Hot on the heels of my Smart people are dumb, failure is awesome post is a followup! I can only imagine how anxious the edges of your seats are for you to stop sitting on them. :)

Another practical way to apply the “just show up” philosophy is finding ways to be better at your job. It’s not as obvious as it sounds, so do read on.

A lot of people, myself included, are naturally inclined toward finding better, faster and smarter ways of doing things. For artists, that’s how we grow. But most people do this. Some people apply it toward a career, some toward a hobby. There are many, many outlets for it but it’s all the same concept.

When people choose to apply this self-improving attitude toward their career, often it’s because they want to get further in life by being better, smarter, and faster at what they do.

Let’s say this is you. You’re a character artist. You find an awesome new way to create characters faster. You’ve put forth a strong initial effort toward finding better, faster, smarter ways of doing your job. You keep finding new ways to rock, and you try to make things better for everyone. You try to make a difference, and it’s all great at first.

Then… slowly… you realize, no one really seems to care. Your effort has no measurable impact outside of your immediate area of responsibility. People just aren’t as excited about your improvements as you are.

But why? You’ve found a more efficient way to do something. This affects them. It doesn’t make sense for them not to care.

This almost always happens. This is when you become discouraged, stop trying, and fall into the same grind everyone else seems to be in. Why keep trying if no one notices?

I’ll tell you what you can do to take a HUGE first step toward making these efforts matter:

Write them down.

Writing them down makes all the difference in the world. The real goal of having it written down is that the fruits of your labor exist outside your head. You don’t have to be there for someone to use them. They may even outlast YOU. These little ideas will be free-floating thoughts that anyone can grab and use without needing you to be there for them. They can be useful all on their own. Being identified with these, particularly if they help someone, is pure gold. And it’s not even that hard.

This ties in perfectly with showing up. Just as simply showing up and outlasting the competition can make all the difference, so can persisting in finding how to be a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit smarter than the rest, and writing it down.

It may not feel like it, but your effort DOES matter, but only so long as you write it down and put it out there for everyone to see, anytime they want! Whether it’s on a bulletin board or in a design doc or a technical specifications document, it still makes a difference, on many different levels:

1) You’re learning. This comes first and is most important. Even if you don’t communicate your little innovations (which you should), ultimately, you’re still getting in the mindset of excellence. You’re learning. You’re self-improving. Writing it down drills it into your brain, and you should do it if only for this single reason.

See, because of this type of thinking, your brain is being kicked into overdrive. It’s hungry, and you’re feeding it pure, juicy MEAT. And if you keep feeding it, the most amazing ideas will keep coming to you, and the awesomeness will only compound further and further.

2) It’ll always be there. Even if your peers or superiors don’t immediately acknowledge what you’ve done, if you put it out there anyway where people can see it, inevitably they’ll keep running across it… keep seeing it… keep eyeing it… and after a while, it’ll hit them right between the eyes, and they’ll get it. The more you do, the more omnipresent you are.

3) Your coworkers will notice. Just think about what it would look like to be the only guy that’s actively finding a better way of working. It’s never instantaneous, and it shouldn’t be. Establishing a consistent reputation as a self-improver, an innovator, has a lot of power if you can pull it off. Especially if your bosses see it and like it. Showing initiative consistently is very seductive. Just keep showing up.

Even if you put it out there and no one cares at first, you shouldn’t let it bother you. If it’s a total revolution, no one will get it at first. What revolution in history has worked perfectly, immediately? None. It totally scales up and down… these things take time.

Listen, even if they don’t understand it at first, or ever, by simple virtue of showing up, figuring it out and recording it for all to see, you’ll eventually be perceived as working a little harder. Or be a little smarter. Or, if they inspect the idea closely enough, perceive you as being a little quicker.

Ever wonder why there are 500 trillion books on writing written by authors that have never written? The authors that are writing don’t show up… so these other guys do instead. People buy their books, because they think “Hey, this guy wrote a book. He must be Sir Smarty of Pants-Town.”

Usually they’re wrong about that, but it’s the same principle. Show up. No one else will. If they do, improve your chances of competing against them successfully by actually being good. Earn the title of “expert,” or if you’re modest, “guy-that-is-knowledgeable-about-stuff.”

The reason people don’t always notice these contributions of yours is because, hey, they’re working too. Or maybe they’re not ready to learn about it. Some people make up their minds never to learn anything new, because they’ve figured it out well enough as it is.

