Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

It sucked. But I suppose that when several pillars of your life are knocked out from under you, you can appreciate the ones that remain. The three main ones that were lost: 1. Job/Financial security. Having been in the game industry for well over 20 years I assumed I’d have no problem landing a job if I needed to. And, I guess that’s true. The problem is that the field has become very narrow due to life circumstances. I need a job that both provides the same health insurance plan, and is local. That’s because I need to keep Heather in the same network of providers who understand her disease. (More of that in the next point.) That’s the external narrowing of the field. Internally I can see I made a career error by not keeping up with the art pipeline for the way art assets are created in games. As my focus shifted to design I COULD have worked harder to stay current on the art side. But I didn’t, and because my transition to designer was still in the mid-way point when I ...

I haven't seen these yet, but I'm expecting to see complaints about Ep 4 of The Mandalorian because "nothing happened". We watched The Travelers recently and that show made me realize something that had been bugging me about this current golden age of television. Imagine a spectrum with Procedural on one side, and Novel on the other. Shows like Murder She Wrote, Law And Order and Star Trek The Next Generation are very Procedural. That is, every episode is self contained and you can watch them in any order because Novel things (Meta-Plot progression) almost never happens. The closest you have to that stuff on those shows is when an actor leaves the show. TV shows back in the day were mostly Procedural for non-artistic reasons, and I would never want to go back to those dark days. (Though I DO love me some ST:NG) But when those shackles were removed, guess what happened? The same thing that happens in all industries when shackles are removed.... everyone went overb...

Good:  1. The Plot.  Escalated without being too redundant.  2. FX. They're good.  You know... Like pretty much everything these days.  3. Teen Drama Garbage. Hear me out. In most media representation of teenage drama the TONE is such that the feelings they have are as important as the characters experience those feelings to be.  I guess this is "good" in the sense that it could theoretically put you in the headspace of the characters.  The problem for me is that teenagers are very stupid and very arrogant and very inexperienced.  I hate being in that headspace and recoil from depictions of it. What Stranger Things 3 did -which is something I haven't seen often- is present the teen drama with a TONE that views it for the silliness that it is. I think it was handled expertly because doing that could easily lead to being alienated from the characters and not caring about their experiences.  Instead I felt like "aww... I ...

You know things are grim when I resort to sports metaphors. This week I got news back from two really incredible interviews with companies I probably would have loved to work for. Both were a No. So that is now 3 places where I had an extended interview that went super well, everybody clicked, jokes were made and received, "We'll get back to you soon!" with smiles were given.  I've been on the other end of interviews many times. So intellectually, I understand that there are SO many reasons -that have nothing to do with the candidate- for not going ahead with them. I know that taking any of this personally -as a reflection of my worth to my chosen profession- would be silly. But man... I sure FEEL like this is a reflection of my worth to my chosen profession. One thing that should theoretically help with these emotions is the fact that I really impressed a VERY fickle and high-prestige company, landing this contract at Moon Studios. It's great that I get t...

I’ve probably written about moms and mother’s day several times on this blog before. But I’m in a position in my life now where the topic is striking me in a new way. I’ve been unemployed for over 2 months now, hoping against hope that this one particular place that has the right health insurance hires me. I’m just now trying to get into the groove of unemployment and maybe try to turn it into funemployment! https://www.patreon.com/posts/26795241 I’m not super good at math or money, but I’m noticing that when I’m not MAKING money, our account balance keeps going down. Like a ticking time bomb. And the lower it gets the more desperate I get to do stuff I really really don’t wanna do. So that’s really stressful. Like a candle, burning slowly down. But there was a time when I was the proverbial candle burning at both ends. And the reason was because of someone who was really really bad at momming. I was married to her, and we had two itty bitty kids. I was in an almo...

The past 8 weeks have been a blur. After 15 ½ years of stable employment, my work-home laid me off along with about a quarter of the staff. I did NOT see that coming, though in retrospect I really should not have been surprised. Statistically most gigs in the game industry don’t last a quarter as long as I was at ArenaNet. And I saw problems at work for the past several years, but since everything had been so stable for so long I just kept my head down and figured we’d weather the storms like we always had. But not this time. I've worked at several game studios over the years and have never quit any of them. I think I’ve just been really lucky to land at places with good people that matched where I was in my journey. The beginning of my time at ArenaNet was a new beginning for me in a lot of ways. I had just escaped a suffocating marriage, moved back close to my parents, and shortly after I started my new job I found the love of my life then married her. ArenaNet provided stab...

