So here in Canada we had our second round of Family Day. Do you have a Family Day holiday where you live? I really do think it's odd that it takes place in the middle of winder and not during a warmer time of the year. Meh... whaddagonado.

So today we, as a family, went for a nice long walk, had a picnic lunch in the playroom, I made a huge bowl of popcorn and we later went out again to play at a local park with a HUGE climbing centre with slides, swings and everything. Then we had nice pork chop dinner. Over all it was a very nice day.

So what did you do on family day?

Today we rolled out the BBQ and had the first one of the season. Just so you can get a better picture of this. Imagine me standing out in the cold with no jacket on, flipping burgers and cooking hotdogs... and it's snowing.

Ahhh yeah. Good times. How early do you bring out the BBQ? Or do you Q all year round regardless of the weather?

It's Valentines Day!

Now I ask you, on this day of days are you far away from your loved one? Wishing you could be there to gently caress and massage those oh so tender and sensitive areas of your special someone? Well, now you can, thanks to some clever thinking on... someones part. Because there is now an Xbox Community Game where you can control the rumble feature of someone else's controller via the internet... and they can control yours. Oh yeah... each player can control the others intensity and speed and it also supports vioce chat too. So you can hear how good you are at pushing your lovers buttons. Just make sure that both you and your partner both have an Xbox 360 and an internet connection and you're ready to go. Oh... and a towel for your controller when you're done. ^_^

Cost is 200 Microsoft points. I wonder if you can control two controllers in the same room on one Xbox though.

So according to science, human/animal hybrids just won't work. One Robert Lanza, scientific director of Advanced Cell Technologies and his team have been at it, trying to find alternate ways of getting stem cells. It's all about taking the nucleus of an egg and swapping it out with another nucleus (animal or human). If done right the egg splits as if it where fertilized by sperm and start to become an embryo. But in the ones that are part human and part animal, the embryo stop dividing after a certain point. Apparently, the genes in the egg start to get switched off if another nucleus is planted in side it. Sort of like mother natures fail safe for this sort of thing.

The scary thing is that experiments like this have been going on for decades and number in the thousands. But we all know it's only a matter of time before someone get's it right. The biggest problem I have with all of this is that these new human animal hybrids will only be used as spare parts. They'll never know a real life. Plus how scary would it be to know they you're the only one of your kind, only made to push science forward.

So yeah... I can't say that I'm a fan of this. It does make me sad that the prospect of cats girls though will never be a reality.... sigh...

What's you take on this?

Guh... I think the suck is finally over.

This week has been nothing but stress. Let's see... so far this week the breaks in the van failed while my wife was driving it. Luckily they failed but then started to work again so she's okay. So the van went back to Canadian Tire so we could yell at them because they put the new break pads on in December. So apparently what happened is the emergency break line snapped and caught something which caused the regular breaks to fail. But according to the dealership, Canadian Tire probably opened and adjusted something that they shouldn't have which caused the emergency breaks to do what they did. We where going to confront them on it but our dealership told us that their is no proof that Canadian Tire did anything wrong because it is possible for something like this to happen... just highly unlikely. Oh and the best part was when the guy at Canadian Tire told us that your emerg break line can snap if not used enough. We told him we use ours to which he then said, "it can also snap if used too much".

...

So yeah... fuck you Canadian Tire and the $500 you cost me for your screw up.

Let's see... next we got a huge amount of rain in my area and a super quick thaw. No... you don't understand. We pretty much lost all our snow in the course of one day or so. Add that to my basement and you get another flood. "But, Joe" you say "don't you have a sump pump?". Yup... but it died. When I don't know. I think it's been dead for about a year. See the hole that the sump pump sits in is crazy deep, so I'm guessing that during the other parts of the year there isn't enough water collected in the hole to flood anything. So yeah, had to go buy a new sump pump with money from my brother in law's pay check. Frig...

Mix that up with arguments with my wife on my birthday AND the next day too and it all adds up to a suck ass week.

I hope it's done now because I know I am. I hope you all have been having a better week then me. Not that that's hard to do at this point.

The suck can seriously stop any time now. It's late and I'm tired... I'll let you all in what's been happening tomorrow.

good night.

what's the worst birthday you ever had?

