YOU COULD WIN $100

BUT FIRST YOU HAVE TO WIN THE CONTEST

So that's my entry to Something Awful's latest photosohp contest. It turns out, Something Awful is going to distribute dvd's for a humor webpage called MEGA 64 The video just contains two dorks running around pulling pranks on people. Sure you've seen this a dozen times since Candid Camera, but these guys are doing the same act with a twist. That twist of course being pranks involving videogames. Yeah, watching a guy dressed up as an L-shaped tetris block running around in a grocery store isn't my idea of good entertainment, but winning this contest could land me 100 bucks.

Seeing as how these folks like videogames, why not paste their faces on the best video game that ever existed. River City Ransom.

PATTERNS

I had a discussion with my good friend John Roland as I was driving into Phoenix this past Sunday evening.

Me: Hey John, how's it going? I just got back into Phoenix.

John: You went to Tucson, right? How was it?

Me: How did you know I went to Tucson? I left Friday on a whim without really telling anyone.

John: Well I figured you were definately out of town since you weren't online on AIM.

Me: You know, while I always have trillian turned on, I'm usually set the status to away.

John: Of course, but in this situation your screen name wasn't even showing. The only time when I've seen that occur is when you're out of town or it's really late at night.

Me: Good point.

Yes I went to Tucson for a bit. Nothing notworthy happened of course, just chilled, met some interesting people and got to meet up with old friends from college. The reason I went is to break free of my pattern. While not being anything close to an adventure, taking a quick trip to Tucson helped to change up my weekend routine, plus I got to eat Brooklyn Pizza (a pizza parlour, not actual pizza from Brooklyn, NY) for the first time in a year and a half.

I have a fear of being predictable. Having a pattern of activity means that others can predict your actions. If one was so inclined, it would be possible to manipulate another person by reconginizng patterns of behavior. This post was supposed to be something interesting, but at 4:45 AM, I doubt that's even possible at this point.

Goodnight.

HE'S WATCHING...

BADMINTON CAN BE FUN...

IF YOU SAY THE SCORES CORRECTLY

Last saturday was a big celebration. There were fajitas, kilt lifter, super monkey balls, decadant chocolate pies, and lots of badminton. Badminton is a wonderful game, and as someone demonstrated that evening, it's one of the few games you can play one handed while drinking a beer. In a relaxed environment competitive nastiness disappears and the need to keep score almost disappears as well.

When keeping score becomes obsolete and all anyone wants to do is just play for the hell of it, then a new type of scoring system must be created. As we all know, you can't serve off a shuttlecock without calling out the score first. To do anything else would just be plain barbaric. My friends and I are victims of being exposed to way too much media, so naturally our new scoring system of the night would involve the names of pop culture icons relevant to our generation. For example, before serving off the shuttlecock, a player would propose one icon vs. another. Whoever gains the point determines which icon is superior. For example... "Dark Crystal vs. Labyrinth." The victor of that round was of course Dark Crystal.

Now I shall attempt to list all the matches that my memory will allow


Transformers Vs. GoBots
GI Joe Vs. M.A.S.K.
Cylons Vs. Stormtroopers
Battlestar Galactica Vs. Buck Rogers
(biddy biddy biddy)
Operations Vs. Don't Wake Daddy
Battleship Vs. Candyland
(Battleship is the game that teaches children how to lie)
The Last Starfighter Vs. Commander Kril
(Commander Kril surprisingly did not die)
Mighty Max Vs. Polly Pocket
ED 209 Vs. Robocop 3
Predator Vs. Running Man
Eisner Vs. Disney
Eisner Vs. The Devil
(Go Devil!)
Eisner Vs. Jesus
Eisner Vs. The Holy Ghost
(Eisner could not defeat a non-corporial form)
Rainbow Brite Vs. Strawberry Shortcake
Masters of the Universe Vs. Power Lords
RoboForce Vs. Starriors
Van Helsing Vs. Monster Squad
Hungry Hungry Hippos Vs. Crossfire
M.U.S.C.L.E. Vs. Battle Beasts
Supernaturals Vs. Visionaries
Dukes of Hazard Vs. BJ & The Bear
Nintendo Vs. Sega
(Coins Vs. Rings)
Thundercats Vs. Silverhawks
Laser Tag Vs. Photon


So far, that's all I can remember at 1:20 AM.

