Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Treasure Island, Florida and the Ramada Inn

Years ago we stayed at the Ramada Inn of Treasure Island, Florida. It was nice, and had a great view of the ocean from our room. I wish I could go further with the images, but Google Streets will only show the street. The Ramada was nice, although the individual working at their gift shop was extremely rude. Ah, the little things I remember.

I think we ate an an IHOP on the island, and one of the things I recall, beyond just how pleasant the environment of the town was, was the number of loud motorcycles roaring past outside, almost all the time. Not sure what the deal is with loud motorcycles, but there seems to be a connection with beach areas (I noticed this with Galveston too.) If I can find my St. John's Pass images, I might post them here.


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Disintegrate

This was an illustration I did for an art class back at Florida State, ages ago. I was as FSU for a couple years studying art, liberal arts, and the general dehumanizing feeling of being in courses with tons of other people. I actually didn't think very highly of FSU, and a large part of why I transferred to Cameron was for smaller class sizes, and to study from teachers who actually gave you the time of day (and didn't just delegate this task to teaching assistants, as happened at FSU.)
Just ranting...

Vintage Cigarette Posters


There's a great collection of ridiculous cigarette posters worth checking out here.

Useless junk




Various explosion images from some of my recent Java game experiments.

A tiny hampster using detached toenails as snowshoes

Another image from the Dad's Toenail book that I drew, based on a story by my friend Andy. The idea here is of a hampster using toenails as snowshoes. Silly stuff.

Eligibility?




I wonder if there's anything to this eligibility issue. This is the first I've actually heard about the eligibility issue, and I think it's kindof like one of those conspiracy-theory things. I found out about this from here.

Landscape!

I painted this landscape years ago for an art class. The lens flare was unintentional when I snapped this picture, but I think it helps improve the picture, actually.

I studied fine art years ago, and although it didn't help my employment situation remotely, it was still an interesting field of study.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Garfish hybrids


A friend of mine was telling me about fishing for these enormous gar fish, and after checking out the site with some images, I wanted to post the link here. These things are huge... and creepy looking!

More exceptional Jan Hammer music

More exceptional Jan Hammer music

Jan Hammer music from Miami Vice

Some music by Jan Hammer that I posted on Youtube. I'm surprised it hasn't been taken down yet. The music was the thing that made this series.

Jon Pertwee - Venusian Katate Master and greatest of all the Doctors

I'm in a strange category in that I think Jon Pertwee, the third Doctor, was the greatest of all the Doctors. I've posted about this before, but I continue to maintain this: Pertwee's Doctor was the best of them all, followed by #4, then #7. I don't consider anything past #7 to be Who.

I remember the first Jon Pertwee Who episode I saw, and here's a Doctor who, unlike Tennant and other lame Doctors, wasn't running from enemies but was actually FIGHTING them! Oh, they had a good thing there, and then came Tom Baker... great Doctor, but the fighting element was all gone.

Anyhow, here's a silly video I made of some of his fighting sequences from DW...

John Calvin still from the old Reformed Fruit video



Just one of the stills from my horrendously stupid Reformed Fruit video. I haven't revisited this in a long time, and I really don't have any intention of doing so.

Friday, June 26, 2009

In case of fire...

fail owned pwned pictures
see more Fail Blog

Argh! Something in my eye!

I've had something stuck in my eye all day. I tried these tips but it hasn't worked yet. I'm gradually going to go through this entire bottle of drops...


How to Remove Something from Your Eye


from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

This is just one of many ways to get something (a stray eyelash, dust, etc.) out of your eye.

Steps


  1. Never rub your eyes when something goes into them.


Grasp and blink method
  1. Grasp only your eyelashes with your fingers and pull your eyelid down over the lower portion of your eye.
  2. Keeping your eyelid closed with your fingers, blink several times and rapidly.
  3. Let go of your eyelid and see if you can find the particle in the lower portion of your eye, or determine if the particle has been cleared from your eye. If not, repeat the above steps.


Follow-on washing method
If you follow steps 1-3 and the particles are still in your eye, try to wash out your eye.
  1. Take a handful of cool water.
  2. Open the afflicted eye and splash water onto your eye.
  3. Once you have done this, dry your eye and blink quickly. If not out yet, repeat once more or seek medical advice.


Tips


  • If you cannot remove the particle from your eye with the method above, seek professional help.
  • Take a strand of hair and gently put into your eye the hair grabs on to dust particles. Try holding it taught with two hands like you would a piece of dental floss and gently pull the middle of the strand down over the particle-- avoiding your actual eye.


Related wikiHows





Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Remove Something from Your Eye. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

RIP Michael Jackson

funny pictures
moar funny pictures

LastFM Profile

I get a kick out of LastFM. Granted, it's not perfect, but I love being able to measure the trends of my bizarre musical interests. John Williams is still in the lead, but there are many other fascinating musicians that I've been enjoying as well.


