Here I am on a Thursday night. I don’t have to work and the Bengals and the Ravens are going to be playing an awesome football game. I love the Bengals, not to mention I have T.J. Houshmandzadeh (yes, I can spell his name without difficulty), Shayne Graham and Mark Clayton on one of my fantasy teams.

I WANT TO WATCH THIS GAME

But I can’t. Because it’s on the NFL Network. And the NFL Network is a complete screwjob. They want over $150 million

T.J. Houshmandzadeh and the Bengals are playing at this very moment, but you won’t be able watch because it’s on the NFL Networkfor cable companies to carry their network, which will result in huge hikes for regular cable tv subscribers (most of whom probably don’t even watch football). So now we’re all stuck with not being able to watch the games because they’re selfish bastards. I guess I’ll just sit here and watch my Yahoo! stattracker :/

Anyway, for those of you fortunate enough (usually I would say unfortunate, but in this case you are the lucky ones with the only alternative options) to have PCs I give you the following links, if you’d like to stick it to the NFL Network and watch streaming, bittorrent style NFL games (I haven’t been able find any with Mac compatible software).

• a list of streamed NFL games
• SOPcast (live online streams)
• TVants (live oneline streams)
• TVUplayer (live oneline streams)

Ray Frenden is an illustrator guy that is able to make really good drawings. You can view his portfolio here: frenden.com. He also is the madman genius behind the hilarious web comic voorhees a jolly good fellow. An exerpt (LOL):

Anyway, I have had the pleasure to talk to him a little bit over the interweb as we are mutually involved with Oddica and several design message boards. I recently took the opportunity to ask him a few questions:

1) what is your favorite color
I never have a good answer for this. I immediately think black, but black is boring. My next instinct is to pick something garish, but then I start to

Ray Frenden is an amazing illustratorthink about its compliment and I digress. That’s your answer.

2) if you could kill anyone in the world, who would it be?
Alive, now? My childhood arch nemesis comes to mind, but that would just be gloating. Last I heard, he ended up in a real bad way. In all probability, the sort of “people” deserving a death sentence are actually corporations.

3) what is your art-making process?
Depending on the sort of art, I typically find some reference, throw it on my second monitor, and go to town with my tablet. I pencil in light blue first and either finish off with ‘inks’ in Painter or Manga Studio or paint in Photoshop. It’s a totally digital process. I work at about 1200 dpi, so if I need to make something vector it’s one easy step away.

4) do any of your animals ever help make art with you ?
I live out in the boonies and I have four dogs, five cats, fifteen chickens, and a horse; there aren’t many people to draw, so my lifedrawing comes from them!

5) if you had a time machine, and you could go back to any time period since the beginning of time, but you could not interact with anything… and only observe, where and when would you go?
I’m an armchair history buff with a penchant for the period that dealt with manifest destiny and the push westward. I’m supposedly 50% native american, but I’ve never had the genetic tests done. Their culture has always interested me. I realize that pursuing a chance to witness romantic nationalism at work is an entirely selfish answer. The atheist in me would be better served to get some definitive proof that organized religion is a sham.

6) what are you listening to right now?
Right this instant? The Decemberists. All Colin Meloy’s body of work set to shuffle. I really like sea shanties. You asked!

7) be honest, when you hear about huge natural disasters that happen to kill lots of people out in china, or indonesia or something, does a little part of you get excited to witness such a historic event ?
I’ll be as tactful as possible. I’m not a huge fan of humanity.

8) what inspired you to create voorhees a jolly good fellow ?
I really like the concept of Jason having an internal dialog that we never get to hear. I had a really rudimentary paint app open and Jason was the first thing that came to mind. It was a given.

9) what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word “inordinate”
Too much. I’m simple.

10) what is your favorite childhood memory, EVER
I have a picture of me sitting on Smurf sheets, wearing pleather pants, sporting a bowl haircut, playing with an Ewok playset. Consumer whore for the win!

• I completely overhauled explodingNOW!!!!. Hopefully you dudes or dudettes dig it. I tested it on Safari and Firefox on Mac. But not PC. I obviously didn’t test anything on Internet Explorer because if you’re using that I hope it looks like crap, because you are probably the bastard child of Satan. Personally I think the new look is a sort of Web 2.0 take on the 70s.

• All my fantasy football teams got completely destroyed this week. In one league I had the good fortune to play against Tony Romo and his 5 TDs. In the other I got to go against LaDainian Tomlinson and Drew Brees. Aslo, omg @ Joseph Addai tonight. Anyway, all in all it was a pretty fun week around the NFL.

• I don’t think I’ve even mentioned on here that I recently got engaged! With the craziness that’s been going on in my life I haven’t found much time to do anything. I will be moving back to Iowa in two weeks and getting married probably sometime in the summer. So updates on this thing could be sporadic until then. Stick with it.

• It’s fall, which means nothing but acoustic and folk-rock has been coming out of my speakers. If you were near me the last week or so you’d be hearing a lot of My Morning Jacket, Idaho, The Microphones, Band of Horses et al.

• For reasons which escape me, I only just recently have begun to appreciate Sparrow House (Jared Van Fleet of the wonderfully Spoon-like band Voxtrot). I’ll admit that when I first discovered the EP on Oink I jumped all over it. But for some reason on the first few listens it just didn’t command my attention. But it came on randomly a few days ago and I was confused. Was this the same band? Apparently I didn’t listen hard enough the first few times.

• Effen vodka and blue Gatorade is the best drink ever. And no, it’s not a girly-drink. It’s refreshing, not fruity.

• I finally got my brand new Guild acoustic in the mail last week. Maybe if you’re good, I will post a song for you sometime.

• Points are definitely not all that matter in fantasy basketball. I’ve come to the conclusion that the key to winning is two strong Centers. The more stats besides points that you can accumulate, the better. Also, my team sucks.