Ye Oldde Blogge

But it flew away from her reach, and the bullets catch in her teeth

2012-01-09T19:28:00.005-05:00

Happy 2012.
This may be the last year that mankind continues to exist! Or it may just be another notch in our belt of millennium. Regardless, I hope you are doing ok.

I have not been up to much, honestly.
With the BBC project done, and the minecraft cartoon finished, I have mostly just been horsing around with friends during the holidays and catching up on some much-needed gamery.

I did produce a video for christmas and even though its a couple of weeks after christmas, I hope it still fills you with christmas cheer!

For christmas I got my brother a giftcard and a nice warm beanie hat. For my father I got an FM internet radio transmitter so he can listen to his favorite internet radio stations in his room. My dad has pretty damn good taste in music. Old records of eric clapton and the peaches, and loves modern stuff like M83 and the White Stripes.

I got some great DVD's for xmas and a nintendo 3DS which I havent gotten any games for yet but due to me registering it online I got a free copy of Mario vs Donkey Kong which is a downloadable title for the Nintendo DS's now. It's also hard as fuck.

I also bought a small game off the downloadable game service called FREAKY FORMERS.
What little I can say about this bizarre 2D spore knockoff is best said with this video I made about it. Enjoy.

I've also been trying alot of new games lately.
I got into the beta for Tribes 2. I am awful at it.

I downloaded DC UNIVERSE ONLINE.
I played it alot for about 3 weeks until I reached the end-game content. And much to my dismay, like most MMORPG's the endgame content is just more boring fetch-quests and copy-paste nonsense. So I stopped playing. May uninstall it eventually. I just have no reason to go back. For what little there is, it is glorious. But not enough for me to pay money or replay much of it.

However in my time playing it, I did make 2 sort of cool characters.
The first was SERGEANT DOE, based off the Team Fortress 2 Soldier character. He used rifles and gadgets and was a Controller. Controller by the way, is the most unfun class to be in DC Universe. Don't do it. Just don't. It's a horrible complex thankless job.
Anyway. After getting to the endgame raids and crap with him and growing bored I decided to make a villain character.

Strelok from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat. Electricity and pistols. Superspeed for movement. Much more fun than Doe. However all the villain quests were the same as the hero ones and I just couldn't be bothered to go through it all again.

If you're a fan of World of Warcraft and enjoy mindless skill-less repetition than feel free to give DC Universe Online a try.

I also got into EVE ONLINE. I received a 30-day free trial from a friend. And I made another Strelok.
EVE might be the most intelligent, complex and brilliant online game ever created. However in being these things it is also perhaps the most dull. Sadly even giant space battles between dozens of ships basically boil down to droves of brilliantly-designed frigates and vessels orbiting each other slowly firing various subsets of multi-functioning ammunition at each other to see who blows up first, while adults shout orders at each other in VENT.
I'm not really sure what to make of it. I think if the battles were turn based and more strategic I'd probably have loved it. But for being so large, so long, and needing so much time and money to play and understand things that could really be simpler and more intuitive, I just can't recommend it. It is beautiful though. Like most MMO's its worth trying just to ogle at the insane world the artist's have created for it.

So with little else to play when it comes to 'rpg' sort of things I have returned to my first love, Spiral Knights. Joined a guild full of knowledgable chaps and have retooled my knight into a tank of death.

I'm the one with the gasmask. I have started doing what so many players of the game do in that I have started building sets for my character. Different loadouts of gear that I swap to and fro depending on the types of foes I may face in the upcoming challenges.
Mostly with the help of my good friend Avid Lebon. Who is not only a fun person to play games with but also helped me sort out some frightening psychological issues I had 6 or so months ago.

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It's not just been vidya gaems however. My friends John and Jack introduced the rest of the friend group to an odd series of modern board games. Each of which is rather unique and show just how much potential board games still have if people are creative when designing them.

The first is a game called Settlers of Catan. This game is apparently world famous and has been played by billions and has huge contests, conventions, and songs devoted to it. Somehow I had not heard of it until a couple of weeks ago.
It is rather brilliant. A sort of clever mix-up of risk, stratego and monopoly where you have to seize land and roll dice to see if it gives you the resources you need to expand. Every expansion earning you a Victory Point which brings you closer to winning. Things in the game can change rapidly at the drop of a hat and theres quite a few expansions that make it into an even deeper experience.

Along with Catan we've been playing Puerto Rico which is a sort of a stock game. You basically claim a crop and choose which character in a town you will be. AS the turns go, you can collect crop, sell it, put it on boats, hire workers, etc. At the end of the game theres several various tech-trees to earn points and whoever has the most is the winner. It too, is strategic and is apparently enjoyed the world over.

And finally we have been playing a massively complex tabletop game that seems almost reminiscent of warhammer, but does not play as such called Twilight Imperium. I honestly can't describe the complexities of this game. Basically imagine every mechanic and tool from every board game, tabletop game, dungeon and dragon campaign, and video game rpg ever used and combine it all into one sci-fi epic where you are basically playing the Republic from Star Wars. Each game lasting nearly 6-10 hours in length.

The amusing things about all these games is, as fun and strategic as they are, human nature turns them into something else entirely. We sit down thinking to have a cultured experience about outwitting each other but we quickly devolve into petty neanderthals trying our hardest to win the game without seeming aggressive.

Here is what you think will happen:

But here is what actually happens:

I would recommend playing all 3 games. You can play Catan online at the official site but I think it costs money.

Anyway. My internal clock is summoning me to the land of slumberville to catch 40 winks.
I bid you good day.

who wants to be the pied piper?

2011-12-21T23:12:00.002-05:00

Where are you christmas?
Do you remember,
the one you used to
knnooooooooowwww?

The Yuletide is upon us. And as traditional, tv stations are showing all manner of christmas movies and christmas specials. My friends Tom & Mike had an idea for a Christmas special, and after chowing down on pasta at a local greek restaraunt, we headed to Mike's parent's house to film THE BEST CHRISTMAS EVER.

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It is the season of giving.
And if anyone is reading this blog, I need you to give to a friend of mine.

My good friend BigArmyBug aka BUG aka BucketGhost.
He was run over by an SUV while on his motorcycle a couple of months ago. He doesn't make much at his job and the expenses are piling up.

These are some arts he has made in the past.

Anyway. In order to make some extra dosh he has opened himself up for COMMISSIONS.

So in summary:

Please help my friend BigArmyBug pay off his hospital bills this christmas by commissioning him to make art for you! Please!

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Anyway.
Merry Christmas

A bottle of whiskey and a new set of lies. Blinds on the window and a pain behind the eyes.

2011-12-15T20:18:00.003-05:00

Well the BBC cartoon thing's been finished for a few days now. In the time during its finishing I put the finishing touches on the Minecraft cartoon I made with my friend Willva. Which basically meant finishing some backgrounds, sound effects, and adding some little effects here and there with Sony Vegas.

Not much to talk about right now.

Killing Floor had an update. All the new weapons are great. Firebug finally has a way to deal with Fleshpounds and Scrakes. Demo finally has a way to deal with crawlers and small crowding zombies.

Team Fortress 2 is about to have an update sometime tonight. Hopefully it will be good. Hopefully.
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I'm going to scan Frombie soon so I can take a big crap all over it.
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Also MINECRAFT has been officially released. And as alot of folks feared, once it was released Notch has dropped the game like a bad habit and moved on to a new game involving spinning globes and H.P.Lovecraft. Luckily, he dropped the game into the hands of Jeb. Jeb seems to be a very bright fellow indeed and I hope he continues to add neat little features to the game.
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Speaking of games I decided to try a little creepy indie title last night called HIDE.

Much like the chap in this video I was only able to find 3 of the 5 signs in the game. Although I found different ones than he did.
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By the way if you have not seen the new Muppet movie you should. It's the best Muppet flick since the Christmas Carol with Michael Caine.
Probably one of the best films of the year. Go go go go go so Disney doesn't forget they own this franchise again.

ace deuce craps wants four

2011-10-29T21:18:00.004-05:00

It's been another month since my last blog post. Remember when I used to do these like every couple of weeks or every week or so? Yeah.

Anyway I have a legitimate reason I haven't been able to post as of late. Actually a few reasons.

For starters, I finished a new cartoon. Well...sort of finished.
For the last little bit now I've been collaborating on a minecraft film with my good friend Willva. The goal was to make it look sort of like the mural I did for Mojang's main office. (which they are moving out of soon so I assume the mural will cease to exist in the near future).

Anyway, the film had to be done by a certain date so we had to rush ALOT of it. Plus I went to New York during its production and lost alot of time. So, while the film may be done, it's very scribbly looking and we're going to be redoing alot of it.
Enjoy these free screenshots of unfinished footage:

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Simultaneously my boss Weebl, hooked me up with a job with the BBC. It's a very short comedy cartoon of sorts. That also has taken up alot of my time lately. It's also some of the most complex symbol-based animation I've ever done. It's also not coming out very well as I have no idea what I'm doing. You'll see it in the future. Maybe on TV.

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However the thing that took up most of my time lately was my trip to NEW YORK CITY.

First off. New York is amazing. It is every bit as weird, filthy, beautiful, amazing, hideous, fantastic, and awe-inspiring as every tv show or movie has ever portrayed it.

I stayed in my friend Alicia's apartment. It was a very small but cozy 6 foot wide room that she, her two roommates, and a cat all live in on Staten Island.

It was a 20 hour drive. 10 hours of driving per day. We were there for basically 3 days. I took my S.T.A.L.K.E.R. costume with me in the hopes I'd get to wear it at the con. That never ended up happening because we usually ended up having to walk a rather long distance to get to the con and my costume was extremely heavy and bulky.
Maybe I'll give it another shot at Megacon in Orlando.