Gallery of the strange

Bears Swimming - from Orlando Sentinel day on pictures

Sculpture study



I did this charcoal drawing ages ago, based on a bust called "The Damned Man", I think. I did a lot of charcoal on a newsprint-quality paper, then I'd lock it all down with a hairspray. This was a good learning medium, but charcoal is not as forgiving as pencil is, and it's very difficult, I found, to correct mistakes made with the medium.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Very Interesting stuff


Some Scenes Can’t Be Seen Everyday

Posted using ShareThis

I get a kick out of a blog called "My Interesting Files". Although some of the content is definitely NSFW, there are some fantastic and fascinating images posted on this blog.

Strange Dali-inspired painting

























This is the one and only Salvador Dali/surreal painting that I've ever done. It doesn't make any sense to me either.

I'm debating whether or not to see the new Transformers movie. I really was NOT fond of the first one, as it seemed to spend too much time around the HUMAN element of the film, when, if I do to see a movie about transformers, I want to see Autobots and Decepticons duking it out, not Sheaf (er, the kid from the last Indiana Jones film) and the boring subplot involving his character. I would have rather seen the entire film built around the Transformers ALONE.

The trailers for the new Transformers film make all of the robots looks dirty, grimy and breakable. In the cartoon, historically, these robots were all near indestructible! That's how I liked it.
I'll wait for this film to arrive on DVD

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

A really dumb fighter game written in Java

Ages ago I made a fighting game involving elves and obscure film actors, but I've
not bothered to work on this in a long time. Here are a couple of the sprites. I wrote this awful game back before I knew anything about bounding rectangles and what not, so the character gameplay was terrible. I used to have this hosted on my geocities page (back before geocities died) and I need to get these updated and posted again, so that people can see how bad this game was.

An unbelievably strange self portrait
























I did this ink sketch of myself ages ago, as part of the Dad's Toenail book. For one thing, it looks nothing like me. The other thing: it's actually rather disturbing.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Innocence Mission - People in the City

An interesting combination of video footage to a remarkable song by the Innocence Mission (one of my favorite songs by them, from the "Small Planes" album.)

Geronimo!



Native america sketch from years ago, when I was in the height of my interest with pen and ink quills. I used to live in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, so this was likely Geronimo-inspired (a few museums on post had information about Geronimo.)

Nibs and dipping pens are just difficult to control and would often splatter (likely the stylish shape to the left of his head was an ink spill that I converted to a scratchy design...)

The best parts of Star Trek III

Great special effects from a non-CGI age. Particularly 40 seconds into the video. Some of James Horner's finest music.

Amoeba story book


For when, you know, you want to read some stories to an amoeba.

And yes, "amoeba" is misspelled on the book cover. Good stuff.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Rejected map for December Sun site

I put this image map together for my December Sun site but decided against using this. It seems a little too busy, and dscomic is already busy enough.




Totally Looks Like

I get a kick out of "Totally Looks Like", a site I visit from time to time. Sometimes the matches are good, but just as often the matches are a stretch. Here's one that I just put together using the "Look-Alike-Builder" tool on the site. Not sure if it will be used or not, but no big deal if it isn't: I just wanted to try it out.

funny pictures
moar funny pictures

Friday, June 19, 2009

Contentious cantaloupe




One of these days I'll be posting the Reformed Fruit comics here. This is one of the rejected characters: contentious cantaloupe.

Pencilled page from "December Sun"



I don't usually make copies of the pencils that I draw, but instead I do minimum pencils and concentrate most of the details with ink. But in issue #2 of December Sun I made an exception and made an extremely detailed pencilled page. I then scanned this and sharpened it enough with Photoshop trickery that it ALMOST looked like it was inked. But NOTHING without brushes looks inked to me, so this serves as a one-time experiment that I won't do again.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Wilford Brimley sprites



Some sprites from a java game I created years ago, that featured Wilford Brimley jumping around blocks to collect bowls of oatmeal. I've never gotten around to updating it, but one of these days I will.

Ghostbusters video game

I remember getting a kick out of Ghostbusters when I was young, so it's interesting to see the game back again. No doubt my aging (and poorly-supported) Sony VAIO could not handle this, so I checked out some of the clips and the game looks decent (especially the reused Elmer Bernstein music for the library sequence). Of course, the game is lacking a lot of what made the films entertaining, and that's the non-action character interaction. But still, it's interesting to see this back again. I wonder if, 25 years later, enough people are still going to be interested in the franchise?

Spiderman vs.... erm, strange, mechanical thing


Another pencilled page of Spiderman artwork from years ago. I'm pretty sure this was for the sake of a Marvel Submissions editor. I never got the job with Marvel, but I still had fun drawing some of the characters.

