#3441747 - safe, artist:ciaran, derpibooru exclusive, aria blaze, zephyr breeze, earth pony, pegasus, pony, rainbow rocks 10th anniversary, equestria girls, g4, my little pony equestria girls: rainbow rocks, alcohol, bar stool, beer, beer stein, crack shipping, disguise, disguised siren, drinking straw, duo, duo male and female, equestria girls ponified, eye clipping through hair, eyebrows, eyebrows visible through hair, eyeshadow, female, human shoulders, looking at each other, looking at someone, looking down, makeup, male, mare, missing accessory, monochrome, open mouth, pencil drawing, pigtails, ponified, ship:zepharia, shipping, silly straw, simple background, smiling, stallion, straight, straw, sucking, table, traditional art, underhoof, wingless

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UPDATE: Inked and lettered version:

Day 12. My challenge for myself for the rest of the year is to focus on the least loved ships on the site. Today’s challenge was to draw Zephyr Breeze and Aria Blaze.

I hope you like Zephyr ships, because almost all of the lowest popularity ships that exist feature him.

Normally today I’d be drawing what I drew yesterday, but I blew myself out drawing on day 11. Pushed things way too far and took a whole day to recover. But it was totally worth it. So, now I’m uploading what I drew today, but maybe that’s more normal. Now instead of drawing into the night I’ll be drawing first thing in the morning. I wonder how long that will last?

Focused instead on getting my old drawing table out of the attic and set up again. Pics related.

PS: This just in; WOW I hate Zephyr’s hair.

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UPDATE: Inked and lettered version:

>>3442730t

Day 12. My challenge for myself for the rest of the year is to focus on the least loved ships on the site. Today's challenge was to draw Zephyr Breeze and Aria Blaze.

I hope you like Zephyr ships, because almost all of the lowest popularity ships that exist feature him.

Normally today I'd be drawing what I drew yesterday, but I blew myself out drawing on [day 11](/images/3440824). Pushed things way too far and took a whole day to recover. But it was totally worth it. So, now I'm uploading what I drew today, but maybe that's more normal. Now instead of drawing into the night I'll be drawing first thing in the morning. I wonder how long that will last?

Focused instead on getting my old drawing table out of the attic and set up again. Pics related.

[![medium](https://i.ibb.co/8DqjXyL/drawing-table-closeup.png)](https://i.ibb.co/8DqjXyL/drawing-table-closeup.png) [![medium](https://i.ibb.co/SPNLcqL/drawing-table-far.png)](https://i.ibb.co/SPNLcqL/drawing-table-far.png)

PS: This just in; WOW I hate Zephyr's hair.

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GigaRainbowDashEQG

The giant awesomeness!

@Ciaran
Hey…..you’re welcome as well. You will see something amazing for them. ;) <3

Posted 4 months ago Report

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

君場森生きる

@GigaRainbowDashEQG

Meeting all humans and ponies that got better together when Aria and Zephyr got along

… uuuhm … yeah … about that. They are getting along, but … they’re still themselves. And in my mind, they might even less good versions of themselves, if that’s even possible.

So … sorries if I ruined it. But even if the final comic isn’t to your taste, you’ll always have this sketch ^_^

Posted 4 months ago Report
Edited 4 months ago

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GigaRainbowDashEQG

The giant awesomeness!

@Ciaran

Hey… I got the best chance by being awesomer to all artists, seeing your sketches. :)

And you know what’s awesome? Meeting all humans and ponies that got better together when Aria and Zephyr got along. ;)

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Ciaran

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君場森生きる

@GigaRainbowDashEQG
Thank you.

I like Sunset Shimmer quite a bit, too. I hope to draw her soon :)

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GigaRainbowDashEQG

The giant awesomeness!

Ponies and Humans are all together, and let me tell you, Ciaran: you did a nice job on Aria and Zephyr Breeze. :)

Did you know my favorite character is Sunset SHimmer? You know - the new Sunset.

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

君場森生きる

@JP
lmao :)

Thank you. Seriously - I didn’t know I was going to do that. I think this might be a part of my brain re-wiring itself. Like, I remember all of that like it was today. But a month ago if you asked me about it, I wouldn’t have remembered any of it.

So … thank you for asking ^_^

And, yes - that clock is so … sacred.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go draw.

