so my soul resembles an ermine. at least, that’s what the golden compass movie website would have me believe. sounds kinda cool to me.

i’m glad i’m not one of the svalbard wolves. i worked on a couple of those for the few months that i was on the GC job at work, so i’m responsible for at least one wolf pelt. also a husky, but that was more of an accident.

anyway, do you think that this loverly ermine matches my personality? i do. but check it out for yourself and see if you agree.

sara has her own daemon, and so does my friend rita.  if you know them, see if you agree.  hooray for viral marketing, yeah?  this time i don’t mind as much, though, since hey — i worked on the movie.  the more of you that go and see it, the better i feel!

Yeah, I dunno neither. Some of the guys on the drawing board are kuh-ray-zee. But anyway, I decided to go along with the ‘cows’ part. I swear, I tried to fit ‘legible’ in there any way I could, but aside from drawing the cow with words instead of lines, I came up with nuthin’. So this is what you get from me. For more legible cows, you should hit The Drawing Board. Would you believe me if I told you I hit up a tutorial on anime eyes in order to get an idea of how to give the cow eyes a little more life? For reals. It helped, though, which is all good. Enjoy!

I’ve seen other examples where the art in question could fall into the ‘Homage or Ripoff?’ category, but today it hits closer to home than I had suspected it ever would. A good friend of mine works in the cinematics division at Blizzard, and today I got these two images in the mail from him. The first is a print ad from Vancouver Film School, in which they seem to be using some student art, and the bottom image is a still frame from the Burning Crusade cinematic (Burning Crusade being the first expansion pack for the ever-popular World of Warcraft MMO). This print ad is from the SIGGRAPH edition of Animation Magazine, no less. And you can bet your ass these images are already making the rounds at the Blizzard offices down in Irvine.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that student homage is great and studying other people’s work is a great way to learn, but the usage in this instance is just wrong. I graduated from VFS back in 2003, and unless things have changed radically, students still need to show their source material when they’re creating their work, and plagiarism is highly frowned upon. Whether or not this instance qualifies as plagiarism could be debated, but the fact that VFS are using this work in an advertisement strikes me as really stupid and insulting. “Oh, hey Blizzard, thanks for your hard work, we’re going to use this to round up a few more students, is that okay?” except not so much with the asking or the legitimacy.

This is either the student’s fault for not disclosing all sources of inspiration like they were supposed to, or VFS’s fault for not giving a shit about who they make money off of. Let the student put it in his/her demo reel at his own risk, sure, but for christ’s sake don’t use it to make money for your school when it’s so very obviously someone else’s work.

VFS, I hope you’re listening. I really want to be proud of my vfx alma mater, but this puts you in a very poor light.

Edit: I realize that this is a strongly worded post, so I want to add that there are definitely good people working up there at VFS, but stupid things like this overshadow that good work and make the school look it doesn’t have any idea what it’s teaching or producing. Obviously something broke in the chain of events that lead to this advertisement, and whatever it is that broke (or was broken already) needs to be fixed.

and i’m starting to get my confidence back. i even joined a ‘drawing board’, where some co-workers and i pick a new topic every week and everyone waits until the night before it’s due to draw anything. the site is called, strangely enough, the drawing board, and while it’s not quite the at the same level as some of the guys at drawergeeks, we do more topics (once a week instead of once every two weeks). anyway. this week’s topic was ‘my favorite fat superhero’, and i’m glad i did it (i missed out last week). here’s my result, and make sure that once you get to the gallery, you click on the image to see the full(er) sized version. the small one doesn’t do justice to the inking, if i may say so myself. :)

sara doesn’t really read my blog. she doesn’t need to, since there’s not much i could post here that she doesn’t already know about. but! i read hers, now that she’s started bloggin’ on a regular basis. i know, i know. everyone but the kitchen sink has a blog (and that particularly unfortunate piece of kitchenware probably has one and i just don’t know it).

but what you don’t know is that she just got a blogtacular facelift. back a couple years ago when i originally coded the site, it was static pages and yadda yadda because we didn’t have time to make anything fancy, since the SCBWI conference was coming up fast and she needed a presence on the web pretty damn quick. fast forward several months and sara asked me if she could have a blog integrated with her current site. so i think about it a little, and then put her site into a blender with a bare-bones wordpress theme, and out comes the new site, which you may have seen previously.

fast forward yet again to at least a year later (now). the site was still in its ‘no posts yet’ phase, as sara hadn’t really taken up the reins yet. she said she was waiting until she really “had something to blog about,” which turned out to be seeing Joss “Is My Master Now” Whedon in person. i’d say that that’s definitely awesome enough. so when that happens, she comes to me and we decide that the site really needs a facelift. so, we increase the real-estate of the text area, move some of the images around, redo the graphics, and pretty up the stylesheet some, and voila — happy new blog. what’s more, now that she’s blogging and reviewing books and talking about writing, she’s actually getting quite a bit of traffic (well, not TONS, but it’s better than nuthin’). congratulations, sara!

so i got my M3 DS Simply the other day, and i’ve been playing with it a lot the past week or so. here’s a summation:

i paid $90 at themodchipstore.com for the M3 and a 2gb microSD card. i bought it as a package so that i could be sure to have a microsd card that would work error-free (see Scorpei’s DS wiki online for details). if i had been more brave, i would have bought the R4 (exact same hardware as the M3) somewhere cheap ($30), and ordered the kingston 2gb card from amazon (even cheaper than the $40 i paid). however, i’d just sold a bunch of stuff i didn’t need, so it was worth it.

setup is a little arcane, since the chinese english is so terribly bad, but once you get understand what files go where, it’s very easy. i even made my own skin, since the default one is pretty stark and ugly. now that i have it all nicely configured, though…

1.) DS Games: i have all the carts that i own (and maybe a few others) on the card, and gameplay is simple and awesome. i can even cheat, thanks to the M3. online gameplay doesn’t work for everything, but for most it’s great.