You can’t change peoples’ minds, period. The harder you try, the less likely they will be to change it. People will change their own mind when they feel like it.

So if you’ve developed some wicked-crazy process improvement, the longer you leave it laying around, the more likely it is they’ll run across it and go for it all on their own. That’s about the best you can do to get into their heads, so putting it where they can see it is a good first step.

What also happens sometimes is that people will appreciate it and simply not tell you. Heh. Yeah, you wouldn’t think so, but that happens more than you know.

People are wrapped up in their own little world most of the time. They’ll forget to give you feedback. Or they’ll assume you’ll come to them and ask for it. It may mean the world to them but they just don’t communicate it. Silence doesn’t mean apathy… some people just keep to themselves. I’ve had this happen a LOT, and it’s always absolutely blown me away. I’d put something out there, no one would care, and a few weeks or months later someone would bring it up and thank me, and I never realized it made a difference. But it does.

See, I’ve started and given up on exactly this type of thing several times over several jobs. I assumed that because my contributions weren’t immediately noticed that I was wasting my time. Eventually I realized that it’s deferred gratification. If I only build up a little library of improvements over time, eventually it’ll sneak up on someone, kick them in the teeth (in the, uh, good way), they’ll finally appreciate it and it’ll all be worth it.

And the whole time, hell, I’m learning as I do it. I have everything to gain by trying, because I’ll always remember it, even if nothing else comes of it. But that’s the beauty of it… the longer I keep at it, the more likely something will come of it.

Most success isn’t made through years of ass-kicking, soul-draining effort, running at maximum power and expending every ounce of effort the whole time. It’s short spurts of effort, persistently carried out, followed by patience. Remember that. It’s never as hard as you think it is.

My overall point is… don’t stop trying harder. Don’t stop being better. Don’t let indifference discourage you. No effort is wasted. Be patient, keep trying, keep showing up, and eventually your efforts will pay off enormously, and you’ll wonder why you didn’t start sooner.

Been thinking about this lately and felt like committing it to paper… so to speak.

Smart people are dumb. Failure is awesome.

Let me explain.

I’ve given a lot of thought over the years to woefully inept people that end up rich, having great jobs, are in positions of power, get all the girls, etc. I wonder how they do it, even though they clearly lack much. By all rights, given what they’re working with, they should fail miserably. But they don’t.

People complain all the time about how the most mediocre people imaginable achieve things that we can’t reach. They can’t understand how. I mean, come on, I have everything that guy doesn’t, but why does he get what he wants and I don’t?

Why? He tries and you don’t.

I said before in my Marketing for Artists article that 90% of success is showing up. And that’s what these crappy people have that “smart” people don’t. The will to keep showing up.

If you’re running a race and everyone else gives up before it’s over, you win by default.

Let’s abstract that for a second: If they’re the ONLY person that keeps trying, who’s there to compete against? Who’s to stop him from winning by default, by being the only player?

It’s like a curve over time. At practically any endeavor, as time passes, people will start dropping out and giving up, slowly at first but then faster and faster. They’re only willing to go so far before throwing in the towel. The playing field narrows itself. Keep showing up. Keep trying. Be patient, give it time, and you’ll win because you were willing to do what they weren’t to succeed.

Sure. You’ll fail a lot on the way. You’ll make mistakes. Mistakes are when weak people give up and hand the trophy over to someone else. Persisting through the mistakes, embracing failure, and determining to keep moving forward is how you win. Every failure is an opportunity to learn, and improve future performance.

The end of the race, with the only other determined contender, is where quality, skill and intelligence come into play. Just doggedly ‘tard your way through the rest up until that point.

It’s all a game. Beyond quality, beyond intelligence, beyond any other factor, all you have to do most of the time is keep showing up, no matter what, and you’ll go places. Opportunities will start coming to you in ways you’d never imagined.

Here’s one real-world application for you: Applying for a job. Most people SUCK at this, and that’s why they don’t get jobs. Most people I know have given up after ONE EMAIL sent to a company they’re applying for. They quit before the race even starts.

After working in sales at Liquid Development, I learned that the follow-up call after initial solicitation is the most important communication you can make. Most people I would email, whether currently clients or people I was soliciting to, would never respond to the first email. Ever. It’s as if they never received it at all. I’d say I got one reply out of a hundred to the first email, if that.

After that, I’d sit on it a week, and send a follow-up to make sure they got the first one. At this point, usually within the next business day, I’d have a reply almost every single time. The response rate here was perhaps one in four. Whether or not it was a positive or negative response, it still got responses, and opportunities were either created or dismissed.