You're GI Joe with the Kung Fu Grip!! You're
strong, tough, and know how to kick some ass.
Don't forget though, no matter how manly you
think you are, you're still just a doll. God
Bless America.


What childhood toy from the 80s are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

KUNG FU GRIP INDEED!

I'm not one for those silly online quizes, but this one appeals to me most. I have finally approached age 24, the age when supposedly a person stops enjoying new things. I think I'm ready for this stage since I've been a nostalgic bastard since age 19. Fitting that the results of the quiz would turn out to be GI JOE, except the 12" doll sized version of GI JOE wasn't the popular toy of the 1980's. The popular toy was the 3 3/4" size action figure, and for those who don't know... the 3 3/4" size action figure was first made popular by Star Wars.

SEE! I know too much useless nostalgic crap for my own good. Oh well... happy birthday to me. Tonight many bottles of Kilt Lifter will be drank in celebration of 24 years well spent.

AND NOW, A DEDICATION

To a time when the popular T.V. show, The Simpsons, was a good show instead of the unfunny crap it is today in the year 2004.


"HE CAN TALK... HE CAN TALK..."

BEHOLD THE GREATEST PIECE OF ANIMATION EVER CREATED

"I LOVE YOU DR. ZAIUS!"

PICTURE RESTORATION IN PHOTOSOHP

Quite often I do a lot of favors for folks who email me pictures and want me to alter them in Photoshop. Last month, an individual sent me an image of an old family photo and they wanted me to restore the image. The picture itself was badly damaged and even contained a few nasty creases and tears. However, it only took me an hour to finish the whole process. Sadly, I don't have the original file (must've deleted it by accident) so there's no way to compare that with the finished photo I'm about to show you.

This will also be a good opportunity to notice certain effects that photoshop creates. Look around the edges of the center of the image for a while and take notice of special blending techniques used to soften the edges of the clothes with the background wall.

YOU ARE INVITED

PARTY @ MY HOUSE STARTING @ 5:00 PM SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2004

Because that day happens to be my birthday. Anyone who reads this site on a regular basis is invited to come have fun, eat delicious bbq food, play video games on an HDTV, and challenge other people to games of badminton. If you can't have fun doing any of these activities then you just plain suck at life.

While food and beer (mini-kegs and half-gallon jugs of local brewery goodness) will be provided, everyone is encouraged to bring whatever they like for their own consumption. Since most of my friends happen to enjoy a vegetarian diet, many batches of delicious falafel will be served.

I'll provide the food & drink while all of you out there only need to bring yourselves. Sweet deal huh?

I LOVE THE POWERGLOVE

IT'S SO BAD.

    

BIRTHDAYS BIRTHDAYS BIRTHDAYS

May is the month of birthdays for my friends and I. Funny, spring time is supposed to get people in the mood for breeding, but for our parents the cold of fall seemed to do the trick. Of course some folk had their birthdays in late April, but close enough. Regardless, as a group most of us are completing another trip around the sun.

The trip was proabably the most difficult one yet. While the Earth goes round and round like the Gravitron carnival ride through space, life goes up and down like a vicious roller coaster. 2003 was probably the lowest I've been. Hope is not lost, and there's still a future ahead of me. Just not the one I always thought was going to be there.

I'm sure that last paragraph didn't make any sense as I'm looking at the clock at reading 1:48 AM. To get to the heart of this brithday business is that a transition between ages 23 and 24 will be occurring in 9 days. Plans must be made as I don't want the chance to throw a big bash to go to waste.

WARNING

WATCHING VAN HELSING WILL GIVE YOU CANCER

Okay so maybe the cancer part isn't true, but the new movie, "Van Helsing," is just plain bad. Written and directed by the creative genius that brought us wonderful pieces of cinema such as The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and my personal favorite "Deep Rising," Van Helsing is easily the worst movie I've seen since 1997's "Batman & Robin."

Before I continue... an explanation is required. First off, I knew Van Helsing wasn't going to be a good movie walking into the theater. However, because the movie showed a 19th century warrior battling against Dracula, Frankenstein, and a Werewolf, I figured it was the closest anyone would ever get to making "Castlevania: The Movie."

I'm not sure how someone gets 200 million dollars to make a movie that's essentially an unnoficial sequel to the awful movie adaptation of last year's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." In this movie, the character Van Helsing is a super secret monster assassin who works for the Vatican. Wasn't Van Helsing a scholar and a professor who used his intelligence to find a way to kill vampires? How the hell did he become an 19th century James Bond with a machine gun crossbow?