32 years ago today, at Belleville General Hospital in Ontario Canada, I was born. It was also a year today that I started my self imposed challenge to make a post every day for a year. Or at least on the days that I could make a post, because I knew there where going to be times when I just when I just wouldn't be able to. Does anyone remember the reason for me doing this? Well, let's refresh.

I'm am very much terrified of death, and when I was around 6 I never thought that I would live past 31. Probably because to a 6 year old 31 seems crazy old. Like, need a cane to walk and stuff kind of old. But as that age of 31 grew close I began to get nervous. Maybe I saw forward and predicted my own end. Things like that do happen from time to time. So I decided to post every day so that if I did die, you all would know it since the posts would stop. But they never did. Was this all hog wash on my part? Probably, but in the end of it all I'm actually able to look back on this year and have a pretty good written journal on what I did or discovered. And you all came along for the ride.

So what are the memorable posts made over the last year? Do you have a favorite? Some of mine where the point blank question ones. Like "what did you have for dinner" and such. I've loved reading the answers to them. ^_^ I think I say that my total favorite though was a response to the second post. It was "You have the kind of kick ass birthday I'd give 10 years of my life for." It really made me think about what I have and how lucky I am to have it. Out of all that was written last year, this was it for me and I'll never forget it.

Let's see what else. Ummm... oh, I've started working on commissions again. I really must apologize for having them fall so far behind. If you've messaged me about current ones or asking about me taking yours on and I haven't replied, I am truly sorry. I for one am horrible for responding to emails and such and I don't mean to be a dick. But as I said, they're back on the menu and here's hoping that they all go over smoothly.

I guess that's about it. Oh, I went and looked up things that happened on Feb in history to see if there was anything cool. I didn't find too much except...

1822 - Haiti invades the newly founded Dominican Republic.
1942 - Year-round Daylight saving time is re-instated in the United States as a wartime measure to help conserve energy resources.
1964 - The Beatles make their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing before a "record-busting" audience of 73 million viewers.

and others thanks to Wikipedia. Meh, nothing to exciting.

Oh, I did want to thank Andy bunny for the picture he made for me. It's awesome and so is he. Thanks Andy! You rock ^_^

Yay! Tomorrow is my birthday! The line will start to the left and the table in side is for gifts. ^_^

I'll refrain from getting all talky now and save it for tomorrow. Dang... that means I'll have to write a great post for tomorrow. I better start thinking about it now. I'll have a lot to cover. It should be fun. Is there anything people out there would like to hear about?

If you could live in one time period for a whole year, which would it be? I think I'd pick the 50's.

From all the pictures I've read about and stories I've heard or read about, it sounds like an interesting time to be in. The one thing that I like about pictures from the 50's is that everyone looks good. I mean, they really look good. It was expected that you got dressed up to do things regardless of what you where doing or if you where going out of the house. Unlike today where you'll see the trashiest looking people shopping around.

It's really a hard question to answer when you think about it. I mean, you'll most likely look at each time period though rose coloured glasses. You'll have to remember that in what ever time you live in, you'll have to endure that periods issues and problems. I'm Native so I'm sure I'd have to deal with discrimination and such. That would suck.

But yeah, I think I would love a chance to love in the 1950's at my current age. I think it would be fun. Not sure what I'd do for work though since video games wouldn't be around. I can animate so I might be able to get in on the early animation industry. Now that would be awesome! ^_^

You're new president has a Wii set up in the east wing of the White House. How damn cool is that? You're President plays games. I wonder how long before you get a full on gamer in the White House? Or our Parliament Building for that matter.

Now that's a leader I'll follow ^_^

So there's a virus going around DA right now. It some how posts a message using your account to a spam site on your friends list. If anyone clicks it it does the same thing to them. Boo... My big question is, who makes these viruses? Who sits around and decides they want to screw with anyone and everyone with a computer? Who? I just don't get it. These people suck and need to find something better to do with their time.

Now excuse me while I do a virus scan on my computer right now.

In a previous entry I talked about what would I do if my kids found my dirty art in house. I said that won't happen (I hope) and others mentioned the internet. It was mentioned that my kids would notice my art style and put 2 and 2 together and BAM-O! All secrets would be reviled. Well, not true, this is the style I paint in for work.