Posted 4 months ago Report
Edited 4 months ago

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I miss the show so much

@Ciaran
I kept thinking about Forrest Gump while reading that.

The mirrored clock is the least weird thing in your life.

We need a Derpibooru Hall of Fame for posts like yours.

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

君場森生きる

@JP

Where on earth did you work?

Ah … good question. DELICIOUS question. Thank you for asking! ^_

Oh! And look! Dave has the LaserMaster Lexicon running again! (aka the ‘Big Gihugic Lexicon of Sick & Twisted Jargon & Slang’) Sweet. Gonna update all of this with actual links to things. Okedoke, pics or it didn’t happen …

My first ‘real’ job - like, not programming robots for assembly lines - was as a Sniveling Macintosh Primadonna in R&D at a tiny and utterly weird company called ‘Bovine Research Center’ because we didn’t want signs that said “here’s all the computers please come and steal them”.

It also had other names.

There, I became an initiate of the blood rites in the ship it department, which meant I spent most of my time soldering shit together until it was no longer broken or literally in flames so the S&M building could make a quadjillion tenders.

In brief, a tiny typeface foundary called DTC - Digital Typeface Corporation figured out why MicroSoft’s rendering system was wrong, and when shown what they had done they basically just noped out and licensed us trimmage which we made not suck. Basically, the secret is wiggling the laser and pixel dust. See US patents 5122884 and 5212559.

Why was it called ‘Trimmage’? Because it sounds like a sex thing.

Mmmmm … gonna get some TRIMMAGE this weekend? Nope - gonna double buffer until blanket time. So yes. Unless spousal context clash.

Anyway, we figured out how to print at gobsmacking speeds. Like, blindingly fast at the time. Like, we could print a page in an hour that would take 10 hours on another printer. Then at previously incomprehensible resolutions. Resolutions that seemed magical at the time. We’d set up systems at tradeshows and run them all day and people would know for a fact it was mirrors or magic.

Sure - today it looks like something from a museum - because it is. But at the time this was cutting edge. BLEEDING edge stuff. So - let me introduce you to …

PROJECT HAROLD

My first real project there was completely accidental. The … wow, how to even describe this.

When I was interviewing, each week I would pick some piece of shit company I didn’t want to work for and would send them an angry venomous rant that was printed on a broken dot matrix printer complaining about something they had nothing to do with. Like, I sent this place a 3 page tirade about what an utter piece of shit PageMaker 2 was. Got out all of my anger and rage and frustration in a single “FUCK YOU” letter sent to someone I never expected to hear from.

They would post mindless and insulting recruiting ads intended to drive people away so they could show the state they were “trying” to fill positions and their shareholders that they were “growing”.

One week, I picked them. And they picked me. The interview was drinks and lunch at the Bayon and the next day I started without any job description, no title, no purpose or cube or anything.

Literally - I got there the first morning, and my job description was Unh … find a cube or build one and find a computer. If you don’t do anything useful by next Friday you’re dead.

So … I did that. Found some cube walls in one bay of the otherwise empty strip mall they’d bought, found a nice Macintosh that no one else seemed to be using, and set myself up in QA land, and slapped the slug.

Then I found something curious. It was in one of the warehouses connected to the back of the strip mall where people set their smoking bit and played foofoo ball. It was a dark, unlit garage with enough space for three semi-trucks with their trailers, littered with things like a giant concrete park bench from San Francisco covered in bizarre bible quotes, a MacWorld tradeshow rug, an Adobe corporate sign, a giant concrete statue of Jesus … tons of random.

So much random. It was like a warren of prizes that no one remembered wanting. Not the LM Museum - this wasn’t the sentimental or precious stuff - this was the stuff that got thrown in the back of the truck that no one remembered wanting.

The curious thing was curious. It had things … and stuff … and parts that made interesting noises. Also it looked like someone had zorched it.

I moved the curious thing to my cube and played with it until it printed.

Then it caught fire. Then my desk caught fire. Lots of paper laying around when you’re trying to invent laser printers plus lasers plus lots of electronics inside a small box can sometimes do that. Not the first instance of the printer on fire bit being set, and absolutely not the last.

