you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

Although this could apply to how I feel right now at 1 in the morning, soaking wet after a night out on the sauce, Wacom doused in an unexpected downpour, it’s actually how I feel about Jon Chang, after he gave some questionable art direction (art below).

This is Jon Chang, the Creative Director at Paltalk, who sits next to me. He’s half Chinese, into Japanese heavy metal, anime, and guns. A Tritium-powered rifle scope came for him in the mail the other day. I have him here with camo fatigues and a beater, speaking his mind on the CADPAT contraversy, a reference to the CADPAT-MARPAT intellectual property dispute. If you saw him in real life, he looks exactly like this. MRE = Meals Ready to Eat, Army food. Tofu = tofu. Chang is a vegetarian.

This is the Matt, VP of Marketing, after having an “accident”. He, on the other hand, looks nothing like the real Matt. Both illustrations done in Illustrator CS2 (PC), with a Wacom 9×12.

Here’s another crappy drawing of the pair, after Matt ordered Pantone books for us. This one’s extra-craptacular cuz I used the paintbrush in Photoshop.

http://www.gamespot.com/ds/puzzle/kanjisonomamarakubikijiten/index.html

This is one of the most fun and unexpected ways to learn Japanese. I never imagined that a kanji dictionary would make its way to the DS, but when you think about the stylus and pen input, it’s really a natural and inventive use of the technology.

When I was living in Japan, I looked for a practical and affordable kanji dictionary I could look up words with by writing them. Most of the electronic dictionaries required you to know the pronunciation of the word, or look up words by radicals and then counting the number of strokes. I settled on a Sony Clie because it had Decuma handwriting recognition and I could run Palm software on it. The included dictionary was minimal though, and largely inadequate. If only this was available when I was there. (DS came out in Dec 2004)

an Illustrator CS2 doodle. kinda looks like what’d happen if Alfalfa and Conan O’Brien mated

here’s what the original sketch looked like (on the back of some Paltalk spec document)

I’ve been meaning to scan this in for a while now. I drew this a few years ago as a prank. My cousin (maybe 14 at the time) asked me for some money as a birthday present, so I drew this, stuck it in a red envelope and gave it to him. United Boogers of Victor.. Immature, I know. It’s the same size as a real bill and still stands up pretty well as a drawing.

Looking back at it today brings to mind a documentary I saw many years ago about an artist who drew money. He was able to get stores to accept his drawings of money as payment. Google helped me find out that his name is JSG Boggs and that show was Nova (one of my favorites as a kid — I was a documentary junkie).

Obviously, this guy got into a lot of trouble with the government, but the story is an interesting discussion on the concept of money, the meaning of value, and the nature and value of art.

Here’s a Wikipedia entry about him and a brief ArtScene article with a few pictures of his drawings.

This boy has popped up in a few of my drawings now. I like drawing pudgey kids more than skinny kids, and I hate big-ass anime eyes. I like little blinky dots for eyes.

He kinda looks like Ness from Super Smash Brothers. Drawn on the back of some scrap print-out from work. Gotta clean it up a bit.

Ha! It doesn’t work with WordPress out of the box! I just tried to stick in some HTML to embed a .swf and Wordpress puked. I found a nice little plugin that does the trick, called Kimili Flash Embed. It replaces all the crap Macromedia object and embed code with just 1 line.

For the 2 users that come to my blog, you may have noticed the dearth of entries for the last 3 months. Paltalk, where I’m designing interfaces and web apps as a contractor, has been keeping me pretty busy. By the time I come home, the last thing I want to do is stare at a computer screen.

… so I’ve been staring at a TV screen instead! I bought an XBOX 360 at the end of August and it’s absolutely dreadful! Don’t get one! It’s worse than liquid crack. I picked up Perfect Dark Zero, and last week, got Dead or Alive 4 off eBay (reviews to come), and some original Xbox games on the cheap, including Half-Life 2, Project Gotham Racing 2, SSX 3, Crimson Skies, Full Spectrum Warrior, and Dead or Alive Ultimate.

To my surprise and frustration, many of the games are not compatible with the 360. PGR2, Full Spectrum Warrior, and DOA Ultimate refuse to run. The problem is that the XBOX 360 is **NOT** backwards compatible out of the box (sorry for the pun). Each title requires a software emulator. For each original XBOX title you stick in the 360, the console goes out to the net and tries to download the emulator. And for that, you need the $99 Xbox 360 hard drive. Sneaky.

spotted in a used car lot in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY this summer.. yes.. spotted indeed!

I don’t do well with meetings (or class lectures, for that matter). Here’s a few doodles from Paltalk sit and smile sessions. Crappy ballpoint pen on crappy 8.5″ x 11″ printer paper.

karoshi = death from overworking. My handwriting in Japanese is as atrocious as my handwriting in English.

I changed it to Elmo’s Goo when I scanned it into Photoshop today. Originally said “Elmo’s Gloo”.

I know for sure one of these is meant to be a beaver (the beaver shaving). It’s a joke from a Playboy magazine.. about “men asking women to do the strangest things”. I dunno what the hell that fish monster thing is.