Yours Truly served 24 years in the US Air Force as a weatherman, earning a Master Meteorologist badge, where I learned to draw lots of smooth, pretty lines on tons and tons of charts as well as figure out how much snow to expect tomorrow.  During that time, I served as weather observer, forecaster, station chief, computer network administrator, and system designer.  An 4 additional years after retirement were as a trainer and technical illustrator / designer and webby type for military weather students.

Currently, I'm on the economy with industrial work, building web pages on the side, and transmuting my various social neuroses into something resembling art and literature.   Cartoons and stories, that is.   And, I get to show off my l33T WE8 k0D1N' 5K1ll2!

You can check out some of my scribbles on my Deviant Art site, and of course, the Wapsi Square fanart thread!  (It's in there somewhere -- just keep looking....)

Q.  What got you started in cartooning?

A.  My weather work got me well into Photoshop as I made various illustrations for the training packages I built.  Following various web cartoons led me to others until I finally came across PAWN by Fredrik K.T. Andersson.  Specifically, the cartoon in Part 1, page 13 (silly Javascript setup, so I can't point directly to the page -- sorry) (NSFW, BTW).  I had admired his pencil work, but that page really got me because I clearly saw and understood both the character setup, anatomy, and page layout.  I thought to myself -  I can do that!  So I started doing it and getting some lessons as well.



Q.  Why does your Carbon-12 atom have the electrons in pairs?

A.  Because electrons travel in pairs, silly.  No, I don't want to hear about the irrelevance of the Bohr Model in light of quantum mechanics.  So there.  Nyah.

 

Q.  What's all this Global Warming stuff?

A.  Mainly political hogwash.  Snowball wants you to help build a windmill.  If you don't get that reference, go read "Animal Farm" by George Orwell.

The earth has warmed and cooled many times and this is no different.  We've been warming for some 14,000 years since the last Ice Age ended.  It ended because it got warmer.  The sun does that.  It was warmer in the 1300s-1500s than today which helped the Vikings get to Greenland when it was green.  The coastal areas, anyway.  It was cooling in the 1970s and Time magazine had cover stories about how we were all going to freeze.  Someday.   Yep, there are plenty of computer models out there that make plenty of assumptions.  I haven't heard of any that could take the International Geophysical Year data of 1957-58 as it's day one and match (or come close to) weather today in 2007.  When your model can't go from a known starting point to a known ending point over just 50 years, why trust it implicitly for 100 or 200 years?

Will the earth get warmer?  Sure.  Is it our fault?  Adding one card to a deck of 100,000 cards will make it heavier, but the other 99,999 cards deserved to be looked at too.  There's no reason to surrender your life to shrill politicos screaming about how we're all going to die unless you do what they say.   It's probably time to read stuff by Bill Whittle.



Q.  You're a forecaster, not a climatologist -- what do you know?

A.   I know that if you keep shooting the messenger, you'll never get the message.



Q.  What tools did you use to make these web pages?

A.  The GIMP (of course), NVU and Kompozer for HTML and basic CSS, and Crimson Editor for CSS editing.  Best of all, they are all Freeware programs!



Q.   This was an awfully chatty, bonehead tutorial on computer graphics.  I mean, really!

A.   Exactly!  This was all the stuff I wish I knew when I got started.  I've tried to present it in a way that makes sense to the complete novice at doing anything like this.  I hope it's been helpful to you, too.  You can send your squawks and comments to me by way of the Wapsi Square forum private messaging or at tadpoleweb at comcast dot net.

Lavish praise accepted gracefully.  ;-)

Go make some art!  That's what!