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Been out for Thanksgiving, updates to return semi-regularly. I keep saying that every other week.

Baked some cookies for the office for thanksgiving.

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Not my best work

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Jacob's S.O. got her wisdom teeth taken out on Monday. She's been craving burgers ever since.

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Been out for a week, but we're back!

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The doodle that started it all

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"How did you get assigned to that project team?"

"I'm not sure, it must be the magical SAP sorting hat." 

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In case you were wondering, this is the offending inflatable.

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Sorry about the lack of updates the past few days, I was at NY Comic Con. In return here's a long post.

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There's a guy in our office that we've nicknamed "Crazy Jim". He'll come into work, tell us stories about the trashiest girls he picked up off the side of the highway over the weekend, and proceed to show us photo documentation. And it's all OK, because he's the best at what he does, so everybody just looks the other way.

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Totally wasn't desperate for material when I made this one...

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A few days ago, our team was given "firefighter" access.

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For context, Jacob's LoL IGN is _____theBear.

CLG fans, if you're reading this, please make this happen. I want bearcow bot lane to be a thing.

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In an office setting, you learn to develop interests in a lot of things you normally wouldn't have otherwise bothered with just to have something to talk about with coworkers, unless you want to turn into 'that guy' that gets home every day bitching about people he has to work with, comes in at the very last second he's required to, and leaves as soon as he thinks he won't be caught, regardless of the status of his work (hint: it's never done). If you really want to enjoy the place where you will spend a majority of your day earning your income, you have to find some way to connect with the people you work with. 

I'm not saying that you should go out and pretend to like things that you hate (assuming you can at least be civil about the fact that someone might like something you don't), but just keeping up a basic working knowledge of what everyone else is talking about is a good way to make work seem less like something you have to go to and more like something that you're doing while you're hanging out with friends. Remember the "current events" bit that your 4th grade teacher made you do, where you had to present a newspaper article in front of your class? Turns out, that's actually a useful skill. You seem more personable to the people around you, they're more willing to come and waste time with you when you have your work wrapped up but can't leave yet, and will be more understanding of when you have to coldly ignore everyone around you to get things done on time.

A good way to get into something that you don't really know that much about is to relate it to something you do spend a lot of your time doing. For me, as a traditional basement-dwelling, anime-watching neckbeard, I try to keep up with mildly amusing facts about things I would usually not follow as closely and turn them into opportunities to make humorous doodles (IT'S MY VERSION OF OEKAKI AND YOU CAN'T TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME). So you can imagine my glee when I found out that Microsoft Lync, our office Instant Messaging software, has native support for my Wacom drawing tablet. And even better was when I found out that my office doesn't actually record the images that are sent with it. It was like I had a hybrid version of snapchat/4chan at my hands, a way to send quick reactionary doodles to people that would never get me in trouble unless the person on the receiving end wanted to be a dick and forward a screenshot of our conversation to HR.

After a considerable amount of these doodles were sent out, it was suggested that I find some way to save and share these conversations anyway, just as long as I only did so with conversation partners who were willing to have our conversations aired out in public. Of course, the procrastinator in me never got around to saving any of these, but a natural consequence of this was that a majority of my Lync conversations were between people who had already indicated that they would be OK with our conversations being shared. These people suddenly showed up on my IM client under the "Frequent Contacts" header, which finally gave me the motivation to kick this project up. So with that, expect to start seeing a steady trickle of mildly amusing Lync conversations signed with reaction images quickly doodled in, in a fashion not unlike dad-jokes carefully honed in the dry environment  of the semi-worksafe standards of "humor".