http://www.trevoroldak.com/uploads/.....tishmapbig.gif

I saw a few I had never heard of, and was very amused to find mine (although they're mostly "things I like" rather than "things I demand") nowhere listed . . . I am a special snowflake XD

. . . a day late. Ah, well.

A new short by Cyriak! Adorable nightmare fuel.

Welcome to Kitty City
http://www.youtube.com/user/cyriak#...../0/jX3iLfcMDCw


Cetetic found this next one. There doesn't seem to be a lot of info on it floating around. It's very enjoyable, especially if you prefer the dragons to win in a dragon vs. knight scenario.

Ritterschlag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7ls.....ure=plpp_video


This is the newly-restored trailer for "The Incal", a never-made epic 1980's scifi/fantasy animated movie by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius . . . this would have been the most beautiful, confusing thing ever. The narration is a little much, but damn, those visuals!

The Incal
http://www.youtube.com/user/PASCALB...../0/c4Vkyzrs1Fk


Aardman has a new one coming out! I love me some claymation (even if it's aided by digital sweetening). Also, Charles Darwin, and Russell Tovey as an albino pirate, oh heck yes! And then they go and use Tenpole Tudor on the soundtrack. I'm loving this already.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD9JIE7bL-Q

EDIT: Apparently it's now called "The Pirates: Band of Misfits". I like the original title :P

Anyone else trying this year?

I've only managed to complete it once, a couple of years ago. Got out of the habit of writing after a computer crash ate everything - several novels-worth of writing, all my notes for stuff in progress. It was more or less completely crushing. I really need to start writing more (plus writing hurts the bad arm less than drawing). I'm not amazingly creative but I can put words together pretty well.

Yesterday was day one, but I spent all of it working, and then hanging out with my one sis who I hadn't seen since August and who had come into town unexpectedly. I won't see her again til after xmas, because of her school and work schedule, so it's not like it was a hard choice to make. Not to mention I haven't actually decided what I want to write - finish the one I tried to do last year? One of the ideas floating around in the skullmeat that I never bother to write down? Just sit down and write something completely new off the cuff? When I did do it, I tended to just write masses of stuff every few days rather than a little something every day, so I don't feel behind yet.

Went to the doc today and got a couple of unpleasant cortisone shots into my shoulder. We should know in a few weeks whether or not I'll need surgery, but the doc seemed pretty confident and maybe he was just playing me, but I hope not! I will BE SO HAPPY to have the use of my drawing arm back.

You have no idea how bored I've been, not being able to draw. Seriously, I've been trying to finish these commissions and I can draw for about 10 minutes at a time before I have to quit. Very frustrating. I've been really down because I'd wanted to have the cryptid calendar to be done by now, but I haven't been able to. Might go back through my files and post some old junk or sketches while I'm healing, just to have some activity going on here at FA.


In other news,  Cetetic sent me this, it's a shockingly good remix of NIN and the Ghostbusters theme, enjoy: http://www.ninremixes.com/thtfremix....._feeds-256.mp3

Also, have a hamster barfing up a human eyeball, just because (via my sis): http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l.....lh1io1_400.gif

What is a computer? "It isn't human! People don't have buttons and a computer does."

These kids from 1984 explain it to you: http://youtu.be/kccWna71sqk

It's pretty funny - I would have been 10 when this was shot, and I remember using programs very similar to this. In fact, one of the first programs I wrote myself (in BASIC!) was a drawing program. You'd hold the G for green, for example, and use the arrow keys to draw a green line. No way to print it or save it, of course.

You kids these days with your Photoshop, you're so spoiled!

Tagged by  Art-fromthe-Heart and nothing better to do today, so here we go.

