digg.com pointed me in the direction of this post about the Top 7 Freshest Designs of 2006 (web design). Some of the designs are really pretty sexy: my personal favorites out of those listed are Cuban Council, Suicide Girls, and Veerle.

Here are couple more drawings I did before Applegeeks.

I believe I did this drawing after I read Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.

1998.

This next drawing was when I was hooked on the Batman Beyond cartoon. I think I posted this before.

2001.

“95 percent of Americans had premarital sex”

Now there’s a shocker.

This is an interesting site: iliketotallyloveit.com, a website aimed at students, where you can post links to an item, rank it’s price, and write a brief blurb about it. I think it functions similarly to digg. It’s relatively new, but once the user base expands, I think it might be pretty useful.

… is one of those strange times of year for me. My family always celebrated it, but never to the scale that my friends did. I’ve spent Christmases with friends and girlfriends, and the experience has always differed from family to family. The one thing that always seems to be the same is a realization of how big families over here are, and the loudness of it all. The gifts, of course, and the good cheer, but there’s a definite culture to Christmas that rises up during the tail end of November. I imagine that for the rest of the year, the rebellious few run their own Christmas underground where they speak out against their oppression by the 12-month calendar.

I remember there was one Christmas that I spent away from home that really made an impression on me. It was the first Christmas I spent with a girlfriend, and it was a huge family event. I never saw so many people and so many gifts in my life. Everyone was talking - there was this buzz of excited conversation, broken on occasion by a squeal from one of the kids as they opened another present. I guess the word I would use is epic. That’s how it seemed to me, at the time.

For me, Christmases growing up were a simple thing, for the most part. I was born and raised here, as was my brother - most of my extended family is back in India. My immediate family (father, mother, brother) live in the U.S. My brother and I grew up with Christmas, but the experience is probably markedly different than the average American’s. Sometimes we spend Christmases home, and sometimes we spend Christmases away - it changes from year to year, but I remember my parents making each Christmas of my youth into something pretty special, albeit different than the way it goes down in other households. One thing they did impress upon us was to be thankful for all the gifts that came our way. Within the family, they usually asked us exactly what we wanted - they weren’t big believers in the “buy a gift for the sake of gifting”, thank god - but outside of the family, they taught us to be grateful about whatever we got, even if we knew we’d never use it. It was a good lesson - it essentially taught my brother and I that it’s the thought that counts.

Receiving one of those “useless” gifts is always an awkward position to be in, though. Right away, you have to muster up excitement and enthusiasm for something that will probably end up in the bottom of your closet. If you don’t fake it well enough, the other person becomes upset - really upset, sometimes. I always tell my closest friends not to get me anything unless they know I want it or know I’d find it useful. If that means waiting till a month or two after Christmas, so be it - I’d rather have something awesome two months late than something mediocre just now, for the sake of the moment. And of course, the well-thought-out gift always holds so much more emotional weight than the spur-of-the-moment by-the-way-I-really-care gift.

What’re your thoughts on Christmas gift-giving? Leave a comment if you like!

This gave me a good laugh in the morning: Top 13 Worst Slogan Translations collects some of the worst ad-campaign-gone-bad stories from big corporations.