Greetings, I told you last night that I would expand on tyranny tonight. But all I have are two small bits on the subject. It's quite vast and it's a major topic of the current government.

Some Republicans think that tyranny is 100% taxes. Until the government taxes 100% of your money, it's not tyrannical, they say. Fuck that, I tell them. Of course, some Democrats think that tyrrany is anything but 100% taxes. Also, to them I say, fuck that. You see, I see tyranny as defined by power and thus control. A person that has unjust power over a person is likely a tyrant. A system or group of people that have unjust power over a person is a tyranny. The founders of USA came up with a pretty good list. When a government passes a law or action to restrict speech, religion, press, or assembly, they are tyrannical. When a government bans the ownership and use of firearms, they are tyrannical. Do you get what I'm saying? When a government (especially our government) violates the constitutional protections, it is exercising tyrannical control over it's citizens. When this happens, it must be stopped by one of the many checks and balances created to correct these injustices. But the checks and balances aren't working now. They haven't been working ever. You can see that throughout history either by popular opinion or horrible misjudgement of a few, our government has violated the rights of its citizens. So what to do? That's what I've been working on. It has been my belief that it is not the government's job to right itself. The anarchist sees the government's failures, so it is the anarchist's task. And so I have named my plans: "The Anarchist's Task". One of my plans is to talk with you, the viewer. That is half done. If you were to e-mail me, it would complete the task.

The second bit on tyranny is not my opinion. It's the opinion of Sally Kalson. I googled tyrrany (sic) and came up with Random acts of tyrrany, a very old article on the topic of random drug testing of high school athletes and club members. Her article not only attacks the justification of "the innocent have nothing to fear" used recently by John Ashcroft, but also explains one of the most important things about privacy: everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

Today, our high schools, middle schools, and elementaries look like distopian novels. But those authoritarians who are attacking the students of our nation and depriving them of a proper education have made a perfect system where it is illegal to advocate for students' rights whether you are a student or not. Our high schools should prove beyond any doubt that tyrrany is not a suitable government for any society.

So, you probably aren't reading this for the philisophical pov, eh? You want to know what that picture above is. Today, I'll give you an actual art lesson. The above was created in XFig and GIMP. XFig is a vector graphics system that seems like it is made for actual UNIX systems rather than Linux. It uses the meta key (which I didn't have until I mapped the ugly Win key to it) for nearly every menu command. It doesn't have any normal Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Z like Windows or KDE programs. It is extremely rugged and has not ever crashed in my experience. It does have problems with text, but I think that it may be related to Xlib rather than XFig. Anyway, I drew this in a few hours tonight. I wrote out a progress map and I have very bad news: HM has very little chance of making the October 1 Demo deadline. Sorry, but that's how it goes. I spent 1.5 weeks on physics and I still haven't finished the stuff. I decided that I need to spend more time on modelling, textures, and audio. So today, I looked at what I had in the way of models. It seems that the model I showed you five weeks ago is just about right. A bit of work and it'll be perfect. I added vertexes and bones for the eyes to move for emotion. I also added bones for the mouth so that the character can talk. I also made a female model out of it. I need an adult version, but that's easy. Then, textures are needed. So that's exactly what the above picture will become. The player's mother will be pretty, kind, smart, and resourceful. She will wear her shoulder-length hair down in a rounded end. Errm, like the one above. I don't think she'll wear glasses, but I added them because she looked like she might need them. So the idea for textures is that I need to go into XFig and just play around until I have ~40 character skins. I need scientists, students, boys, girls, men, and such. No one on Mars is above 60, and only ~20 above 50 (I did the math), so no old people on Mars. *shrug* Javantea (aka. me) will be 55 in 2034. With luck, he'll make an appearance in HM that will make him grow in people's hearts. ^_^ But with my textures, I'm hoping to make characters that are very positive and healthy. Hopefully they can show a bunch of emotion when the talk so as to get the attention of the players. So you can see how I made this character for that sole purpose, eh? Okay, on to the next!!! GAAAAAH!