Kazeii

Yeah, I'm just dropping in to post some art and run. I've got 9500 deviation notifications glaring at me, which is kinda scaring me off. That said, I'm much more active on conspiracydawgart.tumblr.com/, my fancypants art blog, or, if you're willing to put up with a lot of bullshit and cat videos, conspiracydawg.tumblr.com/, my personal blog. I think I'm going to start posting art here again from now on, and at some point I may try to get back into the social loop, but that's still a ways off, I think. Anyway, you can also hit me up on my Facebook art page, [link]. My current dA comment influx is low enough that I have gotten none in the past seven months, so if you comment I'll definitely reply to you, and I'm happy to talk to people and see how you're all doing and whatnot, but it'll be a while before I've checked up on everyone's art and life and all that fun stuff. 

If you're reading this, thanks for sticking around, I appreciate it. This site was vital to my artistic progress for a large portion of my life, and I met a bunch of awfully nice people here. The connections made mean a lot to me, and I do apologize for disappearing for such long stretches at a time.


Edit: tumblr links fixed

As I'm sure you guys have noticed, I don't do much here anymore. Mostly because I haven't been drawing that much, but also because I'm mostly on other social media now. I do check back here occasionally, but I'm mostly on Facebook and Tumblr. My Tumblr (conspiracydawg.tumblr.com/) is like 80% shitposting, 19% video games and movies, and 1% art, if that, but I recently made a public Facebook page solely for my art that you're welcome to follow. I imagine I'll still post some finished work here, but my Facebook will have everything, and my Tumblr will have most of it.

I'm thinking of making an Instagram too. Anyone have good or bad experiences with Instagram for art? Alternatively, what other platforms do you like to view art on? 

Oh look I'm making a journal and it is highly irrelevant and we are all very surprised I'm sure. I decided to try out Dragon Combat Overhaul today and holy shit. That was the most intense thing I have ever done in Skyrim. I decided to start the main quest on one of my new characters, so the first dragon I fought was Mirmulnir. He killed me a number of times before I realized that rushing at dragons with a sword just isn't going to work with this mod. So after I killed him (which took forever), three dragons showed up to avenge him. I honestly said "Oh shit" out loud and I just started running back toward Whiterun. The dragons followed me and it was frickin' scary. They were swooping over me breathing fire and ice and I was out of stamina and just god damn. And then, as the city guards and I were defeating them, they called in reinforcements and THREE. MORE. SHOWED UP. One of which was an Elder Dragon which makes no sense because that character's only like level 23 or something. It was insane. If there is a single guard alive between Whiterun and Rorikstead I am going to be shocked. It took a good 30 minutes to defeat them all and I only lived because I'm paranoid and I always have about 20 healing potions on me.

2. What does your username mean?

So, point A, I graduated high school a couple weeks ago, top ten percent of the class (someone screwed up a calculation), which is pretty cool (although the principal's speech was kind of depressing: "This is the biggest top ten we've ever had! I hope someday we can get the whole senior class up here!"). Since then, mostly just been puttering around, doing a lot of sleeping. I've been sick for almost a month now, which obviously sucks, although it's gotten a lot better, so I'm just trying to keep resting and ditch it completely. Fun. 
Uh, I'm a little low on the senior memories department. Definitely some emotional music moments. I got a lot of awards in orchestra, including some I didn't know existed, so that was pretty cool. If there's one thing in high school I'm really going to miss, it's orchestra. Although... I come to the legend of Hot Art Guy. So this year I took an art class for the first time in my life (I'll post some of the stuff we did later). And in my otherwise ordinary group was a guy who, apart from being the most attractive human being I have ever had the fortune of seeing, was also polite, nice, and funny. Unfortunately, I'm a wuss, so there's not really a continuation of this story. Long story short, he laughed at my jokes and had conversation with me, unlike my other groupmates who did their best to ignore my existence, I was going to ask him to homecoming but didn't because he was like five hundred rungs above me on the social ladder, he switched into Health second semester, he was replaced by a fairly nice guy, and I only ever saw him in passing period after that. Unfortunately, the new guy was friends with one of the douchiest people I have ever had the misfortune to meet, who had been in the class, but second semester started spending every period at our table. And you know, I thought he was okay for a while. But then the special ed kid in our class got a new aid, and Douche Art Guy was obsessed with this aid. He would speculate about her private life, and then proceed to direct monologues at us based on these speculations. Basically he was writing the script for a porno out loud, and I wanted to hit him with a textbook. I mean, what the hell? Who does that? If you're going to fantasize about someone twenty years older than you in the filthiest way imaginable, for fuck's sake do it quietly.
Anyway, the point of this anecdote is that there are aspects of high school I will miss, and aspects I will not.