11 Things about me:

1. I'M GETTING MARRIED!

2. The worst thing that ever happened to me at work was getting hit in the face with a freshly delivered dog placenta.

3. I've been in a couple of plays, cross-dressing in four of them.

4. When I was a kid, I wanted to either be a bronc buster, a stop-motion animator, or a Muppeteer.

5. One of my stealth identities just had a brush with internet-famousness. It's amusing.

6. I once saved a guy's life when he had a seizure and almost choked to death on the bus. The other passengers were just sitting and watching him die, and two ladies were screaming that he was possessed by demons. It's one of my prouder moments.

7. I got to hug the guy who drew the Necronomicon. IT WAS AWESOME.

8. I need to sleep in a sort of nest surrounded by mounds of pillows. I have no idea why, but there you go.

9. One of my ancestors was a French revolutionary and radical atheist who managed to get all the churches in France shut down briefly.

10. Just about the best present anyone could get me is a plastic dinosaur toy.

11. I've got about 5 novel ideas swimming around in my skullmeat, and no time to write any of them.


And these are her specific questions:

1. Do you consider yourself a nerd? X3

Shall I quite to you from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

2. Kittens or Puppies?

KITTENS. I like an animal that is born housetrained.

3. Why is there a chicken on your head? :B

Probably because it's New Years, and that is my silly hat of the year.

4. What's the funniest thing you've heard this week?

My sister who rescues dogs told me this story: One of her foster dogs had been suffering from the runs. She was just about to take him to the vet, when he pooped out a nearly-intact garden glove (the canvas kind, with rubber grippy palm). It's not so much the story itself, but the way she told it that made me laugh.

5. *points* A SPIDER! *respond*

*Screams*

6. Chocolate?

With peanut butter, please!

7. What's more important - Money, Love, or Fulfillment?

I'm not sure how to define fulfillment. Money is very important, because you need it to live, but I'm going to be a sap and say love. I got along without romantic love for the largest portion of my life and was perfectly fine, but now that I got it, I'm glad I have it. Could I live without it? Probably, because it's not oxygen or food, but I'd be very sad. I would never have expected it to be so rewarding.

8. What do you have a hankering for?

Grape popsicles, for some weird reason.

9. What's your favorite color and what does it mean to you?

Purple! I don't think it means anything in particular, it's just an eye-catching color.

10. Paper or plastic?

Plastic. I use it to clean the catbox.

11. If there's one thing you hate...

. . . it's people yelling. Oh god, everyone for the past few days has been screaming their lungs out.


I don't like tagging people, that seems to demanding and intrusive, but feel free to consider yourself tagged. Here are my questions:

1. If you had to live at any point in history besides this one, when would it be?
2. What is your dream job?
3. Tell me a book you think would make an awesome movie.
4. What is the strangest dream you ever had?
5. If you could change one physical feature about yourself, what would it be?
6. What is your mutant superpower of choice?
7. Would you rather be a werewolf, a vampire, a witch/warlock or a human being?
8. Which extinct species would you bring back to life?
9. Pick one and explain why: time travel, FTL spaceships, or the ability to travel to parallel/alternate universes?
10. You wake up and discover yourself on a gorgeous but totally deserted tropical island. What do you do?
11. If you could live perfectly well without sleep, would you choose to do so?

http://youtu.be/xxAJqvslV7M

Pony. Pony. Pony.

Looks like I only get 15 hours at work next week (sigh), which sucks for my paycheck but is good news for my commissioners!

Wow, that last journal was depressing, wasn't it? Here, have something completely stupid instead: http://www.youtube.com/user/buenoth...../0/vJjeesteTEg

. . . for a while, at least, as soon as I finish up these last few commissions.

Here's the story, in case you aren't breathlessly following my fascinating life: about a year and a half ago, I broke my collarbone. About a month later, my then-boss accidentally dropped a box full of umbrella poles on me, and re-broke it. And about a month after that, he dropped a 20-foot ladder on it, and broke it again.

Well, the bone eventually healed up, but since then I've had a constant dull, burning ache in that shoulder which occasionally flares up into screaming agony that spreads out into the chest, weakness in my arm (I can hardly lift it above shoulder level), and muscle spasms that get so bad my hand is jerked around. To sum up: not fun. It gets worse when I overuse the arm, and my current job requires a lot of lifting.

