Dr. Contese

Dr. Contese, local apothecary and wandering scholar. There are rumors about the town that he practices the dark arts but no one has seen proof. He is tall and strange and keeps to himself, working on his potions and elixirs to all hours of the night.


Link to this image on Fur Affinity

I've been working on this picture in Illustrator for almost a month. :( It's lots of textures and gradient meshes and transparent layers and etc. It's not really done. I omitted a work table in the foreground on the right and some darkened bookshelves on the back wall but... I'm tired and want to be done with this piece.

CBS Piles More Dung on evening Line-up.

Stacey forced me to sit through Jericho last night. You can watch the whole piece of crap on yahoo if you really have nothing better to do with your life.

Now, you'd think that as someone who liked Threads and The Day After that I might enjoy this show, and indeed, I might have... If it weren't poorly researched and totally stupid and filled with biases and holding the promise of only getting worse.

First off, they use the wrong type of mushroom cloud. To get an EMP, you need a high air detonation. Second, they set the distance so far away that people in the town couldn't have actually seen the cloud. I mean I know the people of Kansas are largely flat-Earth sorts but seriously. A nuclear detonation is 1) Not that big and 2) would have been beyond the horizon even if it was at the proper altitude.

Lots of other stupid crap. Like apparently the police, fire, and residents of this town had never heard of the emergency broadcast system. No one thought to check it. TV and telephones didn't work, the town only had 1 ham radio and apparently no one had satellite TV or radio of any sort.

The leaders of the town spread bad information based on an answering machine message that got cut off and incite a panic and riot in the streets.

Oh. Also, no one can drive in a nuclear attack. Busses veer wildly out of control and two 1970's cars on an empty highway will somehow be magnetized and slam into one another in a head on collision after staying in nearly pristine condition for over 30 years.

All criminals are bad bad bad people. Why, after a nuclear attack, the only thing they can think of is waiting on a wrecked bus in the middle of nowhere with no food so they can enjoy some fallout and cop-killin'!

In fact, that gets me to the other point that bothered me about this piece of crap. All the subtle conservative spin on it. A friendly fatherly figure shows up in one scene and talks like the old guy from Grizzly Adams and everyone stops rioting. The understated but still very apparent, 'IT'S THE REDEMPTION!' crap, which will be played up more in upcoming episodes, I'm sure. I mean the cities were destroyed by fire and plague is obviously coming next week, then famine the week after, I imagine. Lots of little subtle things that I can't quantify because I would have had to pay more attention to the show and it killed my interest pretty quickly. I imagine these will get worse in later episodes. It's definitely trying to appeal to the Left ButtockBehind audience and similar forms of human cabbage. The name of the town, I'd give a pass to, as it's just a dramatic name. Coffeeville, for instance, doesn't do much. It makes it sound like Smallville but for TooMuchCoffeeMan BUT they have lots of shows targeting the vapid christian audience. I think just before that show aired, 'Joan of Arcadia' was on. Stupid stuff like that.

So.. There's my view. Poorly researched, lousy writing, and it'll probably be immensely popular with human cole-slaw. Depressing. I could have really gotten into a show like that if it were better written and didn't have such an agenda.