Bloggery Schemes And Princesses

The image posted here was originally drawn with the intent of being used in my Princess Bride review. My scheme involved a video review full of still images similar to the one posted. I have since revised this plan on account of how many centuries that would take to do (three) and the fact that I plan to review other movies.

(1920x1080 version of image is available at my DA account. Click image for 728x410 version)

I now scheme to go more the route of my previous blog post, which is basically just a regular blog post, but illustrated. That's much more doable, could be converted into a video later if I felt like it, and hey, people can read it when they're not supposed to because it's all quiet and stuff.

Not that I endorse that sort of thing.

But blog posts about what I'm going to blog about are boring, so yeah, about the image. I don't want to say how it would have fit in the review because I still might do a similar joke, but it's Princess Jasmine from Aladdin proposing to Tiana from The Princess And The Frog.

Not to sound too girly or anything (being the manly man that I am), but these are my two favorite Disney princesses. I was a big fan of Aladdin as a kid, which shouldn't come as a surprise. It was a good movie with a magic genie. Of course I liked it. I even liked the second straight to video movie, because the genie came back to do more magic and that bird I liked became a good guy instead of being stuck in some lamp. I suspect I wouldn't like the sequel as much now, but maybe I would. It's not like I'm expecting much from it.

As for Jasmine, she was an attractive woman with long hair, a cool outfit, a strong personality, a pet tiger, and was in that movie I liked with that genie who was awesome because he could do magic and junk. She was cooler to me than any other Disney Princess one could choose from. I also liked her more than Aladdin. That guy used a wish to be a phony and turn his monkey buddy into an elephant. Jackass.

Tiana, however, usurped Jasmine as my favorite princess. Her humble beginnings, determination, strong work ethic, cooking talents... I could go on, but there's just a lot to like about her as a character. Jasmine's a good character too, and I still like her, but a lot of what I like about her is superficial and due to her environment and friends (GENIE!) more than her directly.

Tiana stands on her own. You could remove Tiana from her environment and I don't think my like of her would be diminished. Take away the magic and Agrabah, however, and my like of Jasmine would be. She'd still be cool and likable, but I don't think she stands as tall on her own as Tiana does.

Who do you think are the best princesses, Disney or otherwise? Don't worry about your manliness status. There are tools and video games in the previous post, so you should be fine.

The Tools Of Combat

I have newfound respect for the video games Half Life, BioShock, and Team Fortress 2. I was recently browsing in a hardware store, as manly men who do manly things are prone to do.

While there, I discovered that they sold wrenches and crowbars. When sold in a hardware store, the assumption is that they will be used to somehow aide in building, repair, and the opening of crates. In the aforementioned video games, they are in aide of bludgeoning.

Okay, you can use the wrench in TF2 to build and fix things, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also used to bust some heads.

My assumption with those games has always been that the wrenches were of exaggerated size, and that the crowbar was dangerous mostly by virtue of its teeth. I believed they were sturdy and handy to have, but ultimately not that big or heavy.

I was wrong! They had 24 inch long aluminum wrenches weighing 12 pounds and 36 inch long crowbars with definite weight to them! I know 12 pounds doesn’t sound like much, but (CAREFULLY) try swinging that around sometime. These could definitely be used as strong weapons.

My first thought upon making this discovery was that the characters in these games must be badass muscle men, which is a little weird when you consider Gordan Freeman, the world’s alpha nerd. Anyone who can swing these things endlessly and without effort must hit the gym a lot.

My second thought involved TF2 Engineer cosplay with an actual wrench at a future convention, which was immediately followed by thoughts of me being thrown out on my ass by convention security.

Assuming, of course, they can get past my sentry.

BEWARE, I LIVE!

Thanks for the intro, Sinistar.

I've been posting less the past week, and it's primarily been due to three factors: having a cold, finishing my taxes, and prep-work / script editing of the next EGS storyline.

Frankly, though, it was mostly the taxes. They were actually easy to do, but I have this stupid anxiety when it comes to filling out government forms that makes it way more of a hassle than it has any right to be.

