The AVGN posted a video on his site about live action Ninja Turtles and, well, I just had to share this moment from a horrible straight-to-VHS thing called Turtle Tunes. He might have been above making a joke about it. I'm not. X)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBL8.....mp;amp;t=16m0s

Michelangelo "just wants to get off," apparently.

They said it, not me!!

Oh sure, they want you to believe that they meant get off the carousel, but no. Look at Mikey's perverted expression. And what the heck is he doing to those poles anyway?

I'm putting out an A.P.B. for anyone who knows NixRubi (Nixus). I'm not sure if he has an account on FA or not. He is a brown dragon and, in the past, I've drawn some Battletoads fanart for him. I haven't heard from him in quite a while and I'm wondering if anyone might know how he is doing. The reason I ask is because the last I heard, he was currently deployed in Afghanistan and when I learned about this, I decided to cheer him up by drawing him a sweet Battletoads pin-up. But that was back in January and unfortunately I haven't been able to share this gift because it seems he hasn't been on-line ever since.

I can't imagine how things must be over there, and maybe he hasn't contacted anyone since then based on the circumstances. But if you might know how I can find him, or if he's okay, please let me know.

Concerning my most recent posting, I think it's unanimous: Sonic Underground sucked.

Really, the Brady Hedgehogs angle - where they all play in a band and sing awful songs - would be bad enough. But then the Mario cartoons had the singing Koopa Kids which were also ear bleedingly bad. No, I think that Jaleel White as the voice of all three hedgehogs - including the girl - was the icing on the cake. And the girl sounds the most like Urkel in Family Matters. How did that work? Was his Urkel voice so compelling that DIC couldn't resist? I mean, here's a show where they had Maurice LaMarche - who voices everything under the sun - and he's regulated to just one character. What you get is an earful of Urkel. When the hedgehogs are talking back and forth, it sounds like a one-man conversation.

Then you had Sleet and Dingo, the Bebop and Rocksteady of this series. Sleet, if I remember correctly, was the brainy wolf and Dingo was... well, he was probably a Dingo. I'm not sure because his design was so atrocious. Both of them looked like they belonged in a different cartoon because they were quite detailed compared to everyone else. Dingo could be transformed into anything Sleet wanted him to be, which was just bizarre. Sleet needed to get somewhere fast? He turns his comrade into a motorcycle. What the heck? Still, these two and their constant failures with Robotnik are more entertaining to watch that the hedgehogs.

My memory of the older Sonic cartoons is admittedly hazy. I know the basic outline of SatAM, but I couldn't tell you about any individual adventure. I do think it's awesome how Robotnik had already taken over the world and the Freedom Fighters were trying to take it back. How many kids cartoons start with the villain having already won? The interesting part was that it took a concept that was very subtle in the games - freeing enslaved woodland creatures - and built a whole environmental story out of it.

And the other one, which was just insane, had no plot anyway. It was obviously from the Tex Avery / Ren and Stimpy school of design and didn't care about making sense. It was total anarchy! But to my little mind, I thought it was funny.

As for Sonic X, the characters all look right. I like the Sonic Adventure look more than the pudgy classic look anyway. But again you have a few awful voices and, surprisingly, a lot of humans. Look, I can understand having some humans in Sonic's world. Robotnik, after all, is supposed to be human. But this whole idea of Sonic and friends entering our world is just bizarre. I'm sorry, but when you see the President of the United States having a negotiation with Rouge the Bat, you have to stop and ask yourself "How the heck did we get here?" And they spend a lot of time with the humans too. Chris is essentially Richie Rich - he gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it. His infinitely wealthy parents are chronically absent from his life. He's raised by the maid and the butler and the inventor grandfather who looks like the lovechild of Doc Brown and Doc Wily. And why do I know all this? Cause it's all the show is about. Family relations. Poor Sonic just mopes on the rooftop all day wanting to go on an adventure, but no, there is trouble brewing in the Thorndyke household! Gotta' focus on that!

It's kind of like The Lost World, you know? We came to see the dinosaurs. Why are we spending 30 minutes following a man who runs into the jungle to take a pee?

The demo for Sonic Generations came out today. It's just one level - Green Hill - played in the classic side scrolling mode. It looks fantastic. It controls super responsively. The music is spot on - a modest remix of Green Hill Zone's theme.

