I made a Telegram group to share art, sketches, and all things Neer. =3 Will be a lot of WIPs and other art stuff, plus commission and stream announcements.

Much of the content will be NSFW. XD

https://t.me/dragoneerart

This is a friendly reminder to back up your data! You never know when something can happen to take that away.

Recently, we had a power outage take out my entire town. Not a light in the sky for miles. When power finally came back on my PC wasn't quite the same. I'd press the power button and it would begin powering up, make a clicking sound, then immediately shut down. It repeated this cycle a few dozen times before randomly booting. However, the stability didn't last, and my motherboard started to glitch, eventually completely failing about a week later. My assumption is that right before the power dropped there was a brief spike which caused a surge, and my motherboard completely spazzed out.

Thankfully, all my data was secure because I *only* work out of my Dropbox. I was able to recover and get back up and running in no time after a new mobo and reinstallation.

If you have a Dropbox or equivalent cloud storage make sure you're using it and keeping your data backed up and protected. Hard drives and SSDs fail, and are considered consumable items in the IT world because of how common their failure rates are. Don't let that you. Back up your stuff now!

I keep eating the bots as fast as I can, but whoo... it's hard to keep up with them. Today I learned one can not simply eat an entire DDOS.

These bots are going straight to the hips.

Signal boost:  izapug

Go check out their gallery!
www.furaffinity.net/user/izapug

This artist is too damn good to have such low views! Check 'em out. They have pug dragons!

Just finished Stranger Things 3, and it was amazing.

Well, mostly. There were some things which irked me to no end.

How were there no bystanders for half the events this season? Somebody gets shot at a carnival, there's battles in the middle of a carnival ride with men storming into it, giant monsters stomping down the streets, storming around the mall, giant mutated blobs being thrown out of hospitals... and there's never anyone around to notice. Ever. Every time something happens there's just magically nobody around to witness it. Seems a little too convenient there'd never be one person to see it and react.

Also, how the hell was there a Russian base under the mall? I get the premise. The mall was built as a guise to tap into the power grid to be less conspicuous and provide cover for their shipments. And yet, the base seemed like it was buried half a mile underground and with tunnels which spanned incredible distances (as noted by Dustin). How'd they even know to build there of all places? The gate would have been so far underground it seems unlikely they'd have known it was even there in the first place. It doesn't appear to have been the gate from Season 2 as it wasn't connected to the old research facility, or was it? Did I miss something in regards to the gate?

This may be the funniest thing I've ever seen.

(This used to be posted on my old LiveJournal, but that story's been lost to time. Was recounting some old stories of the weird stuff I used to run into, and one story in particular came to mind.)

The weirdest thing I ever saw would probably be what I call the Allentown French bread phenomenon. Used to have pictures, but I lost my old Treo 650 that had 'em and my old LiveJournal has been lost to time.

I go to work one day, and as I'm driving I notice a loaf of bread sitting on the side of the road. No big deal, right? Everybody seems random crap (like single shoes) on the side of the road at times, so what's a loaf of bread?

I go up a block: more loaves. Some are on the top of benches, some perched on fences. Each street I go down... more bread. By the time I pull in to work there's dozens and dozens of loaves of bread everywhere. Another loaf of bread every few feet. The entire city had been breaded, and I have no idea what is going on. I figure it had to be some weird Allentown tradition, but why?

Go into work, ask what's up with all the bread and not a single person knows. In fact, nobody believes me. I whip out my phone and show them pics, and suddenly everybody piles outside to go look at the bread.

The bread's gone.

To this day I still have no idea why literally hundreds of loaves of bread were all over the city, who put them there, or where they went.

For those going to see Endgame don't forget your theater etiquette. And no spoilers!

Replaced the power supply and motherboard on my rig aaaaaaaaand the system still didn't come up. =/ Made the decision to replace the system almost entirely, and ordered the new parts for my PC. The bits should be here between Friday and Sunday -- whoo!

My past PC had a rough life. Sometime around last June, my AIO CPU watercooler sprung a leak. My GPU, motherboard, almost everything were soaked. I only realized what happened after I came home and noticed certain applications running so slow it felt like time had stopped. Turns out my PC was running upwards of 95C for almost two days. According to every resource I can find, the maximum safe operating temperature for an Intel 5930K is 66.8C. I was 30C over. That's a huge difference.

A PC will start to throttle down when this happens, and after a certain point, the proc should outright shut itself down to prevent from being damaged. For whatever reason mine didn't.

Ever since my PC has been spastic and glitchy, doing odd things like randomly tabbing between windows, opening explorer, performing hotkeys I never process. Windows notifications about receiving a message from Discord would pop up a week later. Task Manager would report Photoshop zero memory despite having a dozen 4K images open. All my USB devices would lag for upwards of 10 seconds and/or spontaneously reconnect (which, honestly, is really fun when drawing).

I thought it was a software issue for the longest time but reinstalling Windows never seemed to fix it. Again, these issues never happened consistently, so troubleshooting something like that becomes incredibly hard./

Those that follow me on Twitter know I've been complaining about PC weirdness for a while -- and they're probably sick of it, too. But yay, I'm excited.