Like night and day...

I love Demakes.

If you don't know what a demake is it's a remake of a game that is purposefully less then the original. The latest demake to hit the tubes is Guitar Hero for the NES called D-Pad Hero. It plays just like the original only you play with your NES game pad, or keyboard if you don't have a hackjob NES pad for you PC... and you play on an emulator. Actually, this EXACT game play is found on SNK vs CAPCOM for the NEO GEO Pocket Color. You can play mini games to unlock moves and one of them is with Felicia doing this type of Dance Dance Revolution game only with a D pad. Anyhoo... D-Pad Hero comes with 6 chip tune songs, one of them being Sweet Child o Mine, which is totally a classic in what ever form it's in.

Since I'm on the topic, I'll point you in the direction of another demake that I love. GoldenEye from the Nintendo 64... on the GameBoy. Yeah! I love the original GameBoy. If I had a wish, it'd be to make a GameBoy game. So this is totally up my alley. I really recommend it to people as it's a solid game and a good challenge. Only thing is it needs more levels.

And that's why I love demakes.

So today was my first day back in studio. How did it go? I was brought up to speed on the projects and which ones I'll be on. Seems as though I'm being pulled in two directs as they want me to be lead artist on a new title AND over see the art on a project that will be finishing soon.

Ahhh... it's great to be needed.

Then I spend the WHOLE FREAK'N DAY installing programs on my PC. My old work station was wiped clean (no back up made ether... suck) and so I had to rebuild what programs I needed. Then I had to uninstall them because they weren't working right... then install different versions... and so forth and so on. Pretty quickly in to it I remembered "oh yeah, I hate setting up computer programs". What seems like it should be something simple ends up being a pain in the ass. Oh, in case you didn't know, the new MSN Messenger is ass ugly and I hate it. I tried to install the previous version but noooooo. Big daddy Microsoft won't let me use an older version. So if you have the previous version my advice it to keep it. Don't upgrade because you can't go back.

Ugh...

Oh well. Tomorrow, I'll be really to go and I'll actually be productive again. I hope.

Today is the first day of February. That means I have 8 more days until my birthday (Feb 9th). If you've been following along, I'd decided to make posts for a whole year, or at least for every day I could. 366 days (leap year) is my goal. Why? Well, it's hard to fully explain but this past year I've been afraid to die. When I was about 6 I couldn't see myself living past the age of 31. Most likely it was due to my young age, but as I got closer to 31 I started to get scared. See, I'm very much afraid to die anyway so this whole deal really put me on edge. But here I am, 8 days away from reaching my a post a day goal and I'm still here.

Yay!

I hope it's been a pretty good ride. I'm sure you've learned more then a little about me over this past year. Maybe I'll do a question and answer/trivia contest at the end of all this. What would I do as a prize though...

Tonight I made myself a root beer float. Mmmmmm tasty, I haven't made myself one sine I was maybe 8 or 9. It's one of those treats that take me back to my childhood. See, it was my cousin that showed me how to make one. She would make them for us when we watched movies. Ahhh, fun times. We would have Coke floats too but the root beer ones where the best.

Do you have any fun treats that take you back?

We've all had gummi bears before right? Well, the other day I was at a Bulk Barrel looking for a snack and I saw some gummi bears I'd never seen before. In addition to the regular red, green, yellow and white(clear) colours there where blue, purple, pink, sky blue and light yellow. Intrigued I bought some to try. To my surprise these gummi bears had actual flavors! Watermelon, banana, strawberry, pineapple and more! They're awesome! I also noticed they had the letter "A" on their tummies. Has anyone else seen these gummies or know the name of the manufacture? I would love to know, because I'm super hooded on them now. I can't go back to eating the regular gummi bears now. It'd be like eating dirt. Okay, well, maybe not really like eating dirt, but honestly, you just can't compare the two.

So the gummi plea goes out. Where do these gummies come from?

Ever play any of the GROW series?

No?

You should. They're quite possibly the most addictive little games out there on the net.