Anyway, the con was amazing. I went to the Superjail panel. Pendleton Ward the creator of Adventure Time was there. Me and Mike talked to him for a few minutes. Mike begged him to bring back the Cat of Approximate Knowledge while I tried and failed to impress him with my knowledge of animation voice actors.

K.C. Green the creator of gunshow, Horribleville, and Anger Pauly said he was going to be going to the con and just wandering around. Being a creepy fanboy/stalker/futuremurderer of Mr.Green, I quickly recognized him when the poor chap was just trying to get some dinner. The next day I found him again near the rice-boy table and proceeded to bother him some more. Being the nice chap he was he drew even more scribbles in my anime club book.

I had real new york pizza which is incredibly delicious. A real new york hotdog with saurkraut on it. Also tasty. Saw chinatown. Saw little italy. One of the best things was I went to this tiny TINY little cave that is also a bar called the Rabbit Bar. Me and Mike and Alicia all got drunk and one chap in the bar recognized my minecraft shirt. We all got to talkin and as it turns out he's a filmmaker and we gabbed about Vegas, and Premier, and Aftereffects and such. He has a nice simple website and a vimeo page where he's put stuff he's helped make.

I also met the guy who makes Rice Boy. It was rather disappointing. Not cause it wasn't cool but cause I didn't know he was going to be there so I didn't have my riceboy book for him to sign. He did however have a small edition of the first few pages of his new Vattu comic. So he signed that and I nabbed it. He also had a drawing of the pokemon Scraggy on his desk that K.C. Green had drawn for him.

Jared Fletcher was there promoting his webcomic Stranger Fictions. He and Alicia and I got into a long conversation about the webcomics industry. Which is rather funny considering nobody reads my shitty comic yet I act like I have any authority to discuss with these people.

He also linked me to a friend of his who does these odd things.

These people were also there. Selling little sculptures and art. They also have a very nice art blog. Alicia got a very cute shirt.

I also met the creator of a amusing webcomic about aliens that I had not heard of. You should check it out.

I also picked up what might be the laziest, shittiest modern day comic it has ever been my misfortune to read. It is so laughably bad that I am going to devote a whole blog post to tearing into it. Normally I wouldn't do this for an indy comic but, well, just look at the website. I have never seen so much product placement behind a single issue of such a terrible comic. I have not seen something so deserving of getting shat on in a long time. You'll see what I mean when I scan some of the pages of this thing and reveal what utter tripe it is. It's IMPRESSIVELY bad.

On my way back south I visited my good friend BigArmyBug at his house in New Jersey where he had busted his leg. I also showed him that Frombies thing and he also felt it was amazingly shit.

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Anyway nothing else to really report on. My friend Hot Diggedy Demon has a sweet gig making animation for the MEGA64 guys.
He also recently plugged my old Spooky Scary Skeletons flash in his blog. He's a good guy.

Anyway, Happy Halloween. I'm going to see Paranormal Activity 3 in a few days and hope it doesn't suck.

so now you better stop and rebuild all your ruins

2011-09-30T21:50:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I turned 26 years old. Me, Mike, Jack, and Tom all went to the World of Beer and drank heartily.

Simultaneously, Valve finally buffed the damage-output of the flamethrowers back to what they used to be a year and a half ago.

And then as icing on the cake, after I got home Nickelodeon was showing "TRUTH OR SQUARE" which will probably be the last good thing to come out of the spongebob series since the current writers have forgotten the character's original personalities entirely.

All in all, it was a good birthday!

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IMPORTANT

Today, the company Swarovski put my design up on their Playbling showcase.

This is Playbling. It's fancy iphone and dvd cases covered in tiny jewels. If you scroll down you can find my section.

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My good friend R.Wappin was hired not long ago to provide animation for a feature film.
And now that film is coming to DVD soon. This is the film.
You can see a bit of his animation in the preloader for the site.

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My friend sammy knows I have grown to somewhat like the detonator and have been using it to hop into places I shouldn't. He wanted me to make a vid of this one particular hop I found. So here you go.

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Other than that I have nothing of interest to update with.
So have this adorable cartoon:

2011-09-25T20:18:00.004-05:00

Keep an eye on this site. Not long ago I was commissioned to be a designer here and it shouldn't be long until the design I sent them is put up on this site. It was approved and I'll be listed with my own little section like the other designers. It's just not up there YET.

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New weebl and bob cartoon I animated. Features a zombie octopus.

And the background music on its own

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I've posted about old PC games before on this blog. Including a game I played in my childhood called ZOOTOPIA.

A game created by Lawrence Productions and Good Housekeeping Magazine way back in 1994.

I still have the game in my possession. Along with Motoracer, Word Rescue, and SODA Off Road Racing.

Here are scans of my copy:

Every year I check youtube to see if someone else ever played Zootopia. And finally someone else who did has and managed to rip out some of the amusing movies and clips from the game and put them on youtube.

You can watch most of the game on his youtube page.
I'll be posting my favorite bits on this blog. Simply because they are so weird/catchy I must share them with the world.

You can watch the rest on his youtube channel.

Now I must get back to work.

And the moon gives me permission and I enter through her eyes.

2011-09-02T17:47:00.006-05:00

Sorry it's been another month since the last post guys. I've been hovering between bouts of being super busy and bouts of being super bored.

For starters my good friend Mike came back from his stay at Harvard. He didn't enjoy Boston much. In fact he pretty much hated it. But while he was there he managed to buy a massive amount of a drink he had been telling me tales about for ages: L'aqua.
Never going quite into specifics of what exactly it was, except that it was delicious and ONLY sold up north in 1 or 2 states. And others had attested both to its scarcity and its deliciousness.

Theres a few varieties of the stuff. At it's core it is basically Loganberry juice. A drink made from a mix of Raspberry's and Blackberries. Apparently created when some plant scientist accidentally got his chocolate in your peanut butter.

Point is, it is fucking DELICIOUS. One of the best fruit drinks I have ever had (next to mango lemonade made with actual mango). The variety Mike brought down from Boston is called Aunt Rodie's Loganberry.
It comes in a rather lovely simple little can. Granny Smith green with alternating pink and purple text that reminds me of Sid and Marty Krofft.

If by some chance you are up north and see a can of this stuff, BUY IT. It is a must-try. And much like the Gustafson Farms brand of chocolate milk, it is a hard to find treasure.

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When Mike arrived back in town he immediately went to his new Apartment which is roughly 5 minutes from my house. Later he has a housewarming party. I used the party as a good opportunity to get footage for my 100th Youtube Video. A 20 minute long epic featuring animation, me talking, doctored footage of adolf hitler, and frogs flying a rocket ship. Truly the height of my abilities.

The chap in the video who shouts "GOD DAMNIT JACK" is my good old friend Zach. Zach attended animation college with me, and also dropped out much like me. He disappeared for about 6 years after that and happened to show up THAT VERY NIGHT. So while we were all drunk, he, mike, and I all got to work on a new Dustbunny comic.

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Right before Notch left to go to the Penny Arcade convention to show off Minecraft 1.8 he or jeb or carl finally put the minecraft mural I made for them up as a poster.
BEHOLD

Obviously to see the full sized version you are going to need to buy the poster.
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Speaking of art, my friend Wolf Pupy commissioned me to make him a painting. I've known him for years now. He's an animator like myself and recently has gotten oddly popular for his very amusing sense of humor and cute drawings. Plus he apparently knows K.C. Green somehow. Anyway after a couple of weeks of toiling on it off and on it's finally done.

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But wait that's not the only thing I made recently! I also made this:

Chances are you won't understand the humor in this image.
But to clear things up: an isopod is actually a rare variety of fruit and not actually a giant sea crustacean.

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And that's not all! Aaron Simpson of Cold Hard Flash contacted me some time ago. Ed Skudder was making a music video and they wanted people to submit parts for it. I'm a huge fan of Ed so of course I had to contribute a piece for it. It's like the 2nd or 3rd part in.

Actually chances are most of this blog's visitors lately are from the mention I got on ColdHardFlash. HELLO NEWCOMERS! This is my blog that I used to update frequently! Please, go to my webcomic (link on the right) because its much funnier than this is! And more educational as well!
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In other news my good friend Waldemar is making a long version of his popular short film series ANUSBOY.

And he needs funding because he's doing it all on his own!
Help him out! He is one of the few truly unique voices of animation we have on the web right now! Plus he's a good friend and a cool guy.

You can donate to his new movie here!
Here is a cool clip:

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Anyway. That's it for this post. I have some stuff for a bowling company and Swarovski to do.

Make sure to leave a quarter in Sal, will you?

He's dead, Jim.

2011-07-26T18:31:00.006-05:00

Wow it's been a month since my last blog post again. Sorry.

I've been pretty out of it.

Trying to re-adjust my life to my friends all being gone and dealing with high levels of anxiety.

This week's been particularly bad. I've had trouble sleeping and feel so scared for no real reason that I've managed to give myself an awful stomach ache.

Listening to this song usually helps a bit though:

Speaking of, a couple of weeks ago I got to combine my love of minecraft with my love of weebl and bob. Weebl asked me to make a minecraft world and skin for the game for the latest weebl and bob ep titled Piecraft. It's a combination of HD textures I did myself, some zekocraft textures, and some default textures.

In similar news, a company that makes a plastic trombone called a P-Bone contacted weebl about redesigning their mascot. He passed the project onto me and I scribbled out these:

Not sure if they liked any of them I need to ask weebl if they ever got back to him.

Also my friend Lost Kingpin who has helped me with many minecraft-related problems asked me to make him a new avatar.