This is, of course, my right arm. My drawing arm. So you can see the problem. I can still draw, but you may have noticed I've slowed down quite a bit. A couple hours of drawing leaves me almost completely unable to use my right arm.

I've done some research into this - starting with the anatomy books I keep around for drawing reference, amusingly enough - and while I'm not a doctor I'm fairly sure the problem is an entrapped nerve, which is a common complication of a fractured clavicle. It won't get better on its own. Good news: this can be fixed with surgery. Bad news: I don't have health insurance or much money in the bank. I'll get the surgery at some point, but it won't be for a while, and I think it's probably better to lay off on the painting as much as possible.

I can't stop entirely, because I would go INSANE. But if you're one of my watchers and you wonder why there's almost no new stuff, it's not because I'm dead or I hate everybody or I'm leaving forevah. I'm just poor and borked. I'll still be around looking at stuff and cheering you on, but I'm gonna have to bench myself for a while. So it goes, so it goes.

It's finally gotten cool enough here that I can open a window, so I'll be casting a bunch of resin eyes this weekend. If anyone wants to order a set, note me now.

These are 38mm / 1.5 inches across. No "following" eyes. $5 plus shipping, which in the US is $5 and international usually runs 10-15. Any color, any pupil shape, mismatched eyes are no extra charge.
The ones I make this weekend will ship out on next weekend (it takes a little while for the resin to cure)


Examples:
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5475619/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5562120/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5420798/

I have not been terribly impressed with the new Thundercats. Maybe if it were more like this . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gufXf67qBcc

R.E.M., one of all-time favorite bands, is breaking up. So sad, so sad. I've been a fan for over twenty years now, it kind of hurts to think there'll never be a new album, especially since the last one they seemed to be going back to their college-rocks roots and getting away from the dreary slow stuff they'd been doing lately. I even loved the stupid stuff, like Shiny Happy People and Radio Song.
Well, I lost Oingo Boingo in 1995, and now there's only They Might Be Giants out of my holy trinity . . . that's gonna be a sad day when they, too, hang up the accordion and glockenspiel.

The reason I had a terrible crush on Michael Stipe when I was a younger fiend . . . well damn, he quite the prettyboy back in the day! All that floofy bronze hair *droooool*: http://youtu.be/HGiNVZvEnZE

Still one of the finest music videos ever made. It's arty!
(warner Bros won't let me embed): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if-UzXIQ5vw

It seems Ghostbusters is going to be re-released to theaters this October!

One of the best movies ever! I'm a big derpy nerdball about this movie, as anyone who knows me well can tell you. It was the first movie I ever bought with my own money (this was back in the VHS days, when you sometimes had to wait years for a tape to come out and it often debuted at insane prices like $50 a pop). I've probably watched it hundreds of times, and I would sit right down in front of the tv this very second and watch it again.

I know there are a bunch of you whippersnappers who weren't old enough, or possibly not even inexistence at all, when it first came out.
If that's the case, treat yourself. Go.

I've got a good buddy with a big doctor bill due to an emergency and I'd like to help her out, so I'm opening a small number of commissions slots. (still have one to do for Aether but I'm finally making progress on that, so yah)

Going rate is $35 a slot. These will be full color digital, sized so you can print them out (8x11, 300dpi).
More than one character? Sure, fine! Naughty stuff? Bring it on! No child porn, poop or animal abuse but otherwise you're probably good. If you watch me you probably already know the sort of things I'm decent at drawing so know you'll probably be disappointed if you want, say, robots or busty women, but hey, artists need to be challenged so we'll see.

If there's any interest I'll open some more slots up after these are finished.

Slot 1:  Aryte
Slot 2:  JasonWerefox
Slot 3:  sandcastler

Thanks for looking!