That became Amadeus. A cross platform laserprinter that - I shit you not - worked with Macs, Windows, Sun Microsystems … anything you wanted. Impossible at the time, because of the stupid “The first word of this has to be our trademarked name and we wilL SUE your ass if you say our name!” licensing bullshit that companies did to keep things from playing together nice. Like, Adobe asks you what fonts you have and if you don’t say ‘Helvetica’ you’re not a printer. Also your ass is in court because THAT’S OUR WORD YOU CAN’T SAY IT!.

Turned out the secret was to simply buy one of each computer and stuff it into a printer.

Job’s a good’un. Didn’t matter it cost US$18,000 EACH because no one else had one. We couldn’t build them fast enough.

Here’s a secret - S&M was going to call it the “Flexidrive”. Because it worked with any computer (flexible) and had a hard drive in it (drive). I shit you not.

We heard that, and half of the R&D team drove straight downtown and we REGISTERED “Flexidrive” as our OWN trademark because FUCK YOU NO THAT IS NOT THE GOD DAMNED NAME!

So it became the “Unity”. It should have been called “Amadeus” which was the code name, but apparently that was already a thing (Warnung: Deutsche Punkmusik und schickes Anziehen, und wie er waren wir pleite, weil wir getrunken haben. Rock mich, Amadeus!)

For me, it was just a push. My undiagnosed ADHD was in full bloom and I didn’t even notice people patting me on the back and telling me I was one of them.

I just wanted to play with the pretty and incredibly expensive pretty things and make them do stuff.

I remember trying to explain to my parents what an awesome day I had at my new job, where I broke shit all day long in an abandoned strip mall with all the overhead lights ripped out and the fire department’s hook and ladder truck had to respond to my amazing success.

But - I was in. Without even noticing I didn’t puffalump and accidentally hondo’d.

Found out later the guy whose Macintosh I had stolen for my cube was found dead because they didn’t protect their equipment good enough.

Huh.

Then other companies noticed what we were doing and we kind of became a tiny little secret “fuck the competition” R&D lab for everyone else. Apple, MicroSoft, Morisawa, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Adobe … places like that were sending us hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product and asking us to make to work with everything else.

In the meantime, we had our own products like … well, here’s a link to some of what we did.

_{LaserMaster / ColorSpan revolutionized desktop publishing output in the early ‘90s with the world’s first Plain-Paper Typestter with the high resolution of TurboRes (a LaserMaster Patented technology). Highly sought after by LexMark, Canon, Ricoh, Hitachi & Toshiba, the Company went on to create the Wide Format Inkjet marketby innovating and patenting BIDs (Big Ink Delivery System), which solved the problem of refilling HP Thermal InkJet cartridges on-the-fly while printing. This change in ink delivery paved the way for both Wide Format and Long Roll Digital Graphics for banners, posters, signage and digital photo reproductions.}

It didn’t FEEL like we were doing that at the time. We were just working 90 hours weeks, living in our cubes, and never wearing pants.

But, this thing?

That was us.

No one knew what they were for - there was no market for “Big Format Printers”.

There was no one walking around with a CD Rom looking for a place to print their resume or their D&D poster, because the desktop publish revolution hadn’t happened yet and no one did that.

So we rented an empty storefront in the Minneapolis Skyway and set up a commercial printing shop loaded with giant posters and pretty ladies and sold the IDEA of printing your own shit.

Don’t have a Macintosh? Use one of our’s! Don’t know how to use PageMaker on Windows? WE’VE GOT FREE CLASSES FOR YOU!

Then when we got a setup that worked and plausibly could earn enough we loaded a copy of everything including signage and a cash register on palettes and we sold printing shops. Everything you needed on a palette. Sign here, let us know if you need a hand getting it running the first time.

Then we shipped engineers all over the country getting printers running. Literally - R&D would go to shops anywhere with one of our printers to see why it wasn’t working. Or why the print head had blown through a wall and was now imbedded in the concrete floor in the next room. Stuff like that.

Funnest story ever was from … not sure I should say their name … was flown to Israel because there was a print job that was throwing a postscript error and they needed it to print. So he figures out the problem and get the printer to print and as it starts to print one of the people in the room with him pulls out a fucking GLOCK and cocks it and puts it against his head and says; “Do not look at the printer”.

Apparently it was the schematics for a tank.