But you know what's off? The framerate. At first I thought maybe my TV had a lousy refresh rate, and I'm sure it's not fantastic, but Sonic 4 was certainly playable. Anyhow, I was moving slowly around the starting point and it seemed to me like it was running below 30fps even with nothing going on. Same was true of other parts where I'd stop to admire the view. You can imagine how this affects running.

So yeah, that's definitely something they need to hammer out. I don't care what they sacrifice to do it - they need to get this running at a consistent high framerate! :)

Speaking of Sonic, I should have something new coming soon. It's taken a little while between pics, with a number of false starts and unfinished work, but I like how this current one is turning out.

I hadn't, until recently, seen Titan A.E. the whole way through. Not a bad movie. I like the hybrid 2D-3D animation style and wish more movies did that besides this, The Iron Giant, and a couple others. The turncoat captain was very abrupt. I welcome a plot twist, and it definitely made the plot interesting, but I felt it came out of the blue. Bluth's movies are weird like that. Most of the time, he smacks you over the head with the villain. [There's no question when you see the Knights of the Round Table in Quest for Camelot who the villain is. The tall imposing guy with hair like Riff Raff from Rocky Horror? Yeah, he's probably the bad guy.] (Edit: Yeah, and that's not a Bluth movie, silly Kyo). Jenner in The Secret of NIMH is less so, but still painfully obvious. But in Titan A.E., the captain turns with nothing to set it up. To his credit, Bluth sets up Preed as the obvious villain and uses him as a red herring, but still.

This seems to lead to a giant plot hole. If the captain was under the employ of the Drej from the beginning, why in the world did we have the battle at the cafeteria at the start of the movie? The Drej were there! Wouldn't it have been way easier to kidnap Cale, take him back to the Drej ship, and extract whatever information they wanted from the ring? Cale doesn't know any better at that point. He doesn't know what the ring does. Instead, the captain gains his trust (and ours), convinces him he has powers, tells him what the ring is all about. He's the one who empowers Cale, basically. And then he turns against him? Huh?

After the plot twist happens, I thought to myself, "These aliens are too clever for their own good!" :)

Still, from the twist comes welcome unpredictability. And it also created a neat mechanic where you wonder how long the members of the captain's crew will go along with it.

Okay, folks. A memory just popped into my head and I can't identify it. It was a cartoon, from the Looney Tunes era, with a rather fat mouse who wore a red jacket and a black top hat who traveled around the world with a smaller mouse. I think his vehicle of choice was a hot air balloon, but it could have been a magic carpet.

His most distinctive characteristic was that he spoke in a voice that I think is supposed to be a send up of W.C. Fields. He would say things like "Go away kid, you bother me" and speak in a nasally tone that ended sentences with "my boy." Course, that's a pretty common parody, so I hope that the fact that he's a jetsetting mouse helps identify him.

Now, I have no idea if this was Looney Tunes (if so, it's a character who must have been extremely short lived), Hanna-Barbera, or possibly someone else.

Much to my surprise, I've been unable to find anything about this.

A few years before the abysmal Dino Squad, DiC was fooling around with another animated idea involving dinosaurs. Dinosaur Island was a 2002 release that tried to combine the then-popular Survivor series with the fumes of Jurassic Park III. It's about a reality show were a group of four teenagers are supposed to go and survive on a remote island. Unfortunately for them, their plane crashes and they end up on another island which turns out to be the lost world - an island of dinosaurs. The teenagers, of course, don't get along at all, but eventually overcome their differences to escape, yadda yadda yadda.

Oh, and there are cavemen on this island too. Because, you know, it's scientifically proven that humans and dinosaurs totally co-existed. These cavemen are blue for some reason and really hate our protagonists because the first thing they want to do is sacrifice them to the gods. Silly cavemen!

Remember in Code Lyoko how all the characters had massive foreheads? This movie has a similar thing with necks. Once I noticed it, I couldn't stop fixating on how everyone had a giraffe neck and a tiny head atop it. And there are many obnoxious "smash cuts" when they transition from one scene to the next. It may have been 2002, but we still hadn't left the 90s behind.

It's on Netflix instant watch. It's 80 minutes long, and you'll probably notice every one of them. X)

Nickelodeon has posted a teaser for their TMNT revival series in 2012:
http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/03/10/t.....es-nickelodeon

It's... interesting. Obviously, it doesn't reveal much. It does confirm that it will be CG animated. In the best light, the characters look like 3D versions of the comic book counterparts.