It’s time for a top 10 list because why not. Here you go, in no particular order. Also, yeah I’m grouping franchises together. Sue me. UHF Some of my favorite movies are great art. This one is probably not, but I still love it to bits. UHF has too many "I recognize that popular culture reference" jokes to be "Great Comedy" imo. But it also has an incredible sincerity and heart that I've never seen in another goofball comedy movie. And enough quotable lines to choke a camel! And what a shocking structure Mr. Yankovic signed off on for his big shot at a feature length movie. You'd think with a plot about a wacky character who catapults a failing TV station into sudden popularity, that character would be Weird Al. Instead they found a no-name comedian (Michael Richards: later Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld) to be that character. And Weird Al is a ... almost straight man, stepping back and letting Richards steal every scene he's in. Really makes me love Weird Al...

My theory on creativity: The brain does two major things above and beyond basic stimulus-response and regulating body function. First, it generates narratives to make sense of the sensory impressions that your sense-organs deliver. Secondly, it edits those into meta-narratives that tie groups of impressions together into heuristics. This is how we model cause/effect, figure out that calling someone a mean name will make them angry, and that people who look like X probably will act like Y. (So pushed too far, or left to go unchallenged leads to racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc.) That meta-narrative meaning-making process is coordinated by the pre-frontal cortex (massive over-simplification) and is (mostly) shut down during sleep. During sleep our body is still receiving sensations and so the brain is still doing its narrative-building work, but without the benefit/detriment of the pre-frontal. This is why dreams feel like they make sense while you experience them, but on waking int...

Today my lil' wifey turns 39. She's also currently getting cut up by a surgeon. This is her 15th or 16th surgery (we've both lost count) in the 13 years we've been married. The last several have been for various symptoms of EDS. It's become pretty mundane at this point. So I'm going to take this time to blather about Heather Kerekffy-Foreman. Pull up a chair. Her birthdays are hard for me because now my wife is older... no wait, that's not why. It's because her menagerie of diseases means that nothing normal girls like give her pleasure. Here's an incomplete list of things she doesn't like or that actively hurt her: Massage, hot tubs, delicious food, alcohol, jewelry, flowers. Sounds like a miserable life, doesn't it? But incredibly, she is one of the sweetest, kindest people I've ever known. She sees every pain and disease (and she is literally always suffering multiple pains) as opportunities to share her experiences in order to reach o...

I’ve had a slowly emerging epiphany concerning the direction I want to take my platform. It came into sharp focus yesterday. One of the pieces was the process of building a backdrop (dungeon) so I can take better pictures of my Colossus, and then I had the idea of making it multi-purpose so I could use it as a booth for conventions as well. That got me seriously researching foam carving techniques for rocks and ruins. Previously I’d always used heave super strong material like apoxie sculpt for that sort of thing. But researching that lead me to more info on dioramas. Now… I’ve always LOVED dioramas. I’ve started and failed to finish several of them throughout my life. (The pictures here are all very old and I'd like to think future projects would be much better.) But haven’t tried again seriously until recently. Thanks to the internet and YouTube there’s an endless well of free, high quality education on the artform.   That’s where part two of my epiphany came...

I finally got around to uploading an album from a band I started when I was 18.  (Or maybe a tad earlier) Since I was 13 and discovered heavy metal I had fantasized about being in a metal band. And since I was thoroughly embedded in a Christian Evangelical subculture where metal bands were allowed to thrive (as long as they were actively promoting themselves as evangelistic tools for ‘ministry’) there was a powerful synergy between my fiery faith and my testosterone induced love of metal.  I was hugely influenced by “Christian bands” from the early 90’s such as Vengeance Rising, Deliverance, Mortification, Tourniquet and others. The harder, faster and growlier, the better. I was living in a small town of a couple thousand called North Pole in Alaska. So the prospects of finding enough like-minded individuals to start a Christian metal band seemed slim at best.  I had one friend who was a year older than I, and we started taking guitar lessons toget...