This fascinated me. Most people give up after only one communication, when the second one works almost every single time. You’d think that it would annoy people, but mostly, people are cool about it. They know they’re terrible about responding to email, and as long as you’re polite, everything is fine.

When I was applying for a job on my own, I sent out my resume and portfolio to probably 30 or 40 companies. I kept track of what I sent to who and what date, and followed up like clockwork after one week. The second email was always a quoted copy of the first, starting with a “Hi, my name is Jon Jones and I applied for such-and-such position at your company a week ago. I hadn’t heard back yet and I wanted to make sure that you received my email. I’ve quoted it below. Thanks!”

Then the floodgates opened.

Week one: 40 emails. Zero responses.

Week two: 40 follow-up emails. 35 responses within three days.

And you know what the best part was? The really, really funny thing? Every single response began with an apology for not responding sooner. Every single one, without ONE exception.

See, I was scared that I would annoy these companies by emailing more than once. Not so. Quite the contrary, in fact. It showed that I was serious about working with them. Giving them seven to ten days to respond is about right, in my opinion. Then comes the follow-up, which is the clincher.

Just keep trying politely, in an appropriate timeframe, until you get a solid YES or NO answer. In the game industry, most people will never even THINK of doing this! They’ll send out one feeble email and give up. Just one more email could have gotten them a job. Isn’t that tragic?

All it takes is showing up, again and again, until you get someone’s attention. THEN, and only then, do your skills come into play. They see your work, decide they like you, and it just gets better from there.

Some companies I had to follow up with three times or more. When I was applying at Ready At Dawn I sent something like ten or fifteen follow-ups because I’d caught our poor art director in the middle of a crunch. I kept trying. And it resulted in a job so fantastic I still can’t believe I have it.

Yeah. I got a lot of rejections. Almost everything I got back was a rejection. Oh, we’re not hiring right now. Oh, we’re just wrapping up this project. Oh, we’re not a game company and would you please quit emailing us. Blah, blah, blah. But I also got a handful of interviews out of that, and one of those interviews got me a fantastic job.

Why? I didn’t let failure bother me. I kept trying anyway. Failure is a part of life. The more you try, the more potential chances to succeed you have. If I apply to 100 companies and you apply to 5, who’s more likely to succeed? If ONE of your companies says no, they’ve reduced your chances of getting a job by 20%! But if one of mine says no, my chances are only reduced by 1%. Who’s trying smarter?

Let’s make the playing field bigger. If ten people are applying for companies and I’m the only one that applied at 100, my chances of contacting a company that has received NO other job applications is pretty high. See what I mean? Most people won’t even try that hard, and they make me win.

If I’m firing a shotgun at a guy, most of the shotgun pellets will miss. But all I really need is one to hit. The more pellets there are, the better my chances of succeeding. It just comes down to that, really.

Yeah, it’s messy, and a lot of failure is involved. But every failure is a chance to learn. Every time I fail and keep moving forward,

And again, it all comes down to showing up. The more you try, the longer you persist, the better your chances of winning get. It’s so simple that people overlook it. It’s so obvious that it’s instantly dismissed.

This is the way the world works, and this is why seemingly unfit people succeed. They just don’t give up and eventually they get what you want. And it probably annoys you because for some reason or another, you never even started. No gold star for you. :)

And that’s why I say smart people are dumb. “But I’m BETTER than him.” “But I want this MORE than him.” “But he’s so STUPID.” “But he’s ugly!”

But he still wins. Because you create excuses for yourself not to try. Because you’re “too smart” to bother trying, because of X, Y or Z reason.

If you were really smart, wouldn’t you be winning? :)

Man, I really have the worst luck with apartment complexes.

When I lived in Portland and was working for Liquid Development, I lived and worked in the same building downtown. The apartment complex was called Fifth Avenue Court.

It was very convenient, just an elevator ride to work. I traveled farther vertically than horizontally. :) It freed me of the need for a car. It was a small apartment, but clean, and had a nice view of the city. That much was fine.

Unfortunately, almost everything else sucked enormously. The apartment manager would take off days at a time with no notice and no emergency number. She’d yell at me. She’d slam the door in my face. On several occasions, she signed for my packages then hid them and pretended I didn’t have any. She even refused to fix my dishwasher for over a month.

Also, my next door neighbor was insane. Literally.