Point B, just got back from a 4-day road trip with my family, which was pretty fun. Day 1, drove across Nevada, got to Vegas in the evening. It was pretty cool. Nowhere I'd want to be for more than a day or two, but definitely interesting. I always thought people exaggerated it, you know? It couldn't possibly be that ridiculous. But it was. It really was. At least on the Strip. Lights everywhere, noise, people throwing hooker cards at you, Elvis impersonators, Spiderman impersonators, Autobot impersonators, people in every costume you could think of. Even saw a group dressed as the Red vs Blue teams. Also a breakdancing squad all dressed as Spiderman? It was interesting. I'm underage, so I spent the time walking around with my brother, looking at all the kinds of shops that I've never seen in real life. Armani, Tiffany, Gucci, all that. Didn't go in though, I had three dollars. Also some guy stepped on my foot and my immediate reaction was to apologize profusely.
As for the rest of Nevada, I was surprised. I was expecting to really hate it. I hate heat, I really do, and I really like grass and trees and so on and so forth. But we stopped for a break at one point, and it was actually pleasant outside. And the landscape was just vast. It looked like the desert went on forever. Scale was hard, because none of the mountains had snow or trees. There were no trees anywhere, actually. I had to try and work out distances with scrub brush, and I didn't realize how badly I had it figured until I saw these telephone poles in between us and some hills. And the telephone poles were tiny, and I realized that those hills were full-scale mountains. It was pretty intense. Other than that, there were also thunderstorms, which were astonishing. I mean, one minute there would be nothing, and then it was like someone had upended a heavenly bucket. The road would be covered with a couple inches of water, and you couldn't see shit. I was floored, I really was. And when it wasn't raining, there were just these huge, black storm clouds blurring everything, and lightning and such. It was like something out of a movie. Pretty darn cool. You would see a space of sky and think it was empty, and then drive a little and get closer and be able to see through the cloud and a mesa or a mountain range or something would reveal itself.
Day 2, went to the Grand Canyon, north rim. That was impressive. Again with the scale problem. I would look out and see stuff, and then realize that what I thought was scrub was actually a tree, and then have to re-evaluate everything. And the little green line on the other side, those are trees, too, must be ten, fifteen miles away. It was pretty cool. The size of that thing does not come out in pictures, it absolutely does not. Roosevelt had it right. Everyone should see that. It dwarfs everything. Also, being a California native, I'm still kind of trying to process the idea that there are places where it is green in summer. And some of these places are apparently in Arizona. I mean, wow. Arizona. Just drove out of the Nevada desert, gain a couple thousand feet of altitude, and then boom. Pine forest, aspen, green meadows, bison, deer, the whole deal. Did a little hiking, nothing intense or anything, just stuff on the rim. It was spectacular. 
Day 3, off to Zion. That was cool. Incredibly cool. Still had problems with scale, but to be honest, those things are amazing at any size. Just huge, huge towers of brilliantly colored rock, stretching up into the sky like they'll never stop. And the shapes! Twists and swirls and sharp diagonals, even checkerboards. It was insane. We hiked through some of the Narrows, not a whole lot. It's fun, because you're hiking through a river the whole time, and the canyon walls just keep getting closer and closer. You look up and these massive walls just go off into the distance, and you can't tell how tall they really are. You feel tiny. And you're just mucking your way up through a darn river. Makes you feel pretty cool, actually. And it's a fairly easy hike if you don't go more than a few miles, so you feel even cooler. "Look at me, I'm slogging through a river upstream and I ain't even tired!" Definitely the most fun I had.
Day 4, swerved south to hit Death Valley on the way home. Death Valley, for me, has always been one of those "Why would you ever want to go there?" places. I mean, it's called Death Valley, for God's sake. It's salt flats and mines. Woo-hoo. But then we got there, went out into the salt lakebed, and it was something else. I don't mean necessarily how it looked, although the salt formations were pretty cool (razor sharp). I mean, we got out of the car, walked a ways out into the salt, and there was this silence. This complete and utter silence. It felt like if I were to say something, the sand and salt would just swallow it up, like the air itself would just freeze the words as I said them. I've always wanted to experience quiet. I live in a suburb by the freeway, so when I'm at home, apart from the usual creaks and grumbles of the house, there's a constant drone in the background. And when I go out for a walk in the woods, there's the sound of the river, the sound of people on the trail, birds and wind rustling and all that. But on the flats, there's nothing. No leaves to rustle, not much in the way of wildlife (although the coyote we saw looked surprisingly well-fed), not really any other people (although later a biker gang from Italy showed up), just salt and sand and rock. And it was quiet, and it relaxed the hell out of me. I could've stayed there for a long, long time. Especially since it wasn't actually that hot. I was lightweight disappointed, actually. I mean, it's Death Valley, the heat's supposed to hit you like a fist. But it was overcast, and air temp was only like 104, something like that. Heck, gets hotter than that here in Sacramento. But it did make tourism pretty easy.
As we were driving out, we saw this really weird vehicle. It was like one of those big military trucks, only the back part had been cut out and replaced with a trailer, like a normal vacation trailer. It was kind of surreal. We were driving through a desert that looked like a scouted location for a Mad Max movie, and then this vehicle that looks straight out of a post-apocalyptic film. Pretty cool. 
Actually, another interesting thing, as we went through Nevada toward Death Valley, we passed a military base. As we were heading towards it, we were passed by five unmarked white vans, no plates, that went into the base. We also got to see some Predators taking off, which was pretty cool. I had no idea drones were that big. I mean, thinking about it now, it makes sense that they would be big, but somehow I always thought of them as... not small, but definitely not 50, 60 foot wingspan. It was interesting, anyway.

So yeah, that's my overly long blathering about high school and a subsequent road trip.