In this page, Spiderman shows up, and then a big, metal cyborg thing shows up to attack him. I don't remember what the story was. I really like how Spidey turned out in the third panel.

Spiderman vs. Batman!

I drew this page AGES ago, as I thought it would be cool to see Spiderman fighting Batman for no reason at all. This might have been part of my Marvel submission package ages ago, when I was still actively trying to get work with Marvel. I don't remember.

I never bothered inking it, but just did this page of pencils. It was fun to draw both of these charatcers together.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Images for a film I never bothered making for "The People vs. George Lucas" project


I was glad to hear that they were making a film about "The People vs. George Lucas", and thought it was cool that they were taking fan-submitted films from disgruntled Star Wars films cheesed by the prequels, and I BRIEFLY toyed with the idea of making my own film. I never got around to doing a film, but I did put a couple cheesy bitmaps together, which I've posted here. These would have been used in the film.

My entire video was going to be about my disappointment with the music of the prequel films, namely "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith", which featured AWFUL resuages of music from other SW films ("Clones" was the worst, but "Sith" featured some awful reusage of music from "Empire Strikes Back".) But, being the only one in the world who was really bothered by this reusage of music, I just let it go (with a rant or two posted in a blog). I don't have time to put films together anyhow.

Here are a couple images. It's supposed to be me in a theater, eating "Sweet Tarts" and becoming angry that the music is consistently being reused/repeated in the film. George Lucas wasn't aware that, yes indeed, there are music fans who know enough of Williams' music to know when it's lifted and reused from other films.

Another sketch from the 'Dad's Toenail' book




Another pen and ink image of the grandfather from "Dad's Toenail", a very silly book I illustrated last year.

Diabetes in America (comic) by Mike Adams the Health Ranger

Diabetes in America (comic) by Mike Adams the Health Ranger

The single worst illustration of the character Thor ever made!



This was part of a Java game I was trying to write. Yes, this is a very, very, very badly drawn sprite.






Yeah!!! Superman 4!
Music by John Williams!!!!

















.... and it's, oh....








Actually, Superman IV did have some fantastic music (Better than Superman III and Returns, at least) but I would have loved a 100% Williams score for this one.

Awesome Superman computer graphics from "Superman III"






The most sophisticated killing machine ever, yet it has Atari 2600 graphics?

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Reformed Theological Fruit: John Calvin vs. Doctor Plum

Another silly cartoon I made a year or so ago.

Reformed Theological Fruit - Part One

Stupid film that I made a few years ago.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

My great-great grandfathers gravestone




This is pretty cool, actually. Wish I had more time to do genealogy stuff. My great-great grandfather fought in the Civil War, and according to the obituary listed below, his death was by means of "apoplexy", that "seized him while engaged in a checker game".
Guess my great-great grandfather was fond of games, too.

Hurricane Ike images I just found... unpleasant reminder



I just found some of these nightmarish Hurricane Ike images from a forgotten folder on my desktop, and seeing these brings back a whole host of nasty memories. I remember this Doppler image as a sure sign that we needed to get out of the area and fast (and I'm glad we did. The damage done around the area was one thing, but 1+ week without power would have been too much.)

The TransStar images were taken prior to clearing out of the area. This type of traffic is just nightmarish to me, because we encountered the SAME THING four years ago when Hurricane Rita came through. The traffic out was just unreal.

Next time a storm comes near I'm getting out of here early.

But regardless of the hurricanes (TWO of which I've been through in four years in Texas) I still don't miss living up north near Chicago...






Quickly abandoned idea for drawing some of December Sun using MS Paint



I extremely briefly toyed with the idea of drawing some of a future issue of December Sun using MS Paint. I'm not sure what I was thinking at the time, but here it is... up until the point that I realized, "What on earth am I thinking?"

Friday, June 12, 2009

Elf Hunter!



Years ago, I wrote one of the most ridiculous Java games ever, called "Elf Hunter". The game was all about shooting elves that ran across the screen and gaining points. It was silly, and really served as little more than a means for me to learn more about Java.

I've yet to update and recompile this game, but one of these days I will, and I'll post it over at DSCOMIC.

This is the dramatic poster for the game that looks nothing like the actual game.

Old Guy!





Sketches in ink for a children's book I illustrated, called "Dad's toenail". I did these back when I was a big fan of inking with nibs, or frustrating, sharp and easily-broken metal dipping pens that have a propensity to splatter ink. I've since gotten hooked on the line quality of brush.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Porcupine Man!

Watch your helium balloons around generic porcupine man!

and here's the teeny-tiny thumbnail of the same image (oh, the wonderful things you find on the C: drive...)