Something else I'm up to is submitting more stock images to Shutterstock. I have some images on there already (hence the watermarked Sheep), but it's the sort of thing where it doesn't really pay off unless one submits a lot of potentially useful images. As such, my goal is to submit an average of one image per day. I say average because it's probably best to submit several related image at a time to increase their potential usefulness to people.

That said, it might be worth keeping an eye on my Shutterstock gallery. The images have to be watermarked due to the nature of the site, but I'd like to think that doesn't keep them from being amusing.

I haven't been doing much in terms of the Princess Bride review. With a cold screwing up my voice and other tasks of higher priority, I might do a written review and make the video when it's convenient. It's not what I want to do, but it is the most sensible course of action. Besides, there are a ton of other movies I have to get to, and at this rate I shouldn't work under the assumption that I'm going to make videos for all of them.

Bowser Bait?

Click image for 960x480 version. 1920x960 version on DA (download for full size).

I couldn't resist doing a followup image as it would give me an excuse to draw Bowser, and I love how Bowser looks and have wanted to draw him for years. I'm not sure why I hadn't. Come to think of it, I've barely drawn any of the Mario characters in spite of wanting to. Why was I depriving myself?

As a kid, the idea of transforming into various things interested me (shocking, I know). Thanks to the media I was interested in, a bizarre amount of time was spent imagining myself as a turtle-like being. Seriously, between the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Koopalings, it's surprising that turtle-like beings are so underrepresented in my current drawings and comics.

I'd also say it's odd that I choose Charmander over Squirtle in Pokemon, but dragons win over turtles. That's why Koopas are so cool; they're BOTH. That, and the Koopalings had magic wands in Mario 3, and I think I was simply born thinking magic wands are cool.

Which isn't to say I approve of princess-napping. As a kid, I had this annoying tendency of liking a lot of bad guys and imagining them being friends with the good guys, which would often include the Koopalings (this is how bad fan fictions are born, people). My action figures got along much better than they should have, though there was always some bigger threat they had to work together to beat so at least I had some excuse. It wouldn't hold up now, but dude, I was in elementary school. Cut past me some slack.

Of course, I didn't have Mario toys. There weren't any action figures of them to buy, at least as far as I knew. After learning how to make home-made clay in school, however, I tried to make my own Koopa figures. I made an acceptable Larry Koopa figure, a less acceptable Ludwig, and Bowser... let's not talk about my attempt at making Bowser. It... it did not end well.

Speaking of which, they have Mario figures now. I own some myself, but the only Bowsers I've seen have been stuffed animals. Are his spikes that hazardous? I'll wear mittens, whatever, just let me buy Bowser!

...Okay, wow. I thought I was gonna post the image, maybe have a paragraph and be done, but I guess I'm a Mario Bros fanboy. Who knew. I'm going to go save me some princesses.

Mama Mia!

The full version of this image is 600x600 pixels, so it's twice as large as what I tend to post here. Larger version at DA Account.(download for full size).

Yesterday, aka Easter, I foolishly joked on Twitter about drawing Princess Peach in a bunny suit and holding a Yoshi Egg. This was a joke, but then I wanted to draw it.

In my mind, the narrative is that Mario is out on a mission, and Princess Peach is helping by providing Yoshi eggs. Which, of course, begs the question: what the hell is Mario's mission? Peach is clearly not captured by Bowser, so... what? Was Luigi kidnapped? Some foe from the Mario RPGs who doesn't care about Peach?

I have no idea. This image of a princess ruler of a mushroom kingdom in a bunny outfit who is handing out dinosaur eggs that hatch out full-sized to assist a stocky plumber who can jump twelve feet into the air and teleport through pipes has somehow managed to confuse me.

Why Won't You Heal Me, DanShive?!

Something I've been wanting to do since snagging a headset (you know, the headset that isn't good enough for the videos I want to make), I've been wanting to play Team Fortress 2 again. It just seemed like there was something missing when I could only communicate via keyboard. When you're also using the keyboard to move and shoot, that makes communicating with teammates something of an issue.