One wintry morning in December, we were awakened at 5AM by him screaming “MERRY ALCOHOLIC CHRISTMAS!” at the top of his lungs. Immediately following that we heard him throwing beer bottles and anything else he could get his hands on out the window, six floors onto the street below.

We were fairly freaked out, but tried to go back to sleep. At that point, he grew weary of chucking all his worldly possessions out the window. There was a brief pause as he decided it’d be a much better idea to pick up a sledgehammer and start destroying everything in his apartment that was too heavy to lift.

We were wide awake no. We heard him running around smashing out all his windows, putting the sledgehammer through his furniture, smashing up the bathroom, annihilating the toilet, and punching holes in the walls wherever he could.

This went on for about half an hour, screaming “THIS SUCKS!” repeatedly as he smashed everything.

After a short pause that worried us greatly, he decided he’d like a bigger apartment. Why do I know this? Because he started breaking down the wall separating our bedroom to his. It shook our entire bed and we could feel enormous chunks of drywall falling off.

At this point, we were sufficiently freaked enough to call the police and get the HELL out.

Later, we told the insane bitch apartment manager about it, who seemed appropriately worried. She went to do an inspection of the apartment to see what happened to it, and wouldn’t let us anywhere near it.

A couple days later I dropped by and asked her what she found. She looked at me like I was insane and said that the apartment was completely undamaged.

I was astonished. Nearly an hour of destruction went on in there, and there is absolutely no way that nothing was destroyed. I couldn’t believe it.

And then I didn’t, because the very next day there was constant construction and drywall experts working inside the apartment for over two weeks. Nothing damaged? Interesting. Made me feel a lot safer.

A lot of other random crap happened there, like the crazy lady that sat outside the apartment complex and talked to a tree all day, and random people getting shot outside, but that incident was by far the most entertaining.

So fast forward to California. I’ve lived in this complex for nearly 11 months now. I have one month left go on my lease, but I want out so badly that I’m moving out a month early and simply paying for two apartments for that last month.

When I moved from Portland to Huntington Beach, I hired movers, sold my car and flew down here. I had to sign up for the apartment sight unseen, and handle the deposit and paperwork and everything without having seen the complex. Time was a factor.

The apartment complex in question is Huntington Vista Apartments.

The complex sounded great, initially. A mile from the beach, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, 1100 square feet, second story, vaulted ceiling, reasonably close to work, and so on.

Mainly, I was excited about it because of the fitness center, air conditioning, utilities paid, and NO CONSTRUCTION. I’d spent a year living across the street from an extremely active construction site, and by golly, I’d never do that again. This was all verified as being completely true by the apartment manager. Sold, I thought!

So I sold off much of what I owned, hired movers to pick up the rest, sold my car and flew down here, leaving Portland behind for good.

I had a friend drive me to the apartment complex, having seen it for the first time, and I sat down to sign the lease and hand over the cashier’s check to move in.

They waited until that moment to tell me that, actually, the “finished” fitness center had only begun construction. Utilities aren’t paid. And worst of all, there is no air conditioning, and they don’t allow window air conditioners.

Oh, and to top it all off, we can’t see the apartment yet, but I have to sign and pay now anyway or I don’t get it at all.

To establish a bit of context, at this point I have no car, virtually no money, and two days until the movers arrive and no way to contact them. My only choices are

1) Sacrifice a few hundred bucks and desperately scramble to find a place to live, or

2) Sign.

So I signed.

Remember how I said I hated construction? Right after I moved, they began to construct the fitness center 20 feet from my bedroom window, starting at 6am sharp every day. Awesome.

We live across from a girl who, I swear, is the cosmic love child of Fran Drescher and Gilbert Gottfried. She could shatter bulletproof glass simply by speaking. When she laughs, birds fall dead from the sky. Whenever she’s surprised by something, she shrieks with a volume usually reserved for someone that is in the process of being murdered. I always hope that maybe, just maybe, just this one time, that that’s actually the case. But then she keeps talking, and I sulk.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she stayed inside, but for some reason this blabbing bitch sits out on her front porch, facing our apartment, talking on the phone and smoking for hours at a time, every night.

I’ve seen a dozen people move in next to her and move out within a week. You can only do that by breaking your lease. With the apartment they lived in and the fees for breaking it, that’s nearly $4000 per person.

I’ve called security on her more times than I can count. I’ve even called the police on her because it was so bad.

We’ve tried closing all the windows and all the doors in our apartment and retreating to the bedroom, but we can still hear her and she still keeps us up at night. It’s incredible.