I've got Cetetic here and my talon dug in deep, so don't expect to see much from me for a while.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ten#p/u/83/tQMGkeV5qIE

How to Train Your Dragon, done live on stage with giant Walking With Dinosaurs style puppets! It looks amazing.



From the Brisbane Times:
(there will be) at least 24 dragons for a show that will include acrobats and aerial artists, projections and flying creatures. The five-tier set will be backed by a 60-metre screen and the action will unfold on 1000 square metres of stage studded with projectors to provide an immersive experience. . . . ”DreamWorks didn’t want us to be the same as the film. They wanted us to create something new and magical . . . It’s a very different sort of cast and DreamWorks have been very supportive of that.”

So it finally popped up On Demand and I got to see it months after the rest of the world.

Overall it was pretty good. The story was very basic, hero's journey stuff. I used to watch a lot of Westerns as a kid, but the genre doesn't really interest me - still, I was able to catch a lot of references to the classics (although I'm sure I missed a ton of others). Oddly enough, no reviewer seems to have noticed the parallels with Dead Man, another period piece in which Johnny Depp play a hapless innocent who accidentally becomes the stuff of legends. Dead Man happens to be on my short list of best movies ever, so that gives this movie some brownie points in my book. The standard plot was lightened up with some good in-jokes and surreal touches, like how the townsanimals were very blase about the giant eyeball in the tunnels under their town. Seriously, what was that, Cthulhu? The scene that really made me LOL was the banjo version of Ride of the Valkyries. Inspired.

The voice cast was uniformly excellent. Apparently there was no mo-cap involved, but the actors did perform their lines while actually moving around in a room rather than being isolated in front of a mic, and the animators clearly were inspired by the performances. The design was a little weird, it was nice to see characters that weren't aggressively cutesy, quite the opposite, everyone looked stinky and full of fleas. At first Rango's lopsided face was driving me crazy to look at, but I got used to it eventually (although it was odd the designers would give him perfectly accurate teeth and then generic lizard feet instead of distinctive chameleon toes, but whatever, I'm being a nerd). The only really hideous character was Beans, with her weird hair, giant bulging bloodshot eyes and creepy little human mouth. I guess the designers were trying to make her look "pretty" but she ended up looking like a hideous mutant freakmonster. It reminded me of Burton's Planet of the Apes where they gave the lead ape lady a freakish half-human face and make-up, apparently so it would be less creepy she had the hots for the human hero, but it backfired terribly.

The CGI was very impressive, the movie was full of realistic and extraordinarily rendered textures. It actually got a bit distracting, like for example the old mole-man played by Harry Dean Stanton. It not only looked eerily like Stanton but with an, um, flaccid whatsit for a nose, but I got so fascinated by all the wrinkles and sunburn and the long floaty whiskers I kind of lost track of what was going on several times. Not a bad thing, but I would love to get a copy so I could pause it and just drink in all the details.

So all in all it was enjoyable. I'd watch it again.

So my boss tells me this story today about her good friend who went into labor while taking her bar exam, and FINISHED THE EXAM before calmly notifying the proctor she was undergoing active labor. According to my boss this admirable sang-froid is completely typical of her friend, and man alive, if she can pass an exam while giving birth she's gonna make a hell of a lawyer.

I got home and the story's all over the internet, here's one article: http://abovethelaw.com/2011/07/outs.....y-right-after/

It tickled me to death to read this, since I already heard the inside scoop.

Welp, I've finished another book cover. Feeling very accomplished, and very tired.
To celebrate, have a bunch of cat videos!