Here, I'll spoil the movie for you so you don't have to waste 6 - 8 bucks. Dracula's big evil plan is to bring to life thousands of his dead children using Dr. Frankenstein's life giving machine. You see, Dracula spent 400 years screwing his 3 annoying vampire brides. These brides gave birth to "children" in the form of pale gargoyles that burst forth from egg sacks that hang from the ceiling of Dracula's secret lair. Since Dracula and his brides are "undead," the result of them mating is a stillborn gargoyle fetus. If his children can come alive, then Dracula will rule the world with his army of retarded gargoyle children that resemble the creatures from Gremlins.

During a flashback, Dr. Frankenstein is killed by Dracula and the doctor's equipment is stolen by Dracula's army of gas mask wearing midgets (I'm not kidding). Meanwhile Frankenstein's monster comes alive and escapes while the townsfolk attack Frankenstein's castle. Dracula's main problem is that the machine doesn't work without Frankenstein's Monster being used as a giant fuse for the machine. Yes, this is how ridiculous this movie is, and from there it only gets worse.

Van Helsing is ordered by the Vatican to protect a Romanian family that has sworn not to enter Heaven until they vanquis Dracula and all his evil. Here's the real stinger as we see Mr. Helsing enter a fully constructed Vatican City 40 years before the Vatican City was built. So Mr. Helsing gathers up his new gadgets from the underbelly workshops of the Vatican, collects a cowardly friar as a comic relief sidekick and heads off to Transylvania to stop evil.

From there on the movie only gets worse and worse. While I'm not going to give an entire plot summary, I'm going to list some key moments in the film that can do nothing but hurt your brain if you watch them.

During the middle of the film, Van Helsing, Anna (might as well be "Natasha" with that horrible accent) and the friar sidekick are trying to transport Frankenstein's Monster away from Transylvania and back to Rome (the Vatican) to prevent Dracula trying to revive thousands of his dead children. Anna says to Van Helsing, "Nothing travels faster than horse in Transylvania, not even werewolf!" Yet no later than 5 minutes into the following chase sequence do we see their stagecoach (a stagecoach that is getting pulled by 6 horses) get attacked by a werewolf. WHAT?

Kate Beckinsale's character gets thrown through a stone walls at least 3 to 4 times in this movie. Each time she bounces off objects like a tennis ball then manages to flop down on the ground without a scratch. Yet at the end of the movie she DIES because she's tackled by a werwolf. WHAT?

Each character in this movie manages to perform some kind of Tarzan swing off a wire at least twice. To add insult to injury, even Frankenstein's Monster manages to pull off the Tarzan swing at the end of the film. Apparently there wasn't any way to do anything in the 19th century without some form of elaborate swinging.

Hell I could go on and on about what's wrong with Van Helsing. Ever since Friday, I've been trying to undrestand how such a ridiculous and awful movie could even see the light of day. Then it hit me. The only way I can explain how a movie with Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, werewolves, gremlins, and Mr. Hyde all rolled into one manages to be worse than 1987's "Monster Squad," is with this quick little photoshop.

FUCK INTERNET EXPLORER! The goddamn A: HOVER psuedo class isn't supported in IE. So that means the little fixes I've made to make these drop down menus visible in I.E. causes errors for browsers that have full support of the A:HOVER psuedo class. I can never win. I just wanted to make this damn place look cool once and for all. :(

Hey folks, I'm testing out a new design. It's kinda buggy right now but hopefully I'll make it kick ass by the end of tonight.

THE NEXT TRACING

or

A DAY'S WORTH OF DRIVING LANDED ME IN NEO TOKYO

I'm sure everyone just loves that cowboybebop vector trace. Pretty nifty eh? Well it's time to move on from that piece and start something new. Because of Wed. events, I've found just the perfect subject.

Yesterday started out wtih me waking up around noon for no good reason. My brother needed my help fixing one of the hard drives for his computer. The resulting scan disk and formatting commands ate up enough time to make me late on my schedule for leaving the house. My plan was to drive out to Scottsdale and apply for a job. Having already sent my resume, an associate from Scottsdale Insurance told me to come into the HR department and fill out an application. At around 3:20 PM I made the long journey out to Scottsdale, and when I arrived at my detination the time was 3:40 PM. Unfortunately, 3:40 PM meant that I arrived too late. The person who contacted me and told me to come into the office failed to inform me that the application process ends at 3:30 PM. So having spent more than half an hour driving North to Scottsdale, I had to drive back home heavily discouraged.