First off, I STILL don't know if anyone could hear what the crap I was saying. I fiddled with the settings and did some tests, but I still simply don't know. Between the sounds of battle and other people on their headsets, I don't know if I didn't hear any acknowledgments of what I was saying because I was missing them, because people couldn't hear me, or because they muted me on account of my headset making me sound like nails on a chalkboard. So from a purely "testing the headset" perspective, I feel like I didn't accomplish much.

As for the actual play experience, well... it kind of sucked. I was playing Arena simply because it was easy to find games for it, and I was playing as a Medic as that's how I can be most useful in Arena (in pretty much anything else, I'm best utilized as an Engineer). I was quickly reminded of one of the major communication flaws in that game, and that is simply having no idea who is talking to me.

Okay, yeah, I know what their screen name is. It flashes in the lower right corner and I can recognize different voices. The problem is that the voice is associated with one of several other teammates, which is anywhere between 7 and 15 people most of the time with several of them playing as the same character class and switching classes between rounds (and even during rounds if not playing Arena). When someone asks me via their headset to heal them over others for the sake of strategy, and all they say is "Dan Shive, heal me!", odds are I don't know who the crap they are, where they are, or if they're right about being a priority, unless they're right there by me.

I should probably look into adjusting the settings. I currently have to look right at someone to see their name; maybe I can set them to constantly float above their heads, at least for teammates? I don't know. What would help, however, if instead of a "voice" icon next to the name of someone who is talking, Valve had it set up so an icon of the class they're playing as appeared. If I could instantly know that the guy who was talking was the soldier with the top hat, it would make communication one heck of a lot easier.

Son Of A...

So I've decided that I really want to try and do a good job with this whole video review thing and that the headset just wasn't going to cut it, so I ordered a relatively inexpensive, but well reviewed, microphone and a pop filter. For those who are unaware, a pop filter is something you put between you and the microphone to cut down on wind interference and "pop" noises from "p" sounds and the like.

Well, I'm still waiting on the mic, but the pop filter has arrived! ...And it has a hole in the screen. I have not even opened the package, and there is a hole in the screen. In fact, there are two screens in the apparatus, and both have a hole in the same spot. These holes are off-center and the screen may very well be capable of warding off pops, which would be enough, but I'm not even sure I should open the package to try.

Then again, I haven't tried the mic yet, and I'm expecting it tomorrow. Maybe it has some sort of unadvertised pop prevention built in and I'll be able to return this thing and get my money back without having to wait for a replacement to record anything. That could happen, right? Even though the packaging for the pop filter shows a mic that looks exactly like the mic I ordered, I might not really need it, right? Right?

...Crap.

Video Making Quest

I've been plotting to have what I've been referring to as an "elaborate slide show video" for sharing my thoughts both before and after seeing Princess Bride. My scheme was to put it all together in Flash and convert it to an appropriate format for Blip.

I'm used to Flash and don't have much else in the way of editing software, so this seemed like a good idea, but I've made a dramatic discovery: Flash + sound + movie export apparently = disaster.* It's not like I was working with terribly good sound quality to begin with, so it's a pretty significant issue.

As such, I'm downloading a 30-day trial of Adobe Premiere Elements. I figure, you know, April is long enough to figure out whether I'll be making more videos and if the program is worth my while to own.

I'm not jumping right into the Princess Bride video, however. I've made some art for it already, but I'm starting off with a cheesy 45 second "How To Draw A Dragon" video. Yes, I know Strong Bad's done it, but the point isn't to make an awesome video, but rather to work out a process and get technical feedback.

I'm not sure when that'll be done, but I'm hoping soon. I had actually predicted today prior to discovering the Flash sound issue, so it's pretty much going to boil down to how quickly I adapt to the new program and get sound results that don't burn my ears. Considering the conditions I recorded under (screw you, ice cream truck!) and the equipment used, the sound quality is actually pretty decent and lacking in background noise. Pretty much any loss of quality. however, tips the scale towards horrible. I'm hoping Elements can preserve it better, or even improve it.

