Embs Computer Art

Well there’s a video of some marines pissing on dead Taliban soldiers.  The Obama administration is predictably outraged.  But why should he be?  After all wasn’t it Obama who made it legal for American soldiers to have sex with animals?  Yes, it was.  So why is he angry that they are acting like animals?  Because he’s a hypocrite.  That’s why.

To begin reading a proverb a day, download the PDF Bible.

There is a tradition amongst Bible believing Christians to read at least one chapter of the Bible a day.  Because the book of Proverbs has thirty-one chapters it’s possible to read one chapter a day and complete the book every month and begin again.  Today is the 13th so the tradition is that you should read the 13th chapter of the book of Proverbs today and the 14th tomorrow.  On the months that have only 29 or 30 days simply read two or three chapters on that last day in order to begin again on the 1st with the 1st chapter.  That might sound like a lot of reading if you are not accustomed to it, but think of those days as leap days, a time of celebration.

The book of Proverbs imparts wisdom to the reader and is a great way to begin a day.  If you don’t read often I highly recommend you begin forcing yourself to follow the practice of reading a Proverb a Day.  It will discipline your mind towards focus.  If you need to read the words aloud in order to focus please do so.  If you are able to read the chapter aloud with your family please, please do so.

If you are not accustomed to group reading it’s simple.  Begin with a simple prayer for the day such as “Father, we need your guidance today.  Teach us wisdom from your book.  In Jesus Christ’s name.  Amen.”

Now have the father read the first verse and the mother the second and then the eldest child the next and then the younger child and so on in rotation until the chapter is complete.  Following this order helps instill a Biblical authoritarian structure by placing God first, father second, mother third, and children in order of birth.

In all family matters this order is to be encouraged for the family is sovereign and the foundation of what we call society.  No outside authority should be appealed to except God.

We need to teach our children that the government and the “church” should never be involved in anything that a family can address themselves.  The father is the head of the household and he is subject to God alone.  The wife is submissive to the husband, but over the children.  And unless the child despises his birthright, the children are honoured in the order in which God created them.

As a former Sunday School teacher I can tell you that group reading has tremendous benefits for children.  I could tell a major difference in the academic and behavioral abilities of children accustomed to group reading as found in Christian homes and Sunday School.  By learning to read aloud the children learn humility first in that it’s difficult for them.  They learn confidence in that it becomes easier.  They learn poise, diction, and public speaking skills, in that they must read clearly and be well heard.  They build vocabulary in that they are exposed to words they have never seen nor heard.  They learn grammar in that they are exposed to language.  They gain self control by learning to focus and remain still until the reading is complete.  They learn wisdom from reading God’s word and the spiritual benefits are too great to be listed now, but guess what?  You’ll gain those benefits yourself also.  Even if you don’t have a family you can practice group reading with friends in person or over the phone and even reading aloud alone can help you with a lot of things mentioned.

All of the benefits I just listed are greatly enhanced by the King James Bible because it has difficult words not found in books given to children at school.  The grammar of the King James Bible is also perfect as is the spelling.  That’s why we refer to proper English as “The King’s English” for it is found in the King James Bible commissioned for translation by King James I of England.  It is perfect English.  Americans don’t speak, read, or write properly and the education system in America encourages improper English.  The new rules of grammar are contradictory and not enforced by union teachers even when they are not.

We simply do not expect enough from our children.  The children that I taught that were raised around the King James Bible, the group reading of it, and regular church attendance were vastly, I mean VASTLY, more well behaved then those who were not, and their grade levels, both in terms of reading skill and in academic performance, were light-years beyond their peers.

Some tips for reading alone and for group reading:

1. If your child or another adult is struggling with a word give them some time to sound it out.  Only right before the child becomes frustrated say the word for them.  By allowing the reader to have a few victories of their own every time they read they will want to read some more.  Giving the child the answer immediately encourages laziness but letting them struggle too long wears them down.