I never had a gun held to my head. I just got to go into the secret sub-sub-sub-sub basement at Sony Music Japan - you know the place, the enormous incomprehensibly vast concrete spaces where they keep the Evangelion units. Lots of guards - armed guards. Lots of firearms and security doors and endless challenges and signing in and out at every single door until you’re alone in a room as large as a football field and as high as a three story building, and at the end, this thing that you can’t quite make out but the guards are watching so just keep following the footprints painted on the floor to the next door on the far wall.

HA HA just serious.

Anyway, we looked around and realized that we’d done the desktop publishing revolution.

Huh.

And the typefaces we’d been selling for $500 a typeface (want that in Bold? That’s another $500!) were now selling for $10 for 100 typefaces on a CD Rom.

And the printers we’d been selling for $18,000 were now selling for $1,200 and we had a half dozen competitors who were kicking our asses. Hard.

So we looked to Japan. Where typefaces still cost $5,000. Each. Want that in bold? $5,000 more please. And everyone was still using WordPros and NECs that were putting people in mental wards.

Road trip!

Then when we were done in Japan we noticed that the sneaker net was no longer working. People were carrying DVDs and it still wasn’t enough to get a print job to press.

Fuck. We had printers no one wanted to buy because they couldn’t get the print jobs to the print shop.

So it was time for WAM!NET. This is all post-Cerberus though, so I can’t find anything that really represents what insanity that was like.

After helping Apple and Microsoft and Adobe and Hewlett Packard and all those other companies collaborate in the most magnificent competitive dance of all time, some of us moved to Digi and some to WAM!NET. I went the WAM!NET route, and we helped WORLDCOM and MCI compete against each other and collaborate in secret because there were federal laws prohibiting phone companies from transmitting data (and vice versa). Then we were magazines printed in the city they were meant for, digital deliver via satellites, every movie ever recorded in every language at the push of a button, digital delivery to movie theatres … the rendering farm we built in Hawaii for this thing and in-house rendering for stuff like this … and, yes - I know what you’re going to ask:

How can anyone watch a Rendering Farm puke out frames at the rate of 3 frames an hour? Doesn’t that drive you NUTS?

Yes. Very. Very very nuts. Because these are the frames …

2LDR: I can’t go back to Germany ever again because apparently using the D channel on ISDN to deliver the dailies from filming in Africa to the studios in California is “illegal”. I mean … just because no one ever picks up the phone isn’t my fault.

Also pieces of things I did are in every printer sold today. Those gamut things? The whole ‘20% black is really 8% toner at this humidity and temperature with that paper’ thing? Oh my god it took months. And it was so annoying to everyone else they gave me my own warehouse for it. “Durrrr … too dark! … durrr … too LIGHT!” Then the temperature would change and I’d do it again. Thank you, ADHD! I never could have gotten through it without you!

Also I learned how to break computers and networks in ways that opened holes into alternative universes. Yup - that’s the origin of Ci’s Constant. Don’t put your finger in it, it has teeth, and you might not get your finger back.

And I never worked a day in my whole life. I just fucked around with my friends and played with hundreds of thousands of dollars - hell, MILLIONS of dollars worth of products and services - until we accidentally made a new thing with them.

It was a golden fucking age of exploration. And flushing money down holes as fast as we could. So many holes.

Whew. That felt good. All my DNAs have finally expired so I can actually talk about that stuff now.

Also, it’s odd that I can’t remember 2020, but I remember all of that like it’s happening right now.

So … still very unclear on the ‘strokes - good or bad?’ question. I might actually be pro-stroke now.

Posted 4 months ago Report
Edited 4 months ago because: Found a better version of that song

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I miss the show so much

@Ciaran
Where on earth did you work?

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

君場森生きる

@JP
Oh, god. I was afraid no one would even notice. Thank you so much :)

It’s exactly what it looks like it is, and I love it so much. It’s one of the things that I’ve had in every office I ever had. And it ticks SO LOUD that if you’re in the room with it you can’t not look at it.

Some places say “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps” as a joke. Where I worked, the actual goal was to weed out all the sane people as fast as possible. Most new hires didn’t last a single day.

That clock won the “employee of the month” award so many times. Just having it on the wall when interviewing people saved so much time.

The voodoo dolls nailed to the wall on either side of it helped too. But I don’t remember them winning a coffee cup for outstanding performance.

InB4 where the fuck did you work?

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I miss the show so much

The wall clock in the second photo is screwing with my head.

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PROJECT HAROLD

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