So I painted this for him:

"The Lost Kingpin"

Speaking of minecraft, Notch is adding a new enemy to the game and even showed off a screenshot. It looks like some sort of slenderman thing. Some little black humanoid figure with gangly arms and legs and two little white glowing eyes.
I'd post the pic but I'm lazy.

So instead have this spooky scrake picture.

Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men.

2011-06-25T03:08:00.004-05:00

It's been a month since my last post and chances are you've been wondering what I've been up to and what's been happening that has kept me away. What grand adventures have kept me from updating this blog and my webcomic for an entire month.

Well it's rather alot of things.

I'm going to summarize it into a bulletpoint list.

my boss, Weebl, sent me a new song to animate. It was a song about crabs.

I finished work on the intro for the Mass Effect 3 website and sent it off to bioware.

A week later at about 7am I suddenly felt an extreme shortness of breath. Heart palpitations. Believing I was having a heart attack I quickly googled what the symptoms of a heart attack are. I was not having one, I was having a panic attack for no reason.

The next day I went with my friends to see the new X-Men: First Class movie. The movie was excellent but an hour into the film I suddenly couldn't breathe. My heart was beating irregularly and I felt very weak. Frightened I left the theater to catch my breath. I tried to go back in to finish the film but could not. Within minutes I felt like I was suffocating and I had to leave. My chest was hurting and I couldn't inhale. My friend Mike rushed me to the emergency room while I called my father and brother to tell them I loved them, since I was relatively certain I was going to die.

At the hospital they took x-rays of my chest. They also took alot of blood and I learned that if a doctor is good, a syringe doesn't hurt at ALL. Proving past doctors I've had have been kooks. They also measured my heart's EKG. And took a bunch of other tests I can't remember. I learned that I am actually very healthy, I've lost about 60 pounds and my blood pressure is normal. There's nothing physically wrong with me.

In short I have a mental problem that caused me to have a severe anxiety attack. After doing some research I concluded that it brought on by too much caffeine in my diet. Considering I drank about 5-8 cans of soda a day it seemed a pretty certain conclusion. So I have changed my diet to cut out caffiene.

The hospital gave me Xanex which I took to calm my nerves and brain. It also made me very high. I became very depressed and continued to work on the crabs cartoon.

For about a week I still felt weak and depressed and briefly tried to find religion which failed miserably. I made the rounds contacting all my friends and acquaintances I could get ahold of to pay respects in case I passed on.

E3 happened and lifted my spirits a bit. Nintendo showed off their bizarre new system.

I eventually started feeling better and got back to work on the crab cartoon while my friend Mike prepared to move to Boston for seven weeks. My friend John Ward ie FatBear the Indomitable, had already moved up north in Florida a few weeks prior.

the crabs cartoon was so weird and bad when it was finished we decided not to put it on the site. Maybe I'll find something else to do with it.

My bill arrived from the hospital. I owe the hospital $1307.74 and I have no insurance! Wakka wakka wakka!

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The official Mass Effect 3 site is up. They never used the animation I made for them but they are still paying me which is rather nice of them. Although I feel a bit guilty taking Bioware's money considering they never found a use for the work I did for them.

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Bubba the Lovesponge, a semi-local celebrity has a new chihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifp dip that you can get. It is touted as "a chicken wing on a chip" and that is indeed very accurate. It is buffalo sauce, ranch dressing, and chicken breast blended into a gelatinous goop that you dip potato chips in. It is 10 dollars per can. It is amazingly delicious but you could easily make it yourself. I just might.

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http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
I've been playing an adorable online game called Spiral Knights. It's a free to play game that is....an mmorpg.
Yes folks it happened.
I found an MMORPG that doesn't disgust me. It plays exactly like Zelda 4-Swords adventures.

Needless to say after much questing I have managed to make my little character look somewhat like the Pyro from Team Fortress 2.

"somewhat"

Speakin of, Valve finally released Meet the Medic

Yes this is what playing Medic actually feels like.
And they also made Team Fortress 2 a free game. Yes that's right. The game you've heard me babble about a million times is now free-to-play. And they added a bunch of new weapons including the Detonator, a weapon that gives the pyro a much-needed mobility boost. Sadly its broken ingame right now so it's basically a very weak flaregun.

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Also Killing Floor is having an update. A circus update.
I'm pretty excited about this too. New map and what will no doubt be a bunch of weapon balance changes.
Plus the trailer is funny:

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Anyway.
That's what I've been up to for a month. But now everything is mostly back to normal.

Oh the grand galloping gala is the best place for me

2011-05-30T16:27:00.002-05:00

The other night my friend Bug found an amusing team fortress 2 server. He found it via his goon friends over at Something Awful. A server that labels itself "non-serious" where the 30+ people on it at a time spend their time running in little circles and playing music over the mic.
While this kind of activity is acceptable in idle or achievement servers which are designed for people to basically fuck around with no end goal, this server does this on official maps. Simultaneously the members try VERY VERY hard to show off how non-serious they are about things and get very upset if anyone is killed. In a shooting game. So of course me and bug went demoman and heavy weapons and proceeded to piss them all off by repeatedly killing them while they cavorted about micspamming.
Some got so angry they actually fought back. Unfortunately they were terrible players.
Honestly I'm no tf2 prodigy, but god damn.
You'd think I had god-mode on or some shit with the amount of people I was murdering in fights.
I see better players in those 24/7 instant respawn 2fort servers.
Maybe that's why they labeled it non-serious. So nobody would know how bad they are?
Anywho.

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Not long ago Notch, the creator of Minecraft, uploaded a video of himself getting shot with a nerf gun.
My art is on the big wall behind him! ooh ahh!

He added two things recently to the game that I've always ALWAYS wanted.
Hatch doors:

and grass! now also bushes too!

Sadly as of now there is no way to grow this grass and if you destroy it, it has no way of coming back.

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So the big project I was working on the last couple of weeks is finally online. It is a whirlwind of vectors and cuteness.
It is about ponies.
I made it for the online game called Moshi Monsters

Yes, I animated this. And did the backrounds. Weebl did the song.

Probably one of the most complex things I've ever assembled in flash.
And now I'm working on a cartoon about crabs! Hooray!

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Also Kung Fu Panda 2 is excellent. Not quite as great as the original but as far as sequels go, it's great. The team at Dreamworks should all be patting themselves on the back.

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Speaking of animation studios a new one is opening up here in florida.
Looks like they've already taken in some of the former staff of the long-dead Disney florida animation sect that worked on Mulan and Lilo n Stitch.

Here's the article.

Whatever happens, professional animation increasing in Florida is a good thing.
I won't be applying.
I have no skill in 3d animation and I have way too much to do these days anyway.

until we are, in turn, devoured by the cosmic owl

2011-05-10T06:14:00.010-05:00

Long time since update. Long ol time.

Long.

Time long time.

So long in fact it has probably made at least 3 of you question "i wonder what happened to that guy who used to make cartoons and drone about his life. zekky or zookie or something. oh well"

THE ANSWER IS:

Work.

I have been very busy doing important things for people.

So many important things. Things I really have no right to be doing, but I did them anyway and to the best of my abilities.

Alright so for starters, as I may have mentioned a few posts ago the video game studio BIOWARE contacted me. Long story short, when the official mass effect 3 website rolls around, you may notice that other than the movie trailer, its almost entirely done in Flash. Guess who did that! Go on guess! I did! They seemed to like what I did which makes me proud. Nothing feels as bad as disappointing people. It will probably be up soon and I will probably devote a whole dang post to it because its by far the coolest and most unlikely thing I ever thought would happen!

Secondly, I did a new episode of Weebl's series Catface.
The latest episode is about Catface tidying up for spring.

Thirdly I've been hired to animate a 90-second music video for Moshi Monsters.

Fourthly, I made a HUD for Wonder Knight Radish, the pc game me and my friend Billy Monks are making. Here's the latest screenshot of it. Still early in development. He has a few videos up of it but they are all private and he doesnt want anyone to see it moving yet.

Fifthly I did something unique and interesting with my Minecraft texture pack known as Zekocraft. I have done something that no other pack has done in their native resolutions. I have included parallax map support. What is parallax mapping? I honestly couldn't explain it well.
Look at this picture from STALKER:

Okay now notice how the lighting on the tiles makes them seem all shiny and covered in detail? Well that's bump mapping.

On the other hand, see how theres a hole in the wall left where some tiles are missing on the left wall? See how you can see the edges of the remaining tiles? Okay that hole isn't actually there. Neither are those tile edges. It's an effect to create fake "depth" on a 2d plane.

If that doesn't explain it here's a cool video about it:

Isn't that neat? If you've played any fancy videogames in the last 4 years or so you have seen this effect used on something. Something as simple as a brick wall or a bullet hole.

Anyway, Minecraft can actually do this with a dash of modding.
However its usually done on realistic HD texture packs. I decided I wanted to do it on my simple cartoony texture pack.
And I must say the effect is wonderful.
Here it is with some cel shading. Notice how all the rocks in this dimly lit cave that are in the shadows still glint when light hits them?

Notice how the grass on the ground is illuminated where the sun hits it. Notice how the little squares on the grass seem to have different depths?

Notice how some of the stones in the wall stick out more than the others? And how their edges illuminate in the dull light of the torch I'm carrying?

It took absolutely forever to get it working right but it was so worth it.
It looks good in motion too.
My friends found a way to make lightning come out of tools, so I of course had to record the chaos of them smashing everything with lightning.

Also a new friend of mine named Lost Kingpin is working on a mod for minecraft that ad's unfriendly carnivorous fish to the game. I did texture work for it.
Here's how I imagined it would look if Notch himself drew it:

And then here is my super-colorful version for my texture pack.