2. Keep a dictionary handy.  You are sure to find words in the Bible you have never seen before.  Remember that modern spellings are a bit different.  One example is the word “show” which used to be spelled “shew.”  The “ow” spelling was reserved for words that contain an “o-u” sound like in the word “showers” so the word “show” back then was spelled “shew” and remained that way until after the late 1700s.  The proper pronunciation of the word “shew” is like “shoe” as in the word “running-shoe.”  The modern spelling of “show” does not appear in the Bible, but the meaning is the same.  You can always tell what the Bible means from the context, but for the exact definitions of individual words get a good dictionary or use the internet in a pinch (the internet should be your last resort for reliable information however).  Older dictionaries are better than modern ones in a lot of ways that we’ll explore in another post.

3. If you are having trouble with a certain word or a verse, either with the pronunciation or in the understanding of it, simply read it as best as you can and move on.  You’ll understand the word and verse better another time, but you need to finish the chapter or you’ll become frustrated.

4. If you are reading in a group, especially with children, somebody will invariably ask you, “What does that mean?”  In fact you will ask this question yourself every time you read so don’t be afraid!  If you don’t know what the verse means simply say to that person or to yourself, “I don’t know what it means, but it sure sounds interesting!”  All verses in the Bible relate to other ones so you have to read more to understand more.

I hope this has encouraged to the start the practice of daily Bible reading, especially a Proverb a day, especially reading aloud, especially with family and friends.  Enjoy the 13th Proverb!

I had some trouble setting up my Evolution email program in Linux for my AOL email, but these are the settings I used that worked for me.  I hope it helps you if you have trouble.

Go ahead and add a new Mail Account (if you already have one you can just click Edit-Preferences to get to a place where you can add a new one).

Click ADD and a screen that says MAIL CONFIGURATION will appear.  Click FORWARD.

Enter your full name (personal name) and AOL email address WITH the @ symbol and then click FORWARD

Click SERVER TYPE and choose POP

Set the SERVER to POP.AOL.COM all capital letters.

Set the USERNAME to the username you use for aol WITH the @ symbol so that it looks like a full email address.

Set AUTHENTICATION TYPE to Password.  Click FORWARD.  Click FORWARD again.

Now in the SENDING EMAIL screen…

Set the Server to SMTP.AOL.COM:587 all capital letters.

The “587” sets the port to 587 instead of the standard port used for SMTP which is 25 so this setting is something other than standard.

Now click the checkbox on that says SERVER REQUIRES AUTHENTICATION.  In the USERNAME box enter your username WITHOUT the @ symbol.  Click FORWARD.

Now give this account a name so that you can distinguish it from other email addresses you may use.  For example you could use something like MyAolEmail.  Now click FORWARD.  Click APPLY.

Now things should work.

I also recommend going back into the Edit-Preferences and going to the account you just made and clicking EDIT, then go to the RECEIVING OPTIONS tab and click LEAVE MESSAGES ON SERVER or your emails will be deleted from the server when you read them.

Have fun!

Starting the flats for Uncanny X-Force #22.

Working on the flats for Ultimates #7 for Marvel.  Started Monday night and got two pages done then and another two Tuesday night.  The lines look clean and the artwork clear, but sketched pages take a long time so we’ll see how long it’ll take.

I’d be farther along, but setting up my webpage and blog is taking a while.  The connection to the blog database got messed up somehow and I had to fix it by removing wordpress, deleting all the databases, reinstalling wordpress, and reposting everything.  I’m going to backup the entire website through FTP after this.  Maybe that will help fix things next time.

Hi.  This is Jeremiah Embs, this is going to be my art blog once I figure all this out. Ugh, this is all new to me. I’m old school I guess. Blugs and twits are not my thing. Please be patient and I’ll have this up and running in no time. By the way, I’m using a webhost called freespeechwebhosting. It’s like a little over $100 a year, but boy it’s nice to have a real webhost.

I think it’s a great deal personally because it has tons of scripts to use like wordpress and unlimited space and traffic. I had to move to a real webhost because COX decided it wasn’t going to host free webpages anymore. Oh they love jacking up their prices while offering less don’t they?

By the way, check out my homepage at “Embs Computer Art” and download the FREE PDF KING JAMES BIBLE.

It took a while to put together and I need lots of people reading it as a way to prove the text.  If you notice an error go ahead and send me an email.  Feel free to post the PDF Bible on your own website or message board or torrent it, just as long as you make no changes to it.  Just get God’s word out there!