The constant stream of lease-breakers ended when her friends moved in next door. They ALL started hanging out on their front porch, laughing and drinking and screaming and being idiots and playing loud music and never stopping well into the night, every night.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, one prick hooked up an electric guitar to an amp, cranked it up to concert levels and played music all day and all night long.

This, of course, coincides with record heat, where we literally can’t close our windows without getting physically ill from the heat. And we couldn’t very well escape from the noise because they don’t stop at night. The police were even called at night and still they wouldn’t stop.

The apartment manager finally got so many complaints about them that she contacted a lawyer and threatened them with something horrible she wouldn’t elaborate on, and the volume has died down somewhat. A minor relief.

A couple doors down from them live more assholes. On they first day of their moving in, they parked their truck across four parking spaces, including mine, and left it there. I was going to see a movie with Dea and couldn’t leave because of them, and I couldn’t find them. Awesome!

We had to call the apartment manager, read her the license plate, have her look up whose apartment it belonged to and walk over there and ask them to move it.

The beer-guzzling idiot that parked there grudgingly got up from his plaid loveseat, shlumped his way into his raggedy pickup truck and gracefully backed over the recliner he forgot he’d set behind his truck, destroying it immediately.

After he cleared up the mess and moved completely, I was able to leave. Then he immediately drove back in front of the same spaces and left again, so I couldn’t even park when I came back. Double awesome.

I believe the apartment manager had him towed after we left.

The next day, I discovered hundreds of dollars worth of damage to my nearly-new car from variously keying the doors, hood, trunk, top of my car and the wheels, and also several dents that were so bad they scraped all the paint away. Yay.

He and the stupid loud bitch have each done the same thing to my car on two or three more occasions, coinciding perfectly with security being called on them.

Most recently, we had a heat wave. It was over 100 degrees outside, and 95 degrees inside our apartment. There was no air conditioning, window units weren’t allowed, and all our window fans had no effect. We had a window air conditioner from Portland that we weren’t allowed to use, and I called the apartment manager and begged her to use it. She said we couldn’t use it because they look unsightly from the outside. She suggested we buy a swamp cooler ($100 – 500) or a standing air conditioner ($500 – 2000) instead.

We called Renter’s Rights and every local city phone number we could but apparently air conditioning is an amenity and they can evict us at any time if we install one without their permission. Even if it’s a health issue.

We did our best to survive through it, but it was so bad that Dea had a heat stroke. It gave her a migraine so bad she was crying and couldn’t even stand up and threw up for hours. I’m very happy she didn’t lapse into a coma like many heat stroke victims do. Did I mention this happened INSIDE OUR APARTMENT?

Clearly, Huntington Vista Apartments cares more about nondescript tan boxes poking out of a window than human lives.

After that — which was horrible and stressful — I got clever. I bought some plastic tarp, a small wooden table, and some packing tape. With these materials I installed our window unit air conditioner in the living room sliding glass door, then hung up a towel over the chairs on our patio and blocked it off completely. Then we sealed off everything with plastic tarp and tape, and the temperature of our department dropped by 20 degrees and we were fine.

We still run it, they haven’t bitched at us, and we’ve been happy ever since.

There was a lot of other assorted bullshit, like the construction workers following Dea around and whistling at her constantly, then putting a wooden board with nails in it in my parking space so I’d drive over it after we complained.

Fortunately, this is our last month in the apartment, and I can’t wait to get out. I hope the new place I’m moving into will be better.

Are these kinds of problems normal?

Yesterday I went to The Getty Museum with my fiancee and some friends. For those that don’t know, it’s an extremely swanky art museum located on the top of a small mountain in Los Angeles. It’s just off of the highway, but you have to take a tram that winds twistily up the side of the mountain and removes you from all the sounds of city life and traffic. It also provides a truly breathtaking view into the thick wall of smog in front of downtown LA.

It’s like being in another world entirely. It’s the first time in years that I’ve been someplace that’s really, truly quiet. It’s eerie at first, but then gets calming.

What makes it even better beyond simply art is the gardens. They have a huge area devoted to a circular floating garden surrounded by a wide variety of very attractive and unexpectedly living plants.

While I was there I got to see a Rembrandt exhibit, a room full of astonishingly beautiful marble sculptures, a photography exhibit, ancient Roman art, the gardens, and an exhibit showing off the way books used to be made… exquisitely hand-painted, every page, and lettered with loving precision. Each book could easily have taken an entire lifetime to create for all the detail in it.