Art and my nightly streams will be delayed for some time. My computer finally kicked the bucket, and while my laptop works, its not quite beefy enough to handle art or multiple screens. So I'm kind of SOL at the moment.

Not sure when I'll be able to repair/replace my desktop.

When you laugh so hard it hurts.

I don't exactly have a theme song, but if I did, I think Professor Elemental would be just the smashing chap to sing it.

A recent Windows 10 patch broke Photoshop on certain Wacom configurations. The bug causes the brush tool to move the entire canvas instead of drawing lines as normal. This has impacted a decent amount of artists, and is ridiculously frustrating.

This issue was caused by a Windows 10 update which made changes to Windows Ink (which later versions of Photoshop rely on). Fret not! There's a simple fix. All you have to do is download a patch from Microsoft which fixes the Windows Ink issue, reboot, and everything will be right as rain.

Direct Patch Download Link:
http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.....px?q=KB4093105

The second link from the top (x64) will be the version most need. =) And you ONLY need to run this patch if you're getting the issue with the brush tool dragging the canvas.

Happy arting!

Making some quasi-bookmarks for my own reference, but figured they may be helpful to other people.

For the longest time I've had an issue when trying to draw in Photoshop where I'd try to draw a line and a circular menu would pop up, or I'd try to alt-tap and grab a color and nothing would happen, or I'd just get some really minor instances of lag. I FINALLY FOUND THE FIX!

You have to disable "press and hold" on the pen settings. Seems simple, right? Except there's two different settings to actually disable this. I'm sharing this info because I know other people have dealt with this issue, and so I can leave a reminder to myself if I ever forget.

Disable the Photoshop "long press" drawing problem in Win 10:
1) Open Control Panel > Pen & Windows Ink > set "Press and Hold" to "Do Nothing". Easy enough, and you'd think that would be the setting to fix it, but no...
2) Open Control Panel > Ease of Access Center > Make Touch & Tablets Easier to Use > Click the "Make Touch Easier to Use" link on the bottom of the window (because, for some reason, you need to open two different menus named "make touch easier") > Double-click "Press and Hold" > Disable "Enable press and hold for right-clicking".

This setting may make tablet-only devices a bit harder to use... but if you're drawing it makes a huge different in Photoshop and removes the source of a lot of lag every time that menu tries to open. Pen input for small strokes or taps should be dramatically more expedient.

One of the greatest minds in our universe has been lost. RIP, man.

https://www.theguardian.com/science.....r-dies-aged-76

The new season of Digimon is looking great!

Celebrating one of my favorite videos from my favorite YouTube channel: Glove and Boots! They need more exposure and more love so I'm giving them a shout out. I love these guys. <3

Just a note: I think I'm officially done with drawing. Throwing in the towel. Refunds will be processed over the next two weeks. I'm sorry for those who have been waiting and let down. I've run into technical problems that have pretty much just put a stop to everything.

Between Dec 2006 and Jan 2008 I was a help desk/system admin working as a sub-contractor for the Department of Defense responsible for maintaining both PCs and networks in both non-class and classified environments (NIPR/SIPR). I was in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan working on Manas AB, an Air Force base that transitioned troops and supplies to and from fields of operation in Afghanistan.

There's been something that's bothered me for the past decade, and I wanted to get it off my chest: the US Government can be strangely amateur when it comes to OpSec.

The US government held annual and bi-annual bazaars on base where they'd invite the local community to sell their wares on US military bases. This includes pirated copies of operating systems (Windows Vista), Microsoft Office, the latest games, and movies. All pirated. All at insanely cheap prices (about $5).

These were all sold to members of the US Air Force and Army, government officials, as well as US contractors. And often were laden with viruses, malware, and other nasty shit. Most of the pirated material was Russian in origin. And yes, it was all going to the troops on the forward lines.

When I worked the help desk I'd often have troops come in and complain that their personal laptop was infected with viruses and other nasty shit that was rendering their machines unusable. And there was nothing I could do about it because it wasn't a DOD machine, and thus it wasn't my responsibility. I couldn't touch them due to liability issues. Meanwhile, the machines of soldiers on the front lines were being infected with malware. The best I could tell people was to wipe their devices from a recovery disc (if they even had one -- most didn't). Due to liability

I bought this up to JAG and the 376th AF Comm Ops Lt. Col at the time as a concern. Not only were these bazaars selling compromised software but even Green Beans Coffee (a Star Bucks-like coffee shop found on almost every military base) was selling counterfeit iPods, flash drives, and other devices to our troops. And nobody cared. Our internal network was flooded with pirated games, movies, music, and more. AND NOBODY CARED THAT IT WAS ON THE GOVERNMENT NETWORK.

"Copyright doesn't apply to war zones." I was told. In fact, I was even told these software packages provided "excellent savings opportunities" to our troops, despite the fact that they were often pirated, counterfeit, or piggybacking viruses/malware. I tried to stop it but didn't go far enough.

In retrospect, I wish I had made a bigger stink about it and said something. While nothing may bad may have ever come from it... I still felt bad that this was something that ever occurred in the first place, and I didn't do more to stop it.

I just needed to get this off my chest.

Best. Video. 2017.