February 23rd 2011
Look. Look at this.
January 2nd 2011
Holy crap an update? Yes. I've decided to fix this place up a bit since my web design skills have come a ways from when I first coded this heap. If you're one of my many hundreds of thousands of visitors, you'll notice a few cosmetic changes. But if you're a web designer, don't peek under the hood. This thing is a mess and I couldn't be bothered to neaten it up. It works, after all.
As for interesting content... well I've been working on an essay on science and religion. My ranting on the subject has been a long time coming, but my plans for it have become so large that it will probably exceed the term "Essay" and attain the illustrious and philosophically stuffy mantle of "Treatise." In fact, because I've never written anything this large, it's getting terribly unwieldly. On a topic where you want to branch off and write a large "aside" at every turn, organizing the damn thing gets pretty haywire. I know this doesn't really bode well for its readability, but I want to be thorough. Because of this, I don't know when I'll ever get around to not just being "finished," but being happy with it.
What this means is that posting it here is on the horizon, but not in the near future. If you're really curious there's a draft online, and if you're especially wily, you might be able to guess the URL.
As for art, I've practically hung up the digital brushes... Can you even hang up brushes? Is that something artists do? In any case, I think my scandalous affair with the visual arts has gone from passionate and exciting to utterly cold. I get the spark here and there, but the effort involved to get an image from my head onto a digital canvas requires trying. Trying really hard. I've only got so much creative energy, and most of that is being poured into that essay and becoming a rock star. I did, however, get to one of those illustrations down there in the last post. I just... still haven't finished it. I don't know how real digital artists do things, but it's a serious chore to get things to look the way I want. I've found my motivation to finish artwork has always come from incidental pangs of "Oh man! I wish I could paint cool things!". That doesn't happen as often anymore, but it happend last month.
Here's progress!
Also this:
Now I know I started this site mainly to serve as a gallery for my visual art, but since I've been dialing that back, I can start posting other random shit I do. For example, I can drop some mad notes on y'all.
That... that means music. You know, like music notes. Look, what I'm trying to say is that I play guitar. Or, try to. Occasionally, I record my piddly licks.
The only clip I can think of that I'm even remotely comfortable posting involves me actually singing. But let's be really clear. I can't sing.
You see, sometime in November, my internet-bro Cody Miller and I made a website talking about how much we hated the way the Halo story was handled in Halo: Reach.
We got all vociferous about the cause and Cody decided to cover a couple songs with lyrics adjusted to preach the good word. Not to be out-done, I decided to one-up him and actually play my own music rather than sing over some lame instrumental. Here's that:
Reachfly
Firefly Theme
Vocals: Shaun Hashim
Guitar: Shaun Hashim
Yeah. I covered the Firefly theme. Kinda poetic when you peep the voice actors involved in Halo 3: ODST
Anyway, that's it for now.
Now let's see if I can update again in less than 2 years.
-HP
July 29th 2009
Alright, everything seems to work, for now. The Gallery is finally up and running (went with the lightbox style). Time to get to all those other projects I've been working on. Here are some work-in-progress illustrations I've had sitting on the backburner since about last year or more:
-HP
July 23th 2009
Well, the gallery is just about functional. Thumbnails are up and don't quite link anywhere just yet. At this point I'm not sure if I want to make individual pages for each work or just link them lightbox style. Like this:
-HP
July 22th 2009
I'm hand-coding everything so progress is very slow, but the Gallery pages are starting to sprout up. When it's all said and done I'll probably clear off these newsposts and start posting cool stuff. For now, test test test.
-HP
July 18th 2009
So I made the page scrollable in kind of a neat way (so that the navigation and the banner scroll but the background stays fixed; all with cool transparency) but now it doesn't look right in IE due to Microsoft's wonderful support of PNGs. I've tried a bunch of fixes but none do what I want. Fuck Internet Explorer, basically. I now understand why web devs loathe it so.
-HP
July 12th 2009
Because my old website looked like shit, I've decided to redesign everything.
As you can see I've decided to make everything look bitchin' and dark. The site will soon be set up with a bunch of Web 2.0 jazz such as commenting, user accounts and other crap that will probably not see a whole lot of use. That'll happen when a piece of shit jerk friend of mine gets around to it.
I'll be updating this soon with my old gallery of art and keep you posted on new projects, favourite colours and things I find irritating. When I write up my thoughts on things like music, video games, and religion you'll see them here.
For now, here is a picture of Kermit The Frog
-HP