you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

I can safely say that videogames ruined my life in many ways. It all started in 1985 or so, when my brother and I somehow convinced our parents to buy the two of us a Nintendo Entertainment System. Our lives practically changed overnight, and we became videogame addicts. If it hadn’t been for videogames, I probably would be putting my nerdery to better use, like devoting my life to medical research to solve the world’s hunger problem or find some cure. Instead, I squandered most of my youth in front of the TV, dreaming of breaking into the videogame industry as a designer.
In the good ole 8-bit days of the 80’s, it was actually possible for 2 or 3 people to make an entire game by themselves. All you needed was an artist, a musician, and a coder. Sometimes the artist, musician and programmer was the same guy.

As videogame hardware became progressively better and games more realistic, videogame development became much more complex, to the point where hundreds of people and millions of dollars go into making a game. The XBOX 360 game Gears of War reportedly cost Epic Games $10 million to make!
Breaking into videogames is increasingly difficult because of the highly specialized knowledge required to develop for today’s systems and high consumer expectations. Right after I graduated college (1999), the N64, and Dreamcast were the latest in gaming hardware. I still had a chance of getting a job designing games and actually came very close to getting hired by Ubisoft twice (once for a game designer position, and once for a GameLoft web job several months later).

Now, unless I get extremely skilled in 3D modeling, texturing and animation, I don’t have a chance. (I’ve bought some Maya books I’m hoping to getting around to reading). But all is not for naught. Out of that childhood dream to make games came years and years of practice drawing 2-D pixel art, animating, and trying to design my own interfaces and games, which is very useful for other things. Thanks to the web, this skill comes in handy for making icons, illustrations, and Flash animations. I’ve given up on trying to be a game designer, settling for the next best option: designing for the web. It pays better than the game industry, which stereotypically pays pretty poorly compared to other highly specialized trades.
Anyhoo, here are some random pixel art-a-ma-bobs. Above is a sprite I drew for some Mega Man knockoff game I now no longer remember trying to make. Below are some more from years ago:

A slug monster and a dog named “Krog”, apparently. Found these on some old Zip disks from 2001.. must’ve made them for IM icons in ImageReady.

Sendai: Taken at around dusk, during my solo rail trip up north to Tohoku. This is an inaka station somewhere. It went through long stretches of nothing but rice fields and forest. I often took long train rides just to look out the window and clear my mind. It is during such times of solitude and calm that I really get a sense of how the Japanese developed the idea of Zen Buddhism.

Onagawa, Miyagi - a small but important fishing town on the western coast of Japan, home to a lot of fishing companies and processing plants. Don’t buy too much into the propaganda about living in harmony with nature on the town’s website. The official literature of every town says that — even mine, in the heavily urbanized outskirts of Tokyo. In the distance was a mountain getting bulldozed away, and the water looked heavily polluted. Oh yeah.. they also have a nuclear power plant several kilometers away! I tried to walk there, but decided I’d better not, given the propensity of Japan’s nuclear reactors to constantly be leaking and having problems. I can say without much exaggeration that every couple of months I’d open the Japan Times to find another story of a cracked shroud, some sort of coverup and malfunction, or deadly accident.

Onagawa, Miyagi: giant “concrete jacks” as many people call them because of their resemblance to the children’s toys. These are wave breakers used to line the shores and supposedly prevent erosion. Now, they sit in disuse near the dock. To give you a sense of how massive these things are, that rope is about crotch high, so these jacks are at least 15-feet tall.

I hatched this up in Japan one day, after seeing used panties for sale in the adult video store (”adult video store” is a redundancy in Japan.. no video store in Japan is without a HUGE ASS adult section).I thought: “hm.. I bet a lot of Japanese pervs would pay good ole cash money to buy gaijin lady’s underwear to sniff and rub all over themselves.”

Porn is probably Japan’s single biggest industry– probably bigger than anime, cars, and instant ramen combined — though few people would want to admit it. The Japanese are, in my opinion, the biggest freaks in the world, and I wanted to make money off the skeebs.

I called my idea the “gaijin underwear recycle shop” to avoid trouble with the sanity and pornography laws. I’d build a whole fantasy story behind the panties. Each seller would have a photo, a stat card, and a persona, just like in the back of Japanese porno mags. It’d be all up to the seller how weird and wacky they wanted to get (kind of like WWF’s personas and characters).

I told a bunch of people on the Japan forums about it and tried to solicit underwear sellers. Some thought it was a good idea. Some thougt I was insane. I designed a logo, some mascot characters, and started working on a website. I had a male mascot and a female mascot, not wanting to restrict myself to just male pervs. I would recruit male gaijin too and tap the female market. But I got tired of the idea after a few weeks when I figured out, like all my ideas, that it’d need a gigantic amount of time, programming, and business logistics just to get the damn site built.

I haven’t gotten around to trying out the beta yet. Perhaps I should, if just out of professional curiosity. My computer’s got enough problems without installing another unstable program.

I went over to Microsoft’s site to see what wonderful surprises Bill & Friends have in store for us. Instead of downloading the beta, I just took the tour.

So, what’s new in IE 7? Not much, it seems. The big features being announced are tabbed browsing and a toolbar searchbox, both of which have been standard features of Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers for several years. (Oh, there’s “improved security”, but I trust Microsoft’s security claims about as much as I trust Oprah with a box of chocolates.)

Once again, Microsoft is the Johny-come-lately and users of Firefox probably won’t switch back to IE.

Have a website/blog and want to doodle battle with me?

My AIM s/n is monstermallow. I use GAIM, a free, open-source multi-protocol IM program. No ads. Yippie!

i didn’t like the cannibalistic overtones of this one. Kinda spooky, but here it is anyway

use right click > View Image to see the whole thing. i made it too big.

see Mary’s challenge: whale in a museum holding an umbrella

This is supposed to be Dubya, but I need more practice. I’ll try again tomorrow. Here’s the reference photo.