Actually... September is the most STOMPY of all the months.

Hastily drawn thing - GO!

In my defense, I have been doing some stuff with the blog, trying to make it more in line with the website. Hopefully you've noticed. Particularly with the header image remixed from the website.

Unfortunately, this is going to require me learning more about templates for blogger, so expect a couple more little changes as this week goes on and I have more of an idea of what I'm doing.

At some point I'm going to have to get around to updating the website a little too :S.

Also, I'm getting a little bored with this "picture to the left" business, so I'm switching it up for no good reason until I feel otherwise.

What else is new? Nothing.

...And I want my scalps.

More Inglourious Basterds. Just coz it was so good. Nothing interesting to say today I'm afraid.

And I would've gotten away with it, if not for those meddling kids...

Often as I'm walking down the street I'm approached by complete strangers who ask me completely out of nowhere: "Hey Gareth, what if you and your housemates were some kind of Hanna Barbera cartoon?"

Naturally my first response is of confusion. "Who are you?" and "How do you know my name?" are common replies. As are "Stop following me" and "Do you wanna come back to my place, since you seem to know where it is anyway?".

So, what if indeed?

Well I know if we were we'd lie somewhere on the less abstract side of the official "Hanna Barbera Line of cartoon detail". I may be a raging misogynist, but I'm no Fred Flintstone. My guess is we'd be more like Mystery Inc. from Scooby Doo. Sure, we don't have an animal sidekick, but we do solve mysteries on a weekly basis. Mysteries like "Who's turn is it to clean the bathroom?" and "Who left all the lights on and the backdoor open after leaving the house?". You know, the mysteries that matter.

I don't think we fall into the archetypes set by the original group. Sure, I'm sometimes mistaken for a stoner AND I used to have chin hair but I DON'T drive a van, for example. And none of us are swingers like Fred and Daphne,at least as far as I'm aware. What I do think I can do is round out what skills we all bring to the group:

Caitlin - Infiltration/Undercover work.
Sarah - Critical and logical thinking? Heh... Probably interrogation.
James - Legal reasoning and YELLING.
Gareth - General indifference. And Internet detectivery.

Anyway, this picture took SOOOOOO much longer than I was expecting. Even now I still wish I'd managed to do a good background. But really, it was getting so late and it's What If Wednesdays, not What If Thursdays. I may add in the background and some text and quietly slip it in later.

Speaking of quietly slipping it in later: I remember ages ago someone explained to me why Fred and Daphne were swingers (I think it was something to do with the neck scarves? Apparently back in the day that was swinger code for "Come get it, boys!") and also why Shaggy and Velma were habitual druggos (kinda obvious there). But what I didn't realise is how Daphne's always striking these Bettie Page style cheesecake poses all the time in promo pics. All suggestive hips and come hither eyes. No wonder we're a generation of deviants. Coincidentally, don't do a Google image search for Daphne Blake.

You could've been number one.

One day I've really gotta get around to finishing Starlight. Pretty much all the coding is done, I just need to get around to doing all the art and placing all the levels.

The main character is this guy, Mr. I'm-totally-spacing-on-his-name. I'm pretty sure it was some Muse reference though, just like everything else in this game. For instance, he's part of the military order of the Knights of Cydonia. He pilots a ship that has the universes only U.N.O. gun. There are also Super Massive Blackholes. Also revelations.

In other related news, my old sketching pen finally ran out of ink so I've been forced to move on to another one. It's a different brand and not as good in my humble opinion. I should've bought up big with the other pen, but I guess that's something to remember for the future. Furthermore last night I was well and truly wrecked so I rushed the colouring somewhat. Story over.

Bonjourno!

I saw Inglourious Basterds on the weekend. I was not let down. Perhaps it's not everyone's cup of tea but it's easily the best thing I've seen this year.

So... What do I wanna take from Tarantino? Sure, I'd love to steal his snappy dialogue or "devil may fuck" attitude but really, what I admire most is his ability to take a genre and then make a definitive movie from it.

Also, I'd steal his entire knowledge of film. To be honest, I haven't been watching as much stuff recently and its a damn shame. Well... not movies at least. I keep forgetting about all the older stuff I've totally missed. Maybe I should make a list?

Back into trouble again...

James Julius von Roekelschtab is from a game that will never be. I've really gotta sit down and work out names for some of these projects sometime. Naturally, this one doesn't have a proper name yet, So we'll just refer to it by my super secret code name 'Project Mute'. OK? OK.

JJVR is the son of European aristocrats and lived a charmed life up until a moment we've all been through: Teenage rebellion. JJVR's chosen practise of rebelling was to run away and join an art collective. His lack of respect for authority, ingrained (if undeserved) sense of entitlement and taste for the finer things eventually led him to theft. His natural charisma allowed him to manipulate other members of his collective into working together under the pretense of a "Crusade against the Rich". Soon enough, JJVR and his posse mimes (can't pin a crime against just one when everyone looks the same!) had progressed up from petty theft to outright murder, and JJVR became known as one of the worlds best hitmen.

JJ is also known to torture his victims with avant garde dance numbers and soliloquys before killing them.

This character is mostly inspired by the music of The Hives. Not in any meaningful way (well, maybe thier trademark "colourful idoicy") but definitely in regards to the themes in their music.

Particularly that one song about "being on my way" and then "stopping and doing somethin" and then "being on my way again" and then offending someone.

