Why do I even bother to pretend I know how to play video games anymore?

So, should I be annoyed or proud that my son has beaten Super Mario Galaxy 2 before me?

I watch him fly through the end levels with the ease of a practiced expert. Gliding over obstacles, jumping and careening through danger with no more care or consideration than a buzzing bee floating lazily through a field of flowers. He’s masterful in his precision, moving with grace and confidence. A skill forged through the fires of tireless repetition and an incredibly patient trial-and-error persistence.

Did I mention he’s only six? ‘Cause he’s only six.

Yeah, I think I’m going to go with proud.

So, this is pretty awesome. Somebody went and created a Frogger game using real-time data from 5th Avenue in New York City. A webcam tracks the movements of the cars, and a program maps those movements into virtual cars in the game. That. Is. CRAZY. And absolutely fantastic. I would love to play something like this. Check out the video and then you can find out more at 5thavefrogger.com.

(Via Joystiq)

(Source: http://player.vimeo.com/)

Tomorrow is Xenoblade Chronicles day!

Which for most people will result in something resembling the following:

  1. Pick up Xenoblade Chronicles
  2. Go home and play Xenoblade Chronicles

But, unfortunately, for ME at least, the process will actually look something more like this:

  1. Pick up Xenoblade Chronicles
  2. Work the rest of the day (periodically flipping through the art book, of course)
  3. Go out to dinner with the wife
  4. Bed (I’ve recently cut soda out of my diet, which means I’ve been going to bed a lot earlier than I used to)
  5. Help my sister build a fence all day Saturday
  6. Bed (because, man, I’m likely going to be exhausted after that)
  7. Easter service and family stuff on Sunday
  8. Stare longingly at my lonely copy of Xenoblade Chronicles every time I pass by, wondering when I’ll get a chance to play

Mind you, I’m not complaining about any of the things I’ve got going on this weekend — especially date night with the wife, which is always a wonderful time. Just a bit of poor planning on my part which results in a fantastic, highly-anticipated new RPG game sitting quietly on a shelf awaiting its moment to shine. Hopefully, it won’t be waiting long. Unfortunately, unlike Skyward Sword, I likely won’t be able to play Xenoblade around the kids. Which means it’s automatically relegated to the post-bedtime hours. So, there’s that.

And yes, I’ve tagged this first world problems, because, yeah.

Help me name my new car!

So, earlier this week, I went and bought me a car. It’s a shiny red 2010 Chevy Aveo, and it’s a pretty little thing. Exactly what I was looking for: reliable, fuel-efficient, small, and affordable. The perfect little commuter car for the 400+ minutes I spend on the highway every week.

The only drawback: she didn’t come with a name.

I can’t very well go driving around all day in a car with no name. That’s just shameful. But I’m having a hard time thinking of a quality name that suits the car, myself, and our combined personalities. So that’s where I turn to you, FACELESS INTERNETS, in an effort to crowdsource a better nom de plume (nom de guerre?)

The car’s personality is malleable, because, well, it’s a CAR. An inanimate object by design. I’m free to project whatever personality I see fit onto the machine, in accordance with my relevant interests. As far as tying the car to my personality, well, that’s a different matter altogether. I’m essentially your standard archetypal nerd. To be more specific, here’s a list of some of my interests:

  • Comics (any major title, though I’m partial to DC)
  • Nintendo (except Pokemon – never really got into that)
  • General scifi and fantasy nerdery (D&D, Magic: the Gathering, Munchkin, that sort of thing)
  • Shows like Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, IT Crowd, and Walking Dead
  • Novels by Kurt Vonnegut, John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and China Mieville
  • Other nerdy things? I guess?

Armed with that knowledge, I can only assume someone (not me, obviously) should be able to come up with a fitting name for my car. I’ll leave this open for a few days, and come back to select a winning name.

Wait, “winning name”? Yes, did I forget to mention that there’s prizes involved (such as they are)?! I’ll go through all of the suggestions and select the one that I feel is the MOST AWESOME. That suggestion will, of course, become the name of my car. But in addition, I will also create a custom drawing for the suggestioner, of their own choosing, and ship it out to them. Various other entries that I feel are pretty awesome in their own right, but not necessarily awesome enough to be the actual name of the car, will receive some smaller drawings of my own design, as a little thank you for being NEARLY but not quite ALL-ENCOMPASSING AWESOME.

Suggestions can be submitted in a multitude of ways. Through a Tumblr reblog of this post, a Disqus comment, my ask box, my message box, an email, a comment on Facebook, or @/DM me on Twitter. I’m not picky.

Also, feel free to reblog, tweet, like, or otherwise link this post out into the wider internet. I’m not necessarily looking for traffic or anything (it’s just a personal blog, you know, it’s not like I’m doing business here or anything). But the more people who see it, then (potentially) the better suggestions I’ll receive.

I’ll give you all a week or so? I guess? I don’t know. I’ve never done something like this before. Let me give it a few days, and see how things go.

