Spidercow2010 has won Character Design Contests 31 (Weapon), 45 (Kirby), and 48 (Circus), and Caption Contest 71, which is a darn impressive resume. Here's a little more info about the homo sapiens behind the arachnobovine.
- Online name used in HeroMachine environs: Spidercow2010
- A photo (or drawing) of you in "real life": I feel compelled to admit that under my crunchy shell lurks another goateed individual with rapidly thinning hair.
- Real name: If I was willing to give my real name, I wouldn’t be representing as last year’s arachnobovine.
- Real city/state/country: Portland, Oregon. By the way, here in Oregon we pronounce it OR-i-gun. Not Or-e-GAWN.
Never mind what you’ve heard from people who don’t know. - Real job: Nighttime Security/Reception
- Real age:56
- Gender: Male
- Relationship status (married, single, in a long-term relationship, dating someone, "it's complicated", etc): Single, but that may change soon. (Xd fingers)
- Online archive of your creations (if any): http://spidercow2010.deviantart.com/gallery
- The best piece of HeroMachine art you've created: I’m partial to this:
- Favorite all-time geeky movie if any: The Wrath of Khan
- Favorite all-time geeky book if any: Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road
- Favorite all-time geeky TV show if any: Fireball XL-5
- Favorite all-time comic book character if any: The ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing
- If you could have one super-heroic power in real life, you'd choose: Teleportation. I suppose it’d need to be a line-of-sight sort of thing; I can see myself teleporting into a hillside or something if I don’t know exactly where I’ll end up. And I suppose there’d be plenty of times when I materialized 8 feet up in the air. But nobody said god-like power would be easy.
- In your leisure time you like to: I’m an actor. I’d have to say semi-professionally, though. I’m not doing it full-time or anything, but I don’t do it for free, unless it’s for a worthy cause. Most of my work has been doing Shakespeare.
- Character design turn-ons (things you love to see that make for a good design): Composition. I like for all the elements to achieve some sort of balance, the kind of thing you know when you see it but it’s hard to explain. And I think everything in the image should work toward whatever story the image is telling, just as every machine should have no unnecessary parts, and every word in a joke should work toward setting up the punch line, or at least give us another reason to laugh at the butt of the joke.
- Character design turn-offs (things you hate to see that make for a bad design): Well, as above, I hate it when there’s just too much going on. And I’ve been guilty of this, like here:
I tried to jam too many elements in there, pretty much for the sake of a lame gag. This was my entry for the Aquarius character contest and, as I recall, I--quite rightly--didn’t get a mention, and had no expectation I would. Maybe I could have made it marginally better by improving the composition, shifting things around, using negative space better, but at the core this thing is just too busy. And unbalanced. Hey, like me!
- Best tip for a HeroMachine newbie: Experiment. This juggernaut has just gotten more and more versatile with time and the efforts of Jeff and, um, those other guys whose names escape me at the moment, and there’s a whole cosmos of stuff that can be done with masking, resizing, color gradations, and through thinking outside the box. Be willing to magnificently fail. Teddy Roosevelt said it better:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
- Any personal message you'd like to share with the HeroMachine community about Geek Life: (None provided.)
