at the moment, and I'm just waiting to see which one takes hold first. For more stuff like this, subscribe to the Commerciology YouTube channel.

While I share the distaste for it that the rest of the internet seems to, I don't personally see a great deal of distance between Scientology and any other religion. The concept of Thetans is no less ridiculous than magic underwear, the talking snake, the idea of rapture, or the concept of a 6,000 year-old earth. Giving an electropsychometer reading and then selling the subject books and tapes to control mental tension is no more a rip-off than televangelists hitting up old ladies for their social security checks or, for that matter, the whole idea that there are living people who can tell you what the afterlife is like and how you should work to get there.

And while Scientology is known for some creepy methods of retribution against those who have left the religion, they absolutely pale in comparison to the Islamic countries where apostasy is punishable by death. I wonder sometimes why Scientology specifically attracts so many internet detractors, when there are much bigger fish out there to fry.

Resistance to Scientology is a good thing, because it helps inform the public and control the spread of a new excuse not to think before it has a chance to take solid root beyond the confines of Hollywood. But I do wish groups like Anonymous would take that ire they focus on couch-jumping celebrities and open it up to all religions. Unfortunately, I don't expect any such realizations anytime soon. Scientology is just more fun to oppose, and their version of a fatwa is much easier to ignore.

I'm in the middle of doing some redesigns for the Treading Ground crew. I'd like to emulate what my style would have developed into if I hadn't taken quite so many cues from Ken Akamatsu, but also what it would be like if I hadn't skipped drawing for ~year-long periods. Expect slightly smaller eyes, more realistic hair, and more anatomical accuracy.

Getting back into webcomics, however, presents a series of problems. One of the reasons I kept giving up on TG is that it just takes so damn long to do anything. Each comic from start to finish would take between 6 and 8 hours, and that's not even including any writing time. I'd also like to keep a more ambitious update schedule. I'm concerned that I will get fed up with putting that much time into it. I may need go to flat colors or even black and white in order to drive down the time requirement, neither of which is desirable to me.

Then of course, I have to consider if TG is even relevant and workable now. There are some temporal bookmarks I'd have to go in and remove in order to make the comic current again - otherwise it's stuck in 2003. One interesting factor is that there was no Sarah Palin in the public mindscape when I introduced the character of Tracy, but wow, she certainly does seem like a Palin parody when looked upon in 2009. This almost makes me want to do a complete relaunch, or alternately, work on a different story altogether. I have several ideas in waiting.

In addition, I have a backlog of unused scripts and story ideas for TG, but what happens when those run out? I don't work in a grocery store anymore, I'm not single, and hell, I don't even have roommates. As a married 30-year-old IT guy, can I still relate to characters that exist in my world of 10 years ago?

Whatever I end up doing, it's clear that I have realized lately that Treading Ground, in many ways, is the most significant thing I've ever done. In its prime, it receivied ~1500 unique visits a day, which for me is quite impressive. In pure monetary terms I've done much more with my actual jobs over the years, but it's not comparable to making people laugh, getting them engaged in a story, and creating characters they really get into.

So yeah, figured I'd give Xtranormal another shot, and produced this. I still find it annoying.

Not sure how many of you still follow the tgupdate RSS feed, but LJ is lax about updating syndicated feeds anyway, so clicky clicky.

A friend of mine is getting into the review game. I was on the writing team (if you can call four guys hanging out in a living room and ripping on an old, crappy special a "writing team"), and I provided the only finished art I've produced in a year and a half. It is extensive, but believe me, it's a much more efficient and entertaining experience than watching the actual special.

If you enjoy it, spread it around!

I finally managed to get some eggnog yesterday. My family and I are connoisseurs of the stuff. Each year we would get the first eggnog of the season and have a tasting session, where we would carefully judge the nog for flavor and consistency, comparing the different brands of this year with their counterparts the year before.

I missed the tasting at the house in SC this year, where they got the product in much earlier than my local sources. As far as the Atlanta area goes, the best this year is a mixture. The Publix Reduced Fat is a bit thick, but combined with the Trader Joe's Light, it evens out nicely, and it's a good alternative to the full-fat varieties.

This is what I imagine it would be like being taught to cook by Richard Feynman.

What snow-covered cars have to do with anything, I can't possibly guess, but he certainly loves zoom out from them. And for the love of God, don't forget the toast. Or he'll GET you.

A while back I was contemplating the idea of cheat codes for real life. While looking for ways to get extra lives and infinite money would of course lead one directly into the clutches of scam artists both spiritual and monetary, it's often hard not to imagine if there are better ways you could be doing things. Research on the subject led me to the concept of the life hack. Since then, Chris and I have embraced ways to do things more efficiently.

• Food - We made the switch to cooking at home some time ago. This saves us money as well as giving us more variety, but until recently it has been pretty wasteful, with us relying far too much on stuff from the freezer and not enough on fresh food. Now, with the help of a 2-month dry erase calendar we found at Micro Center for $3, we're planning our meals out for up to two weeks ahead, and we always go to the store with a full shopping list. We get exactly what we need and throw out almost nothing. We're also trying new recipes, thanks in large part to discovering Just Cook This.