Myself, I grew up with the cheesy 1980s cartoon and I've never been a fan of the edgy serious direction of the last series back in the 2000s. I know that was closer to the original tone of the comic, but I think that the serious episodes of the 2000s series are really boring. It's really hard for me to relate to tales of feudal Japan and shogun warriors.

I don't know what the 2012 series will do in terms of tone. But given how awesome Turtles Forever was, they have a tough act to follow.

As we brace ourselves for another fun-filled and disorienting time warp for Daylight Savings, I feel the need to show you this chart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:D.....bdivisions.png

In blue: Countries that observe DST.
In orange: Countries that once did, and now don't
In red: Countries that never did

So, really, it's just us, Europe, and all of Russia who still buy into this silly idea. The rest of the world doesn't bother with it! China did it, and doesn't now. Neither does India. Neither does most of South America and Australia for that matter. And here in the states, Arizona is apparently our lone representative of sanity.

Can we stop doing it? Pretty please? It's dumb.

If you use Gimp and you have a Wacom tablet, you've probably noticed that Gimp doesn't always notice you have it hooked up. It's bugged me for a while. Today I finally learned what the deal is.

For whatever reason, it matters how you clicked on the Gimp icon to launch the program. If you used your mouse, it won't detect the tablet. If you used the tablet, all is well. I know that makes absolutely no sense.

So what you need to do is use your tablet to launch Gimp, then in Edit -> Preferences, go to Input Devices and click on Configure Extended Input Devices. If you used the tablet to launch Gimp, you should see entries for the Wacom tablet here. If you used the mouse, it will say there are no extended devices. So, assuming you see the Wacom stuff, close that menu and click on the Save Input Device Settings Now button and press OK.

Now, Gimp will see the tablet whether you launched with it or not.

I finally found that Kung Fu Dino Posse is on Netflix Instant. Has this even aired in the States? I know it's made the rounds seemingly everywhere else, but I can't remember ever seeing it on TV here. Probably because it's not edumacational so Saturday morning won't have anything of it. Which is too bad, because it's way more fun than that painful Dino Squad.

But yeah, this is a pretty silly cartoon so far. It reminds me a lot of Samurai Pizza Cats, in that it's clearly dubbed in a goofy way and the lips never match up. Although it must have been equally crazy in whatever the original language was. I mean, a mutant Dutch-Boy-asaurus?

In this timeline, all dinosaurs were anthropomorphic and had human-like mannerisms before the coming of the Ice Age, and they remained frozen up until our near future when an accident defrosted them. Four of the dinosaurs - a T-Rex, Triceratops, Stegosaur and a Pterodactyl - band together and hide in the basement of a museum where they learned kung fu from TV and fight evil. The other two, Velociraptor brothers, intend to take over the world by using some kind of fossil reanimation thingamajig invented by this kid who works at the museum and who is also kind of a human liaison to the good dinos. More likely than not, their plan succeeds and they reanimate the giant villain of the week which the good dinos have to fight. For some bizarre reason, the good dinos have the ability to go all Voltron on us if they all collide with each other at exactly 88 mph (1.21 jiggawatts not necessary), transforming into a ninja Godzilla-like thing for some kaiju action.

Why? Who cares! The story obviously doesn't! It makes no sense. But then why should something called Kung Fu Dino Posse make sense anyway? XD

Wow, this is strange. I actually have a backlog of pictures to finish. I drew and CG'ed the characters and then didn't fuss over the background before moving onto the next. Weird.

Meanwhile, winter decided to have one last hurrah with a few flakes falling around here. Nothing major. I love the way snow quiets the ambient noise outside when it falls.

Two sworn enemies have to put aside their differences and work together to stop a greater threat.

It's a trope as old as time itself, and yet it's one of those tired old chestnuts that braindead people who write kids movies love to trot out. Yogi Bear is the latest in a long line of these. Even though I never liked Yogi Bear growing up, I distinctly remember that Ranger Smith was Yogi Bear's adversary. For every "smarter than the average bear" scheme Yogi had, Smith was the foil and the wrench in the gears.

So why then would Yogi work with Ranger Smith to save the park from the EVIL land developers? Because that dull plot apparently gets you $80 million to make a movie.

Now, granted, this is Yogi Bear. It's an incredibly flimsy premise to start with. But why in the world are movie producers so compelled to rewrite the rules of what tiny plot existed? Could you not write a plot where Ranger Smith was the bad guy? Was that just too much to digest?

