Apparently, an earlier post I made about how angry I get when people steal my pictures is offensive to some people! Gasp!

Apparently, this post means that I am complaining so much! Wow!

Apparently, when people are looking for pictures, they don’t care where they get them from, so that should make it OK for people to steal from me! Shock!

Apparently, I’m wrong to feel this way because I’m acting like these are my own personal images that I drew, even though I have seen people take my drawings without asking and put them up on their websites without any sort of credit to me. Heinous!

Apparently, since these are all just screenshots that were uploaded, it should be ok for other people to steal my bandwidth and use them without permission, despite all of the hard work I spent on taking these screenshots and writting the text that goes with them! Scandal!

Apparently, because I have chosen to express my displeasure over being stolen from, I am whining like a little girl. Insult!

Apparently, I should actually be grateful that people steal from me so much! Hooray!

Apparently, I should stop complaining about it. Demanded!

Well, apparently, some people don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Owned!

I’ll stop complaining about people stealing from me when people stop stealing from me. It’s just that simple! But since I’m apparently supposed to be happy about my hard work being disrespected and trounced upon by people who don’t even know the most simple and basic rules of etiquette, I should just sit here with a smile on my face and allow everyone to take advantage of all the effort that I put into making this website as original and entertaining as it is.

This is not a new problem, it’s been going on for years. I could have been complaining all this time, and I’d have been well within my right to do so, but I didn’t. Now this outright theft has gotten completely out of hand and I want it to stop. This is my property we’re talking about and this is my website, so I have every right to use my website to say how much it pisses me off when people abuse my property. If people can’t deal with that, well then, apparently, they need to get real and look at the big picture here.

Stealing is wrong. I don’t care if everyone is stealing from everyone else on the Internet. Don’t steal from Ninjatron. It’s really easy. Just don’t do it.

Sayonara.

Situations beyond my control have meant that I’m not able to be around my work station as much as I would like. I’d usually work well into the night, but I’ve not been able to do that for the past few weeks, nor will I be able to for the next several weeks. I have been working on a new piece of artwork, but because of the limited amount of time that I have to work on it each day, it’s taking much longer to finish than I’d like it to.

For the longest time I’ve been struggling with getting an image that I worked on in Photoshop looking like I want it to when it’s saved. There’s always a huge difference in colour between what I see in Photoshop and how the image turns out when I save it for use on my website. It has something to do with this complicated system of ICC Colour Profiles. I’ve tried everything to get Photoshop thinking about colour the same way that everything else does, trying to work on a picture and save it as a .jpg or whatever without any surprises in between. I thought that I had it figured out before I started my latest piece, but after finishing it and saving it, it turned out looking really weak. All the punch I had in the colour was faded and washed out. What’s the deal?

I can’t understand why this has to be so frustrating. How are you supposed to even know if it’s right or not? Nothing I’ve read on the subject can explain it in plain English. I know the monitor is set up properly, and I was positive that Photoshop had been set up to display colour just like everything else. Yet when I look at this picture, I’m not looking at the same thing I worked on. There’s got to be an easy way to make it so that the picture will look like it’s supposed to no matter what software or monitor or colour setting or whatever other variations get in the way, because this is ridiculous.

I know that this is some really advanced stuff, but I If anyone out there knows what I’m talking about and has any tips, I’d really like to hear from you.

All this amounts to is me having to spend even more time tweaking a picture that I’ve already spent far too long working on. Bloody Hell.

Sayonara.

And now it’s time for another thrilling episode of…

Toys Ninja Just Bought!

Let me tell you a story. There is a secret shared within the ranks of action figure collectors. It is by no means a rule, and often will not bear fruit. However, once in a blue moon, fortune will smile upon those who know this secret.

Today, I will share this precious secret with you all .

You see, action figure collectors often visit stores several times a week to find what they want, often hoping to find that the rare figure, be the first to buy from a new assortment just put on the shelves, so simply to look and see what’s out there. Natural choices for these excursions are places like Toys R Us, Wal-Mart, and other department stores.

The secret is that sometimes the most unlikely of stores have some interesting items worth buying. Drug stores, clothing stores, those sorts of places. The places that no one goes to while looking for action figures. Sometimes you’ll find that rare figure or a new assortment before anyone else has gotten to it. And sometimes you’ll find something that has long since gone out of circulation. And sometimes you’ll find these items at a price far less than they really ought to be sold for. So, every once in a while, I extend my search to cover places like these in the hopes of unearthing some sort of hidden treasure.

The moon was blue today.

A clothing store catering to an adult clientele is the last place any collector would expect to find action figures, but there is a local one that has a small and messy tucked away toy section. Because parents will often leave there children unattended there, the place usually looks like a hurricane blew threw it. There is no order here, only chaos. Searching through it is not for the faint of heart. Amidst the Harry Potter toys inexplicably intermingling with die-cast cars and craft sets with damaged packaging, something caught my eye. It was a Masters of the Universe vs The Snakemen action figure. Except for a final few waves of figures late last year, this toy line has been cancelled in this country. And yet, there it was, and selling for several dollars less than usual. So, why not give it a good home? I considered the purchase and wondered if there were any more.