Here's the book trailer from the last cover!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2i_r7XusJ4

My birthday's coming up in about a week, in case anyone wants to get me a diesel-powered robotiger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMaS4pB9rw

You'd think riding on an elephant would protect you from tigers. You would be wrong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VMLK9_HJ44

The Cat Piano - super awesome animated short narrated by Nick Cave! If you haven't seen it yet, now you have: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj4RBmU-PIo

Grab the Cats, the hot new video game sensation from Russia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2RqVUjwxdM

"Hair Balls" pilot (skip this one if you're bothered by cartoon gore): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-NnYgfz8Po

A stop-motion animated cat of the future, the Striger (skip ahead to 1:30): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM0m7dGQ-Fc

Tommy the Cat, Primus + Tom Waits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4OhIU-PmB8

Koko and her kitten (you may want to chop onions near the end of this): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqTUG8MPmGg

Meow by Cyriak - dancing zombie kitties take over: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNwCojCJ3-Q

"Get me a box of kittens, stat!": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ1mYHWlnNA

The Great Cat Family, brought to you by Walt Disney circa 1956: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXvuUZ4C1VI

The demon cat (Clancy Brown) my favorite monster from Adventure Time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9_iQ1FSnp8

Thundercats cussing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftU5GfORvH8

The Cat with Hands (creepy): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFvfFiQ2fjQ

DEVO's cat listening party. Lucky unimpressed cats: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVLebnwKAkM

Cat Burglar - ok, this one is a bit of a stretch, but that's one of my favorite actors as the cat burglar so I'm gonna add it anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxZeopeGwW0

I'm away from home this wknd and left my sleeping pills at home, so having lost the ability to sleep I've been watching goofy movies all night. This is easily the goofiest of them was "Goliath and the Dragon", but one interesting thing is does have is a practical centaur suit with moving legs. I've never seen that before, and it actually doesn't look half-bad considering the era (1960's). Now I'm sitting here watching a special on Harry Potter's visual effects and seeing how much was done with CGI, and it makes me wonder what the movies would have looked like in "the old days". I've always been fascinated by cinematic special effects, and

You can get an idea of what that would look like from watching the "premakes" by "WhpisEyevan" on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/whoisey.....nd=23&ob=5 He's cut together old movies to make trailers for modern films as they would have looked in that era. The Ghostbusters and Up ones are particularly nice. Kevin the bird from up is represented by the Diatryma animated by stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen in "The Mysterious Island", and likely that's how a lot of monster effects would have been achieved.

I've always been fascinated by cinematic special effects, and it's interesting seeing CGI be invented and sort of take over in my lifetime. I appreciate the work that goes into it - I took a course in computer animation and even doing the simplest stuff can be a hideous struggle. There's no button you can push and just add an effect. But I also think moviemakers have become too quick to say "this will need to be CG because we could never do it practicaly". Pre-CGI writers, directors and special effects artists had to work around the limitations of what they could do, and this forced them to be more creative in some ways.

Still, oddly, looking back there seem to be so many missed opportunities. For example, I'm really surprised no one ever used stop-motion to do a werewolf transformation effect. The Wolf Man did it with lap dissolves, and not only was the design slavishly copied for the next 40 years, the effect was too. I wonder if automatically defaulting to CGI now is stifling creators now in the same way.

They're remaking EVIL DEAD.

Sam Raimi isn't directing. Bruce Campbell is "involved" but not starring. It's going to be written by the hack who wrote "Juno".

They're remaking EVIL DEAD.

Sam Raimi isn't directing. Bruce Campbell is "involved" but not starring. It's going to be written by the hack who wrote "Juno".

I just realized that next month will be my fourth year on FA.
On the day itself I probably won't be around - I have naughty business I will be preoccupied with - but I feel like I should do something to mark the occasion.

Any ideas on how to celebrate?



Also, my birthday is at the end of the month and that dinosaur park is still on the market, hint hint.
I'd be happy with just the 8-foot stegosaurus, though :)

The cryptid photo contest over at io9.com was pretty damn shameful - a bunch of common bugs, a blurry picture of a tree.

But then there's this: http://fastcache.gawkerassets.com/a.....itecheetah.jpg

A nearly spotless cheetah!

Yeah, it's pretty much  rathacat's Ratha in real life! How cool is that?!