• Computer - I got my home network straightened out. I upgraded my router with the DD-WRT firmware, started running VNC so I can connect to the home computers from work, and temporarily ran my own FTP server. Lately I've begun using Dropbox to keep a selection of files available to me at all times. Given that I use 7 computers regularly, some of them with multiple operating systems, it doesn't make sense not to.


• General - Lifehacker has become one of my daily must-reads, as well as a great resource when I am working on tackling any sort of problem. Here are some of the hacks from that site I've personally employed:
  
  
  • Open a banana like a monkey
    
    This hack can be useful on a banana that's not quite the perfect ripeness yet, but in general I stick with the traditional opening methods. And speaking of bananas...
  
  
  • Clean a scratched CD or DVD with a banana
    
    I took this hack a bit further, and used it on the car for some small scratches. It was just as effective as Turtle Wax.
  
  
  • DIY Microwave Popcorn
    
    I'm still perfecting my own version of this - I end up with way too many kernels left over - but the idea shows promise, and it turns out better than doing it on the stove when you're using olive oil.

Now I just need to extend these efficiency boosts into other areas of life where they are more desperately needed, like creativity and fitness. I think I'm getting a more solid handle on things, and by continuing to make improvements one at a time, I'll get there soon.

November 9th would have been Carl Sagan's 75th birthday, and this weekend people are celebrating. While I can't quite be in Florida for the official Carl Sagan Day festivities, we have been in the middle of a re-watching of Cosmos, and our schedule did serendipitously permit us to watch the final episode today.

This seems like as good a time as any to share the second video featuring Dr. Sagan from John Boswell. If you liked A Glorious Dawn, this is definitely worth checking out.

Today's the day Geocities shuts down. Ken Gagne over at ComputerWorld reminds us of the good times.

Geocities is where many of us hosted our own websites for the first time (and in many cases, the only time.) I started learning HTML way back in 1996 because I had a place to work on it and share it with others. Those are skills that served me well when I decided to do a webcomic, in my current job, and even just in participating in various forums and comment threads where I already knew the code to add images, bold and italicize my text. Although it has long since outlived its usefulness, it's still a little sad to see it go.

"The commercial challenges have to be confronted," (U2 Bassist Adam) Clayton says during an interview backstage at "Saturday Night Live," as awaits the band's performance on the show's season kickoff. "But I think, in a sense, the more interesting challenge is, 'What is rock 'n' roll in this changing world?' Because, to some extent, the concept of the music fan – the concept of the person who buys music and listens to music for the pleasure of music itself – is an outdated idea."

Or, you know, maybe people are tired of U2. I know after 20 years of listening to "alternative" radio and being force-fed the band, I've developed a distaste.

U2 Adapts To Changing Times, Laments Loss Of Obama Election Joy [HuffPost]

NASA's LCROSS mission ended anticlimactically this morning. We didn't see jack, although the close up pictures of the approach by the second probe were pretty neat in and of themselves. I just hope we can glean the information we needed from the impact, even if it wasn't as splodey as we would have preferred.

We're all set to watch the moon-bombing at 7:31 EST. It's going to have to be on television, since my telescope is not powerful enough to see much, and I'm sure others will have plenty of nice video to post. Plus, getting up at 7:30 is going to be hard enough without additional dressing and set-up time.

My interest in astronomy has been re-invigorated lately, in part because of the video I'm posting below. We've seen Auto-Tune used for flashy hip-hop and hilarious parodies, but this is the first time I've seen it used for something artful and inspiring. I know I'm not the only one spreading this around, but if you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth your time.

A while back, I tweeted about how Yahoo is closing GeoCities without giving existing users any way to reclaim their files that would be recognizable as decent by any rational being. Since they have refused to open up the FTP server to free accounts even for the small period of time we have left, we are expected to go into the File Manager and painstakingly right-click each file and save to disk.

Well, fuck that. There is always a better way, and I've come across two of them lately.

The easiest, but least customizable, way to keep your old website from being lost to the ether is to use a website copying program like HTTrack. This is useful if you simply want to keep the public side of your site, perhaps for reposting elsewhere. (Note - If your Geocities page is as bad as mine, I'd urge you to reconsider that whole reposting idea.)

If, however, you're like me and at some point in time used your Geocities account as a web-based repository for files you may need, you'll want to go more in-depth. The Firefox Add-on DownThemAll has worked quite nicely for me. Once installed, open your File Manager, right click to open DownThemAll, and select the files to save in a single operation.

Free website hosts are fairly easy to find these days, but if you're just looking to replace Geocities as a web repository, I'd recommend Dropbox. Considering that I use multiple OSes across 7 different computers regularly, it just didn't make sense not to use it. The installation is simple on Windows, Mac and Linux, the signup is application-based and painless, it's easy and convenient to use, and you get 2 gigs of space for free.