It's like that Tom and Jerry movie where they sing. Why? Tom and Jerry are supposed to be mute. That's kind of the schtick. And yet the first thing Hollywood must have thought was "We can't have that! We know better! We'll give them celebrity voices!" And thus it was so!

What's next? The Coyote signing a peace accord with the Roadrunner to stop ACME? Where's my $80 million? XD

I swear, every time I see the box art for Kinectimals... I think of  zen

http://images.google.com/images?q=Kinectimals+box

Every now and then, the raptor gets an appetite for katsu. And given how the teriyaki places around here are always super busy during the workweek, a great time to hit them is on the weekend.

But you better have that hankering on Satuday, cause despite all of the teriyaki places - and there are at least a dozen within a three mile radius, I swear - every last one is closed on Sunday.

Now, I know that most teriyaki shops are little mom and pop operations, and everyone needs a break sometime, but how did they all agree that it was Sunday? I mean, wouldn't the one teriyaki shop open on Sunday totally mop up? No competition! XD

Did anyone see that new poster for the Yogi Bear movie? The one with Yogi Bear standing behind Boo-Boo?

http://www.google.com/images?q=yogi+bear+poster

Maybe it's just my furry mind, but between their expressions, their positioning, and that tagline "Great Things Come In Bears"... it's just so wrong! XD

Coinstar machines let you convert loose change into cash for a fee. The largest transaction made by one of these machines was a man in Alabama who converted $13,000... in pennies.

He apparently kept the 1.3 million pennies in 55-gallon drums. Happy to get some publicity, Coinstar sent a dump truck to collect them, which got stuck in the mud hauling the 4.5 ton load. X)

Sitting in the warm light of a teriyaki joint sipping egg flower soup as I look out the windows and see the gray sky and rain falling for the first time in months as Sister Christian plays on the radio.

Oh yes, I think I'm in my happy place. <3

There's an outfit called The Asylum whose entire schtick involves making "mockbusters." Basically, these are cheap B-movie knockoffs of popular movies. Snakes on a Plane becomes Snakes on a Train, Transformers becomes Transmorphers, and The Day the Earth Stood Still becomes The Day the Earth Stopped. You get the idea.

All of the movies are uniformly horrendous and would even give SyFy Originals a run for their money, though they can make for great riffing fodder if you are Netflixing with a friend on Xbox Live. But I think what makes them so awful is that they play the material completely straight. Everyone is stonefaced and serious, as though the B-movie has actually deluded itself into thinking it's the same as the Hollywood blockbuster it's ripping off. And I don't mean this in a so-awful-it's-awesome Ed Wood sort of way. Because Plan 9 from Outer Space is awesome. *alien salute*

How different would these movies be if they just embraced the corny low budgetness of it all and actually emphasized the mock part of mockbuster. Wouldn't there be a market for a movie that makes fun of a blockbuster? Come on, admit it, doesn't Michael Bay deserve to be ripped a new one after Transformers 2? I think some of the best B-movies know exactly what they are and revel in this. :)

I remember when I first played No Mercy in Left 4 Dead a couple years ago. What was so funny about it? That I had planned for a mod that was eerily similar to it!

A subway was going to drop Freeman off at the base of a hospital. After making his way through the platform and station, he'd then trek through the hospital and at some point wait for an elevator. He'd make it to the top floor, which was unfinished with drywall and scaffolding (I had F.E.A.R. on the mind at the time), and then confront a gunship on the rooftop.

Course, no one would believe me, right? ^_^;

So after I got through No Mercy, I thought to myself - I'm sure glad I didn't go through with that idea. Because that would have been really funny and people would have probably accused me of ripping off No Mercy. >_>

Incidentally, I know I haven't posted anything in a bit. I'm using the free time to get a pretty aggressive head start on my next mapping project. I should settle back down in the next week or so.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. My Xbox 360 pulled the good ol' RROD trick. And because it's from 2006, it's out of warranty.

Conveniently, Microsoft announced and released the new Xbox 360 Slim at E3, but there's a little problem. See, just to be jerks about it, they replaced their proprietary hard drive design with a new proprietary hard drive design. So I have a dead Xbox I can't turn on to do a traditional USB transfer and an HD that I apparently can't connect into the new system. Brilliant! *groans*

I love Photoshop, I really do. But there's one quirk that drives me up the wall: Undo versus Step Backward.