Also a few weeks ago in the span of roughly 10 minutes I recorded the crappiest horror film ever seen by the eyes of mankind.
DEATH OF A PARROT
starring a sock and two kinder surprise eggs

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My friend Matt recently had two pieces of my art framed. And he sent me pictures of how they look!

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And besides all that I just got an email maybe a day ago from an important person from an important television channel wanting to commission me for art pieces.

I rarely use smilies but this seems like as good a time as any for this particular one:

O_o

It's been a very chaotic and strange couple of months. I have not been this popular online in like....five or six years.
And the thing is, I'm not even really trying. I stopped trying like last year. I gave up trying to network long ago. I don't know anyone at any studios and nobody from most studios want anything to do with me. I don't advertise. I don't even try doing film festivals anymore. It's all too much for me, as I'm rather slow and easily frustrated and my talents are "moderate" at best when it comes to graphic design and animation.

So it's been very strange to have all these opportunities suddenly land right in my face. I'd like to pretend its Karma, but deep down I'm a terrible human being! So, instead I shall chalk it all up to good luck! I knew I kept that lucky golden turtle for a reason. I will polish it's shell tonight. And yes America, you can quote that line out of context all you like!

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Not long ago I ranted about an awful AWFUL film I saw called LEECHES which was basically about a bunch of half-naked muscular young men fighting off the shittiest god damn monster puppets I ever did see.

However when Mike purchased this film from the bargain bin at some retail outlet, we forgot that it came with another movie.

A movie called THE COLD EQUATIONS.

And wow.

It is a fucking travesty that a movie as good as the Cold Equations is on the same DVD as Leeches.

The Cold Equations stars a few actors that you are familiar with. Some who have faded away, like the guy who starred in the Rocketeer, and others who have grown to become very popular on hit TV shows.

The film is about a disposable transport ship with just enough fuel to carry one person, in this case a military pilot who is bringing medicine to some miners working on a frozen planet.
He realizes soon after takeoff that he has a stowaway. A redhead young woman who grew up in the slums of the space colonies and got on the ship so she could travel and see her brother on the ice planet.

The trouble is theres only enough fuel for the ship to carry ONE person. So what quickly becomes a confrontation as these two try to murder each other and throw the other one into space, quickly becomes a terrifying race against time as they try to calculate how much crap they can throw off the ship so it can land safely with both of them inside.

The story is good, the acting is good. The only thing that isn't is the CGI. This movie apparently came out in 1996. And apparently it was a made-for-tv movie from USA networks.

Yes I know theres been a million short films and a Twilight Zone episode based on the short story this movie is based on.

You will find next to nothing about this film online. Not even clips of it exist on Youtube. It is a film that time forgot apparently.

Which is a shame for how well done it is.

If you see this film in a bargain bin at your local Costco, Walmart, Target, or gas station, pick it up. Take it home. Watch it.

Thank me later.

Also you should see the film MOON if you haven't seen it. It's also an excellent low-budget science fiction film with a heartbreaking story.

Also also you should see THOR. It was actually really damn well put together. Of all Marvel Superhero characters I never thought would ever translate well to film, Thor and Kraven were at the top of the list.
But God DAMN did they do Thor well. Also HAWKEYE was in the film. And he was cool as hell even though he was only in it for like 10 seconds.

Anyway I need to rest a bit.

cause bich is latin for generosity

2011-04-22T23:37:00.004-05:00

Recently my friend BigArmyBug received the game Killing Floor via steam. And his amazingly poor pc was actually able to run the game rather decently. However Killing Floor has a rather steep learning curve right from the start, that quickly levels out once you figure out how its weird menu and perk system works.

So I made this quick guide for my friend so he could easily understand the basics:

Inspired by this, my friend PlasticFir/Lain who helps run the minecraft servers I tend to spend time on, decided to write up his own guide on the game, going a bit more indepth on which weapons to use and when.
It's a good read for anyone wanting to really get into this fun game.

How do I not be bad at Killing Floor?

If you read both these guides you'll be able to play the game way better than the level of bad I decided to play as this morning in order to have a laugh at watching my team die.
Seen here:

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After months of waiting, Portal 2 was finally released.
The scope of this game is incredible. Whereas in Portal 1 you spent most of the game in the sterile white testing facilities, Portal 2 really lets you see what makes Aperture Science tick. Including a bit of a history lesson as you travel through the old parts of the lab, that were set up in a salt mine in the early 50's by an entrepreneur named Cave Johnson.
It's pretty interesting because as you ascend the labs, you can see time pass. See the typewriters turn into early computers, see how the company went from a promising lab that experimented on olympians and astronauts, to eventually becoming bankrupt and kidnapping hobos and orphans for test subjects.
You hear Cave Johnson's old recordings to employees as he gets older and bitter and eventually goes silent before he could complete his dream of putting his mind in a machine.

It's an excellent game. Short, but definitely longer than the original.
It might not be half life 3 but with the environments the dev team did for this game, this just gets me more stoked for the possibilities of hl3.
Just look at these screenshots.

Theres a couple of half-life references in the game but nothing that hints toward any sort of finale.

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I've spent the last couple of weeks working on the intro to the official website for mass effect 3. But the site is not done or online yet.
Soon though.
Soon.
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In more gruesome news, the other night as I exited Steak n Shake I felt a weird sensation in my mouth. I reached my finger in and felt a large chunk of my top right wisdom tooth fall off.
In a panic I researched what this means on the internet. And then spent the next 12 hours in a fetal position on the floor staring at a wall and weeping occasionally.
Eventually I got to a dentist and as it turns out that wasn't a chunk of actual tooth. However I do need my wisdom teeth to all be removed rather badly.
On monday I'm seeing another dentist and then afterwards will probably be having them removed next week at some point I wager.

I honestly don't care how much it costs at this point. I just want this hysteria to be over and to be asleep during the procedure. I can't go through the hell that was my root canal all over again.

Anyway I'm dying to sleep good night.

Stand back boys, I'm welding.

2011-04-13T00:20:00.017-05:00

People listen attentively
I mean about future calamity
I used to think the idea was obsolete
Until I heard the old man stampin' his feet
In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there'll be Hell to pay
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Other than an annoying computer virus this has been a pretty great week.

WHY?

I shall tell you. (skip to the bottom for cool art news)

For starters the finale of the cadbury cream egg Goovies is done and up on youtube. Weebl liked it so much he offered me a raise on all future projects! hooray!

Secondly Valve has been prepping the great event that will be Portal 2 with all manner of various gobbeldygook. Starting with a very pretty comic that connects the events of portal 1 to portal 2. On top of that they've been ritualistically releasing videos to promote the game using J.K. Simmons as Cave Johnson. They are all hilarious.

On top of that Valve has been up to their usual ARG shenanigans with promos in other games. However this time it seems everyone is going all out. The game THE BALL got a Portal 2 themed map. What the shit!?

Most importantly, as if to quietly admit how much better than left4dead the game Killing Floor is, Valve and the developers at Tripwire Interactive have released a great new Killing Floor map that takes place in the world of Portal 2!
Holy fuck!

Behold screenshots.
Normally this screen says Aperture Science but for this map it says HORZINE which is the scientific facility that created all the horrifying mutants you kill in Killing Floor.

Here, a Skrake (a very tough slow mutant with a chainsaw for a hand) has just finished killing one of my teammates in a portalgun testing chamber. I was already dead. Thanks, Skrake!

I wonder if Tripwire made the assets in this game themself or if Valve donated some. It's VERY pretty. Both devs love their industrial complexes.

Glad0s personality core spheres are the shop inbetween rounds. Glad0s also talks throughout.

"ooh what's in heeeeere?" - glad0s curiosity core

what? who's this!?

Oh it's the Team Fortress 2 Pyro fighting zombies and mutants with a bunch of military mercenaries and Horzine employees in a Portal2 map in the PC game Killing Floor. 3 CROSSOVERS AT ONCE. My god.

mmmm delicious industry

I love being level 6 support. Oh winchester hunting shotgun. How I love thee. And wish to make sweet love to your barrel.
oh god.
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And now audiosurf has portal guns and companion cubes bouncing around in it.
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Oh and another reason this week has been great, the team at Mojang (minecraft) finally released pictures of the art I did for them which they made into a cool mural right in their main development office area! :O :O :O :O

THIS IS ONE OF THE COOLEST THINGS THAT I'VE EVER CONTRIBUTED TOWARDS!
BEHOLD!

(you cant see it here but in the bottom right is a guy going into cardiac arrest from finding a massive diamond)

this is the original chunk of the image that was a fanart piece I did quite some time ago that got rather unexpectedly ridiculously popular.

He's not actually raging at the fact his minecart is about to hit lava, he's actually raging at all the FUCKING CASUALS around him that aren't also flinging themselves into the lava. FFFFFFUUUUUUU

the spider just wanted shelter from the harsh winter biome.

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Anyway now my schedule is free (mostly).
I can start getting some real work done on this project for Bioware I can't talk about yet and continuing to train myself how to use Blender. And work on Polypeptide again FINALLY.

Before I go here is a another painfully early screenshot of the WONDER KNIGHT game me and my friend Billy Monks have been working on.
This picture highlights the new per-pixel lighting engine he got working the other night after many hours of frustration.

And I have nothing else of interest to yak about.
GOODBYE.

(this is the dance I am doing this week but much slower because I am fat)

update 4/14
edit 4/14

oh hey two new pictures are out of my art in the office
Here is notch himself sitting near it with someone I think is Jeb.