In conclusion, I officially declare the last week of March to be "Dragon Week" for this blog, as this is the fourth post in a row having something to do with dragons and it's getting somewhat ridiculous.

* EDIT: Yeah, I should've tried .avi instead of .mov. The .avi files are huge, but I can reduce them down and change the format easily. So the real conclusion is that I was being stupid and I should definitely have the dragon test video done this week ^^;

A Different Way To Train Your Dragon

Note: Blogger's images seem to be having trouble showing up. If you can't see the image for this post, click here to see it on DA.

As I've stated, I loved the How To Train Your Dragon (HTTYD) movie. While watching the end credits, I noticed that it claimed to be based on a book. Given that I had become an instant HTTYD-fanboy, I decided to look into it.

It turns out there's a series of children's novels, and they've gotten good reviews on Amazon. What they are not, however, is the same as the movie. After a bit of research, it's very clear to me that the movie was more "inspired by" than "based on" the books.

There is common ground between them, but if you changed the names of the movie and its characters, I suspect the only significant things they'd have left in common is the presence of vikings and dragons. I have not read the books, so there may be subtle similarities that I am not aware of, but it really does sound like they're the apples and oranges of family friendly viking-themed dragon fiction (a genre I am certain is massive in stature).

I find this interesting, as book fans have historically been strongly opposed to movies that deviate heavily from the source material. There are Harry Potter fans who foam at the mouth with rage over the general lack of house elves in the movies and Lord Of The Ring fans who want the head of Peter Jackson, but those movies are guilty of very minor divergences relative to the HTTYD movie. Given the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the HTTYD movie, I wonder what fans of the books think. It also makes me wonder what the author of the books, Cressida Cowel, thinks.

Of course, these might not be like the Harry Potter books with readers of all ages. If it's mostly just kids reading them, I doubt there'd be as much fanboy rage in the face of unfaithful adaptations. I've also never seen a bookstore overflowing with people as a result of a HTTYD book release or people getting lynched for revealing HTTYD spoilers. Nonetheless, there's probably someone, somewhere out there who is gritting their teeth with rage over this movie.

Personally, I liked the movie as it was, and I'm glad they deviated from the source material as much as they did. It's a little weird to be saying that. I'm generally okay with movies deviating from their source material in order to make movies that, frankly, don't suck. What I usually do want to stay faithful, however, are the themes and the characters, and it doesn't sound like HTTYD did that.

That said, the movie is still awesome, and I still plot to see it in 3d.

The LOLCat Pokémon

First off, many thanks to everyone who have suggested movies! Please keep them coming; I scheme to get through at least one of these suggested movies a week and post about them here, DVD rental shop willing. I just hope they're not playing hockey on the roof when I get there.

Anyway, a few of you have asked for updates on my Bellsprout, which I initially thought was odd until I looked at that cursed sketch again (went for another long walk after that). I've actually walked close to 10,000 steps with Bellsprout, more than half of which were after that post, so you can rest assured that the ones and zeros that make up its being are happy.

Earlier today, however, I wanted to use the Pokéwalker as a pedometer but had nothing in it. It still functions as a pedometer without a critter in it, so I snagged it and went on my way. When I later checked my steps, I discovered that some Wooper (pictured) had started following me around. How's that for awesome?

Frankly, I love Woopers. They're of an advantageous combination of types and are hilarious. Every time they enter battle, they make a noise and hop as they quickly turn back to look at you before facing their enemies, all while making the face shown here. It's so cute and silly that some deranged part of my brain can't let it go without hearing something like "OMG!", "ONOES!", "OH YEAH!", "ROCK ON!", and so forth.