Feeling like my day had gone to a complete waste, I continued to head South on the 101 loop and decided to stop buy Atomic Comics. It's well known that I don't buy comics anymore, so whenever I go to Atomic Comics it's for the chance to purchase more of that yummy Black Lemonade. Sadly, no Black Lemonade would be turning my tongue black that day for Atomic Comics was sold out of the tasty beverage. It just wasn't my day. While purchasing a Jones Raspberry Lime Soda as a shoddy replacement for Black Lemonade, I noticed something on the wall. In Atomic Comics' DVD selection I noticed a familiar image.



"HOLY SHIT" I said aloud. For I had just seen the DVD case for Manie-Manie Meikyu Monogatari aka "Neo Tokyo." For those who don't know, Manie-Manie Meikyu Monogatari (Labyrinth Stories) is a movie comprised of 3 animated short films from Japan. Back when I was 12 years old... I saw the middle segment "Running Man" within a second season episode of MTV'S "Liquid Television." The image of the character, Zack Hugh, screaming in agony and terror as his own tele-kinetic powers tear apart his jet car / hovercraft has huanted me ever since. Years later when I moved to Arizona for a second time in my life, I was able to spot this image yet again but this time on the cover of a VHS tape in a local Blockbuster on 40th St. and Chandler. The box was labeled "Neo Tokyo" and showed that the "Running Man" segment from Liquid TV I so loved was 1/3 of a strange and entertaining animated film.

Up until yesterday, I had not seen a single copy of Neo Tokyo for 9 years. Of course I had to buy the dvd as soon as I saw it in Atomic Comics. Realizing what I had just acquired, the idea to find new screen caps to vector trace sprung into my head. Of course screens of my favorite segment, "The Running Man" were made. Here are the 4 which I'm considering for vector tracing. Leave a comment and let me know which you readers out there think should be recreated in vector graphics.

YOU GOT SERVED

or

YOU GOT F'ED IN THE A

Since I'm an idiot trying to blog at 2:35 AM, I accidentally wrote over my Jack Chick post. So here's my pathetic attempt to recreate it.

Religious lunatic, cartoonist, and source of unintentional comedy, Jack T. Chick, has brought us another important lesson in Christianity. God hates gay people. In his latest comic "The Birds and the Bees," Mr. Chick shows young upstanding Christian school children being chewed out by their EVIL witch-like secular teacher, Miss Henn, for their lack of tolerance and compassion for homosexuals. Not only is this tract ridiculous but it is also ripe with the potential for hilarious parody by means of photoshop. Nothing makes my day quite like making parodies out of the work of a derranged religous lunatic.

Here... take a look.

AND NOW... THE BIG FINISH!

That last image is not mine. Unfortunately my skills with Adobe ImageReady are no where near as good as they need to be to make a beautiful animated picture as seen above. My best work so far invovles a small clip of Patrick Stewart yelling out "ATOMICS" in the 1984 film version of Dune.

THE DAMN THING IS FINALLY DONE

That's right folks. The goddamn Cowboy Bebop vector trace is finished. Sure, I could've done this in a day had I wanted to devote a total of 20+ hours completing it, but I didn't want to. Instead, I chose to stretch the creation process out a few weeks and took little stabs at completing characters every so often. So far it's the most complicated vector tracing I've done yet. The most interesting feature of this tracing is that you can see how much I learned over time. The order of completion for the characters is in this order: Jet Black, Spike Spiegel, Ed, and Faye Valentine.



800 x 600 | 1024 x 768 | 1280 x 1024 | 1600 x 1200

PHOTOSHOP PHRIDAY!

... or Sunday.

I just spent the past hour photoshopping this piece for Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday. With any luck my entry will be up next Friday. When I first took a stab at this idea, I wanted to vector trace the image, but after I realized how ridiculously long that would take... I went the traditional raster approach.



If you don't get the reference, I recommend watching this classic 1971 post apocalyptic movie involving nocturnal man-eating nuclear zombies.

THESE AREN'T MINE...

BUT THEY ARE VERY FUNNY

THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY CIRCUS