Miscellany

I've been a bit bored lately. Did some work on a pitch for the lovely fellows at Treat and we won it so as of next week or so I will be a busy bee on some christmas ads. Other than that I have been doing alot of not much.

A nice timewaster I have found, which follows on from my former (and still to a small extent current) timekiller of doing Mario Paint Composer covers, is Notessimo, which is sort of like a more advanced, Flash based version. It has loads more instruments, lets you set volume and panning for individual notes, and has layers. I've been working on-and-off on a cover of "The Extreme", the final boss theme from Final Fantasy VIII. I don't remember that one being a particularly good game, but it's an incredibly awesome piece of music, and the equivalents from VI and VII have already been done (they're even on the Featured page!), so I thought, "Why not?" This is where I'm at right now.


Link in case the flash embed fails.


My attention span is rather short so while I will hopefully finish this (I'm fairly pleased with how it's going so I'd definitely like to), I don't know if I'll do many more in future. It's so much more complicated and time-consuming than Mario Paint! That said, I did also start Sandopolis Zone Act 2 from Sonic 3 & Knuckles concurrently (I alternated between the two before I got into a good groove with The Extreme), so here's the current progress on that, which I'm also rather pleased with.


Link.

I also went the London MCM Expo on Sunday. When I was invited by my lovely, almost saintly friend Emily I was thinking "Jesus has it really already been a year?" Then she told me it's every six months. Thank goodness! Anyway, as promised I went dressed as Tetsuo, but I tragically COMPLETELY FORGOT TO TAKE ANY PHOTOS, so you will have to take my word for it (and Emily's and Joe's if they comment on here, since they both bore witness). I decided not to do the whole "red cape white vest" thing we see him do in the movie, because: A. It's goofy; B. It's been done alot. So I kind of amalgamated a couple of different looks from various parts of the manga (he changes appearance about 5 times), and wore a utility vest over nothing, which he wears in volume 6, but also kept the robotic arm that he has earlier on. You'll know roughly what I mean if you've watched the movie, but in the manga it's more organic, so I achieved it by painting it all over my right arm, and customising one of those skeleton gloves to look mechanical. It worked surprisingly well, even if the paint got somewhat rubbed off on the way in (because it was FREEZING COLD so I had to wear a jumper over it *sadface*). For the full look, I should also have gone barefoot and bleached my hair, but I learned too late that bleaching one's hair does not happen in an afternoon.

I know it's lame to do a whole paragraph talking about stuff like that with no visual guide but that's how I roll.

I also got to play Kirby's Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and the Wii version of Goldeneye. Of the first, I thought it was adorable and definitely fun with two people, though hopefully it continues to offer new things so the original novelty factor doesn't wear off (also I think it's kinda dark how you kill enemies by just... unravelling them, and I find this rather appropriate). Of the second, I thought it was a bit gimmicky and didn't seem to have much real substance (also I've never been all too keen on the idea of having to waggle to do a basic thing like roll). Of the third, I remained totally unsure of the point. Goldeneye was fun on the N64 because if you had an N64 you weren't playing the probably superior FPS's on the PC, and also because it was the first game of the sort where you could really expect to have four people playing it together in the same room. Repeating it now just seems redundant (also, inverted y-axis master race was here, all you non-inverted peasants should go back to trading hats or something).

I kind of wish I'd brought more than just a tenner, because then maybe I would have bought some of the neat things I saw there. It's all well and good going home and doing a £50 manga binge on Amazon, but you can't get stuff like doujinshi on Amazon. I saw an Aria one (don't know if it was hentai or not, lolzzz), I should've bought it and maybe checked out more from that stall. I also tried to get Emily to buy a K-On futanari doujinshi for a friend of hers who had requested porn. IT WOULD'VE BEEN WORTH £14. I also saw a stall run by Yamino, the artist of Sister Claire, one of the only webcomics out of all the ones I read that I would not feel embarassed for other people to see. I actually feel really terrible for saying hi and then not buying anything. I'M SORRY YAMINO. If you're at the next one I promise I'll give you some money (if you update more, he says, well aware of the inherent hypocrisy).

The whole "at least one creative thing per blog post" thing seems to have merely caused me to post even less rather than draw more. However, I plan to stick by it, and I'm not counting those Notesimmo works above, so here are two drawings I did today.

If you don't get it, be thankful, it is literally the lamest and most forced meme ever. I currently have "doubles" and "check em" filtered and will keep things that way for the forseeable future and I still can't seem to completely avoid it.

Yes, more of that same creature from Alien Nine. Though it's more than just a dumb practice doodle this time (this is a lie, I literally thought this up on the toilet). Those drills take fucking ages to draw, I've no idea how Hitoshi Tomizawa ever did a weekly manga with those things everywhere. Must've had lots of assistants (or just worked literally all day every day, as I hear most manga artists do). It's also really hard to keep a good composition going with those things involved. I am pleased with how appealing Kumi looks, though.

Oh yeah, I'm still watching Panty and Stocking. It is by far the most difficult to place thing I've watched it ages. On the one hand I feel it's actually got uglier since the first episode, and the awesome animation and visual moments haven't really been coming consistently or at all (I even got into a massive argument with some people on /a/ about it, as I'm prone to do, which also led to a nervous little moment when someone recognised me through a filename and linked this blog on there, and I was worried this little corner of the internet where I can talk shit with impunity would be compromised). On the other hand, the humour and characters are sporadically improving and there's been some actual genuinely funny moments. Overall, as my friend Joe said, it's interesting, and that's one of the best things you can say about most anime these days. I'm not going to end up rating it as highly as a masterpiece like, say, FLCL (oh, I can hear the trolls already), or even just a really overall great series like Gurren Lagann, but I'll definitely remember it more than I will Mitsudomoe or whatever other flavour-of-the-month nonsense I've watched lately.

P.S. I'm in the Stocking camp. I know everybody's in the Stocking camp. I don't care.

This moment from episode 4 is probably the hardest I've laughed at an anime in literally years.

Oh yeah, I also watched Forrest Gump recently, which is a good film, as well as the first few episodes of Seinfeld, which is also, as it turns out, quite good.