Okay, I think that’s it. Ready? SUBMIT!

I tell aspiring writers that they should write. It’s the only real advice I have. If you think you have talent, then write. You’ll find out if you’re any good. And you’ll also find out that it takes a lot more than just talent to be a writer. You have to be willing to write on the days you don’t feel like writing, for a start. And you have to learn to finish things, and to start the next thing.

Neil Gaiman makes a living saying excellent things in excellent ways. This is just the latest example of his advice that I will attempt to take to heart in an effort to finally become a published author.

eschergirls:

lesstitsnass:

You punch like a girl, Masochist. 

Seriously, that kind of posing on a punch is pretty much only drawn on girls. You’ll likely never see a punch done this way on a man. No, a man puts his back into a punch. There’s follow-through. This girl here, she has a weak punch because her back’s going the opposite direction, and her waist is swiveled in such a way as we get to see both her butt cheeks and both her boobs at the same time. There’s also the fact that the artist chose to draw the moment the punch connects, rather than the follow-through of the punch, which makes it look like a tap on the chin rather than the impact it should be. And this is the big no-no in all “How to draw comics” books when drawing a fight scene: if you want your punch to look like it actually caused damage, draw the follow-through. 

I’m going to concentrate on the full body posing here. See the first small image? This is the current line of action for Masochist. The punch is a secondary action to the body posing. Here’s the first hint of weakness. If you look at the original, the artist drew speed lines from Masochist, trying to tell us that Masochist is running really really fast to hit good ol’ Supes. In the second one, you’ve got Superman’s line of action added in, and as you can see, the speed doesn’t work because it’s not flowing in the same direction as Maso’s line of action. Weak! 

Third drawing shows what the line of action SHOULD be on her. And how it impacts with Superman’s own line of action. This is a strong action! The full force of the body’s in there. So before I actually roughed out the drawing, I got up and mimicked a hard punch to the face, took note of my body, spine, back, hips. I took in account the fact that she was running first, so as much as we twist at the waist when punching in a standing pose, when running, the whole body turns with the punch. Then I slapped down really rough lines to get my motion in. 

In order to understand this motion better, you really need to think of what’s happening to this character before the punch actually happens. There’s a wind up, an antic (short for anticipation) of the movement: that line of action is curved back, and whips forward with the punch! There’s a moment of pulling back her fist as far as it will go to be able to bring it forward to cause the most damage possible. Since she’s running, think of her RIGHT leg hitting the ground, the whole body twists as the LEFT leg pushes off the ground and that whole velocity carries enough kinetic force as to make Superman’s head snap back. (Art fixed! Thanks Anonymous!)

But instead we get a boobs and butt swivel-waist and a tap on the chin of our hero. And speed lines that make it look as if she was zipping forward, frozen in that pose. Yeah. 

I love this breakdown because one of the knee-jerk defenses is “so, she’s punching” but the choice of HOW she’s punching is up to the artist and as you so brilliantly showed, it’s not even a really effective or realistic way to be following through on a punch either.  That’s part of the problem of a lot of the “action” poses in my blog, the women may be punching or attacking, but their motions are really limited and constrained, generally to show more sexiness, or to have them posing, and it ends up with them not looking particularly aggressive.  (In that example, Artemis’ arms are in FULL extension which means she has no more leverage to be hitting Diana with and her sword isn’t even close to hitting her, and that’s not even getting into Diana’s posture.)

In the original picture, you can tell she’s punching, but the way her body is, it looks like she’s already as far extended as she can get and so the punch doesn’t look that hard except that Superman’s reacting to it, however your punch looks WAY more powerful and also adds so much more dynamic to scene.  It’s not “Masochist is punching Superman”, it’s “WOW MASOCHIST JUST PUNCHED SUPERMAN!”

Going into what it would look like in a wind up is a great idea too.  I don’t draw that much, but I do write a lot, and when I do an action scene, I always act it out in the mirror so my descriptions are logical, and doing this for art seems very sensible too. 🙂

Beautiful de-construction of art from a recent Superman issue demonstrating that the “New 52” artists are far more concerned with showing a girl’s sexy bits than they are with actually drawing good action poses.

I’ve been a fan of a lot of the New 52 stuff, but some of their decisions (either editorial or artistic) regarding their portrayal of the female form have left me scratching my head. Sacrificing quality panels for the sake of displaying some T and A is a way to ruin a franchise, in my opinion.

An addendum: RE: itsdangeroustogoalone.com

In my haste to inform people that yes, I no longer own itsdangeroustogoalone.com, and yes, I’m aware it’s now controlled by a spammer WHY DOES THAT SURPRISE YOU, I completely forgot that I still control the Feedburner feed for the URL, which is apparently still subscribed to by roughly 40 people.

So, I redirected the content of the feed from the old URL to my new blog RSS feed, LIKE A BOSS.

The important takeaway here is that I’m slightly happier now, and that’s all that truly matters. Carry on.