Here’s my artistic and psychological evolution over the past four years.
It’s interesting to reflect on my changing attitudes and approach to the same subject matter. Through it all I remained brave and kept my sense of humour, even when I fell into despair.
It feels good to look back on the tremendous growth my art has made in a few years. I just reached a point where I was ashamed that I was in my 30’s and my art had barely improved since high school. Now I can clearly see progress.
Here’s another solo shoot, just me and my phone camera. This is around the same spot that I did my first Naked Snake photoshoot, although they have since destroyed that beautiful little alcove of trees I had used. Still the area provided the kind of scenery I needed, with bonus authentic mosquitoes. I was being eaten alive, it was worth it. It’s nice to see how far my costume and my physique have come in about a year. That STABO harness was a nightmare from beginning to end. It’s been my white whale for years, I finally found authentic parachute clips online, but they only shipped to the United States, so I needed my dad to order them and ship them to me. I thought sewing the straps would take an hour tops, instead it took nine hours. It’s a complicated system to begin with, but then in the game, there’s no adjustment straps, so I had to tailor to fit me exactly. Then on top of that I had to figure out a bunch of hidden tricks to make it conform better to my body.
The final piece missing from this costume is the radio switchbox, and maybe an M1911 replica gun.
Normal people take walks and admire the scenery, I find a cool location, go home and come back in costume for a photoshoot. This was about a ten minute walk from my house, I shot this on my phone on a tripod using natural lighting. I couldn’t have asked for a more ideal location, a hidden pit beneath a canopy of trees, right there next to the sidewalk
I survived the colonoscopy, they didn’t need to perform surgery beyond the biopsies, I won’t know what’s wrong with me for a couple of weeks still.
Waking up from the anaesthesia was horrific, I was drifting in between dreams and reality, both seeming to be equally real. The hospital was on fire, I called out to Snake, he stood there doing nothing. Then in reality, I kept trying to turn over on my stomach and crawl away. The doctors were yelling at me to open my eyes, I couldn’t figure out why they were getting angry at me. I didn’t understand why one of them kept poking me so hard in the ribs, I would have punched her back, but I wasn’t lucid enough. I thrashed and writhed around, the doctors all had to hold me down and sedate me, I then starting hallucinating that certain rape scene from Berserk. I woke up later in another room, still struggling to regain consciousness.
They later asked me if if I was afraid of snakes. “Why?” I asked. “You kept saying there were snakes”. I laugh, “Oh, Snake, that’s the codename of this character in this game I like”. Thankfully one of the nurses was a gamer, so he got it.
It could just be that I had a bad reaction to anaesthesia, or maybe I’ve retrained my brain having had to lucid dream so often to combat the nightmares. Big Boss is one of those “tulpas” I call on to intervene.
Travian Designs 