It amuses me that there is a refrigerator company named "Smeg"

I also noticed today my pageviews are in the 500-600 count which I can deem somewhat unnatural. Then I noticed some of the Mojang staff linked to me on their twitters and also apparently there is a large thread on Reddit about this. (im glad someone likes my taste in music).

I can't upload the image as a desktop wallpaper sort of thing, guys.

Sorry, bros.

It is technically a commissioned (i probably misspelled that word) piece of art. It is up to them as to if they wish to share it. They own that version of the image!

The good news is Carl Manneh of Mojang is going to make it available as a poster/print thing at their shop where they sell their shirts at some point. I'm curious if they will put up the version they used on their wall or will put up the alternate version I made. Or both!

(i made two images of that scene. the continuous one and another where its divided into 3 parts, the center everyone is familiar with, a nether scene, and an underwater glass house scene all side by side).

Anyway so yeah. There it is!

That said, if you guys really want a 'desktop' sort of thing I made, there's always this:

Although it's not nearly as nice since it's a product of me dicking around in adobe flash when I was bored. Still, maybe someone will like it.

For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.

2011-03-30T21:48:00.012-05:00

Alot to talk about.

For starters I saw Sucker Punch. It is completely mindless. It tries to trick you at first into thinking the film is deep, but honestly any of the various cheap pokemon movies manage to have more depth than the film. Also theres about 9 important characters but only 3 of them are interesting. However, those 3 are so interesting they make the film decently entertaining when it's not in the middle of one of it's indescribably over the top action sequences.
Biplanes fighting dragons? Mechs fighting World War I blimps? Robot samurais with gatling guns? Robots hijacking a train?

SuckerPunch is like the new Heavy Metal film that we will never really get. Except it's not quite as spooky or interesting as Heavy Metal.

If you bother to see Sucker Punch, see it for the action sequences and incredible soundtrack. Turn your brain off. Enjoy.

I worry for the new Superman film by Zach Snyder.
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Border's still hasn't died entirely yet. So I went there and bought a big book about Blender. I am going to get good at this software if it kills me.

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The newest Cadbury episode is done but isn't online yet for whatever reason. I think the chocolate company is late on approving it for distribution or summat.
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Two LARGE moths have been hanging outside my house. So I did the sane thing and recorded myself poking the moths with a stick. Enjoy!

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Also this game looks cool as hell.

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On the minecraft server me and my friends run, they've been trying to recreate Pripyat. Includes the Chernobyl NPP and alot of other landmarks.
Here's some pictures.

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Valve is testing a new Left 4 Dead campaign made by a fan modder. The guy who made the map 2 Evil Eyes. Which has been a popular custom campaign for a while.

The new campaign is called COLD STREAM (beta).

It's pretty decent. Not great. Some good ideas though. Very odd designs, some VERY hard parts, theres an flooded house where water currents push you down the stairs and basements of the building as if the house were a giant toilet whirlpool.
The finale is horrible currently as you honestly cant tell what to do even if you've beaten it before. It's mostly flailing around in pine trees while a tank approaches from somewhere.

It is however, very pretty so far. Alot of nice sun effects and Valve's usual very pretty water. Alot of people are suggesting they put the campaign at night. Wandering through a river at night? Sounds spooky to me. One of the best and hardest parts of "THE PASSING" campaign was being stuck in pitch black sewers slowly meandering through water while zombies came from every direction.

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If you're a fan of Will it Blend you should check out the latest Dustbunny webcomic I did. It's a giant retarded thing about that series.

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Bioware (the peeps who make Dragon Age and Mass Effect) recently contacted me about something pretty awesome.
I might be able to talk about it later but I probably shouldn't for now.

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Billy Monks has been working diligently on the level editor for our upcoming game "WONDER KNIGHT RADISH"
I made him around 20-30 new textures the other night.
Here's a rather poor quality image of him fiddling with bugs in the level editor.

We're going to need more wands.

2011-03-19T17:59:00.004-05:00

The moon is 15% bigger today. Apparently it swung closer to earth tonight for some reason. I went outside to take a lookie-loo. It is indeed slightly larger and brighter. Nothing exactly earth-shattering though. It's not like its a comet or a meteor shower or a nuke. Still, hasn't stopped lots of people from grabbing their tripods and their old dusty betamax camcorders and plonking down on the sidewalk to record the moon. You know, just in case it decides to leave.

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Who wants to hear me rap? Anyone? No? Well guess what, dicksponges? You get to hear it anyway!

MC ZEKEY GETS DOWN

Yeah unf take it all. You wish you could rap that hard.
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Oh yeah I painted something.

Anyone who visits regularly may have noticed that I have not made a new painting in rather a while. Months even. Maybe even a year. I'm not sure. Anyway I finally worked up the motivation last night to pop open Art Rage Studio and make myself paint something.
And hey it's....not bad actually. Added it to the ol' portfolio. Not sure how many hours I spent on it.

Anyway here it is.

0²

Based loosely off this and this.
Kirby, Mother, and Klonoa. Three adorable games that usually have really creepy final bosses.

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Last post I talked about how I had refined my Minecraft texture pack to be a subtle edit of everything. Someone posted it on Reddit and it got like 3,000 views. Alot of my junk's been posted on Reddit lately. I think I have like one really devoted fan who does it. Anywho, in a great bit of irony Minecraft no longer works properly for me. Game crashes after about 5 minutes of play, even after downloading a fresh install. Breaks my heart.

This doesn't mean I won't keep updating the pack however, in fact I'm going to need to update it soon.

Recently the creators posted that they are adding pets to the game. Something people have been modding into the game for ages, but now the creators are doing their own. Look, pet wolves. D'awww how cute.

On notch's Tumblr (which is a blog thing much like blogger and wordpress) he wrote "There are manly men with powertools in our office, punching floors and walls in an attempt to make things look better. "
I wonder if this means they are putting up...that thing...that I did for them.

Which reminds me I drew a minecrafty thing you can use for a desktop if you want. I felt like drawing a Ghast. And so I did.

ONTO THE NEXT SUBJECT OF BLOGGERY
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Valve recently added a new thing to the Tf2beta or as I like to call it 'Pyro is briefly useful mode'
The thing they added? Replays! No longer will you have to fiddle with frustrating demos and source code to make cool video of people blowing each other up.
It's a simple video editor ingame that records one life of play, saves it, and then lets you play it back, move the camera easily, snip chunks out, export them, etc. It's buggy as hell right now but works pretty good.

So I figured I might as well make a frag video showing my astonishing pyro skills. As everyone knows it is the class with the highest skill ceiling.

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That reminds me Radiohead have a new album out. And the Gorillaz new on-the-road album the Fall is getting a physical release. I loved The Fall.

I think you can still listen to it if you register here but I have no fuckin idea it's a wild flying guess.

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Rango is amazing by the way please go and see it.

every time you think, you weaken the nation

2011-03-15T02:06:00.003-05:00

So the inception cadbury thing is done.

I think this one is my favorite, if only because of the trombone people dancing around stupidly. That was fun to do.

Doing one making fun of Michael Cera films next.

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Hey you remember how in my last blog post I showed off that little personal project where I was reskinning minecraft? Well. Since that time several weeks ago, I did a complete overhaul of the project, simply because I enjoyed the results of what I had already done.
So I redid everything. Every monster. Every texture. Every animal. Every menu. Every button. And every icon except maybe 3 of them. I also put in a little bit of mod support. Theres alot of very cool mods for minecraft. Sadly alot of people can't run alot of them. Either because they are incompatible together, take too much memory, or because the creators are obnoxious and refuse to explain how to implement them.
Regardless, I added support for one of my favorite mods called wildgrass. It makes grass grow on grass blocks.
One of those things I always hope will one day be added officially into the game, much like how the new smooth lighting system was added recently. The sidegrass mod needs to be added as well. Or Bettergrass. SOMETHING. I wouldn't mind the anti-alias mod being official either but considering what a memory hog it is, I doubt that will ever happen. My fancy can-run-crysis-and-metro2033-on-max-settings-DX11 gaming rig actually has huge frame rate dips when they have the anti-alias set too high. FOR MINECRAFT.
Anyway, with the depth of field mod that allows anti-alias and wildgrass mod, I took some very sharp new pictures of my reskin in action. I'll be honest I'm pretty fucking happy with it. It always feels so good when an art project goes well.
Anyway BEHOLD screenshots. Here's what minecraft looks like normally for comparison:

And here it is with my reskin and fancy-smancy forced AA and depth-of-field mods.

I did so much that after my friend plasticfir, who helps run the server I dick around on bothered me about it, I decided to even go through the trouble of remaking the original video advertisement for the texture pack.

If you want it, here's the most up to date version: http://www.mediafire.com/?cawcdq4izdvsl7t

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Speakin of youtube crap, the most amazing thing has happened! No, 'fred' didn't die in a fiery explosion. Even better!
Someone finally uploaded ZOOM.

What is ZOOM? Something I have talked about at least twice on this blog. It was a short animated film that Nickelodeon back in the late 80's and early 90's used to play between television shows as a bumper.

As time went on and Nickelodeon forgot why it existed and all the old ads and bumps went off the air, we've been lucky to live in an age where not only have these been put online by nostalgic fans, but there's even entire webpages dedicated to such things. Go look up the old Toonami bumps. I'll wait.

Anywayz, ZOOM was based off an art book. The artist has the original film online but its a tiny quicktime file. And I DO mean tiny. Like maybe 80 pixels wide by 50 high. Plus it's missing the catchy piano melody that was the score.

So you can imagine my immense pleasure when some wonderful person who managed to record this by accident onto a VHS tape and a decade later decided to upload it on youtube.

So here it is! If you're around 22-30 years of age this should seem familiar!