You play them like this. You start with a scene and some objects you can click and place in the scene. Even turn they "level up" and do a little animation. The more objects placed in the scene the more animations will follow. But there is a twist. You want to level up each object to it's MAX level so that means you have to click on the objects in a specific order. The more right you are, the better, cooler and more elaborate the animations get. That's pretty much it really. It's so simple but I can guarantee if you try one you'll keep on playing it until you get it right. I think I pissed away a whole half day when I worked at Gameloft playing these games. I call it R&D. ^_^

Oh, and try this one too, you play with your num pad on side of your key board. It's like a whack a mole/adventure game. It'll keep you playing for hours. I love these games ^_^

Yoshinori Yamagishi is a producer for SquareEnix. For their Star Ocean series to be specific, but he has a secret. He wants to make naughty video games. He actually said so an interview for game site Gpara. He told them...

"Personally, I want to make erotic games... Really. I quietly said to the previous company president "I'd like to make erotic games" to which he retorted loudly, 'NO!'"

I think that's it pretty big of him to come out and say such a thing. I mean, everyone knows this now. I can bet though that after this announcement he's probably had offers to produce at least a couple. I have to admit that I too would love to make adult games... but that's not much of a shock to people now is it. I guess for now I'll have to be happy just playing naughty games. Maybe someday Yoshinori Yamagishi and I will have our dreams come true.

Someday...

So I come home today and discover blood drops on my floor. I point this out to the other adults and we all stop to see who's bleeding. The answer was my beagle Bernard. Apparently he had injured his dew claw and it was now pointing up and bleeding. Not a large amount, but enough to leave blood dots as he walked. The crazy thing is, it looked like it didn't even bother him as he wasn't limping or anything. I quickly got him ready and drove him to the vet. Once there the vet took him behind closed doors and tended to his claw. I was told he didn't rip it off completely, and it will grow back over time. Bernard's upper paw was bandaged up and then we came home.

He's okay but looks funny with his bandage. He seems to show it off to us as if to say "look, I've got a gimpy paw... I deserve a treat. Maybe a taco or a steak or something". Nice try Bernard. It's a good thing I've got pet insurance on him.

If there is one thing I can tell you people it's if you have a pet, get pet insurance. There is nothing worse then having to make a decision about the cost of medical attention for your pet. It's worth every penny you'll put in to it. Seriously.

Got the call from my studio saying thing want me to come back to the studio. Yay! Monday will be my first day back. It'll be nice to be getting a pay check again. I am still nervous about the stability of the studio thought I must admit. I feel like I need to work with one foot out side the door in case I need to bail. Needless to say I'll still be working on bettering my portfolio. But yay for getting back to work.

Now if you excuse me, I'm going to have a Cream Soda to celebrate. ^_^

What did you do today?

My day started with my wife letting me sleep in late (yay!). I them got up and watched Cars with the kids and then took my daughter to a birthday party. After the party we came home where I helped clean up the play room and just puttered around helping out with dinner. Called my Dad when the kids where in the bath and then read stories with my daughter. Soothed my son back to sleep after he woke up then sat on my ass and watched some tv. Then made this post.

How about you? Anything interesting?

Did you have a favorite toy when you where a kid? A toy you had to take ever where. I had a stuffed Ernie and I took him all over the place until one day I dropped him and thought that he got hurt so I never took him out again. I even put a bandage in him to make sure he was okay. That bandage stayed on him for close to 30 years before I took it off. Yup, I still have my Ernie. My daughter has one too that is exactly the same. I need to get my son one now too but it's hard to find. Or maybe a Bert stuffie.

So what was you favorite childhood toy and do you still have it?

I just got done playing a game of Trivial Pursuit 90's edition. My team won ^_^

Playing reminded me that I love board games too and not just video game ones. I loved playing Life as a kid and my Pac Man board game, but my top favorite one was Clue. Man, I could play that for hours. One game that I never got to play was "Scotland Yard". I remember seeing commercials for it as a kid but never got it or even seen it in stores now that I think about it. Other that I owned was this collection of mini travel games called Flipsiders. They where awesome! I had a racing one, a rock tour one, a mall madness one, plus lots more. Ahhh, great memories with those ones. I still have them actually. I should break them out and play them with my daughter.

Do you have any favorite board games?