Now, bizarrely enough, even though I’m a professional artist, I dislike most traditional art, and passionately hate quite a bit of it. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve only ever created functional \ technical art for games instead of traditional art like painting or sculpture that makes me deeply agnostic about deeper meaning in art, but so much art is absolutely intolerable for me.

For example, the photography exhibit was full of 3×5 black and white photos of random, meaningless crap. Some were of the side of a small house, others were of unremarkable people, there was even a small series of closeups of the least interesting parts of a plant. The latter were intended to represent the beautiful sanctity of nature and the photographer’s passionate hate of the evils of man by his deliberate exclusion of anything man-made, modern or industrial in any way.

People were walking through the exhibit and seeming to marvel at the depth of each photograph and find all these “hidden” meanings in it and act like they’re practically spasming in pleasure over it.

I wanted to find the artist, grab him by the shoulders and violently shake him back and forth screaming “You are not an artist, you take pictures of random, uninteresting PAP and feebly attempt to rationalize a deeper meaning out of it so people won’t notice it’s BAD and you SUCK!” and then, I don’t know, throw him down a flight of stairs, or maybe just give him paper cuts from his own photos or something.

See, I hate people like that. I hate art that makes people do that. I hate artists that hang a blank canvas and call it art. I hate artists that record over four minutes of silence and call it art. I hate artists that splatter a bunch of random crap onto a canvas and call it art. I hate artists that make terrible art and try to justify its importance by claiming it has a deeper meaning borne deep from the pit of his tortured soul that utterly transcends silly pedestrian concepts like being a competent artist.

I realize art is the realm of the subjective, but so many mediocrities use it as a safe haven to be not only terrible at what they do, but a reason for being arrogant. On the other side of the coin, so many people seem to try desperately to find the deeper meaning in art that has none simply to try to lord their superiority over others.

I suppose that all boils down to pretentiousness, which, even when found roaming in the wild, I despise. The fact that so many people in a different wing of the field I chose to enter use art as a way to BE pretentious makes me sick.

For this reason, I actually hesitate to tell people I’m an artist for fear that I’ll be identified as one of these slack-witted doddering slabs of lumpy flesh.

Granted, there is quite a lot of good art, but I rarely find it in painting. Too much room to suck. I seem to prefer sculpture because traditionally they’re all working toward one specific, easily measurable standard: reality. Michelangelo’s David is a great example of what I like. Sculpture tends toward recreating human anatomy and figure as accurately and dramatically as possible, so you can easily tell what’s good and what’s not simply on a technical level.

There’s a marble sculpture I saw yesterday that was a woman draped in cloth. The cloth was so exquisitely carved and smoothed that it looked like real cloth, as if I could reach out and touch it and it would sway gently. All this out of a giant chunk of ugly rock. What’s more, since it’s marble, you can’t afford to make even a single mistake or the entire sculpture is hideously marred.

The skill sculptors needed to have to accomplish that, both realism and dealing with a VERY unforgiving and expensive material, THAT is what impresses me. Not a pile of sliced ham on a bed that some pathetic loser is hawking as art.

It’s objective measurement and specific purpose like that that I find attractive about art for games. It’s working within a set of constraints for a specfic end goal. If I make a character that looks great but doesn’t work in the game, I’ve failed to make that character be what it was intended to be, and I’m not doing my job. Period. I don’t get points for effort, I don’t get a little yellow ribbon for being a participant, I simply fail.

The challenge of my job is to take what’s asked of me and create it as best I can within the constraints of the game’s engine. Simple, cut and dry. Subjectivity takes a backseat to function, which is how I like it. That’s how I roll. :)

On a slightly different subject, I bought a Canon Powershot A95 about a month back. It’s a fantastic little toy that’s easy to use, has a wide array of features and takes deliciously huge pictures. Even a cam-tard like me can use it to take really great pictures.

I took some pictures from my visit to the Getty… if anyone’s interested, you can see them at the link below:

Jon Jones’ visit to the Getty Museum

Updates may be sporadic over the next couple months as I’m getting ready to move to a new apartment complex… an apartment complex that wouldn’t rather let my fiancee suffer a heat stroke (which she did) and lie about air conditioning to get me to move in, then forbid me from installing my own because “air conditioners look unsightly from the outside.” Apparently, purdy lil’ apartments take precedence over human lives. Once things are set in stone and I’m out for good, I’ll talk more about it. More on that soon…