And as a reward for you, my loyal readers, who have bothered to click through to the comments --

-- Have an explanation for why MAAD hasn't updated for several years now!



(I'd also like to point out that, due to a lack of both recent software and drivers for my drawing tablet, I assembled the comic on my old 200 mHz machine running Mac OS 9. Using an application called Color It that was discontinued back in the 1990s. An oldskooler is me!)

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I need to show you a picture I actually had to submit as part of a homework assignment: the final project for my Experimental Psychology class.

It needed a diagram. It did illustrate the experimental apparatus, kinda, but what it really illustrated is my total inability to draw.

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Alright! I promise not to laugh.

(Out loud.)

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(But seriously, I hear you. Drawing isn't an inborn skill, and those of us who can pretty much have developed it through trial, error, and a lot of patience. The only reason today's comic looked even vaguely decent is because of gratuitous use of the "undo" key; and because putting together the few figures I copied & pasted was the work of the better part of an afternoon.

Drawing is kind of like writing or coding, in that anyone, given sufficient time and editing, can assemble a picture that will ultimately take shape into something decent. But it takes a lot of practice to get to the point where the process isn't like pulling teeth.

If I started drawing regularly, I might be able to get back to that point. But until then, I'm in no position to judge.)

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Drawing skills stop sucking when you start drawing more. I know this because I was -- ever so humbly -- a fantastic pencil artist in high school, when the best way to entertain myself during class was to draw.

Once I'd gone off to do the independent study thing, my artistic ability took a nose dive. The last time I gave it a shot, it was a miserable failure.

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Absolutely, 100 percent true. I know this because the same thing happened to me.

I still have most of my high school comics. For being drawn with pen (!!) on lined paper, they were pretty darn good.

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Could be worse, could be programmer-developed recipes: "Eh, we'll work that metallic taste out in the next revision..."

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Most of the reason that programmer recipes are scary, in my personal experience, is that programmers treat recipes in the same modular way that they treat code: "Oh, if we forgot to drop it in here, we'll just move it to another subroutine."

If you don't understand the dependencies structure*, cooking can get quite scary.

--
* Like the bug where some foods behave unpredictably unless a cook function has been properly linked. E.g., calling eat() on an object of type Egg will pop Breakfast off of your stack unless Egg.cook() returns a non-error value.

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E.g., calling eat() on an object of type Egg will pop Breakfast off of your stack...

I LOLed.

But, then I thought that that statement is really dependent on the consuming object. To wit: Makuus.Consume(new Egg(EggStates.Raw)); will likely cause the entire contents of the stack to be popped, whereas GenericBoxer.Consume(new Egg(EggStates.Raw)); might execute just fine.

(And then I went off and had a cup of tea, because I've obviously been coding for too long without a break.)

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Heehee. :)

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I've endured "Budget Gourmet" before. Actually, I used to like them, but my dual excuses are that I was 12 at the time and they've gotten much, much worse in the last five years. (It's been a decline for all nine years, but the steep portion of the curve didn't kick in immediately.)

So yeah, that probably is what that dubious text string means.

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> they've gotten much, much worse in the last five years

Have they? I haven't kept track.

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I used to like the beef stroganoff. It decayed: the beef got tougher and tougher, and now the small beef strips (which had an average of three spitouts per container) have been replaced by ground seasoned beef, which is mostly fat and gristle.

There's a reason it costs $0.79. (Unless it's in the vending machine at work, where it costs $2.50, which is sad to say the least.)

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*giggles* I love the second photographic panel tucked in there,

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Took me three takes, too. :-p I made the mistake of drawing the hand first and subsequently taking the photo to match it.

(The photo itself is sort of a mini-homage to my all-photo strip.)

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Oh awesome! I didn't know about MAAD, but I did know that you could draw - sort of. You did a guest strip in Theri There.

Also, I'm posting this (w/ a link to MAAD) into the Draconity forum (unless you'd prefer for me to place it in Art)?

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I scripted a guest comic for TT; here. A different thing from drawing one, though I keep threatening to do that too.

Post as you'd like, although MAAD tends to sort of be a dumping ground for odd little moments of my life -- it's not specifically draconic, except for the fact of me being the main character.

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You've got a tablet? Cool.

I use a mouse in Paint sometimes... man, it's annoying. Faces and hands are the evil. Particularly ears. Evil, I say.

I really, really hate those commercials where all these Italian chefs are without customers because everyone's eating some frozen substitute instead... Microwaved and at home will never replace eating out.

I hope.

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Would you let me in on what "programmer inspired" means? A quick search didn't reveal anything.

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It doesn't have any more meaning than "chef inspired" does. But in my brain, it made the ingenuousness of the phrase clearer.

Anyone can sit down with a recipe, cook food, and at the very worst, just end up with a scorched inedible meal. But a novice sitting down with a compiler and a book of C++ syntax has the potential to really screw things up. WTF has an abundance of examples.

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Disingenuousness?

Worse is possible in cooking as well, particularly if a crock pot is involved.

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