Similarly, one thing I like about simplistic RPG games where they don't show detailed battles is picturing them myself. When I'm playing these games, there's action-packed epic duels going on in my head even if all it's saying on screen is "Wooper used Water Gun". In my mind, it's more along the lines of after slamming into his opponent, Wooper is thrown backwards by his foe's counterattack! Distance now between them, Wooper blasts water out of his mouth, K'Oing his enemy before he even hits the ground.

Anyway, enough gabbing about Pokémon. I need to go watch nostalgic movies to prove to everyone that I'm a geek!

Keeping Them Real

According to TV Guide, Disney is banning breast implants from Pirates Of The Caribbean 4. Or, at least, for a particular group of actresses. From the sound of the requirements, the women will likely be involved in dancing or some other form of activity where the presence of implants could be obvious. From the article:

The potential ladies will also have to undergo a test involving jiggling and jogging to determine their breasts' authenticity

I am 100% certain the only concern here is historical accuracy. After all, it's common knowledge that silicone implants of this nature weren't used before 1962.

The obvious joke here is "I wish I was the casting director!" I believe that's a bit shortsighted. What if you're not sure about someone? What if an actress misreads the look on your face and accuses you of suspecting something? What if she's not misreading your face? It's a scenario where you'd potentially have hundreds, if not thousands, of attractive young women knowing for certain that you're staring at their chests and judging their authenticity. The hostility generated could power all of LA.

...Okay, yeah, I'd still totally take the job. I'm only human, after all.

In all seriousness, while I was made aware of this via TVGuide.com, there are a lot more details in the original source of this information, The New York Post. It's actually somewhat disturbing what they went through to "enhance" Keira Knightley. I'm sure she would have been just fine without it.

Tears Of A Pokemon

I neglected my Bellsprout today.

I transferred it to my Pokewalker last night and told it we'd be going for a walk on the beautiful beach today, but I've continually forgotten to put the Pokewalker in my pocket. It's been sitting there all day wondering when we're going to go to the beach, and now it's gotten pretty late. I could put the Pokewalker in my pocket now, maybe get a few hundred steps in before the day's over, but it just seems so awkward now.

I'm sorry, Bellsprout. I'll try to do better tomorrow.

Gah! Okay, okay! We'll go jog a frikkin' mile or two, just... gah!

Plants vs Zombie Sketches

Note: This was originally part of a second blog I decided I don't need as the labels allow me to mark all posts with artwork so it will be easier if I just keep it all in one blog.

These are some old Plants vs Zombie sketches that I already shared on Twitter, and I may post some other old artwork as well, but I scheme to draw plenty of new stuff as well.

Oh, The Shame, The Shame Of It All!

So, yeah. I recently acquired the latest incarnation of Pokemon and tried out the Pokewalker. These facts have inspired this sketch (as always, click for full size):

THE SHAME! Although, in reality all I would have to do would be have an Eevee follow me around and women would flock to it. I'd be ignored entirely, of course, but there'd certainly be less shame.

Upcoming Songs of EGS

The next four storylines of my webcomic El Goonish Shive are being planned out. While this is all subject to change, here are some songs that come to mind when I think of certain parts of these upcoming stories. Please note that I have no sort of official connection to these songs; they simply come to mind when thinking about these stories.

"Eye Of The Tiger" by Survivor
"East Bound And Down" by Jerry Reed
"Kryptonite" by 3 Doors Down
"When You're Evil" by Voltaire

"Hallelujah" also fits in there, but there are so many covers of it that I don't know which artist to list. In any case, I'm not going to say why I find these songs fitting for certain parts, only that I do. I will, however, likely clarify it all later during the commentaries of these upcoming stories.

A Nostalgic Tale

I'd normally (or I suspect I would normally; this is, like, my fifth post here) post a sketched fan art such as this only at Deviant Art, but I actually have a bit of a story to tell connected with this that's worth posting here.

Click for larger Version

Review - Something, Something, Something, Dark Side

Something, Something, Something, Dark Side
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: December 22, 2009
Version Reviewed: 2009 DVD
Run Time: 54 minutes
Rating: Not Rated (but intended for mature audiences)