You'd think tv stations would put super-sharp old bumps on itunes or something for a small fee. I mean it'd basically be free money.

Step aside, and you won't have to feel the awesome wrath of our mustaches.

2011-02-27T03:59:00.010-05:00

I have been an extremely busy bee.

Right off the bat, here's something important. I made my own minecraft texture pack. Yes that's right. I basically wanted to make a simple cartoony texture pack that used alot of squares and stripes in the design. BEHOLD SCREENSHOTS.

If I had words

to make a day for you

I'd give you a morning

golden and new

And here is a rather dark video I made of the pack in action:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD IT (updated march 3rd)

I doubt I'll edit that link as the game updates and will instead just post new versions in new blogposts because thats easier and makes more sense.

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Here's some art you have never seen before.
I painted this more than a year ago. I hated it. I hated it more than anything I've ever done. It was a paintover of a photo a friend took. Can you tell which part is the photo hyuck hyuck.
Anyway times change, standards have been lowered, and I don't hate this thing as much as I once did.
And so like the dusty overstretched hand-me-down undergarments of an older sibling, I pass this exercise in artistic futility down to you.

To see the huge version click here.
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So other than that what have I been up to? Well for starters I've been very busy with the latest Cadbury cream egg advert which is now online! It was a parody of Tron Legacy. And as I am a fan of the tron films and forgotten video game on the xbox, I wanted to make this one as nice as I could.

So BEHOLD:

This was a massive amount of work! There's actually a very sly subtle reference to the Tron 2.0 videogame in the bar scene. A reference nobody will get since nobody played that great game. :C

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I also uploaded an unfinished flash I was doing for weebl ages ago. It never went anywhere and we completely forgot it existed. It has some nice bits of animation in it, as much like the still unfinished Polypeptide, I did it all with my tablet PC so I tried to cram as much motion into it as I could.

One day I need to finish a cartoon that doesn't belong to someone else.

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Borders, the famous bookstore chain, is dying. And so currently alot of their books are currently 20-40% off. So I decided to splurge today and get a bunch of books I've always wanted to own.
I got The Amazing Screw-On Head by Mike Mignola, Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, the sequel to The Big Book of Color, and a few books on street art and graphic and typographical design.

I think the coolest thing I saw at the Borders in terms of non-book stuff was they had the film Delicatessen on DVD. A very dark comedic film about a performer in a post-apocalyptic world who moves into a house owned by a butcher who wants to kill him and serve his meat to people for lots of money, since food is now a currency in the foodless future. OBSCURE AS FUCK. And not in the hipster way either. I'm still shocked they had it there.

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Also about a week ago, I was informed by my friend Courtney that the fair was in town. And I hadn't gone yet. And I go every year.
So, me and Mike went. I ate a deep-fried snickers that gave me a toothache that lasted 3 days. YAY FAIR FOOD.

Anyway, like most events I go to, I brought along my camera so you can watch as I wander the fair, murmuring unfunny things to myself in my unsettling voice! This video also features "The Chicken that Wouldn't Shut Up" which later died when someone squeezed it's beak shut and it rapidly filled with BUCKAWS and exploded.

Anyway the Princess Bride is on. Good day.

yeah you're all gonna be in this experimental film and even though I can't explain it

2011-02-14T21:11:00.005-05:00

It seems like it was just a few months ago I was ranting about how Taito had run itself into the ground and Square-Enix was helping them do it. And how bubblebobble/bustamove had sucked hardcore for years thanks to half-assed incompetent gimmicky game decisions.

Well as it turns out, Taito (whom I assume only licensed this game and didn't help develop it in any form or fashion)have a new Bubble Bobble / Puzzle Bobble game coming out soon.

Puzzle Bobble Online. How about that? And wow, whoever is in charge of this didn't try to radically redesign the characters or enviroment from how they looked originally!
Behold the adorable trailer:

Even the bubble blowing machine is a 3d recreation of the original machine.

Obviously however, a trailer doesn't mean much unless the gameplay is good. After watching several videos however, I don't think that will be a worry. This entire game appears to be a very robust remake of the VS MODE that was always such a prominent feature in the old games. With the key difference now being that winning a match against others online allows you to purchase random doodlybops to decorate your avatar with.

(i really love how the bubbles jiggle when they hit each other)

This is pretty much exactly what they should have done with this franchise a long time ago. Honestly the last time they truly made Bust-A-Move / Puzzle Bobble better was when they introduced different sized bubbles with this title. That game is long forgotten though and I'm sure none of the very trippy characters that were in it will be appearing in this new more classic-style title.

So yeah I'm pretty happy.
The only thing that would be icing on the cake at this point would be a game-mode in the style of the original bubble bobble before it was a puzzle game where you and some friends get plopped into a randomly generated level with a bunch of enemies and try to kill them all within a certain time period.
But that's pretty much a whole separate game that will never get revisited.

Point is, I'm just happy that Bust-A-Move is back in an online PC format licensed by the original creators and being developed by people who are clearly fans of the originals.

I mean honestly how often does that happen? A game franchise being passed on to another developer who don't try to change it but manage to improve it?

Other than Bionic Commando and Donkey Kong Country Returns I just can't think of any examples.

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Speaking of old game franchises coming back from the GREAT BEYOND, a long LONG time ago, Nintendo showed off a trailer to a Kirby game coming out for the Gamecube.
Other than a few meaty screenshots and a trailer, the game was never released. Not soon after, the Gamecube died after a long and difficult battle to remain relevant. And the wii emerged. Nintendo shifted the 'release' of the game to the wii and then quickly shut up about it. No new information came out after that. And it seemed the game was cancelled. The crew behind it and the engine donated to make the new Smash Brothers fighting game. All that remained was this ancient trailer for the game:

Years passed. Nobody cared anymore and it was safe to assume the franchise would remain on the handheld systems (the game boy advanced and DS) to somewhat preserve their 16-32bit charms.
Then last E3, Nintendo showed off "EPIC YARN" a new Kirby game for the wii. A fun wonderful game but also not a challenging game by any stretch of the imagination. Beautiful however with some of the best 2d animation I think has ever been done in a video game. Plus they managed to cram in enough extra crap to do so the game had a decent running time despite it's simplicity.
Logically, everyone assumed that the old Kirby game was shelved and restructured into Epic Yarn and that was that.

Well apparently everyone (including myself) were wrong.
Because but a little bit ago, Nintendo released a NEW trailer for the first game that was meant to come out some time ago. And it's clearly been remade from the ground up. And the gameplay, unlike epic yarn's very kirbydreamland123 style of play, is alot more reminiscent of Kirby Superstar and it's offshoots that we've been getting on the handheld systems the last few years.
Needless to say, I'm very excited for this:

I'm already liking what I see here.
Kirby games can generally be split into two categories:
platform and action.

Kirby's Dreamland series on the NES and GameBoy, Kirby64, Nightmare in Dreamland on the Advanced, Canvas Curse on the DS, and Epic Yarn all count as platformers. Fighting enemies is as simple as eating them and spitting them out. Powers gained from enemies can only be used in one way. Health values on Kirby and enemies are static. These games tend to be alot prettier graphically then their action-oriented counterparts. Goals are always simply to beat a level and get to a boss.

The action-based games however provide much richer gameplay. Kirby Super Star, Super Star Ultra, Air Ride, Amazing Mirror, and Squeak Squad all fall into this category. Generally they are not as "artistic" as their platformer counterparts. In these games, enemies are smarter and can usually take a beating before dying. Generally theres alot more routes through the levels with a bit of time-based puzzles thrown in for good measure. Alot of enemies cant be eaten and need to be avoided or hit with a power. Powers kirby gets usually have a whole list of alternate abilities that they come with.

The action based games usually rely more on humor and story and characters while the platformer ones usually relied more on telling a trippy story that often has some sort of bizarre horrifying finale.

But no Kirby game has ever really been both. It's always lead me to believe that there are two separate teams of developers at Hal Laboratory who make these, which is why the games always seems to alternate.

Hence why this new trailer has made me raise my eyebrows. I'm seeing lots of things that pertain to BOTH styles of Kirby gameplay. As if the two teams have come together to create a glorious amalgamation. Design-wise I'm seeing alot of callbacks to enemies and items from Kirby64 and the original game boy titles. Namely the floating mummies, the big one eyed yellow pit monster, the cappy mushroom enemies, greek-style architecture, spaceship crashed in the desert, and the curlycew logs. Lots of decoration in textures, leaves, grass and such. Plenty of eyecandy in both the background and the extreme foreground. How when kirby spits out a star made of multiple enemies he ate, it's a GIANT star being orbited by smaller ones.
However the gameplay appears to be more akin to the action titles. Powers with several different ways of using them, enemies that require several hits to kill, and kirby having a health bar more in the style of a fighting game.

Whereas Epic Yarn delivered something different, THIS looks like the game longtime fans of this franchise have been waiting for!
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So in short: this entire blog post was made because I am happy that two games I've always loved (Kirby and BubbleBobble) are coming back in and looking better then ever.

King Dedede approves.

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Oh yeah and the Aquabats have a new album out. They even went on tour with the guys who make Homestarrunner.

Oh and uh Happy Valentines Day I suppose?

those politicians that you carry around in your pocket, like so many nickels and dimes

2011-02-12T22:33:00.003-05:00

Not much to talk about here today. Split roughly into 4 blog chunks.