Indeed there were. I turned around and discovered several more characters that I was interested in. I dug through the aisles, thoroughly scanning the area, and when I was finished I ended up taking home 6 action figures for about half the price they would have originally sold for had this line not been as scarce as it was.

And there we have it. Venom Spitting Kahn, King Hsss, the recoloured version of Two Bad, Serpent Track Mekaneck, the kick-ass character Zodak, and Battle Fist. Not a bad haul for this neck of the woods, all things considered.

I also bought this GI Joe set with 3 figures and the VHS tape of the Spy Troops movie. I never got into GI Joe as a kid, but what the hell, this stuff looks cool. Cobra Commander is a cool villain and Snake Eyes is a ninja, which is always a plus in my book. The cashier made a mistake and charged me less than what she was supposed to. Lucky me.

So that was today’s adventure. I hope that those toy collectors out there who are now made privy to the secret will use it for good and not for evil. Buy the toys that you or someone you know will enjoy, and not the rare ones so you can scalp them on EBay for more than you paid. Otherwise I’ll be forced to see to your destruction. Happy hunting.

Sayonara.

People still take my pictures. I’ve taken several steps to prevent it, but it still happens and I’m really sick of it.

The worst offenders, by far, are Street Fighter fans. I’ve seen images from my Street Fighter Alpha Anime DVD review all over the place, and nobody cares that they are stealing from me. Not only are those images hosted on my webspace, making it bandwidth theft, but they are also DVD captures that I took using my own DVD and my own DVD playing software and spent a good long time going through, sorting out, and resizing. That’s a lot of hard work and I don’t appreciate so many people trampling all over me and taking advantage of what I have done to serve their own ends without the slightest bit of gratitude being sent my way. I’m not saying I don’t want people to look at those pictures, but the idea behind it all was for people to read the article and look at the pictures and then stay on the website and look around some more and perhaps tell me what they thought about it. Instead my website is just being harvested for pictures with no regard for the content. I would love to do some original Street Fighter artwork but I know it’d just end up getting stolen.

Some people are pretty brazen about it too. I recently found someone’s weblog that had a few of my pictures from another article I wrote. Underneath them it said “Pictures stolen from SykoGrafix.com despite their best efforts to stop me” or something like that. Geeze, way to be a jackass about it! There was a link included so I didn’t make a fuss about it, but still, that was pretty much a spit in the face.

But it doesn’t end there. It’s not just the pictures that people might actually find interesting that get stolen. Even things like my guestbook title image find there way onto several peoples’ crappy personal websites. I don’t get it! It says “guestbook”, but it’s part of my design so it doesn’t even look good in anyone else’s webpage! Just recently I found my guestbook image on some chick’s website that had a bunch of pictures of her in a bikini. She was alright but not nearly hot enough for me to turn a blind eye to her bandwidth theft.

The weirdest thing is when people ask me where they can find certain pictures since I don’t want people taking my images. Like how the hell am I supposed to know? Here’s a good place to get some pictures: The Internet! Just don’t steal from other websites and you sure as hell better not steal from me, because if you do I will find you and I will get you.

Sayonara.

I’m teaching again. First class was this past Saturday. The past 2 sessions in the fall and winter were pretty slow and I only had one class in each of them, but now this time I’ve got two classes. I’ve got a Anime Round 1 class with at least 5 people (and hopefully more should some tag-alongs decide to sign up), and enough people returned to take Round 3 to justify running it. So as far as my classes go, I’m doing all right, but the numbers for everyone are pretty low this time. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t actually sign up ahead of time, they just suddenly appear on the first day and expect to be taught. So we have no idea how things are going to go until the end of the day, and even then things can change. I think that we ultimately ended up doing ok, it’s just shame that we have to start off each session with a big question mark.

My Round 1 class seems like a really interesting bunch so far. I had a great time with them. Much more of an enthusiastic bunch then I typically get on the very first day. They asked a lot of questions and were really excited about being there and learning about anime. They seemed to really like me, so I’m looking forward to teaching them more.

When I was done teaching for the day, I went and bought a bunch of used games for the GameCube. $80 CDN got me 4 games, which is a pretty good deal where I’m standing. One of the games I got is Soul Caliber 2. Wow! This game freakin’ rocks! I can’t belive it’s taken me so long to play this game, but I’m glad I’m playing it now because I’m really enjoying it. And it doesn’t hurt that the girls in this game are really something else! Taki is one red hot ninja babe! Plus, it’s got Link! Link rules in this game. Speaking of Link, I also got the Legend of Zelda Collectors Set, with the 2 NES Zelda games and the 2 N64 Zelda Games on 1 disk. Aside from toying around a little back in the day, I’ve never really played them before, and I have no idea if I’ll ever bother to even play all the way through all 4 of those Zelda games, but since it wasn’t made to be sold in stores, it’s nice to have for the sake of posterity anyway.

So between my new classes, my new games, some new stuff I’m working on for the site, and a few other suprises, I’m finding ways of keeping myself pretty busy.

Sayonara.