How appropriate, you fight like a cow.

So I dunno, this was supposed to be Motivational Monday or something I have a feeling it failed. But truth be told I had to put out something. It had been 6 days since my last post and I didn't even have the excuse of being deathly sick anymore.

So what is my excuse? Oblivion.

The game I bought aaaaaaaaaaages ago and then vowed never to play it because I knew I'd end up doing nothing but playing it. What started as an way to spend a recovery day after being sick has slowly devoured all my time. That game is the devil.

But what does it have to do with Monkey Island? Well... Nothing. I was going to make a post about being a pirate or something, but it seems pointless now. Furthermore, I really rushed this out for the sake of posting something. Some isolated sections look OK, but others are the stuff of my nightmares. Guybrush deserves better. Maybe some day soon I'll give something else a go.

As a side note, it would be pretty cool to make a Guybrush style character and run through Oblivion as him. I don't think there is a Pirate class, but I think it should be pretty easy to make up. He'd have to have:

-Attributes: Luck (Nothing can kill him thanks to sheer luck), Personality (He does a lot of talking), Strength (He can carry all that stuff!).
-Birthsign: Thief (Mainly for the luck bonus). He could also go Shadow to get the 60 seconds of invisibility, but it would be cooler to have an actual necklace of invisibility made from eyes like the game.
-Race: Imperial (Providing you can make them blonde).
-Skills: Speechcraft (For talking your way out of stuff), Blade (For insult sword fighting), Mercentile (Pirate's gotta make money), Athletics (Lots of walking), Light armor (Unless a pot counts as heavy armor), Acrobatics (It'll help when being fired out of the cannon).

Oldies but goodies.

The geezer to the left is Montgomery Kellerman from a comic that once got started (and subsequently stalled) called "The Payload".

He's a genius British biochemist, responsible for creating an an ridiculously potent air delivery nerve agent. Feeling that he's been slighted by his employers, he offers knowledge of his discovery and guaranteed access to a hefty store of it to the highest bidder.

Unfortunately for Monty, things don't really go his way.

I found all my old notes for this series the other day when I was cleaning out my desk. I think one weekend I might go back and draw up the first part at least. Then again, I say that about a lot of things.

What If Wednesdays?

What if the X-men were all hipsters, oppressed by the rest of humanity for their taste in clothes, musical taste, and general unwarranted elitism? I ask the tough questions.

So hopefully the lineup here should be pretty obvious, otherwise I've totally failed. If you're having a tough time, this is definitely a pre-Morrison team. One of them may be a challenge.

Once again, I was practising with my stylus, this time more line-art/inking kinda of stuff. Originally they were just going to be generic hipster rip-offs in the style of Scott Pilgrim, but my reluctance to check source material and resemblence of the front guy to Wolverine made me head down this path.

But the most important part: what would their power music be?

Wolverine - Old school rock and punk, maybe something like Iggy Pop and the Stooges, since he would've been around at the time.

Cyclops - Some kind of Ska band, Maybe Reel Big Fish or the Aquabats. Because he's a dork.

Gambit - Motorhead (Ace of Spades!). Or Kenny Rogers, just for "The Gambler".

Psylocke - Something emo, but like... serious emo.

Jean Grey - Tegan and Sara. No reason. Or Belle and Sebastion.

Colossus - Metal. Duh.

Nightcrawler - German industrial. And Kraftwerk.

Rogue - Rilo Kiley. Or the Long Blondes.

New(character)s day Tuesday?

I'm totally going to do time for that labored ryhme.

heh.

Anyway. This character is kind of between names at the moment. I was at one point calling him the Nightwatchman, but it's a bit of a mouthfull and I suspect it's already been taken. That's the problem with superhero names, the well was tapped dry a long time ago.

So I came up with this guy and his game concept a while ago, as a kind of mental exercise of fixing something that went terribly wrong. I'm not really sure how much detail I can go into without giving away the key gimmick, but this guy exists in a city where all the superheroes and villians are Batman style gadget users.

The Nightwatchman himself was security guard who caught the villain "The Grappler" and took his signature tool, made himself a padded armour suit and decided to hunt down other villains. His other key weapon is his modified baton. He possesses an only slightly above average strength and speed (i.e. he's no olympian).

Disregard how poorly the grapple came out, I had no idea what was going on.

Motivational Monday?

To be honest, Tuesday is my Monday... And that's where I need to get motivated. But I'm going for alliteration here so it'll have to do. I was also thinking that I'd do these up has like a motivational poster, but it looked stupid, and I couldn't think of a good joke. Also tired. So instead, its just going to be fan art of characters/people and me prattling on about why I aspire to be them.

So today, it's Solid Snake from the Metal Gear series. Why? Well he's the ultimate bad-ass. But being a silent wall of death isn't why I'm a fan. He's a man, probably the biggest man in games. He's one of the more multidimensional characters ever. He's practical and a thinker. But most importantly, he carries on after everything has gone wrong. Even when the actions he's been ordered to do just mess up things more, he pushes on and get's it done. I aspire to have that kind of determination.

Also I have a weakness for redheads who could kick my ass.

On the picture: I was kind of happy with it when I was doing it, but looking back it doesn't seem as good. I've been having trouble with my computer (and everyone else's in the house too... Yay for being tech support) so when I get the chance I like to practice with my wacom and with colour, since those are the two things I've had the least practice with. I did it pretty hastily... but these things need to be done sometimes.