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Brian Jaques died.
One of my most favorite childhood authors and one the few authors where I sought out and read each book he ever wrote. He is prominently known as the author of the Redwall books. A very long series of stories taking place in an imaginary medieval land where animals have huge violent battles with each other, and the good ones live in an area called Mossflower. There's an Abbey there called Redwall which is basically a massive fortress church that is a sanctuary for the sick, poor, injured, and defenseless. To the north of the land was deserts full of warlords. To the south was the ocean where Salamandastron stood. A hollowed out Volcano where badger warriors lived. Badgers would FUCK SHIT UP in these books. Like the Hulk. You did not fuck with the Badgers or their army of rabbits called The Long Patrol.
In the ocean itself is where the badguys lived. Vermin: rats, weasels, lizards, bats, snakes, stoats, etc you get the idea.
The books were such fun. Full of large eventful stories, funny lines, memorable characters, and often packed with alot of great little poems and limericks.

Give him a name and leave him a while
Veil may grow to be evil and vile
Although I hope my prediction will fail
And evil so vile will not live in Veil
- poem describing Veil, the asshole who would later save his only friend but only when it became an act of desperation to do so.

The only other thing I can think of these days that compares to the Redwall series are the fantastic Mouseguard comics.

Anyway, I'm very sad he's dead.
Especially since I'm sure that now he's dead, someone somewhere is going to produce some big expensive animated film based on one of his stories and completely remove the violence. They already did it once. And it sucked. They'll do it again.
It's a shame the director of Watership Down and Plague Dogs fell off the face of the earth. He'd be perfect for that sort of job.

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Next order of business

I've been selling alot of stuff from my store in the last couple of weeks. Every couple of days I'm selling 3+ shirts. Usually customized using zazzle's store tools.
So I can only assume they are all being bought the same person, as I usually sell like 1 shirt a months.

Sir or Madame, whoever you are, thank you! If possible, please contact me and let me know how the shirts age over time. Or send pictures of yourself wearing them!

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Third order of business, Weebl put up the next episode of the Cadbury Creme Egg ads I've been doing for this year.
It's a parody of Back to the Future. Next one is Tron. Anyway, this one was alot of work so enjoy:

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And finally, in the best news of all, Valve has updated the beta for TF2. Amongst a lot of small changes there were some BIG ones.
New Medic gun that charges 50% faster uber and heals 50% faster and also allows the medic to run as fast as people who run faster than him. The detriment being that the Uber does not make you invincible or shoot crits. It just makes your healing rate go 3 times as fast.
A STRANGE GUN.

The best part of the update however was they finally fixed the Pyro class. For almost forever now Pyros have been the underdog class. Not really good at anything and probably the easiest class to kill unless you were previously injured when facing one. A short range class with no way of getting into close range without being shot to death first.
Valve fixed him hard.
New flaregun that explodes and can launch the pyro into the air. The flaregun also crits on burning people no matter the range. In short the Pyro is now beastly and an actual threat. The best part is how far you can fly.

Since this has been something I've been wanting ever since this game was released, you can imagine I am very happy with the results. And in my glee I decided to make a comic about it, inspired by the affable webcomic The Sweet Brother and his friend Infernal Jeffrey

Butts are bad because they wash out to sea, and fish smoke them and become nicotine dependent.

2011-02-01T22:02:00.005-05:00

Last night I saw a horror film with friends called Leeches. It's a terrible TERRIBLE film from 2003 with special effects akin to the cheapest puppet from Saul of the Molemen. Nothing wrong with cheap puppets but there were alot of things wrong with the film. And some things about the film that seemed off.

Ignoring the massive half-assed subplots of the movie "swim team has a homicidal maniac as a member" and "the coach is evil somehow" and my favorite "a giant cocoon hatches but nothing comes out" there was something oddly....whats the best way to put this....homoerotic about the film.

From the moment it began til the hilarious finale the film's entire cast was nothing but a group of studly jocks who spend all their time walking in slow motion while the camera slowly panned from all their muscles to their legs, to their crotches, to their flamboyant haircuts, and then back to their muscles again.

Oh, and eventually some rather phallic giant puppet leeches come out and proceed to crawl VERY SLOWLY to the various victims of the film.

It's rather amusing because they somehow couldn't afford to tie strings to these leech monsters. Case in point: a guy is attacked by 6 leeches. He holds 2 to his face while he gyrates around screaming and pretending he is trying to yank them off. The other 4 puppets just....sit there. Inanimate. The laziness is palpable. Could they really not afford to have 4 people stand offscreen with strings on their fingers attached to the puppets to make them move?

At other times someone (who clearly was paid very little) sticks their hand inside the leach puppet and attempts to make them look like they are slithering as the camera follows the leeches as they "slither" over all the toned manflesh that adorns this film like rainbow confetti at a party, or at times directly into the mouths of these men.

The leeches themselves make little sense. Despite being slow and large and noisy nobody notices they are near. Yet once people notice, the leeches suddenly move quickly enough to latch onto faces and.....do something.
I'm not really sure what the leaches are supposed to be doing. It seems like they attempt to bite the victims with their lamprey mouths (apparently nobody who made this film knows what a leech is) and rather than suck out the blood proceed to electrocute the victim. Hours later the victim is shown. Dead, pale, and of course almost nude.
Like I said, the film is very homoerotic. So much so that I quipped it wouldn't surprise me if it was meant to be gay porn originally but somewhere in the process the director decided to make a monster movie instead.
Here's a couple of clips.

This is the first 3 minutes of the film. The whole movie is basically like this in any scene where puppet leeches aren't being tossed at people's faces.

In this clip the very annoying and prissy main character dies to LEECHES. Then his bro (or lover maybe) who is the film's villain becomes the main character. Neither of them were pleasant individuals and I'm glad both died horrible deaths.

Subtle stuff. Tasteful.

Best Scene: the coach, who at first we are lead to believe is a murderer, but actually isn't, is tied to a valve near a pool because he threatened the main character for no reason and is considered a threat now. As he sits there one of the steroid-fueled mutant leeches comes slithering towards him. As it gets close to his face he grunts "You little bitch. You're just full of steroids aren't you? GIVE ME STRENGTH" and proceeds to BITE the LEECH and devour the puppet. The "strength" he gains is just enough for him to slip his hands out of world's loosest knot of rope and allow him to life heavy objects like a 5-foot-tall petite blonde girl. He almost lifts her one whole foot off the ground! HOLY SHIT! HULK SMASH!

Anyway after laughing our asses off at this film we decided to check out IMDB to see what other films the director has made.
What a shock. Since 1985 the director has made nothing but cheap monster movies and gay pornographic films. So I was basically right! Somehow in the course of 25 years, he has made roughly eighty films and not a single one is good. Each one is either smut or shitty horror.

Why do directors like this get funded?
And why do these movies get to be on DVD? And sold at WalMart?

anyway
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I've recently been chatting with the people who make one of my favorite video games. I can't say much about it but I will give you a hint: it rhymes with Sineklaft.
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Speaking of Sineklaft, on the smp server I help moderate we've been working on a bigass castle with alot of surrounding houses and structures and whatnot. The majority of it was put together by Plasticfir with me doing little bits here and there.

Here are two pictures of it:

It's pretty cool. We have an above ground pool, an underground maze of catacombs with only redstone ore lighting in the darkness. It eventually connects to a tomb where we have graves set up with names on them in tribute to all the regular members who never log on or come into the servers anymore. Under the maze is a massive railroad for minecarts complete with speed boosters. Glitches like hell though.
There's also a restaurant, a portal to the nether that doesn't work, a water fall, a clock tower, a cannon, and in the basement is a series of note blocks that play this song when you press a button.
There's also a garden that I built that is the ceiling of a lab where cannons, lava shooters, and other weird crap is tested.
My friend jake also has a secret underground house I helped him build in the map.

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anyway I'm going to go update my comic now.

For now you can view the recently released parody of the movie Avatar that I did for Cadbury's and Weebl.

Please for the love of Pete, do not feed Da Huuuuuudge!

2011-01-29T21:19:00.002-05:00

Busy times are here again.

The first of the weebl and bob goovies, which is a parody of Avatar, is done. It hasn't been released yet however.

Up next is a parody of Back to the Future which I have already started work on.

Speakin of these things, Weebl let me upload their predecessor to my youtube account. Long before these were about his already-popular characters, they were originally going to be about mocking famous celebrities who were trying out to be the mascot for the company. But worries the actual celebrities might see these came up and the format was canceled. Regardless, I still think it's funny. Weebl's al pacino impression cracks me up.
This thing is probably almost 3 years old now:

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I got an email today from the creators of a game I really like. I'll talk more about that next time.

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Last night I heard a loud FLAP noise. It turns out Rosa, my father's pet parrot, leapt off the top of her cage in the middle of the night just so she could waddle across the house to somebody because she was bored.

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Hum dee dum.

Oh hey who wants to hear me rap in the style of a late-80's afterschool hip hop special?

http://www.thebackalleys.com/dump/player.php?f=4575

There you go. It is terrible in every way.
But not as terrible as the new martin lawrence big momma film.

WHY MARTIN LAWRENCE WHY

it's about how the world is plastic and full of government cheese swans

2011-01-17T04:13:00.008-05:00

Well, Catface hasn't been out for more than a week yet and already work has begun on the next batch of goovies. Painting backrounds and such.

And luckily the first one is making fun of two horrible films that came out last year that I hated a whole lot! It will be done before the end of the month. Weebl has to go somewhere at the start of February.

Regardless, these should be fun.
I believe Weebl wants to do one based off Inception. I certainly hope so.