The purpose of the PDF Bible is not only to provide a digital Bible for free to everyone, but also to provide a file from which the entire Bible can be printed with a desktop printer and distributed.  The pages are formatted in a way that the whole Bible can be printed on regular 8.5×11 inch copy paper and bound together as a finished product.  This will allow missionaries and churches to become their own Bible printers without any setup costs. My current project is a PDF Concordance.  It’s going to take a while, but I hope to have it out by the end of February.  I’m going to have a lot of stuff on the page eventually that will be good for Bible study and maybe even some stuff for home-schoolers like a history curriculum.  This kind of localized printing is becoming very popular for missionaries and churches.  Some people wouldn’t see the benefit of printed material in the computer age, but people will always take a free item from people, whereas getting them to download something is more difficult.  If you hand them a Bible or a tract you know they’ve got it in their hands and they are excited to get something for free.  Plus (and this may come as a real shock to most of you) some people don’t own a computer and even those that do don’t always have internet access.  Plus, if the power is out, computers don’t work, plus taking a laptop computer to church isn’t cool at all.  It’s cumbersome and awkward.  Give me a real book any day.  I’ll probably talk a lot about the problems with E-books in another post.

For a long time printers have used the primary colors of process cyan, process magenta, and process yellow, along with carbon black (represented by the letter K for Carbon) to print comic books.  Before digital coloring the books were colored through a painful process involving  acetate film which was used to make printing plates through a photographic process.  The exact process is a bit difficult to explain, but it involved a series of codes called “color codes” which are no longer used. I have included a chart of these color codes in case you’d like to learn them or need to restore an old comic book from the printing plate alone digitally (such as I have done for some of the Marvel Masterworks series).

The chart requires a bit of explanation. Firstly, it is in tiff format in CMYK color so that the color is not tainted by the standard degradation of the jpg format and so that it will print more perfectly than an rgb file would. It must therefore be opened in a program that can handle tifs and the CMYK color mode such as Adobe Photoshop or the colors won’t be seen correctly. Most image viewers do not support cmyk format and will shift the colors to an imperfect rgb so that the colors seen do not appear as they should.

Secondly while one would think that the code “R” represents red and “B” represents blue remember that pure red and blue were not used in the printing process. The “R” actually stands for process magenta (a very cool red containing a large percentage of blue) and the “B” actually stands for process cyan (a very cool blue containing a large percentage of green). The Y does however represent the color yellow, but process yellow is cooler (contains more green) than standard yellows such as Cadmium Yellow.  The letters “R” and “B” were used only for the sake of simplicity and now represent a misnomer. Refer to the key below the link to understand how to interpret the chart.

To get the chart right click on the link below and click “save as” to download it to your computer.

http://www.embscomputerart.com/imgs/colorcodes.tif

and here is a Photoshop .aco swatches palette with the codes

http://www.embscomputerart.com/imgs/comiccodecolors.aco

Key to the Codes

Y = Yellow

R = Magenta

B = Cyan

2 = 25% color coverage

3 = 50% color coverage

A letter alone represents 100% coverage

Examples:

Y = 0,0,100,0 or simply 100% yellow or total possible yellow coverage.

Y2 = in cmyk code 0,0,25,0 or simply 25% of total possible yellow coverage.

Y3 R2 B = 100, 25, 50, 0 or simply 100% Cyan coverage combined with 25% Magenta coverage and 50% yellow coverage.

A fully saturated non-carbon black could be made from simply Y R B which would be 100,100,100,0 in cmyk code, but because paper has a limit to how much ink it can properly absorb without breaking down it is considered a better practice to use some carbon ink in any mix that is particularly dark. This is because K tones are more efficient in toning down the color and so less ink is required preventing the page from reaching full saturation as quickly. Also carbon ink is cheaper and therefore it is preferred by printers any time black is needed rather than a mixture of colors that would result in a black. Also you should know that Karbon Black is a bit transparent so pure Karbon Black is usually “underprinted” with a combination of colors which lay underneath the black to make the black more solid and rich.