2.) DS linux: boot linux, ssh to home machine, OR run any of a multitude of precompiled apps. i use dslinux to ssh to my home machine and then connect to my screened terminals. \m/ very easy install, also.

3.) homebrew apps: a very nice irc client, a good organizer app, and even an xm tracker, among other things. running apps is just like putting a game rom on your card.

4.) homebrew games: one word: lemmings. playing lemmings was never so awesome. also, check out the ports of nethack and SCUMMVM for the DS.

5.) moonshell: this is a shell that launches from the m3’s boot screen, and it handles txt, jpg, and a lot of music files (including mp3s), as well as video (if properly converted). the txt viewer is about what you’d expect, and the jpg viewer is so-so (ComicBookDS is better, IMO), but there is very little that beats listening to NES and SNES soundtracks in their original form. i’m listening to final fantasy VI right now, and it’s freaking awesome. also effortless, since the tracks auto-advance (it ignores looping).

all in all, this is one of the best purchases i’ve made in a long damn time.

so i’ve been living here in LA for, what, almost 4 years now? and i’ve never been to the LA Film Festival. how utterly sad, right? yes. sad. but! this year i went, and was well rewarded for my attendance.

so there’s this thing that’s been happening: www.buffysings.com, where a theater full of people sing along to the eternally awesome Buffy: the Vampire Slayer episode “Once More, With Feeling”. it’s like a modern-day Rocky Horror Picture Show, but without so much of the food-throwing. there was a showing this past wednesday night, and sara and i went with our friend rita. not only was it so much freaking fun (we’re going again in september when the show comes back to LA), but at the end, the MC guy (the same guy that runs the site/blog from the previous link) says that he wants to introduce someone, and all of a sudden hands the mic over to Marti Noxon. holy crap! the place went wild. Marty was really cool and right away told us that she was indeed wearing underwear. she seemed very flattered at the number of people who showed up, and after saying a little more (i don’t remember much, i was frantically snapping pictures), she turns around and invites Joss Whedon to come down and say a few words. He stands up at the very back and the entire theater goes absolutely NUTS.

it was an awesome evening. my friend rita’s blog really captures it all, thanks to her for having her EOS with her that evening. *awesome* photos she has there, and i’ll post some of mine as soon as i have a chance to get them up to the server. in the meantime, hit rita’s blog and check out the Whedon Fandom at critical mass.

just spent 5 days in cancun. could not possibly be more relaxed. here’s the daily schedule of events that sara and i followed:

• wake up in giant bed, shower in giant rainfall-type shower in giant luxury bathroom
• order breakfast from room service
• stake out giant thatched-roof umbrella on the beach, lie down in total shade
• meander out to giant pool and fountain, swim around aimlessly and enjoy the near-body-temperature water
• swim up to bar, order margaritas with lots of salt
• swim around drunk
• meander back to umbrella, read book, possibly with naps.
• swim out into ocean, ride the waves on inflatable raft
• order guacamole and chips in spanish from cute cancunian.
• meander to pool again, swim around some more.
• head back to room as sun sets, take another rainfall shower.
• meander down to beachhouse restaurant, order awesome tacos.
• head back to room, sit around in terrycloth robe, watch american movie with spanish subtitles, drink beer, fall asleep.
• lather, rinse, REPEAT AS NECESSARY.

yeah, there’s been a lull. i don’t post as often as i used to. mostly because i haven’t had anything to impart. that, and it’s been pretty busy here at work. i’m involved on the R&D team for the work we’re doing on an unnamed movie, and that’s taken up a LOT of my time. i’ve moved to a bigger and better office, though, and that’s nice. i likes a bigger space fo’ sho. the sad thing is that my MAME cabinet got the axe, and i had to take it home with me. on the downside, there’s a lot of people who played on it that are sad because now they’ve got to do something else on late nights or during lunch. it was a fun service to provide for people, and it wasn’t distracting (we had pretty strict rules about use in order to keep from bothering people nearby). on the upside, i have a nice MAME cabinet in my apartment now, that i can play on whenever the hell i feel like it. :)

also, i’ve been teaching myself some php and mysql, which has been challenging but very rewarding. it’s for my own project for myself and some friends, so it’s nothing huge, but it’s a good experiment. speaking of my friends, i’ve made a bunch of new ones. i’m going to be an enforcer for PAX’07 this coming august, and i’ve been chatting a lot with other enforcers, both new and veteran. they’re a great bunch of people, and i’m stoked about volunteering at yet another awesome convention.

i’ve still been drawing, but not as often. the drawing level has dropped since i’ve been involved in this more technical project, but once it’s done, i expect the pendulum to swing the other way again. i’ve read scott mccloud’s books and i bought myself a giant awesome volume of facial expressions (one of my weaknesses), and i’m excited about drawing more soon. maybe when i scan in some of this fun stuff i’ll share it up.

thanks for listening/reading.

i did not think that i could post from my cell phone, but it appears to be remarkably easy, thanks to the opera mobile browser. too bad that even with t9 typing, word entry is still painful and tedious. i guess i need a blackberry or something with a full keyboard.