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I got an amusing email from Artician the other day (the site I keep my art on). Letting me know I hadn't logged in in 2 months. The last piece of art I put on there was that fanart of Minecraft that I did. I uploaded it on my birthday. Which was at the end of September. It is now January 17th.
What can I say? My art has gotten worse over time. It's like I'm somehow unlearning how to paint.
It's rather difficult to paint when you know it's just going to frustrate you to the point where you don't even want to do it anymore.
It's like when you've gotten to a point in a game where it's become so annoying that the fun factor has disappeared and you feel no need to play it. Any anger you built up from failing at it has been completely drowned by apathy and chances are highly unlikely you'll be giving it another go any time soon.

Maybe inspiration will finally strike sometime in the future but I doubt it will be within the NEAR future.
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I realized in my last post I didn't talk about Christmas much.
Three things I got for Christmas:

- portable hard drive with 500gb from my father
- Stadium Arcadium from my brother (red hot chili peppers)
- several days of delicious turkey sandwiches

I got my father a turntable that allows one to turn records into mp3's. This is good because my father in his younger days operated a popular record store in the Bahamas. He has stuff so rare it literally does not exist anymore.

He also got a slow cooker from his girlfriend. The first thing we made was a couple of Pot Roasts. They were OK. Then we decided to make some slow-cooked homemade chili. Which I was more than happy to help with as Mike and I have made many a chili and its cousin Sloppy Joe and it's great grand-nephew Slorky Bob's many a time.
Needless to say with a hefty dose of black beans and caribbean jerk seasoning, the chili has been DELICIOUS.

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Most of my pageviews on this blog seem to come from minecraft stuff I've noticed.
Which is rather fitting as I wanted to gabble about it a bit today.
A few days ago Notch, the creator of the game, released a nice new update.

In it was a few new things. Skeletons now drop bones, which can be used as fertilizer to speed up plant growth. Reeds (now called Sugar Cane) can be made into sugar. Sugar can be used to bake a cake (which is good to have in SMP when several people are in need of health). Wool from sheep can now be dyed with pigments that come from a large variety of in-game sources. Most importantly red and yellow from the little flowers that have dotted the landscape ever since this games creation! Yes! They have a purpose now! A new building was added: the dispenser. You fill it with lots of an item and place a button or switch near it. Each time it's activated it dispenses one of the items within. If filled with weaponry, such as arrows, it fires them out in whatever direction it was facing.
New trees. New kinds of wood. new leaves.
A new monster was added as well. SQUIDS! Other than being adorable these things are completely peaceful. Currently if killed they drop ink which can be used to dye cloth.
The best part by far is the ability to color cloth. Most horrifying part is that spiders can now climb any wall that isn't sand or the new sandstone block.

As such, with all the new gobbeldy-gook I proceeded to make myself a new world and a new house.
After beating the shit out of ALOT of sheep (ALOT) I constructed a new house. This time rather than flailing in panic at the monsters I calmly would continue building at night and hide in the upper parts of my house if they got too close. Then calmly go back to building later. Allowing me to actually concentrate on actual house design (the inside is really neat. chandeliers and crazy ways of getting up and down the various floors). As opposed to usual where I hurf out a cube house and decide later when I have weapons how I want my house to look.
My new house stands right on the edge of the sea wedged between two short mountains.:

Same house at night. Theres a cave in the ground in the forest behind me. Will spelunk later:

Meanwhile the guys I hang with on the old classic mode VHMWF creative servers set up a semi-stable server for Multi Player survival. We found a mountain with a lava fall. They hollowed it out and I decorated the outside with wood scaffolding and support beams (aka abusing fences).

After turning the inside of the base into a lounge of sorts complete with a bar area, Plasticfir went to the mountain on top to attempt to make a giant Maho out of dyed wool. I think Maho is a thing from that Touhou video game.
Regardless, it was too big and hit the ceiling of the map. So he had to give up. Then a creeper knocked him off or something and he got really angry because he made part of it out of obsidian.
After he finished it out of wool from sheep later I proceeded to make a giant green zombie head house as I tend to always do. Here you can see both from within the base.

Meanwhile inside the cave, Cromartie and Remigar and myself were attempting to connect the basement of the fort to the giant tunnels underneath the original spawn. A rather far distance.

Basically I would tunnel mindlessly forward towards the maps spawnpoint using a compass. Once I reach lava or water we could backtrack, lining the mine with TNT so we could widen it, and with luck, find the source of the lava and douse it.

We died many times in this endeavor.

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I leave you now with this.

i wills begins the paperwork. good day.

2011-01-11T04:51:00.005-05:00

My day today started off awful because I was sick as fuck and then...well....

Here I'll let this comic explain it!

Yay!
I got Nick Cross's newest short film The Pig Farmer in my mail today along with DVD's of his last two short films! YAAAAYY!!
Also he's sending me a print as well! Yaaaaaaaaaaay!
Here's a terrible scan of my packages contents:

In other happy news my friend Bug aka BigArmyBug aka W+M1Pyro aka Buggollo aka Ropesnake aka Ropey aka Bugsmer aka Brandon might have just gotten hired by a very famous animator! Also it's his birthday today and he got a bunch of Tf2 posters!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND in final happy news my friend Felix Cosgrave put his delicious demo reel up on Youtube!
Yaaaaay!

in final news:

A FAT BIRD HOLY SHIT

that knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there

2011-01-08T21:42:00.002-05:00

I've been very busy. And very sick at the same time.

Happy new year, to you few patient folk who still come to this runaway stagecoach of hogwash I call a blog.

First things first it's been almost a month since my last post.
"BUT WHY? WITHOUT YOUR BLOG MY GRANDMOTHER LOST THE WILL TO LIVE!"
I am sorry for your lots. However, my lack of posting comes down to two main things:

MAIN THING NUMBER ONE:

I have been working on a new Catface episode. It is now completed and online. It was a much more complex thing than most episodes. As you will see when you watch it. It has occupied a large majority of my time.

MAIN THING NUMBER TWO:

I have also been working on a freelance job for Verizon. Animating a possible "pilot" of something they might be doing. It, much like the above note, is also now complete.

Sidething one: usually I spent most of my days working on these, when it came time for me to sleep I would haul myself into a brief game of TeamFortress2 or KillingFloor or Left4Dead2, and then promptly hoist my exorbitant trunk into bed.

Despite all these things however I have managed to update Dustbunnies every week with a new comic.

Anyway, the Verizon job I did is not online anywhere in any capacity right now and other than the generous paycheck I received, most people aren't aware it even exists right now. In short: I can't show it to you guys. If it ever ends up on tv or as a downloadable cel phone app or something I'll let you know.

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The other order of business is the completed Catface film.
You can view the flash version in the usual place: Weebls-Stuff
Or on Youtube where it's technically a 2-parter since this episode is a direct sequel.

I also made this silly video of me and some friends dicking about on their tf2 server.

ANYWAY

I am now a free man.

Which means:

A.) possibly a new shitty painting sometime soon. I have been feeling the itch to disappoint myself with digital art again.

B.) getting to work on the much-neglected short film I've been making called Polypeptide.

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In other news I've spent the last 2 days hanging out with my friends at their house.
Today, my good buddy John (occasionally known as FatBear the BloodGod) whopped out the smoker he and Courtney own.
The night before we had all purchased various MEATS and MORE MEATS to throw into it today.
What meats you may ask?
Meats much like this:

EXCEPT EVEN MORE MEAT.
IT TAKES THE FLESH OF MANY BEASTS TO SATIATE MY INFERNAL HUNGER.

THEN THE TIME CAME TO SMOKE THE MEAT:

A GREAT LAVISH FEAST OF MEAT THEN ENSUED. AND THERE WAS MUCH RENDING OF FLESH AND TEARING OF BONES AND GNASHING OF TEETH.

In short it was delicious.
Now to drain my sick nostrils.
See you next time.

my margaret, what a subpar ham

2010-12-14T05:57:00.007-05:00

Sorry about the lack of anything at all really.

Been busy being cold as hell and working on the new Catface episode which is quite an ordeal as it's very action packed.

So heres a brief rundown of recent stuff I've been up to:
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I got a space heater for my room. It's just too damn cold for me to sleep without it. Air conditioning system can't heat my room worth a crap. It cost about 14 bucks. Turns the room into an inferno relatively fast.

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Billy Monks finished a working demo of our new game to present to his game-making course at his University. He has a working level editor and everything.
Here is a screenshot.

And a tiny version of the backround. The original is a 5mb 3500pixel wide png.

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In other news, the game Killing Floor had a big christmas update. Twisted Christmas. You can see a trailer here.

Killing Floor is a shooter that began as a mod to a pre-existing game. (a trend I'm noticing in alot of good games). You and a group of up to 6 players take positions in a labyrinth of hallways, cubicles, forests, laboratories, whatever. And then proceed to kill a wave of mutants. After this, you earn money on how well you did to spend at a trader for better weapons, ammo, and armor. Then the next wave comes and is usually harder and has more higher leveled mutants. At the end of several waves the Patriarch comes along. A giant mutant scientist with a rocket launcher/gatling gun for an arm.
You can play a whole bevvy of military and science based characters. And you assign a perk to yourself. A perk gives you a proficiency in a certain variety of weapons. For example I'm a sharpshooter. My job is to get headshots using pistols and take down lots of the smaller zombies. My other more important job once a few waves have passed is to snipe the bigger MUCH more dangerous mutants with the crossbow. Or in some cases the M14 rifle. Crossbow reloads slower but kills pretty much anything in 1 headshot. M14 is like a blast-away-anything gun. Easier to use (and more fun) but not great for sniping or taking down larger angry mutants.

The xmas update makes the game cross over with tf2. The Pyro character is now in the game plus theres a hilarious new Christmas map that you can see in the trailer above. And the pyro in tf2 gets the gasmask and tie of the Mr.Foster character from Killing Floor.

cool huh?

Anyway back to work for me.