Photoshop's Undo works like no other Undo I've ever known. Basically, the same hotkey, Ctrl-Z, toggles between Undo and Redo. So, if you press Ctrl-Z repeatedly, all you get is Undoing and Redoing the same thing, which doesn't seem all that useful. In most programs, Undo just keeps undoing your work and Redo is mapped to another key.

Photoshop's Step Backward command, Alt-Ctrl-Z, is more like your typical Undo. They even have a counterpart, Step Forward, as Shift-Ctrl-Z.

That's all well and good, except for one super annoying quirk with Step Backward. It doesn't remember layer selection. Say you have Layer 1 and Layer 2. You do nothing on Layer 1, and then select Layer 2 and scribble a line. If you Step Backward, the line goes away and you're back on Layer 1. Why? Shouldn't switching layers count as a step? Heck, switching blending modes counts as a step, why wouldn't switching layers?

The first half is quite good. It's New York City, slowly being reclaimed by nature, and it appears that our protagonist, Will Smith, and his dog are the only two things still alive as a result of a cancer vaccine with an accidental and nasty side effect of turning humans into zombies. Smith is a virologist, although I never understood what his role was in the virus' creation, and he seeks to find a cure while looking for survivors in the bleak wasteland. For their part, the zombies suffer from a debilitating weakness for UV radiation and cannot go out in the daylight.

The second half throws all of that aside and veers sharply into a dull, typical direction. We meet up with a couple other survivors from out of nowhere, we learn that there are far more survivors than we first believed, and that the kid survivor really likes Shrek. I hate movies-in-movies, and Shrek in a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland feels painfully out-of-place. The survivors are on a road trip to a camp up north, but they accidentally lure the zombies to Smith's house and a final fight ensues.

The alternate ending is, strangely, exactly how I thought the movie was going to end. Pithy, with a "you are the monster you are fighting" moral. Instead, the real ending is pretty "meh."

It's too bad the movie has such a goofy second half, because the first half is actually well done, especially considering that it's just Smith and a dog propping up the whole movie. It never veers into the realm of being a bad movie, but it's a shame it doesn't end as strongly as it begins.

Alright, I'll admit, I finally saw Avatar. And my opinion? I could sum it up in two words: relentlessly conventional.

Was there ever a point in the movie where you didn't know what was going to happen next? You've heard the story a hundred times before. You knew what each character's role was going to be from the minute they showed up. The greedy corporate douchebag. Sarge from Quake 3. The girl who doesn't trust the protagonist but will inevitably end up in bed with him by the end of the movie. The die-hard leader who will lead his army right off the edge and never look back. The nervous protagonist with an epiphany of gold.

Maybe you didn't see it with blue furries versus humans, but you've seen this same conflict before. It's Captain Planet. The infallible tree-huggers versus the infinitely evil military-industrial complex. It's not exactly subtle.

The only front where the movie works, I think, is the effects angle. It's easy to see how their digital make-up is as important an advancement as the make-up in the original Planet of the Apes. But, at least in this case, there's simply no heart behind the effects.

Actually, it's made me want to go and watch District 9 again because I don't think I gave that movie a fair shake the first time I saw it. For my money, the Prawns were far more compelling aliens. Possibly because District 9 liked to understate things. It didn't let the special effects replace the story. It was an allegory just the same, but there was something about it that clicked better.

The movie 9. Hmm.

Well, um, it looks great. The robots are the stuff nightmares are made out of. Think of the mechanical spider in Toy Story with the doll head and you're halfway there. The main characters are all robotic ragdolls and they wander in a devastated world of corpses and burnt-out buildings.

Oh, did I mention it's definitely not a kid's movie?

It's dark and bleak and never lets up. And maybe this is the movie's greatest flaw - it's unrelentingly bleak. There's no hope. There's no happy ending. There's no dark humor. It just plays that one dystopian note for all its worth and doesn't pause for any other emotion. So, it comes across as a single-minded movie. The overly efficient dialog doesn't help either. It's "We have to go there!" / "Wait, you can't, it's too dangerous!" / "But I have to because the storyboard says so!" repeated for the entire movie.

EDIT: It's actually based on a short student film you can watch on YouTube. Save yourself the hour and watch this version instead - it's better. Honest! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_zQAGXaQgc